Amiga & AROS Archive

Icaros Desktop, the distribution for i386 PC of the AROS Research Operating System (an open source revival of classic AmigaOS) reached version 1.2.6 and introduces new improvements and features.

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".

Hyperion Entertainment have posted a visualisation of the AmigaOS source code repositry. You can see it grow from AmigaOS 1.0 back in 1985 right through to today.

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.

And as time goes by, the date the AmigaOne X1000 will be unveiled creeps ever closer. Last week, A-Eon has announced it will make 100 Nemo motherboards, rev-2, available to 100 beta testers under a special discount program. Several AmigaOS4 developers already have access to these motherboards for a while now, as they are working on implementing the necessary drivers.

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.

A few weeks ago, Novell and Red Hat jointly fended off a patent infringement suit thrown their way by a patent troll. The patent in question more or less came down to the concept of virtual desktops - and thanks to Groklaw, several people helped in finding cases of prior art. The most interesting one of all? A carefully restored and working Amiga 1000 demonstrated to the judge and jury.

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.

I really wonder how I missed this one. While I'm sure most of you have already been playing this, I only discovered it a few days ago and have been hooked ever since. It's called Digital: A Love Story, and it's an interactive story set in 1988, written/created by Christine Love. The interface of the game is the Amiga Workbench, and you progress through the story by reading, replying, and hacking BBSs using your modem.

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.

After days of wild speculation and ridiculously fast-growing threads on AmigaWorld.net, we finally know most of what we need to know about the new Amiga. This is not just a random PowerPC evaluation board that you can stuff in a generic case - no, this is an all-new system with a custom motherboard, and some very, very interesting innovations - like a fully customisable co-processor. Twenty-five years after the introduction of the first Amiga, this is one heck of a machine.

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.

An effort is currently under way to port the Firefox web browser to the Amiga operating system. This effort goes by the name Project Timberworlf, and is the latest in a long line of efforts to port Firefox to alternative operating systems. This raises the question: is Firefox really suited for these small platforms?

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.