[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

And this is the reason the Amiga needs to die, everyone bickering over nonsense.
What a joke!!!!

On the contrary, not only is the bickering keeping it alive, it adds to the retro experience!

30 years ago everybody complained about the price of Amiga software, and swore they would buy rather than pirate if prices went down (to less than the cost of a blank disk). A few of us insisted on staying legal to support producers, but eventually even we had to admit that cracking down on piracy wouldn't save a dying industry. Turns out the large supply of pirate software was driving sales of the hardware!

A few years later Commodore was dead and everybody moved to PCs. So you would think that today all commercial Amiga software would be abandonware or given to the community because the platform is dead. But no! Even today some Amiga software is worth enough that people are still bickering over the legalities! Which proves that the Amiga should not die.

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Err, the CoffinOS installer is 32GB???

That's several times larger than a macOS or Windows 10 Installation Image. What a bloated piece of shit!

Yep, if all you wanted was the OS then it's the ultimate example of bloat. But even if you stripped off all the games etc. it would still be a bloated piece of shit, because it includes OS 3.9.

I don't really understand why anyone cares if 3.9 is being distributed as part of CoffinOS.

I don't care, but for different reasons than you might think. If anyone wants to spoil themselves with an SD card jam-packed with every piece of Amiga software ever produced then I say let them. This is just the modern equivalent of those hundreds of disks they used to have 30 years ago - far more than they could ever get full value out of and cheapening the experience.

As for 3.9, the official distribution is so onerous, and the OS itself so bloated and incompetently implemented it doesn't deserve any better. OTOH I don't mind if people are discouraged from using it, because it means fewer software titles will be produced that require it.

It's about time we stopped caring about the legalities of 20 year old software.

It would be nice to think we could, but we can't because that 20 year old software is still under copyright and (I presume) still being sold.

I feel no shame in saying that I downloaded a pirate copy of OS 3.9 to evaluate - then uninstalled it and went back to 3.1. If it had been worth buying I would have. Today I purchased Roadshow - because it is worth buying. They had the good sense to distribute a demo version so people could legally see whether it was worth buying before plonking their money down.