Amiga and Hyperion Settle Ownership of AmigaOS 227
HKcastaway writes "Amiga Inc and Hyperion Entertainment announced a settlement over ownership and licensing over AmigaOS 4.0 and future versions. Since the bankruptcy of Commodore, Amiga's history has been littered with lawsuits that have affected the development of Amiga hardware and software. Having a lawsuit-free OS probably will help a great deal to the continuity and recovery of the Amiga heritage. Hyperion also provides AmigaOS SDKs for developers.'
Re:let the flames begin (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Worth the legal fees? Who uses this OS? (Score:4, Informative)
As far as current guessing goes, there were around 1500 AmigaOne systems sold, and there's been around 300 SAM440ep boards sold. (Disclaimer: This is purely what I've read elsewhere.) Those systems run OS 4, so that's about 1800 users. (There's way more users of OS 3.x out there, though.)
I think Hyperion also do contract work outside of Amiga stuff. I'm not sure what though.
On the Amiga Inc. side, one of their main financiers, Pentti Kouri [wikipedia.org], died back in January. Whether this has "encouraged" the end of the legal action is open to speculation. Whatever's gone on in the background though, it's good for the platform that Hyperion have come out on top. Amiga Inc. have done almost nothing productive with it for the past 9 years. There's been a lot of weirdness going on on the Amiga Inc. side for a long time, but that's another thread entirely.
Why use Amiga OS in 2009? It makes me smile. It's fun. It really is as simple as that. I wouldn't run a business on it, but that's not what it's for. :)
Re:let the flames begin (Score:3, Informative)
Um, one of those "niches" is approaching double-digit market share in the US. By comparison, the Amiga is a "microniche". Which doesn't mean that the Amiga isn't worth talking about, of course. There was a time when Windows was a niche product, after all (I was there, I remember), and will be again some day.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:4, Informative)
You can do that with an Amiga 500 or 1200. There are dozens, hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of these sitting unused in attics and garages around the world. Post a want to buy and you can get one for less than $125, probably from someone in your town.
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:3, Informative)
Zilog's Z80 is still VERY relevant. I learned Z80 assembler to properly program my TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. The TI-89 and up use the Motorola 68k.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:3, Informative)
Some of this is a bit of legacy. Back when Commodore went bankrupt there was a lot of talk about moving to PowerPC since Motorola basically EOL'd the 68k series of cpu's and the Mac used PPC chips it seemed a logical path to take. ESCOM even talked about moving to PPC before they went bankrupt, and Phase 5 came out with the Cyberstorm CPU card for the 3000/4000 - which essentially was a 68060 and a 604 PPC cpu on a single board - these machines effectively became a development platform for the next version of Amiga DOS.
So there is a decent amount of PPC development already done for the Amiga - even though now most of it is obsolete (arguably). The PPC platform has never been a really mature environment - every PREP machine I've ever had (even the Pegasos II) had buggy firmware that took hours to get working just to boot the base OS. Every step of the way you felt like the machine you had in front of you just barely made it out of the prototype stage.
So yeah I'd welcome a x86 version. Amiga DOS still has a lot of potential for being user friendly, but extremely powerful and flexible at the same time - which there really isn't an OS out there that covers this fully. Even if it means re-writing a lot of software already written to take advantage of PPC cpu's.
Re:let the flames begin (Score:3, Informative)
When was Windows a niche? The first year of Windows 3.0 sales they sold over 3 million copies of the OS which dwarfed all Mac hardware sales to that date (keep in mind the launch date for Win 3 was 1990 - so outselling 6 years of Mac sales in its first year is nothing to scoff at). I got that number from Cringely's Accidental Empires (decent book).
I can't find the sales figures for Windows 1.0 or 2.0, but they did go from 140 million in revenue in 1985 (Windows 1 launch date) to over a billion in 1990 (Windows 3 launch date). If it was a niche it was for a very very short period.
Anyhow as someone who had a bunch of Amiga's (I still have 2 - an A4000 and an A1200 - as well as a Pegasos II) - it was always a niche because the only killer app it had was Video Toaster. The killer app for the Mac originally was Pagemaker, and then Photoshop.
I have a Mac, and to be honest it doesn't have a single app I use that makes me want to buy the machine over anything else. Its still running 10.4.x, but the UI experience is really honestly nothing to write home about. It never remembers any of my window positions in Finder, and there are situations where its easy to lose dialogue boxes (for example - if a save dialogue pops up in Firefox it will let you click on the Firefox window moving the save window back (this is something MS-Windows will not let you do) - and its really hard to get that save window to the front again...). Even when I worked in the print industry at one point a stronghold for the Mac - however no-one used Mac's there anymore because they were too expensive, and Quark/Adobe stuff ran on Windows just fine and would read all the Mac files just fine. Most all of EFI's stuff runs on Windows these days - Mac's just interface with it.
Apple has essentially positioned OSX for people who like the software/hardware or people who think its hip to use a Mac. While I agree its gaining marketshare and that is a good thing, I wonder to what end. Its an interesting position really - I don't think any other computer company has been able to sustain a market based on user experience or hipness alone so it will be interesting to see how it all pans out.
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Wow, my clock must be broken (Score:5, Informative)
You didn't video editing on an Amiga without serious add-on hardware.
Most folks using Amigas for video were doing analog video, too... digital was barely there at the end. You could use a Genlock for titling, other devices to overlay effects on video, etc. but it was still tape to tape. That wasn't for the feint of heart, and while it was revolutionary for a small number of video professionals, it was only a precursor to today's video revolution, which required digital capabilities.
An Amiga with today's hardware specs would be just like a Macintosh with today's hardware specs: it would be a PC. Guaranteed. Near the end, we were already moving toward using as many commodity parts are possible: PC power supplies, disc drives, etc. Future systems were going to use the PCI bus, and would most likely have been designed CPU-agnostic (look up the "PIOS One" for an example, if there's anything still online... that's the direction I was pushing things before C= failed).
There was a question, back in '93 or so, about the future of desktop CPUs. So we had proponents of the PowerPC, of the PA-RISC, of the Alpha. But by the time the whole Escom/Amiga Technologies adventure was over, things were changing. Shortly thereafter, Apple guaranteed the failure of the PowerPC on the desktop by cancelling Mac Cloning, and it was obviously clear to anyone who was paying proper attention that x86 was the only game in town for this class of computing.
And still the bozos at New Amiga or Hyperion Entertainment or whomever kept their sights on the PowerPC (I do not know specifically where the bozos were, but bozos there were, have no doubts). I know a few of these people, not all of them, but the collective functions as a group of wannabes without proper long term vision. I even tried to hit them in the head with a clue-by-four, even going back to the short tenure of this stuff at Gateway 2000, but there was no help.
The hardware didn't need saving... you need to reinvent computing hardware every five years or so, or it gets too complex to keep advancing. Had Commodore not failed, they would have eventually got out of the graphics chip business, just like Compaq and various other PC companies who once did their own graphics chips stopped. Graphics chips became GPUs, and any one systems company could no more make their own GPU than their own CPU. Everyone who tried either of these failed, in time, unless they built a very strong market well above the level of the personal computer. You could afford to spend $2000 on a CPU for a high-end server or whatever it if went a little faster than the next guy's... you couldn't do that for personal computers. Much less the reality that, without sufficient volume, you couldn't even keep up. The problem Apple so well illustrated with the PowerPC's rise and fall.
The software needed saving, or at least, it would have made things more interesting. There was real opportunity, if they had assembled a team of top notch OS people, like Be did... but that's not really what happened. So, after spending several times as long on AmigaOS 3.x -> 4.x as it took to get from nothing to 1.0 (or beyond), they now have what... a fairly small incremental improvement that runs on... pretty much nothing. We actually did a real engineering analysis of this upgrade in 1995-1996... moving from AmigaOS 3.x to a version, written for CPU-independence, targeted for the PowerPC, with a proper HAL, was about a two year project for the team Amiga Technologies had started assembling. Along the way, that included fixing many of the system's flaws.
When this didn't happen, and AT fell apart, we wound up doing much the same thing at Metabox AG, only this time building a modernized AmigaOS-like OS from scratch... AmigaOS enough that things like Voyager and MUI were easy ports. Took about two years.
The fact that nothing had come of this public Amiga silliness pretty much should drive home what a non-event this is. There's no much of value that can some from this, they're just too far behind.
Re:Of course not (Score:3, Informative)
Some of that's actually going away, slowly. It certainly depends on your workflow.
I used to have MIDI, with Bars and Pipes, on the Amiga, which led me to Cakewalk on the PC, and one of those MOTU 8-port MIDI devices, all kinds of stuff. These days, while I could record on the computer, I'm more likely to record on my Fostex portastudio, then bring all the raw tracks in for mixing on the PC. If you're in a big studio, you're going to have external digital ADC/DAC and mixing, so the PC itself needs just some good digital ports.
Curiously, the "PIOS One" project at PIOS/Metabox was exactly the idea of this... a personal computer optimized for audio/video work. Even in 1997, though, it made sense to think most I/O was going to be external. I had a good sound chip (Aureal... another good company that failed, largely do to evildoers from the outside.. I hired some of the Aureal engineers briefly at Metabox USA), with separately regulated and filtered audio power supply. But going beyond four channels, you would hook an external box to the audio expansion port, and bring it in digitally.
Lots of ports, sure. Firewire was critical to video, but that's going away... tapeless is coming on like crazy, and it's great. I bought a little pocket-sized camcorder awhile back, a Sanyo VPC-FH1, which records on SDHC cards. My goal was to reduce wear and tear on the expensive HDV camcorders, but the video quality out this bad boy is crazy.. and it can shoot at 1080/60p, twice the rate of any Blu-Ray mode. But the real key.. flash memory means fast, totally reliable transfer. There are a number of low-end pro cams doing the same things, and even on the high end, lots of people using SxS cards are loading up two SDHC cards into an adapter.
For DSPs, I don't think so... they're just not cost effective. This is the same thing Be realized, going from their original Hobbit+DSP3210/07 prototype to the PPC model. Signal processing on the main PC is really fast these days, and you get to use that power for general purpose computing, not just some specialized bits. There are interesting areas of computing acceleration, but I would look at GPU and FPGA computing, not DSP. If you really like DSP, you could always build one in a system with some kind of FPGA resource. Not just build it, but build a different one optimized for the specific work involved. Both of these run into software issues, too... special support not needed for native signal processing work. So the benefit has to be large.
You definitely want a 64-bit file system, and one tuned to do media well. The last time I built Linux video servers (just over a year ago, eight x86 cores in a 1U rackmount), I got better performance from XFS than ext2 or ext3, which wasn't a shock. I didn't mess around with ZFS, and ext4 was still a work in progress, though they seem to have been moving in the right direction. One nice thing about Linux... all these FS choices. The same thing that optimizes streaming HD video doesn't necessarily optimize a zillion tiny file accesses in a web server.
The best way to implement security in a multimedia environment is simple: don't connect the media network to the internet. Problem solved. Of course, if you're paranoid, go ahead and run the web browser in a sandbox, that's fine.. you don't want the rest of the system slowed down by VM overhead.