AmigaOS 3.1.4 withdrawn from market after Amiga

[wawa]

you should be able to use binaries (or maybe even libraries) compiled for aros-m68k on amiga as long as the are not (statically?) linked against aros exclusive libraries, such as posixc or arosc.

in practice i think this is the show stopper.
however it works the other way around. well.. mostly.

[Ledfoot]

Well, if I had won the big Powerball jackpot 2 weeks ago for $1.4 Billion I would have bought up all the Amiga IP and copyrights and tried to clean up this mess... But alas, no such luck!

[Minuous]

@bszilli:

>3.1.4 is also a downgrade from 3.9 and it also introduced new bugs and compatibility issues

I agree, not sure where you got the idea that I thought otherwise. I've not seen any important reason to switch to OS3.1.4, and OS3.9 is better overall. I don't know what you mean that I am "ignoring the bugs" in OS3.1.4. I don't use it, don't have any strong view for or against it, and haven't even really said anything about it until now. I accept Hyperion's right to create and sell it. Obviously it's missing ReAction so it's not much use by itself, but an OS3.9+BB4+parts of OS3.1.4 system would be quite compelling.

If Hyperion do have full rights for ReAction for classic, and it is just a matter of programmer manpower to backport OS4 ReAction to OS3, I might consider joining forces with Thor and Olsen to make that happen.

[wawa]

Originally Posted by Ledfoot

Well, if I had won the big Powerball jackpot 2 weeks ago for $1.4 Billion I would have bought up all the Amiga IP and copyrights and tried to clean up this mess... But alas, no such luck!

im pretty sure at least me, if i __REALLY__ won such a prize, id put it to a better use. and i think im not alone in this.

[Ledfoot]

Originally Posted by wawa

im pretty sure at least me, if i __REALLY__ won such a prize, id put it to a better use. and i think im not alone in this.

Well, it's not like it would make much of a dent in 1.4 BILLION! LOL... When you have that kind of money you can afford to do a little "community philanthropic" work with a bit of it... there's no way it would cost anywhere near that much to gather all things Amiga under 1 roof again and get things straightened out for the future. Hell, could even fund some work on future hardware and software with that kind of money.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by Ledfoot

Well, it's not like it would make much of a dent in 1.4 BILLION! LOL...

To be fair, after taxes, it would only be like $800 million...
But I suppose I could have scraped by...

(And yes, buying all the Amiga stuff was on my "when I win" list as well.)

[wawa]

ah. ok.. billions..

[lilalurl]

Even though there is the "Amiga" word in these posts about the lottery, they are not really related to the topic at hand (whatever it is/was).

I guess next time, rather than a warning, it will be a topic lock.

[grelbfarlk]

So could Thor & co. work with Haage & Partner to release an updated version of 3.9?

[Minuous]

Unfortunately H&P have left the Amiga market :-(

[nobody]

Well Sega spend around 500 million for Dreamcast then almost gone bankrupt after poor sales. Go figure. The market is too crowded for new players. That for hardware. But for Amiga OS, there was a place if it was ported to x86 due to being very lightweight. With a bunch of good modern applications (browser, office, PDF, video player, rar etc) it could have an impact. Instead it is jailed to m68k/ppc.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by nobody

But for Amiga OS, there was a place if it was ported to x86 due to being very lightweight. With a bunch of good modern applications (browser, office, PDF, video player, rar etc) it could have an impact. Instead it is jailed to m68k/ppc.

I agree, if AMiGA had landed on x86 the history of computing would have changed and AMiGA would have excelled as it did then

[Dunny]

Official backing to AROS would be nice. Even though it's currently slow as hell, it's still way, way faster than any other (mainstream) x86 OS out there.

[nobody]

Just because Apple was using PPC they ported the OS to PPC instead of the logical choice that was x86. Then Apple ported everything to x86 lol

[kolla]

Originally Posted by Minuous

If Hyperion do have full rights for ReAction for classic, and it is just a matter of programmer manpower to backport OS4 ReAction to OS3, I might consider joining forces with Thor and Olsen to make that happen.

You gave the impression the other day that you knew something about this, but could not tell due to whatever... so what was that about?

[kolla]

Originally Posted by nobody

Just because Apple was using PPC they ported the OS to PPC instead of the logical choice that was x86. Then Apple ported everything to x86 lol

PPC was a logical step at the time due to endianess, porting to x86 would have meant no integrated 68k emulation, and no smooth transition - not a logical step. When NeXT took over at Apple, they brought NeXTSTEP, a BSD UNIX and a GUI/API/development toolkit OPENSTEP, that already had proven portable, and endian-agnostic, existing on both 68k and x86 (and SPARC, DEC Alpha and more), so porting to PowerPC while maintaining x86 compatibility was not a huge issue. Certain components from classic MacOS was also ported to OPENSTEP, as well as "look and feel". During this process of merging OPENSTEP ("yellowbox") and MacOS components ("bluebox"), while updating the underlying UNIX (mach3+BSD kernel known as Darwin, user-land from FreeBSD), the OS was known as Rhapsody and was first available for x86 and PowerPC, and once it was "ready" (aka "MacOS X Server 1.0 pre-release", aka "Rhapsody Premium") only on PowerPC, as Apple wanted to lock it to their own hardware after all, and emulation/dual-booting to old MacOS was only possible on PowerPC. This was in 1999. There is no doubt that Apple made sure x86 compatibility was kept all through the "MacOS X on PowerPC" years (2000-2006), which was mostly a period for porting software from old MacOS to OSX. Once the vast majority of important legacy software had been ported to OSX, making a "flip" to x86 was easy - for the most part it would just be matter of switching target in the compiler.

So, IMO, it is wrong to say that Apple "ported the OS from PPC to x86", the vast part of that job was done already at NeXT, and what happened at Apple was porting to PowerPC while maintaining portability with x86 (and other possibly relevant archs), as well as porting certain concepts from old MacOS to the new OS ("Carbon"). The goal has been all the time to make transitions as smooth as possible, for developers and users alike, and I would say it has been a huge success in that regard - Apple are now in a position that they can switch to any architecture whenever they wish, with minimal impact on the software portfolio.

[plasmab]

The first PPC Mac came out in 1994. The first x86 MAC was circa 2004. That’s a long time for a “not port”.

I don’t think it would have made sense to port AmigaOS to x86 in 1994. By 1998 it was looking much more sensible because the hardware was so cheap. It was about then AROS started. But it was too late for Amiga by then. Most people had moved to PC etc.

I think there was a market for AmigaOS on PC around 1997-1998. Windows 98 sucked really bad, Windows 95 was a toy. Once Windows 2000/XP came along I think the market was diminishing for an alternative OS. ESP considering Linux was out and really usable by then. From 2000-2005 I used Linux exclusively on cheap dual processor machines.

I breathed a sigh when I didn’t have to manually install 200 dependencies to run an application. This is what’s still missing from AmigaOS.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by plasmab

The first PPC Mac came out in 1994. The first x86 MAC was circa 2004. That’s a long time for a “not port”.

And the first NeXTSTEP release for i386 was in 1993 - that was when the "port of OSX to x86" was done.

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by kolla

And the first NeXTSTEP release for i386 was in 1993 - that was when the "port of OSX to x86" was done.

I doubt that by the time MacOSX came out on x86 there was very much left that was compatible. Maybe the init routines... ten years is a long time in any codebase. I think that saying MacOS is NextSTEP is a stretch. And a big one.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by plasmab

I doubt that by the time MacOSX came out on x86 there was very much left that was compatible. Maybe the init routines... ten years is a long time in any codebase. I think that saying MacOS is NextSTEP is a stretch. And a big one.

Hm. NeXTSTEP took over Apple in 1996, Rhapsody came in 1997 on x86 and PowerPC, PowerPC-only from 1998 and in 2006 Apple swiftly took OSX "back" to x86. Why on earth would Apple internally not keep OSX x86 compatible between 1998 and 2006? It's not a big stretch, that NeXTSTEP evolved into OSX is not something I make up. At university I had access to all bits and pieces I mention here, for a long while I had a NeXTStation in my office, we had Rhapsody systems installed in the labs, CHRP/PREP systems from Motorola and IBM, tons of Apple PowerPC and m68k systems around, even a few MacOS X Servers that Apple pushed a while for running video streaming...

I have never been a huge Apple fan, but I did witness the transitions they went through with great envy. Ironically, early sketches for Amiga OS4 were drawn along the same lines as that of NeXTSTEP, even before Apple bought NeXT. But Apple did the transition Amiga should have done, while those OS4 ideas ended up becoming MorphOS, and stagnated on "abox" - yeah, another "box" concept - "abox" (amiga compatible) vs "qbox" (native) - comparable with "blue box" (classic compatible) vs "yellowbox" (native) on OSX. The "morph" from abox to qbox never happened, so the name "MorphOS" has no real significance anymore.