Amiga & AROS Archive

Hyperion Entertainment announced the availability of the fourth update to the AmigaOS4.0 developer prerelease for all A1 owners. Major new features in this update includes a fast transparent JIT 68k Amiga software emulator, screen dragging in any direction, improved Warp3D/input support, and much more. A first impressions review is already available.

The AROS team has posted their first update of 2006. "Georg Steger has fixed input preferences for mouse, in order to improve mice tracking and pointer precision on the screen. Mathias Rustler has updated documentation for users and developers, adding some nice hints and removing obsolete informations. You'll find signs of his work through this site. Mathias has also commited ExecuteStartup, a little tool that executes whatever application you'll copy in the SYS:WBstartup drawer. Thanks to Nick Andrews and Jack Patton AROS has got IRC and Telnet clients. In order to enable networking on hosted version of AROS, Michal Schulz has commited a .tap interface hidd for all Unix targets."

Just as the discussion surrounding the Pegasos II and AmigaOS4 is settling down, a new possibility for hardware for AmigaOS4 has arisen. PPCNux reports about an Amiga-branded G5 board- which is basically the motherboard of the iMac G5 without the AirPort slot, but with an Amiga sticker slapped on. Another reason why this is a fake is that the board lacks legacy ports, heresy for Amiga fans. PPCNux speculates that with the switch to x86, Apple might be left with excess stock on PPC hardware, and will be licensing them as Amiga hardware. This is supported by Hyperion's statement that they "are working with several hardware companies that want to provide hardware for AmigaOS4.0." Another possible indication is that Hyperion states that AmigaOS4 runs on the PPC 9xx series-- the G5 is the 970. Speculation, and probably a prank at best, but an interesting idea nonetheless.

There is kind of a stir in the Amiga community. As Hyperion employees explained in an IRC chat, Hyperion suffers from a lack of hardware for the development (and thus sales) of AmigaOS4. However, what about Genesi? Genesi is the company behind the ODW, a PPC workstation that could potentially be the solution to Hyperion's lack-of-hardware problems. However, friction between the two companies is preventing them from coming to an agreement. More from the community here, and here. My take: I find this a rather silly situation. It is quite clear that Genesi is one of the few companies capable of offering a steady flow of PPC hardware for the AmigaOS, yet things in the past are preventing a financially interesting cooperation. And who suffer? Exactly-- Amiga fans.

"AROS has finally got a new, faster and smarter file system: Michal Schulz has ported SFS to the Amiga Research Operating System, so opening and saving lots of files won't take ages anymore, but just few seconds. Neil Cafferkey has written a Intel Pro/100 NIC driver, allowing support for i8255x family of network adapters. Marcel 'Frostwork' Unbehaun has created an AROS/PPC Live-CD for Pegasos computers."

The AROS-Max team has released version 0.4.8 of their AROS-based live-CD. Their website is hopelessly outdated, so don't count on that to give you any information. A direct link to the download can be found here, and oGALAXYo has put up some screenshots of this new release (1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8).

The Amiga. A platform with a history. Today, we are reviewing Amiga Forever, which was kindly provided by Cloanto, its manufacturer. The question I tried to answer during the usage of Amiga Forever was: does it have anything to offer to OS enthousiasts today? Of course Amiga Forever offers great functionality for Amiga fans, but what about the rest of us? Can Amiga Forever cater to more people than just Amiga fans?

Various bits of news from the AmiZilla front. "Firstly, oli has finished his GTK->MUI AROS Bounty. Also, OS4 people have ported the the GTK->MUI emulation layer from AmigaOS3.1 to AmigaOS4." Other than that, the AmiZilla project will be recieving help from a group of students from King's College (London) as part of their practical coursework. "AmiZilla has been split up into individual projects for them- as we have five students, we have added in creating a GTK->Reaction layer to AmigaOS4, and maybe porting AmiZilla to MorphOS and AROS, as well as the AmigaOS 3.1 target."

AROS has seen a lot of under-the-hood work lately. Firstly, Joe Fenton has been able to run AROS PPC on his iMac using Fedora Core 4. Joe and Markuss Weiss are working hard on them, in order to give us a PPC version of AROS. Secondly, Bernd Roesch has compiled an AmigaOS-68k hosted version of AROS called AfA (AROS for AmigaOS): "AfA OS is a way to use AROS source without changes and compile them on every AmigaOS based operating system. It can run and be build hosted on every AmigaOS compatible system and provides a compatible API to all systems."

The cross-compiler effort now includes AROS as a target. Install these new binaries right along side of your OS3 and OS4 binaries and compile for all three platforms. Binaries for i686-linux so far, i686-cygwin will follow. Binaries available here.

Hyperion Entertainment, creator of various Linux game ports and currently working on the next generation Amiga OS, has now unveiled their new dedicated Amiga OS 4.0 website. It showcases important features and is targeted to current and new users as well as potential OEM clients.

The Cairo 2D graphics library is now available on AmigaOS due to the efforts of programmer Andrea Palmaté. He also ported LibXML2 and Libfreetype. LibXML2 is the XML C parser and toolkit of GNOME. All ports are available here.

Feelin has been ported to AROS. Feelin is an object-oriented system for AmigaOS as described on their website. It provides a GUI toolkit that looks polished (screenshot). The AROS Archives is up and ready to accept your files. This web site will be the main repository for all AROS software.

Commodore, the company that sold 2.5 million VIC-20's and 25 million Commodore 64's was reduced to bankruptcy less than ten years after it released the computer that was supposed to revolutionize the computer industry, the Amiga.  Read the history of Commodore at Braeburn.