AmigaOS 3.2.2 released for those feeling nostalgic A new update to AmigaOS 3, for the classic Motorola 68000-powered Amiga computers, has just been released: AmigaOS 3.2.2. Commodore Inc released AmigaOS 3.1 a full three decades ago now, in 1993. Since then, there has been a long, embattled and confusing history of arguments, announcements, acquisitions, and sell-offs of the …
[Author here]
> the chances of Hyperion ROMs being bundled with that are non-existent
Quite so, although the word is that they've now settled their differences.
I do have Amiga Forever 10, thanks to Cloanto, but it comes with 3.1 and I was unable to get 3.2 to boot or install on any of its "VMs".
I got a bit further with WinUAE but not to a functioning install.
Which is why the story was not and did not contain a review as such, nor even a screenshot.
This is just my experience, but the ROMs that shipped with Amiga Forever for me seemed to have some strange encryption on them, which made them only work in certain "approved" emulators when accompanied by a license key. In other words, they weren't "pure" rips of the original ROMs, but modified versions.
They did the same last time we had an Amiga article as well! Why would I remember something that inconsequential? Because I'm an Atari 8-bit (and Amiga) owning geek, that's why, and I notice when "my" machine- especially the less-remembered 130XE- gets attention!
Anyway, guessing they wanted to pull the "Amiga vs. Atari" (i.e. Atari ST) ragebait-and-switch- again- did a search on "Atari computer", got something that looked a bit like an ST and used that. (*)
Well, the 130XE *does* look very much like an ST with the keypad et al sawn off, but it's essentially the same 8-bit machine as the Atari 800 (albeit with more memory) relaunched in a case that looks like its newer sibling. (Much like the Spectrum+ did with the Sinclair QL case/styling and the updated C64 did with the C128).
Biggest irony is that, despite the "Amiga vs. Atari" schtick, the Atari 800, 800XL and 130XE are far closer to being the spiritual parent of the Amiga (and vice versa) than the Atari ST. The Amiga design team involved many former Atari Corp. engineers who designed it as an independent company before Commodore bought the rights. It shares quite a few architectural similarities with the Atari 800 (albeit more developed), is also heavily based on powerful custom chips and was similarly both state-of-the-art and expensive when it first came out.
The Atari ST was produced after Jack Tramiel bought out the original Atari Inc.'s computer business, sacked almost all their existing engineers and used it as the basis for his Atari Corp. The ST used more off-the-shelf components and very much followed his "Power Without The Price" approach- a very different company from the original Atari that had designed the Atari 800, and the ST was a very different machine that had no real spiritual connection to it.
(*) Or maybe they got *that* wrong deliberately too...? Hmm.
I've been running 3.2, then 3.2.1 since its release and there's definitely life in the old dog yet.
As the article says, a decent accelerator and ram (PiStorm has some bugs still, so ymmv depending on what you want to do) plus some decently sized storage of your choice (and a floppy emulator if you're done with 3.5" disks for good) and you have a really usable system for 80s-90s Amiga goodness.
Yes, those arguments in the school playground
"I've got a built in TV modulator!"
"I've got 4096 colours!"
"I've got MIDI ports!"
"The graphics on the games are better!"
"It's cheaper!"
"The sound chip is better!"
Those of us who were there at the time may be able to work out who might have been the Atari or Amiga owner there!
As someone who'd already defected from the ST to the Amiga, I thought the Falcon looked nice when it was announced, but even then I knew it was obviously doomed because the ST line (to which it was a successor) was already in terminal decline and Jack Tramiel's cheapskate Atari Corp. couldn't- and wouldn't- market their way out of a paper bag to overcome that.
Not to mention that even its nemesis, the Amiga, had peaked by then and was starting to lose its as desirable machine du jour to the ever-encroaching PC and the new console hotness (i.e. the Sega Mega Drive).
I still remember saving up close to a thousand quid I needed to buy an Amiga 4000. This was hard money for me to save at the time. So I rang up a dealer from a magazine ad who told me that Commodore had jacked up the price by another £100. So I bought a PC from Evesham Micros instead. Lucky escape really I guess.
I had the Commodore A1500 around that time; maybe got it around Christmas 1989. Lot of good memories of that machine. However, £1000 quid of new amiga, or upgrades in 1993 did not go far. And with Commodore dead too...
£1000 got us an 800x600 monitor, SB16, 486DX2 and a 250MB Hard Drive, Windows 3.1, nice hires word processing & spreadsheets, X-wing and Doom. Which is exactly what we went for.
Had commodore finished the AAA chipset instead of (failing) to go for a cost-reduced route that wasn't cost reduced at all...Well, the commodore what-ifs are a longer list than are worth repeating here!
The interviews with David Pleasance (Commodore UK boss) are fascinating and show just how misguided the parent corporation were.
I had both but I don't think I ever thought the ST was better than an Amiga. Aside from the higher resolution mono mode and midi it was pretty much inferior in every other way. That said, by the end of the ST family's life when it became the STE and then Falcon it was coming damned close to feature parity with the likes of the A4000 and in some ways exceeded it. Not that it mattered much for either platform by that point.
The ST was substantially cheaper for most of its lifespan; e.g. at launch in 1985 an 8Mhz 512kb Atari ST with a colour monitor (the more expensive option) was $1000, compared with $1,295 for a 7.14Mhz 256kb Amiga with no monitor. Leading to the ST being the world's first computer to offer 1mb for less than $1000.
Around 1990 when the difference was only about £100 it's not so important, admittedly.
According to Wikipedia, the cheaper version was $800 and still came with "just" the mono monitor (*) (it was later sold without). So yes- the machine itself was significantly cheaper in the early days, and I've no doubt that's why the ST dominated at first, despite the Amiga's general superiority.
> Around 1990 when the difference was only about £100 it's not so important, admittedly.
One difference is the ST started off with lower-end models, whereas the cheaper Amiga 500 (all-in-one 520ST-style case) didn't come out until a couple of years later, for £500 around the time the 520STFM had fallen to £300.
I think the Amiga 500 fell to £400 in late 1989, and it's safe to assume that's the reason (as you imply) that the Amiga rapidly overtook the ST in popularity.
(*) Assuming that was the dedicated one the high-res mono mode required, it'd have been *better* for some things than colour (which I assume used the (lower) standard TV-compatible resolutions and refresh rates). The Amiga offered a high-res mode with more colours than the ST's that *was* usable at standard TV resolutions. Unfortunately, that required it to be interlaced, leading to horrible flicker. (The later high-end Amiga 3000 had a "flicker fixer" which effectively converted that to a non-interlaced mode).
Interlace was an instant turn-off for just about anything that used it unless you had the moolah for a flickerfixer.
I recall Wordworth using it on Miggy; not something you would ever do for any longer than you absolutely had to. "Cheap" PC's with nice monitors by default as opposed to very expensive A3000/A4000 was a huge contributing factor to the PC taking over.
Amiga "could", but only the dedicated could accept the price tag.
It was cheaper, by about 100 quid IIRC in their best selling forms - 520ST & A500. The price disparity was pretty obvious though running them side by side.
Commodore didn't sell a consumer Amiga with 1Mb until the A500 Plus and then A600 (1Mb) and A1200 (2Mb) but the A500 had a trapdoor memory expansion unlike the 520ST which required soldering trace leads and daughterboards. So even if there were a 1040ST I suspect more A500s got RAM upgrades than probably Atari ever sold. I think the Amiga could make better use of more RAM too since you could run multiple programs at once in AmigaOS unlike in TOS.
I recall us getting a 512k expansion for our A500 within a few months of getting it (I could be wrong). I also remember that the one my dad got didn't fit unless you left the trapdoor off, so we just sellotaped some paper over the hole to keep the dust out.
Oh, and it had a real time clock unit too!
Unlike the Falcon, the earlier STe was only a small improvement over the original, though, including:-
* They increased the colour palette from 512 to 4096, but not the (more limiting) maximum 16 colours on-screen in normal use, which made it of questionable benefit.
* The sampled sound- an admitted improvement over the ST's horrid square wave chip- was still hobbled by a limited number of fixed playback rates (a problem when creating sample-based music) compared to the Amiga's.
I assume Atari had *intended* the STe to make the ST line more competitive with the Amiga 500, but it still wasn't quite as good... yet cost the same (£400).
Maybe they planned that- and it made sense- when the Amiga 500 was still £500, but the A500 fell to £400 around the time of the STe's launch.
They should have bitten the bullet, sold the STe for £300 and had it replace the (old spec) 520STFM completely at launch. That would have made the ST line more attractive in general and might have got enough STe models into circulation to warrant software taking advantage of its enhancements. (*)
Instead (most likely due to Tramiel-era greed and short-termism), it stuck at £400. So anyone buying an ST because it was cheaper got the £300 STFM and entrenched the bog-standard base spec. And anyone with £100 extra was always going to choose the Amiga over the STe's minor improvements and little that took advantage of them.
They may as well not have bothered.
(*) Atari eventually did that in mid-1991, but it was too late by then.
The whole Amiga OS version naming is very confusing, since I know I had version 3.5 installed on my A1200 back in the late 90s early 2000s which the article mentions is from a different developer than this 3.2.2 release, which sounds like it should be an older version. Perhaps Hyperion should have decided to go with a different naming convention for their releases to differentiate from the Haage and Partner releases?
Ill look out for Dan Wood or some other retro computing channel doing a Youtube review of AmigaOS 3.2.2 and see how it compared to 3.5
[Author here]
> I had version 3.5 installed on my A1200 back in the late 90s
I did touch on that, but yes.
I couldn't go into the whole history, and didn't want to.
[1] There are no impartial sources.
[2] The article would be 10× longer.
[3] Various companies have gone under, been resurrected, bought, sold, lost, found again, sold, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
Basically, AFAICT, H&P did AmigaOS 3.5 & 3.9, by adding enhancements for higher-end machines but without access to the core source code. So they replaced bits but couldn't fix or change the core OS.
This is worth doing, and it's more or less what Arca Noæ are doing with OS/2, AFAICS.
But Hyperion has the source, and it is allowing volunteers and external community members to make relatively modest changes to the original core OS.
My personal hope is that ultimately it will result in the OG AmigaOS catching up with and overtaking the H&P edition.
AmigaOS 4, AmigaOS 3, MorphOS, AROS - what's the point in developing four different super-niche Amiga-like systems that all compete for the same tiny audience? Especially when three of them are proprietary, 32bit-only, and only run on ancient museum hardware*. And when only one of them has a usable browser (Wayfarer on MorphOS).
*and I think the super expensive sold-out-everywhere AmigaOne system from 2016 or so?
Because the OG hardware is a fun and useful machine to use even after all this time, and you definitely don't need one of those irrelevant PPC AmigaOS 4 machines which just uses a subset of UAE anyway to run older stuff.
AROS is a route to avoid the legal treacle surrounding the breakup of commodore and the IP shenanigans; though 3.2.2 probably is a better release for enthusiasts than any other out there.
Daft me says I wouldn't mind a recapped and gotekked A1200. Sensible me says "use an emulator!"
Having been involved in the community for the last 8 years, demand for our refurbished Amiga's and servicing of Amiga's have increased, and this is being driven in part by AmigaOS 3.2 taking away the pain of support for large HDD/CF cards, dealing with other limitations of the 1990s and brings it up to a level where as adults spare time can be a little short, you can install AmigaOS 3.2 within 20/30 mins or of course doing to emulation and then put the HDD/CF card in the Amiga.
The TF1230 and 1260 cards, Pistorm and Pistorm32 have given the Amiga a new lease of life and AmigaOS 3.2 is the perfect compliment to this! 2023 is a very exciting year for the Amiga!
Wouldn't surprise me if it was a trademark issue. The rights to Commodore's IP and brands have been split and scattered among numerous rights holders, licensees and sub-licensees over the years.
This is- I assume- how you end up with (e.g.) the mini "retro console" reproduction of the Amiga A500 being called "The A500" and not featuring the "Amiga" or "Commodore" names and logos anywhere on the case or box.
(Now that I think about it, the same applied to "The C64 Mini"- no mention of Commodore anywhere).
Still have two Amiga 500s here, but I think their floppy drives were damaged by one of the old floppies I had (was working fine for multiple disks, then none). Also have a large ADF collection. Would love a solution where I can have a CF/SD card full of ADF files and play them on the native hardware, would the PiStorm do that? Which Amiga OS would I need then, 3.1?
A floppy emulator would be the best way to go if you just want a collection of ADFs on-hand. There are a number of tools to mount ADFs within Workbench, but none of which I am aware allow you to mount and boot. Your best bet for compatibility with OCS/ECS games of the era is Kickstart 1.3. No need to go any higher if you are not going to run Workbench.
[Author here]
> PiStorm is blasphemy
I do know what you mean. Ripping out an Amiga's CPU and putting an entire ARM computer in there, running Linux, and running an emulator on that to replace the Miggy's CPU, *does* feel blasphemous to me.
But, OTOH, it works, and it works well, I am told. And it's about ¹/₂₀ of the price of a Vampire. It's hard to argue with on that basis, and I intend to try with my own A1200 at some point.
Michael Schultz' Emu68 project looks like being a much more elegant way to do the same thing:
https://github.com/michalsc/Emu68
I supported Amigas on two of my first tech jobs. The first was an art school where they were used to teach animation. At the second, one was used for video sequencing. I had to replace its hard drive which was an adventure. I still have a couple of manuals I keep as momentos.
Using them felt very much before their time. Too bad they're being kept around now mostly for nostalgia's sake.
Amiga was indeed ahead of the times. Lightwave, Video Toaster, the first digital video editor I ever used. It SHOULD have been the dominate desktop, but we got MS and Apple instead. Both very second rate compared to Amiga.
Amiga was doing 25 years ago what we take for granted today.
Sigh. We can never have nice things.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
