AmigaOS 5 surfaces... sort of

AmigaOS 5 made a covert appearance at an event outside the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), turning up in the guise of a version of Space Invaders running on a Windows Mobile 6-based smartphone. Amiga – the company – was ostensibly showing AmigaAnywhere 2, the new version of its virtual machine technology. But taking Amiga …

[Brett Saunders]

Rubbish

I got my careear started on an Amiga, and still boot the old Ami up everytime I go home for Christmas.

This "amiga anywhere" nonsense shouldn't even use the name Amiga - it has nothing in common with the Amiga computer.

I can't see how running AmigaOS inside a virtual machine on a cell phone would appeal to developers. After all, the first thing anyone did in running their games on a real Amiga was ditch the OS, gain control of the hardware, and recover AmigaOS's memory.

Sure - this may not be possible on a cell phone - but to call a glorified java replacement an "amiga" is a cheat.

[Giles Jones]

Hate to say it

But the Amiga is long dead. People are just using the brand and following it had as a brand to attach to all sorts of rubbish technology.

Look back at the technology the Amiga had at its launch and to be called an Amiga now you'll need a computer that could render hollywood quality graphics in real time and have a truly amazing OS.

Let it die with dignity.

[Matt Bucknall]

Another VM for portable devices

...just what the world needs.

[James Le Cuirot]

Clever stuff

I agree that the Amiga name should never have been used for this (AmigaAnywhere was bad, AmigaOS 5 is just heresy) but from what I've read about AmigaAnywhere, it's really amazing stuff. Apparently it can utilise CPUs of entirely different architectures in parallel. Unfortunately, there aren't many machines like that in existence. In fact, the Amiga PPC/m68k hybrids are the only example I can think of!

[Outcast]

Nothing to see... Move along.

As a practising Amigan (I own an AmigaOne) I would just like to say...

"Read my reply title"

[Lordlorddef]

More bullsh*t then

McEwen is a knob. Hopefully at some point the world will realise that and ignore every single A.Inc press release.

Hyperions OS4 is the closest to a new AmigaOS we'll ever see for newish hardware.

My advice is to forget about A.Inc, pull out that old a1200 and have a couple of games of Final Fight followed by a game of Cannon Foddder.

[Matt Bryant]

How do you make money out of this?

Do you give the VM software away free to each OS vendor then charge the app makers a licence fee? It does have value if it can provide a stable and performant base across multiple OSs, just think of the developer savings is they only need to tune the app for one virtual OS yet can offer the product to many users on different platforms.

PS: To the Amiga fanbois whining about this being called Amiga - grow up! It's a trademarked name, the name has value so they will use it.

[Peter Gordon]

Yeah, right.

What a load of crap. AmigaAnywhere never had anything to do with AmigaOS, and AA2 won't either. No part of AmigaOS boots up inside AmigaAnywhere. The two things are completely unrelated other than the fact that Amiga, Inc. have slapped the Amiga name on AmigaAnywhere.

[Gordon]

Who cares???

To be honest this is a bit like having the headline "Talbot to restart production". The Amiga was BIG in the 1980s, yes, as was a great Machine in it's day. But a lack of investment coupled with a emergence of cheap(ish) PC clones and games consoles killed it stone dead. Now the "computer hobbyist" market is served very well by Intel boxes (running Windows or Linux) and the "Casual Gamer" market is served by the XBOX and PS consoles.

Interestingly the fact is that the proprietory Amiga was never going to work up against the open standard of the PC!

[Anonymous Coward]

EyeAm condemns AmigaAnywhere2 as "Amiga OS"

Amiga having nothing to do with "personal computers"? Who are we kidding. That's where Amiga OS should be--it should not be focused on this. Amiga Inc. should be delivering Amiga OS on x86-64 architecture, with a 64-Bit-centric worldview (i.e., Desktops and Servers at its core!)

Many want Amiga OS to be revamped, updated, brought up to standards (like with SATA I & II, USB. 2/3, PCI-E support, etc.); and for it to be able to utilize regular PC motherboards.

The path for Amiga OS is just that--with all these tiny devices like PDAs, phones, and so forth, satelliting around the main PERSONAL COMPUTER.

I have to condemn Amiga until they announce they are putting the OS on x86-64 (and by that I mean a desktop/server OS utilizing CPUs from the likes of Intel and AMD). I want to see Amiga OS exactly where Microsoft Windows exists, utilizing exactly what Microsoft Windows and Apple utilizes, and providing an alternative to those very OSes--because this, I recognize, is what many, many, many people desire out of Amiga Inc. Not some follow-the-leader exercise.

I do not support their AmigaAnywhere 2 vision whatsoever. I condemn their lack of resolve in providing what the end-user (Amigans) really wants. I really wish they would get rid of Bill McEwen and do the right thing with the OS, and not ruin the good reputation and brand it had in the past.

They could easily partner with Commodore and pick up the "Commodore-Amiga" line of computers, providing a "Commodore-Amiga 5000", for example, which could be designed to take either PPC or x86-64 motherboards, and be made to support all the latest industry standards. Doesn't have to be Commodore as parent company, either, to do that.

They should write/release "Amiga Phoenix" (i.e., OS5) that can auto-sense the hardware, and install appropriate libraries (for PPC or x86-64), and that has full backward compatibility with all previous Amiga OSes and Amiga software (quite possible by rewriting Amiga's Exec kernel in the exokernel structure, separating resource management from resource protection). They could then have this 32-Bit AmigaAnywhere (or AmigaDE as it was once called) merged with the 32-Bit Amiga OS classic as a deployable module that both resides on the larger, better, more advanced 64-Bit OS...as well as hosted on Windows, Linux, MAC, and so on.

--EyeAm

[e-mail]

[Raffaele]

Amiga is alive and kicking...

Who cares of Amiga Anywhere?

I mean it is good technology and I knew it does tricks that are not common with Java...

As AmigaAnywhere runs the same programs by changing screen resolution on the fly on different devices, and if you run any program from SD memory cards and then you extract it hotplug (plug-in plug-out) from a device, then it suspends the running program and continue running it on another device, just after the hotplugging...

But it is not Open Source, while Java it is...

And AmigaAnywhere is not aimed at desktop usage...

While us Amigans want to spread how beauty and usable it is AmigaOS...

It is no resource consuming... It runs with a minimum of 128 MB (MEGA) of RAM, and common installation may vary from 17 Megabytes (MorphOS) or 40 Megabyte (AmigaOS 4.0)...

It is very low footprint... It is real multitasking and aimed at multimedia...

The OS needs a very limited number of files to run, it has an easy system to deal with Hardware Devices, and its system of directories, commands, preferences and common rules sure needs very few time and effort to be learnt and then mastered by any user...

To install a program usually you have just to copy only 2 or 3 files in a directory with the same name of the software you purchased, and a library with the same name of the software, in the obliged path "Libs:"...

To upgrade the system usually needs only one single file to be placed in obliged places...

EAAAASY!

There are lots of programs

(See here for example a range of its software running on MorphOS:

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2007/07/efika-morphos.html

Nice to discover it runs alll this software, eh?

And there is more and more

Take a look for example its Youtube Client software Tubexx:

http://www.webalice.it/pgermano/tubexx/pix/yt_01.png

Nice, isn't it?)

And there is many, many more...

There are centralized systems for dealing with files (Ddatatype and Mimetype system), recognizing and extracting achives and compressed (XAD Library), and with FTP (Amiga trade Center), and so on...

Real heirs of ancient Amiga are:

AmigaOS 4.0

MorphOS 1.4.5 (2.0 incoming)

AROS

See it:

AmigaOS 4.0:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/b7/AmigaOS4.png/800px-AmigaOS4.png

MorphOS:

http://amigator.free.fr/img/MyOSMOS2.jpg

AROS:

http://www.tecnomagazine.it/tech/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/arosrus.jpeg

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/nova/arosshow/amistart_aros_1.jpg

http://mama.indstate.edu/users/nova/arosshow/aros-icons.jpg

AROS hosted in Windows:

http://amidevcpp.amiga-world.de/WinAros/ScreenShot_VPC.jpg

Aros it is more than normal AmigaOS...

It is an OPEN SOURCE Operating System which uses the same API as AmigaOS 3.1 as a starting point to develop a brand NEW and INDIPENEDENT OS...

http://www.aros.org

Any person with coding skills could contributed AROS to being complete...

AROS can run standalone on INTEL X86 Machines (your computer at home), or on PPC or on Palm computers...

It can run in HOSTED environment into Windows or Linux

You can download even a LIVE CD ISO of it here:

http://aros.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/nightly-download?20071212/Binaries/AROS-20071212-i386-pc-boot-iso.zip

(A brand new ISO it is here

http://aros.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/nightly-download?20080104/Binaries/AROS-20080104-i386-pc-boot-iso.zip

very, very brand new...)

And you can also try a VMWARE preinstalled environment of it:

http://www.vmwaros.org

Run it into the free VMWare Player...

http://vmwaros.blogspot.com/2007/12/vmwaros-beta-05-released.html

VMWare preinstalled version is 200 MB circa (and if I remember well it has been compressed with 7-Zip)

-----

Just think this fact...

If Amiga were were dead, then it couldn't be ENOUGH VITAL to generate at least THREE BEAUTIFUL HEIRS...

All proofs says that AMIGA IT IS ALIVE AND KICKING!

Now any of you it is free to test AROS and see in action an Amiga system, try the demos, and the demoprograms as Lunapaint, MAME, etc...

Now you are free to discover how it is easy and performant an Amiga Like system...

See how many memory it is free for the user... See how few CPU Stress...

Dedicate an ancient Pentium III or IV machines to a complete installation of AROS, and you will see these machines fly high...

Enjoy Amiga!

[Raffaele]

@ Eyeam

Eyeam wrote:

[quote]

Many want Amiga OS to be revamped, updated, brought up to standards (like with SATA I & II, USB. 2/3, PCI-E support, etc.); and for it to be able to utilize regular PC motherboards.

[/quote]

But Amiga has already USB 2.0 support... Use Poseidon stack with a compatible USB 2.0 PCI card...

Regarding SATA and PCI-Express, the italian made SAM440EP moherboard, born o became the new Amiga it is ready for that technology and just awaits for a license of AmigaOS 4.0

[quote]

I have to condemn Amiga until they announce they are putting the OS on x86-64 (and by that I mean a desktop/server OS utilizing CPUs from the likes of Intel and AMD). I want to see Amiga OS exactly where Microsoft Windows exists

[/quote]

Then all you must to do it is to get an old PC Intel machine and download and install the 64bit full version of AROS on it!

64bit Live CD version:

http://aros.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/nightly-download?20080107/Binaries/AROS-20080107-x86_64-pc-boot-iso.zip

64Bit full installation:

http://aros.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/nightly-download?20080107/Binaries/AROS-20080107-x86_64-all-contrib.tar.bz2

Eheheh! Yes! AROS works on 64bit machines!

Remember that AROS it is incomplete and still in development!

Enjoy AROS! Enjoy Amiga!

Ciao,

Raffaele

[Liam Proven]

Taos lives on

AmigaAnywhere was just a licensed version of Tao's stunning Taos OS, a technical tour-de-force. It's a brilliant bit of code; binaries were completely cross-platform compatible. The same single executable ran on x86, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, whatever, without any cumbersome bytecode interpreter or just-in-time compiler; Tao's VP code was converted on the fly into native machine code as it was loaded from disk.

However, with the world converging on X86, I'm not sure there's much need for it any more. SPARC and POWER and ARM are going their own ways; the desktop is now X86-only. Perhaps Taos' deep multithreading and very SMP-aware code might benefit it, but it didn't do BeOS much good.

Tao is dead and gone now. Amiga can't be far behind.

- LP

[Outcast]

Eyeam Escaped ?

Hey Eyeam....

/me grabs eyeam by the short & curlies.....

Back to the MooBunny with you.. Can't have you talking sense around here !!

[Graham Lockley]

Oh No !

Who opened the door marked 'fringe lunatics' ?

If it wasnt bad enough with the usual MS/Linux/OSX nutters having a sniping war every now and then, we now have to watch out for this lot ! Any minute now and the Atarians will wade in closely followed by the Archimedeans....

Blood on the streets Im telling you :)

[Andy Bright]

Dream on

Until it comes bundled with Deluxe Paint and you can get Imagine or Real 3D on a coverdisk, it ain't and never will be an Amiga.

So there. With knobs on.

[Graham Lerant]

Minimig rulez

"To be honest this is a bit like having the headline "Talbot to restart production". "

If you quoted the headline "The Krays to restart Talbot production"

You would be overstating the acheivement and understating the integrity of the characters involved.

[Stephen]

EyeAm condemns AmigaAnywhere2 as "Amiga OS"

Amiga having nothing to do with "personal computers"? Who are we kidding. That's where Amiga OS should be--it should not be focused on this. Amiga Inc. should be delivering Amiga OS on x86-64 architecture, with a 64-Bit-centric worldview (i.e., Desktops and Servers at its core!)

Many want Amiga OS to be revamped, updated, brought up to standards (like with SATA I & II, USB. 2/3, PCI-E support, etc.); and for it to be able to utilize regular PC motherboards.

The path for Amiga OS is just that--with all these tiny devices like PDAs, phones, and so forth, satelliting around the main PERSONAL COMPUTER.

I have to condemn Amiga until they announce they are putting the OS on x86-64 (and by that I mean a desktop/server OS utilizing CPUs from the likes of Intel and AMD). I want to see Amiga OS exactly where Microsoft Windows exists, utilizing exactly what Microsoft Windows and Apple utilizes, and providing an alternative to those very OSes--because this, I recognize, is what many, many, many people desire out of Amiga Inc. Not some follow-the-leader exercise.

I do not support their AmigaAnywhere 2 vision whatsoever. I condemn their lack of resolve in providing what the end-user (Amigans) really wants. I really wish they would get rid of Bill McEwen and do the right thing with the OS, and not ruin the good reputation and brand it had in the past.

They could easily partner with Commodore and pick up the "Commodore-Amiga" line of computers, providing a "Commodore-Amiga 5000", for example, which could be designed to take either PPC or x86-64 motherboards, and be made to support all the latest industry standards. Doesn't have to be Commodore as parent company, either, to do that.

They should write/release "Amiga Phoenix" (i.e., OS5) that can auto-sense the hardware, and install appropriate libraries (for PPC or x86-64), and that has full backward compatibility with all previous Amiga OSes and Amiga software (quite possible by rewriting Amiga's Exec kernel in the exokernel structure, separating resource management from resource protection). They could then have this 32-Bit AmigaAnywhere (or AmigaDE as it was once called) merged with the 32-Bit Amiga OS classic as a deployable module that both resides on the larger, better, more advanced 64-Bit OS...as well as hosted on Windows, Linux, MAC, and so on.

--EyeAm

[e-mail]

[Peter Gordon]

@Graham

Very true. "The Krays to market stick-on Talbot badges and claim that any car with one on is a genuine talbot" would be closer :-)

[Simon Preston]

Amiga OS4 in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk9LMdEof-A

Sadly not many people will get to use it.