OS4 to be shown in the UK

[Severin]

OS4 is going to be shown on several A1's (including mine), a MicroA1 (used to be called the 'lite') and possibly a CSPPC classic system if we can get one, in Bath on December 13th

More details here.

[Amiga1992]

Will OS4 be able to run on Mac PPC machines or not? I'm waiting for that to boot my iBook with the beast.

[Severin]

No

well, not officially, someone will probably hack it though...

[Korodny]

Originally posted by Severin
No

well, not officially, someone will probably hack it though...

I doubt that. The Macs use a different Southbridge, a different Northbridge and a different BIOS standard (Openfirmware instead of UBoot). Additionally, OS4 is copy-protected (the Dongle code).

To get OS4 booting on a Macintosh without access to the sources would require an insane amount of hacking.

Even if somebody tries to port MacOnLinux to MacoS and tries to make OS4 running inside it, he would be facing pretty much the same problems.

[Severin]

Originally posted by Korodny
To get OS4 booting on a Macintosh without access to the sources would require an insane amount of hacking.

Has anyone here ever accused mac users of being sane? Admitted that they're a lot saner than peeps who worship/love windows and wouldn't use anything else, they need a nice white room with bouncy walls

Come to think of it, has anyone who comes here been accused of being sane? Don't think so...

I'm sure someone will try, just for the challenge...

[Drake1009]

I think §ane has been called Sane before.

I'm still on windows, not because I really like it, but because of compatibility and ease of use when you're half asleep.

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by Severin
Has anyone here ever accused mac users of being sane?

I;m not sane, thank you

[Unknown_K]

I dont think any computer user who picks 1 platform as being their god and every other platform is satan is sane. Your just limiting what you can do thinking that way (a marketers wet dream is a person who buys their bullshit and ignores the other options).

Why would people want to hack OS 4 to run on a mac anyway. If your so gung ho to want an OS with no apps for it you might as well shell out a ton of money for a motherboard (amiga one) that has no hardware for it. Just makes sense.

[Amiga1992]

*cough*
No hardware for AmigaOne? I thought PCI, AGP, USB, etc were standard? I must be stupid.

Anyway, as you said, why should we be so anal as to regard one platform as the end-all platform of them all? Why can't I run OS X and OS4 concurrently if there is a possibility?

I would satisfy meself with a proper OS X emu like WinUAE. But that doesn't exist, so my dream of a portable Amiga went out of thewindow. For now.

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by Akira
*cough*
No hardware for AmigaOne? I thought PCI, AGP, USB, etc were standard? I must be stupid.

Anyway, as you said, why should we be so anal as to regard one platform as the end-all platform of them all? Why can't I run OS X and OS4 concurrently if there is a possibility?

I would satisfy meself with a proper OS X emu like WinUAE. But that doesn't exist, so my dream of a portable Amiga went out of thewindow. For now.

I mean nobody is making hardware for the thing. Pulling a voodoo 3 out of the scrap heap and plugging it into your amigaone isnt the same thing as a custom made video card that does something special. You might as well go buy an all in one ECS motherboard and run WinUAE on it if your limited to 1% of the old obsolete PC hardware the OS 4 people have gotten around to making drivers for.

You cant run OSX on anything but apples hardware for the same reason I can run AGA games on my atari 1040ST. If you have a hardon for OSX go buy a mac, if your nuts about windows XP go buy intel hardware, if you want to run amiga OS go buy an old amiga, if you want to run linux some nutjob will port it to anything with a processor and some ram just because he can.

The only thing that was close to a modern dual system were the old macs that had pc hardware on a board. Windows running in a window on a mac os machine must have been cool to have when it was cutting edge. This wasnt a slow buggy emulation, its 2 pc's in 1 case kind of like the 3 pc's in 1 case the old commodore 128 was (c64, cp/m z80, c128).

If the retro hardware craze doesnt completely die off maybe in a few years we can buy cheap computers on PCI cards or USB 2.0 external boxes. Nothing like adding an atari ST, amiga 1200, psx, dreamcast, saturn, apple iigs, atari 800, c128, etc on an addon card with 100% hardware compatibility and the option of using the original drives along with your internal hd for storage.

[Severin]

Time for another *cough*

Amiga OS4 will support 160 gfx chip sets, that's thousands of off the shelf gfx cards...

It only supports 2 atm, but it's still in it's alpha stage, we're just waiting for 'snap' to finish being ported...

Why would I wan't to buy a PC and run windows to run winuae and the old OS3.9? seems an incredibly odd thing to do when I can buy a nice 933Mhz G4 PPC Amiga to run a fast PPC OS on?

Erm, what about the PC bridgeboards and emplant board for the big box amigas? My A1 is quite happy running Amiga, Linux and Mac OS's none of which are emulated, they all run natively...

If the 'quality' of software was better on winslows I would be temped, but it seems to me that their attitude of 'don't bother writing small, neat, fast code, just add the new bits in, and let new more powerful hardware deal with it' and all the adverts saying you need the latest pentium chip even to think about browsing the net, are the major problems in the windows world, or simply put 'don't fix it bung more power at it'

My old A4k does 99% of what I want to do on a computer, it browses the net just as fast as the latest PC hardware, the only thing It won't do is play dvd/vcd's and is a bit slow for 2 or 3 games.

Having OS4 and going from a 50Mhz system to 933Mhz is going to make quite a difference, especially as it won't have windows in the background hogging large amounts of the cpu time...

@Unknown_k and anyone else in the UK

Come to the show, talk to the owners, play with the alpha OS4 we'll be displaying...

Then maybe you will stop comparing 10 year old amiga's with the A1's...

Hmmm, maybe I should start ranting about how much better my A1 is compared to a P60

[Fred the Fop]

It's all about the apps. Games..etc.
I think to convince people to buy an A1, you need to show em them apps and games.
Not stuff like Star Office or whatever.
Real, customer and company supported apps.
Not shareware.

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by Severin
Time for another *cough*

Amiga OS4 will support 160 gfx chip sets, that's thousands of off the shelf gfx cards...

It only supports 2 atm, but it's still in it's alpha stage, we're just waiting for 'snap' to finish being ported...

Why would I wan't to buy a PC and run windows to run winuae and the old OS3.9? seems an incredibly odd thing to do when I can buy a nice 933Mhz G4 PPC Amiga to run a fast PPC OS on?

Erm, what about the PC bridgeboards and emplant board for the big box amigas? My A1 is quite happy running Amiga, Linux and Mac OS's none of which are emulated, they all run natively...

If the 'quality' of software was better on winslows I would be temped, but it seems to me that their attitude of 'don't bother writing small, neat, fast code, just add the new bits in, and let new more powerful hardware deal with it' and all the adverts saying you need the latest pentium chip even to think about browsing the net, are the major problems in the windows world, or simply put 'don't fix it bung more power at it'

My old A4k does 99% of what I want to do on a computer, it browses the net just as fast as the latest PC hardware, the only thing It won't do is play dvd/vcd's and is a bit slow for 2 or 3 games.

Having OS4 and going from a 50Mhz system to 933Mhz is going to make quite a difference, especially as it won't have windows in the background hogging large amounts of the cpu time...

@Unknown_k and anyone else in the UK

Come to the show, talk to the owners, play with the alpha OS4 we'll be displaying...

Then maybe you will stop comparing 10 year old amiga's with the A1's...

Hmmm, maybe I should start ranting about how much better my A1 is compared to a P60

Well if you like waiting a decade then maybe OS 4 will ship and support 160 chipsets. By then maybe a few people will have written a couple apps and maybe a few games for it. There isnt enough money and programmers behind it to make it viable in my opinion.

I am not saying the platform itself is crap, alot of great platforms have come and gone because of market decisions and lack of full support in the last 10 years. I cant get all worked up over an OS when to me its just the glue that runs the applications I want on the hardware I have to have. Applications impress me and cause me to purchase the hardware to run them, which is what most people do. Its like people buy a console after they decide what games they want to play, not the other way around.

Apple and the mac would not be here today if it wasnt for first spreadsheet being apple II only.

[jmmijo]

Originally posted by Unknown_K

Well if you like waiting a decade then maybe OS 4 will ship and support 160 chipsets. By then maybe a few people will have written a couple apps and maybe a few games for it. There isnt enough money and programmers behind it to make it viable in my opinion.

I am not saying the platform itself is crap, alot of great platforms have come and gone because of market decisions and lack of full support in the last 10 years. I cant get all worked up over an OS when to me its just the glue that runs the applications I want on the hardware I have to have. Applications impress me and cause me to purchase the hardware to run them, which is what most people do. Its like people buy a console after they decide what games they want to play, not the other way around.

Apple and the mac would not be here today if it wasnt for first spreadsheet being apple II only.

I tend to agree with this as well, as much as I would like to see OS4 succeed, there would have to be at least one *killer* app that would cause users to purchase the hardware.

@Unknown_K, that spreadsheet for the Apple II, was that Visicalc ?!?

Seems to me it was and before anybody knew about Lotus

[Unknown_K]

yes it was visicalc, I couldnt think of the name when I was typing had lotus 123 in my mind for some reason.

The intel platform is the PC gaming platform and has been for the last decade . While alot of video editing and digital publishing is done on apple hardware, there is alot that can be done on the PC too. I can think of a system that even comes close to rivaling the amount of hardware available, software available, nich markets it serves, quantity and quality of developers , and userbase that the intel platform has. Linux with millions of users and quite a bit of home grown developers cant make a dent in the windows/intel platform how do you think amiga can? And while there are a few die hard amiga fans there are 10,000x more apple fans. Without some ground breaking compelling reason to change to amiga os it is stillborn before the first 2 bytes of code were typed. They would have had much better chances with an inexpensive PC addon card (or mac addon card) then a whole new platform.

[jmmijo]

I do however like the Power PC cpu's and I think the reason that a new platform was used is because the developers wanted to use the Power PC rather then an x86 flavor.

Myself I would've wanted cheaper hardware cost's as well but I think there may have been other reasons for choosing the Power PC as well

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by jmmijo
I do however like the Power PC cpu's and I think the reason that a new platform was used is because the developers wanted to use the Power PC rather then an x86 flavor.

Myself I would've wanted cheaper hardware cost's as well but I think there may have been other reasons for choosing the Power PC as well

What do you think the mac uses? They could of built a hardware card (64bit even) that took over a mac computer. A g5 would have been a better choice then a g3 or g4. Thye probably chose a ppc because of the work already done for ppc on the addon boards for the real amiga's and the fact that they are alot closer to the old 68k then the x86 is.

[jmmijo]

I should have made myself a little more clear on this, yes I know that's what MAC's use, however, Apple has made a proprietary mainboard and I'm sure that they said no to licensing it out or even something similar in design hence the reason I think a brand new board was required instead.

[Unknown_K]

Originally posted by jmmijo
I should have made myself a little more clear on this, yes I know that's what MAC's use, however, Apple has made a proprietary mainboard and I'm sure that they said no to licensing it out or even something similar in design hence the reason I think a brand new board was required instead.

I didnt say to buy a mac motherboard or liscence the design. I was talking about buying a whole mac computer (if you dont have one) and adding a card that takes over the mac and turns it into a PPC amiga. The only design would be the card and how it interfaced with the hardware present on the mac. I dont think any of the new macs have a hardwar rom anymore they just dump the rom code on the harddrive you boot from so its a little easier then making a card for the old rommed machines. I know the old A/UX unix os had to load a mac file before it could boot into unix because of the way the mac built in roms worked. The major proprietary thing on the g5 is the OS and the code that boots the system, other then that its all off the shelf components that can be referenced.

[jmmijo]

I understand that but I think the same thing would apply, Apple in their not so infinite wisdom, would not allow such a thing to occur