Amiga & AROS Archive

A few moments ago, a woman appeared at my doorstep with a package for me. Since it was about 19:30, I was a little perplexed - this isn't a very usual time to be delivering packages. Also, this was a woman who I've seen walking around town before - she's a local. She handed over the package, and when I saw the note on top, I was even more intrigued: "From Trevor Dickinson, A-EON Technology".

Always wanted to own the IP and trademarks of one of the most innovative computer brands in history? A brand carried by a computer which was easily ten years ahead of its time, capable of multitasking (in colour) with multiple resolutions displayed at the same time, while Windows were still windows and the Mac couldn't hold more than 8 pages in its word processor on its single-tasking monochrome operating system? Yes, Bill McEwen's Amiga, Inc. is selling the Amiga trademark and all associated IP. It's not like the guy was doing anything with it anyway.

The fabled Amiga X1000 has been spotted in the wild, in the homeliest of places--Station X, a.k.a Bletchley Park. "The AmigaOne X1000 is a custom dual core PowerPC board with plenty of modern ports and I/O interfaces. It runs AmigaOS 4, and is supported by Hyperion, a partner in the project. The most interesting bit, though, is the use of an 500Mhz XCore co-processor, which the X1000's hardware designer describes as a descendant of the transputer - once the great hope of British silicon." With thanks to Jason McGint, 'Richard' and Pascal Papara for submissions.

After much, much development, the developers behind AmigaOS 4 have released the first alpha of Timberwolf, the AmigaOS 4 port of the Firefox web browser. I tried it out on my Amiga, and indeed confirmed that this is very much alpha material.

The journey that started 18 months ago to create a next generation Amiga on commodity hardware has now reached its first major milestone by becoming a completely driver native Aros system powered by the energy efficient Intel Atom processor. This has been achieved with the supply of hardware and in some cases financial rewards to key developers in the Aros world. The plan with the following steps has been to create a base reference platform for Aros and the Amiga community to build on and support.

Good news from the AROS world. Thanks to a bounty, they've been working on Gallium3D for a while, and the fruit of this work is starting to taste good. Part of this effort included a 3D driver for NVIDIA cards, and now a 2D driver, based on Nouveau, is being developed as well. This driver has reached beta status, and testers are needed.

Ah, the AmigaOne x1000 - now that the summer is approaching, the powerful next-generation Amiga machine is getting ever closer to being officially unveiled and launched. The hardware is being developed by A-EON Technology, who formed a strategic partnership with Hyperion Entertainment, the company behind AmigaOS 4.x, with the "express purpose of developing new hardware for AmigaOS 4 and beyond". Obligement has a long and detailed interview up with Trevor Dickinson, long-time Amiga enthusiast and collector, and one of the prime forces behind A-EON.

"Hyperion Entertainment CVBA announces the immediate availability of Update 2 for AmigaOS 4.1 for AmigaOne, SAM440EP and Pegasos II for registered users. Note that for this update you must have previously installed AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. Installation of this Update 2 is required for the upcoming public alpha of Timberwolf . This is a minor update which contains mostly bugfixes."

Thanks to the efforts of Neil Cafferkey, it has been possible since early March to install and boot AROS from a USB stick (if your BIOS supports this functionality, obviously). There is an ongoing topic about this at Aros-Exec, and the Icaros Desktop Blog talks about it as well.

It seems like only yesterday, but in fact it's already six months ago. July last year, we published our review of AmigaOS 4.1 running on ACube's sam440ep motherboard, and here we are, six months later, and Hyperion has released AmigaOS 4.1 Update 1. This free update brings with it quite a number of new features, and since I still have the sam440ep on my desk, I could test the new features first-hand.

People, this is an interesting thing to follow first-hand. Hyperion, the company behind AmigaOS4, has been talking about its "Most Ambitious Project" for a while now, but on December 31, they started teasing the Amiga community like crazy. They opened a site called a-eon.com, which is most likely about the MAP.

AROS distribution Icaros Desktop v1.2 has been released. AROS is a lightweight, portable and independent operating system aiming to recreate the original AmigaOS experience on any platform and, after many years of development, has finally reached a good degree of reliability. Icaros Desktop provides a full, already pre-configured Amiga-like desktop environment on any PC, packing it with many useful or entertaining applications, games and so on.

Yes, we are continuing our new-found fascination with the Amiga platform, by reporting to you straight from the floors of AmiWest and Pianeta Amiga. Chris Handley consolidated all the information from these two Amiga shows into one handy post, and the future of the AmigaOS looks bright indeed! Update: More planned features have emerged. Read on for the update.

It's really been an Amiga week, hasn't it? As such, it seems only fitting to close this week off with some seriously epic news from the Amiga community. As most of you will know, Hyperion and Amiga, Inc. have been embroiled in a tough legal battle over the distribution and development rights of the AmigaOS, and all its associated trademarks. The epic news is that this situation is now completely and utterly resolved.