AmigaOS 3.2 and beyond

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by kamelito

Isn’t electronics versions available? All these were stored in servers right?

What difference would that make? Someone would still have to go through everything and check for personal/sensitive data as bubbob42 said.

[bubbob42]

Originally Posted by indigolemon

What difference would that make? Someone would still have to go through everything and check for personal/sensitive data as bubbob42 said.

Correct.

But I think @kamelito only misinterpreted my use of "scan" as in "scanning paper". What I meant was "scanning" in the sense of "reviewing very thoroughly".

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by kamelito

@thedevteam
What would be nice of you is to release all datas from CIX and BIX servers at least for historical reasons. I don’t wanna hear excuses, sensible data’s if they exists might be omitted. Your thoughts?

I'm curious if any of that material survived the last 35 years. BIX was a subscription service in which, as far as I know, much of the early (1986 onwards) Amiga developer community thrived and in which Commodore engineers participated, too.

When I was still paying decent money for Commodore's ADSP membership we used to see bug reports, etc. posted which originated from BIX but were fed back into the ADSP netnews groups. That's the extent to which I was aware of what happened a BIX at the time. From the point of view of us humble european Amiga developers, BIX likely received more attention and received better feedback from Commodore than we did. I got the impression that were considered something of an irrelevant nuisance to Commodore, but still "sufficiently gullible" to have signed up with ADSP in the first place. For example, we were the last to know about the A600, the A4000, the A1200 and those ill-advised ideas of reviving a follow-up to the C64 which would have actively competed with the Amiga.

Commodore's own ADSP network contents (Unix-based, using private newsgroups and e-mail forwarding) did survive in backup. The late Klaus Burkert personally recovered it from an Amiga Unix server which wound up at Village Tronic GmbH in the late 1990'ies and which reportedly came from Commodore's Braunschweig operation.

As for BIX (and CIX, which I did not know about until you mentioned it and I had to look it up) I doubt that Commodore ever had more than just transient access (if you will), with participation requiring a login for the service which gave you access to what was posted there but did not transmit the lot of the conversations to local storage. If Commodore had a permanent comprehensive record of what was posted on BIX or CIX I am not aware of it. But then, what I do know?

[gdonner]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

To dispel any rumours, no producers, directors, screenwriters or script doctors involved in the making of the "Star Wars" franchise have contributed to AmigaOS 3.1.4, 3.1.4.1 or 3.2.

We didn't ask around and nobody applied. There could be a reason for that beyond the reaction to the last three movies made, but this is just me speculating.

lol And we won't even mention Jar Jar Binks.

[gdonner]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

I'm curious if any of that material survived the last 35 years. BIX was a subscription service in which, as far as I know, much of the early (1986 onwards) Amiga developer community thrived and in which Commodore engineers participated, too.

When I was still paying decent money for Commodore's ADSP membership we used to see bug reports, etc. posted which originated from BIX but were fed back into the ADSP netnews groups. That's the extent to which I was aware of what happened a BIX at the time. From the point of view of us humble European Amiga developers, BIX likely received more attention and received better feedback from Commodore than we did. I got the impression that were considered something of an irrelevant nuisance to Commodore, but still "sufficiently gullible" to have signed up with ADSP in the first place. For example, we were the last to know about the A600, the A4000, the A1200 and those ill-advised ideas of reviving a follow-up to the C64 which would have actively competed with the Amiga.

Commodore's own ADSP network contents (Unix-based, using private newsgroups and e-mail forwarding) did survive in backup. The late Klaus Burkert personally recovered it from an Amiga Unix server which wound up at Village Tronic GmbH in the late 1990'ies and which reportedly came from Commodore's Braunschweig operation.
[snip]

I'm sorry European Amiga developers weren't shown the respect and diligence they should have been.

But a perfect time to ask: does anyone know what ever happened to all of Commodore's digital copies of Amiga hardware manuals, brochures, etc.? I have always been impressed by the quality documentation work that Commodore did from AmigaOS 2.x until bankruptcy. The Amiga User Interface Style Guide is one of my favorite manuals, and I'm thankful to own a hard copy.

Anyway, surely those digital files had to exist somewhere, and unless they were outsourced to another company (and lost), I'd hope someone in the Amiga community still has the digital files in some form?

I ask, as I noticed that a day ago, an Amiga 3000T manual sold on eBay for ~$150 U.S., and in my web searching I couldn't find a digital copy of it anywhere.

[kamelito]

At least I tried…

[NorthWay]

At a later date you could access BIX by internet - I did around the time C= died. IIRC I sent the 4000T 40.70 image to Joanne Dow who uploaded it to BIX.

[digitalMedic]

Are there any AmigaOS 3.2 dealers in the US other than Amiga on the Lake? They always seem to be out of stock whenever I check. I want the CD version, but also needs ROMS for an A4000D and A4000T. Thanks for any info.

[gdonner]

Originally Posted by digitalMedic

Are there any AmigaOS 3.2 dealers in the US other than Amiga on the Lake? They always seem to be out of stock whenever I check. I want the CD version, but also needs ROMS for an A4000D and A4000T. Thanks for any info.

Not that I know of; I ordered my copy of OS 3.2 and ROMs from Alinea in Germany--takes a couple of weeks for shipping, but was well worth it, since they had 3.2 in stock.

[arcanist]

Originally Posted by digitalMedic

Are there any AmigaOS 3.2 dealers in the US other than Amiga on the Lake? They always seem to be out of stock whenever I check. I want the CD version, but also needs ROMS for an A4000D and A4000T. Thanks for any info.

I bought mine from Retro Rewind in Canada. $70 shipped incl. taxes for CD + A1200 ROMs.

[Tomislav]

Originally Posted by gdonner

I'm sorry European Amiga developers weren't shown the respect and diligence they should have been.

But a perfect time to ask: does anyone know what ever happened to all of Commodore's digital copies of Amiga hardware manuals, brochures, etc.? I have always been impressed by the quality documentation work that Commodore did from AmigaOS 2.x until bankruptcy. The Amiga User Interface Style Guide is one of my favorite manuals, and I'm thankful to own a hard copy.

Anyway, surely those digital files had to exist somewhere, and unless they were outsourced to another company (and lost), I'd hope someone in the Amiga community still has the digital files in some form?

I ask, as I noticed that a day ago, an Amiga 3000T manual sold on eBay for ~$150 U.S., and in my web searching I couldn't find a digital copy of it anywhere.

I don't about original digital copies, but on archive org are some books converted to PDF:
https://archive.org/search.php?query...-Amiga+Inc.%22

[Yulquen74]

Don't know if anyone else has reported it in this long thread, but with the 3.2 ROM (47.96),
during reset it detects and adds 1.5MB of the ranger memory (slow fast),
while the old 3.1 ROM detects and adds the whole 1.75MB (0xc00000 - 0xdbffff), at least on my A500+ system.

While using the 3.2 ROM I can add the remaining 0.25MB (0xd80000 - 0xdbffff) manually in startup-sequence using addmem, but it would be better if everything was in one piece.

Else I'm quite happy with 3.2 so far.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by Yulquen74

Don't know if anyone else has reported it in this long thread, but with the 3.2 ROM (47.96),
during reset it detects and adds 1.5MB of the ranger memory (slow fast),
while the old 3.1 ROM detects and adds the whole 1.75MB (0xc00000 - 0xdbffff), at least on my A500+ system.

While using the 3.2 ROM I can add the remaining 0.25MB (0xd80000 - 0xdbffff) manually in startup-sequence using addmem, but it would be better if everything was in one piece.

Else I'm quite happy with 3.2 so far.

Sorry for the inconvenience, but its more of a challenge and decisions to be made for compatibility with the many expansion devices out there, sadly many do not follow all the rules, so compromises had to be made.
That's why the upgraded pcmcia device did not make it, it fixed many issues, but made some things fail, so for now, we stick with the legacy behavior that we know the last 3 decades.

[ScottC2010]

Love the new os and it's working well on my A1200 with 8MB - the only problem was with card.resource which in 3.0 allowed pcmcia to work with the 8MB Hawk, this was lost in 3.1 and then fixed for 3.1.4 - it now doesn't work again but i have made a custom ROM and used card.resource from that as well as adding back Workbench and Icon libs (I used a 1MB ROM)
The CD boots nicely on my CDTV and i might look into running the new extended roms too
On the 1200 i have set up my hard disk as in the faq and it works so much faster - keep up the great work!

[Warty]

Questions for the Dev Team:

1. Any news on A3000 softkick support (3.2.1?)?
2. Will there be a version of the NDK released that supports VBCC? I've rebuilt the protos and inlines using the fd and sfd files, but it looks like I'm at a dead end in terms of reaction.lib not existing in a format VBCC can use. I've tried digging up gcc reaction.lib from aminet, but that's not compatible (it seems). Open to trying just about anything, but short of ideas at this point.
3. NDK: Tiny thing, but nice to fix: GetOutlinePen. have to undef this after including gfxmacros.

[gulliver]

@Warty

The A3000 can already softkick using the respective modules disk. If you refer to A3000s with 1.4 ROMs (SuperKickstart), we have not nailed it since the last time we gave it a shot. And we haven't returned to that specific job yet because we are busy with the NDK between other things.

Speaking about the NDK, a new release is ready and should happen next week which should improve things. That said, there are further releases planned for the near future. A lot of work is being put on improving/enhancing the NDK right now.

[Warty]

Thanks for update!

I did indeed mean SuperKickStart A3000 stuff.

Very glad to hear about the NDK update next week. Still banging my head against the wall here trying to get the sample code to build (I should give up, but...)

[nogginthenog]

Question. A user here reported an Amiga OS bug which I can reproduce with enforcer / MuForce. Where is the best place to report this?

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...&postcount=730

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by nogginthenog

Question. A user here reported an Amiga OS bug which I can reproduce with enforcer / MuForce. Where is the best place to report this?

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=...&postcount=730

It is already on our bug tracker, but thanks.

[Ulysses13]

Is VisualPrefs compatible with 3.2? I installed it but uninstalled it again as it was producing some weirdness, in particular with the right and bottom window borders.

I would love more control over the WB colour scheme. Perhaps 3.2.1 or later could introduce more granular colour options in the existing 'Palette' prefs app. Then we could do some of the things VisualPrefs allowed, like control over inactive window colour schemes and fine control over the colour of GUI elements...

There are now soooo many prefs apps which seem to control the appearance of the WB, its confusing knowing which one controls which things as a casual user. Perhaps they should be merged, maybe into a tabbed app.

While I'm here - I would love to be able to alter the padding of screen title bars, above and below the text, to correct the weirdness of fonts looking too high up. And perhaps control the content of window title bars, like has been added to the Workbench screen title bar, the 'XX% full, XX free XX in use' text.

Loving 3.2 so far - still finding new things to play with!