Official update to OS 3.1 from Hyperion

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by frank_b

Oh Does this mean more goodies going forward for the OS from you? I prefer the check mark btw You did great work on 3.5! The thought of evolving 3.x sounds great.

Let's say that there may be an opportunity not to just remove and add to what goes into a Kickstart ROM, or a Workbench disk, but to actually modify and extend those components which have not been changed since 1993/1994.

Whether this will actually come to pass or cause even more calamity (we've seen enough of that in the past 22+ years) we'll have to see.

Personally, I'm hoping that further changes to Kickstart and Workbench 3.1 will be possible. There appears to be a need for that to happen

[frank_b]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

Let's say that there may be an opportunity not to just remove and add to what goes into a Kickstart ROM, or a Workbench disk, but to actually modify and extend those components which have not been changed since 1993/1994.

Whether this will actually come to pass or cause even more calamity (we've seen enough of that in the past 22+ years) we'll have to see.

Personally, I'm hoping that further changes to Kickstart and Workbench 3.1 will be possible. There appears to be a need for that to happen

Nice If I can make a couple of suggestions?

1) Fix the font spacing on windows. There's a pixel gap at the bottom but not the top > 2.x This looked better in 1.x

2) Make the aspect of some of the gadgets dynamic based on the screen mode. That way they'd look nice in 640*512 and 640*200.

3) Add bblank support on the screen mode requestor for chipsets >= ECS.

4) swap the pens used for highlight. This would allow icons to look good in 1.x and 2.x

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

@Olaf, was there any kind of dialogue between Hyperion and Cloanto before this was done?

I think a lot of ppl will agree its confusing to have two parallel official, but slightly different distributions of OS 3.1

If there was any contact between the two parties, I was not privy to the conversation.

I am not employed by Hyperion. My part in this strange Amiga "business" is strictly as a paid consultant, who has certain techical knowledge of the Amiga and who actually likes to develop software for it (in the little spare time I seem to have left to do so these days). Maybe I shouldn't spend so much time trying to debug the "smbfs" file system, come to think of it

This being a small market (ahem), with few parties invested in it as deeply as Hyperion and Cloanto are, I would be surprised if there was no contact, though.

[Exit]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

Let's say that there may be an opportunity not to just remove and add to what goes into a Kickstart ROM, or a Workbench disk, but to actually modify and extend those components which have not been changed since 1993/1994.

Whether this will actually come to pass or cause even more calamity (we've seen enough of that in the past 22+ years) we'll have to see.

Personally, I'm hoping that further changes to Kickstart and Workbench 3.1 will be possible. There appears to be a need for that to happen

Yes that would be great.. workbench 3.10

but for now, i dont see the need to buy this upgrade, its simply too small of a change imo..

[Korodny]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

With Commodore gone, the Boing! ball was revived. It was after all the original Amiga logo, when Amiga was still independent.

No, it was revived because it was cheaper to print (only two colors). Petro was a glorified accounting clerk, not a visionary tech geek that knew everything about ancient Amiga history...

[wawa]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

With Commodore gone, the Boing! ball was revived. It was after all the original Amiga logo, when Amiga was still independent.

unfortunatelly, its not like with commodore gone, amiga became independant. rather on the contrary, whatever hard products we may still today have, what concerns amiga, thats what commodore bought up, designed and eventually issued to the public. before it became a boing ball of amatheurish shortsighted interests and no successor has been able to add up anything much worth mention. so, as you see from this thread, overwhelming majority of fans identifies checkmark with amiga, not boing balls, even if they had historically some valid reference..

[SnkBitten]

I bought them, just to show support for the 68k, 3.1/3.9 side of Amiga.

I hope to see more development like this in the future, so adding a few bucks to their incentive to do more.

[wXR]

I can appreciate the effort here, but every purchase of this justifies (in someone's mind) AmigaOS' continuing status as proprietary software. At this point, it should be re-licensed and made available under a permissive open source license -- liberated to its users, in other words. Why are we messing around with anything else? Whoever this benefits financially surely is not making much of an income from it, not that an income is proper justification for this in the first place.

Please, stop trying to OWN everything, and let us have this thing that has meant so much to us for so many years. Respect a rightful kind of commons. Lets make AmigaOS legally available on GitHub so that we can patch it and improve it in public, and with all the benefits of public scrutiny and feedback.

[Heiroglyph]

I can see both wXR's and SnkBitten's point of view on this one, but I bought both updates.

I just want to encourage 68k support in any way.

All parties seem like they would rather take the source code to their graves than benefit the 68k users with it, so this is at least a step in a direction I'm OK with.

[wXR]

This doesn't benefit 68K users either. Given the current conditions and limitations, you are probably better off with those so-called unofficial patches that have been honed and tested for years.

I don't want to slag off Hyperion, because in my heart I respect anyone who puts hurculean efforts into passion projects like this. But a proprietary IP model is completely the wrong application here. As far as I'm concerned, that was proven by AmigaOS 4, which would also be far better off as a permissively licensed, open-source project. Imagine the bridges that could have been built between so-called classic users, and the PPC world, if it had all been open! The result instead, are divisions, and increasingly diminishing returns.

[kolla]

@wXr

But you know, the community crowd is just not smart enough to handle a project like this. Never mind that the community made, not one, but _two_, spin-off operating systems, on their own, and even ported them to different architectures. And a few other operating systems too.

One can only wonder what could have been had the sources had been legally available already back when commodore went out of business. Instead, here we are, 22 years later and all that officially has changed is that the tick is replaced with a boing ball. Yay.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by kolla

@wXr

But you know, the community crowd is just not smart enough to handle a project like this.

Harsh words.

I do not see this issue in terms of of "smarts", it's just that developing a product such as AmigaOS, with Kickstart (ROM) and Workbench (disks), for the 68k platform, on the existing codebase, is very, very complex and challenging work.

Those developers who excelled at these challenges have long been drawn to different challenges (you are bound to find them at Google, Facebook or Sony, to name just a few companies). Some may be close to retirement. Those people who worked on the AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 updates and beyond are now old enough to have grown-up children. There is little enough time to do Amiga software development as a hobby, it is even harder to make time for operating system development as a side-project.

Getting into AmigaOS development is difficult. The developer documentation (the RKMs, etc.) can be found on archive.org and a select few other web sites. Example code and tutorials are around, but they are arguably difficult to learn from without knowing a lot more background about the Amiga than you can quickly absorb today. Even the toolchain needed to build Amiga applications is something of a mess today. Worse still, Amiga operating system development hinges on the knowledge of the 'C' programming language (and to a certain degree 68000 CPU family assembly language). These are not the top programming languages the curious will grow up with today (JavaScript and Python, anyone?).

I am not convinced that it will be "easy enough" to change this situation, so that more curious people will find their way to discover the Amiga as a software development platform. That's my pessimistic streak. However, I believe it is not impossible to improve the situation, it just takes commitment and time to make it happen. Which is hard to come by. Would you rather have some guy like me take a spanner to the Amiga operating system, or have him mentor the next generation of Amiga enthusiasts who want to get into programming? It probably can't be both, so it would have to be one or the other.

One last parting shot: open sourcing the operating system (which I believe is not permitted by the current rights owner, the Pentti Kouri estate) will not solve the organizational and technical problems that need to be tackled. It's part of the whole problem, and (I believe) the smallest part.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by akira

this update brings nothing worth a purchase or update.

+1

A good update would be:

1. Proper IDE port handling during boot so that you don't get boot delays and have no problems with HDs that spin up too slowly. The way it works now is crappy.

2. Various IDE devices support.

3. Big HD support.

4. 4K block size handling.

This 'update', however, is nonsense, and not worth anyone's time.

[Predseda]

+1 to Akira

+2 to Thorham

[grond]

Commodore always had rainbows for their products because colour displays were a big thing in the 80s. Even the VIC20 had the rainbow. Of course, the wow factor has diminished over the decades...

Regarding the legal situation of AOS: I believe that none of the two really owns any rights to it. There is no proof that the rights to the software were ever sold from the bankruptcy assets.

[wXR]

Olaf, the beauty of open source development is that the tools (these days, at least) facilitate a kind of self-organization. Discussions around complex technical topics can be resolved with issues. Pull requests allow individual developers to submit changes, but that doesn't mean your fork gets overruled. With GitHub, you can put a project online as a maintainer who has the final say in terms of what gets pulled in. The point is it's all there for you, a model that has proven itself with tens of thousands of succesful projects at this point.

I don't doubt that Amiga development is complex, but it doesn't get any less complex without code being dissected and discussed in public, in a forum that is familiar to today's developers. If I were to say "yes" to your question about mentoring, it wouldn't matter if the code wasn't available anyway. The whole idea would be preposterous.

And of course things are a mess, but it's a mess because of both the practices around its development and the inevitable crust of time. Still, all of the toolchains can be improved. Perhaps some of them can be unified. The wonderful part is that, with an open source development model, someone can come in and improve some smart part in a spare moment, while another improves something else of interest. There is no need for a monolithic approach, though again, as the maintainer, you can reject anything you want during your code review.

Surely this makes more sense than the way things are done now. Surely a near-total industry shift to this model for everything except games and appallingly dangerous IoT devices tells us that this is something that works?

Personally I don't care who owns the so-called "rights" to AmigaOS, but if that bothers some folks, and/or makes it harder to collaborate on GitHub, then perhaps we shold simply look at collectively buying out these rights, once and for all? Why not pool our energies a bit and liberate them to the Internet, as should have been done 20+-odd years ago already.

[Marlon_]

I totally agree with wXR

[idrougge]

We don't need open source, just as we don't need an updated Kickstart where the main change is copyright strings and a picture.

But there seems to be a lot of people who feel a very strong need to pay for updated copyright strings and a picture. The kind of people who will ensure that we will never have a Kickstart you can just use for getting UAE up and running or that software authors feel that they can't ship their software on an autobooting floppy or CD.

Every time you pay for a pointless old Kickstart, you're dooming the Amiga to greater obscurity.

* None of this should be interpreted as criticism of Olsen, who is always doing a great job. It's just that this kind of thing doesn't solve any problems, it just creates more of them.

[wXR]

idrougge, you make a very good point. Imagine an Amiga entry experience that goes something like this:

As a developer, I navigate to github.com/amigaos in my browser. I see an active operating system repository, an SDK repository, and several repositories for related tools. I enter the SDK repository and click the "releases" button, where I see a list of the latest up-to-date, tagged development environments, which include an "instant on" AmigaOS and a full development toolset. I click "Wiki" and see a full set of documentation for every conceivable part of the OS, some even put there by the original AmigaOS developers, who were asked to contribute. I click "issues" and see a current list of discussions around the most pressing issues in the current development branch. I click "branches" and see PPC and even X86 experiments going on, both blending elements of OS3 and OS4. I take a casual look at the README.md for the current branch and notice that, in my Debian-based repo, I can simply type "apt-get install amigaos-dev" to get the full development environment on my system, which auto-updates. On Mac, I can type "brew install amigaos-dev". Rad.

As a casual emulation user, I navigate to amigaos.com, because I want to setup "an Amiga" on my computer. It auto-detects my operating system and I click "Download", and a bundled installer is dropped onto my desktop, which I double-click for a full-screen, fully graphical, best-of-class Amiga experience.

And on and on.

In both cases, the user doesn't need to fuss about ROMs, licenses, or placating well-intentioned but effectively parasitic companies. This scenario above would only be possible through permissive licensing.

[Retro1234]

Aros is the back to the future