The Continuing Rise Of Amiga

Mike Bouma writes: "Already well over 15,000 developers have bought the Amiga SDK 1.0 and soon there will be an update available (3D, Sound, GUI and performance improvements). It will be downloadable freely for 1.0 buyers and a Windows equivalent will be available. There is an enormous amount of activity going on within the Amiga community, for example only yesterday Hyperion Software acquired the rights for a Europa Universalis port. While Hyperion Software already had an incredible lineup of games licenses for the Amiga (Majesty, Soldier of Fortune, Sin, Heretic II, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Freespace: The Great War, Worms: Armageddon), Linux (Majesty, Sin, Shogo) and Mac (Shogo, Soldier of Fortune). Read this interesting interview with Thomas Frieden to know more about them. They are also working together with Titan Software to port various titles like Alien Nations as Titan has the Amiga and Mac porting rights.(Also their Exodus: the Last War *finally a Napalm beater?* and Evils Doom are great new games) Meanwhile many other companies are investing a lot of effort to support alternative OSes and especially the Next Generation Amiga Digital Environment. Some examples are Epic Interactive and PaganGames (Earth 2140, Scavengers, Magick, Simon The Sorcerer 2, Dafel: Bloodline, etc., for both Amiga/Mac and Foundations series), Crystal Interactive (Gilbert Goodmate, Bubble Heroes, Dark Millennia, Dweebs, Gorky17), Digital Dreams Entertainment (Hell Squad, Wasted Dreams series, Diablo's Land), Blittersoft (Wipeout 2097 for Amiga/Mac, Payback, Homeland, etc.) and many many other small and unannounced companies developing for the new Amiga. Some interesting Amiga SDK information and some open sourced games and utilities for the Amiga SDK can be downloaded here."

15.000 developers?!?

Wow! A whole 15.000 developers have downloaded it! Maybe if they're lucky, 5 more will get it, and they'll have a nice round 20.000 developers... :P

Re:15.000 developers?!?

Some countries use "." as series delimiters, including telephone numbers and other multigroup numbers...

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Re:This is something NEW, folks

I do this too -and with good reason. There are NO lossless animation/pixel-by-pixel editing tools available anywhere else that I hae found that are on a par with the Amiga's various image processing suites, such as PPaint and Animation Studio.

The modern ones are all either veery powerful, but with hideous, clunky user interfaces (gimp, photoshop), or with superficially similar easy UIs to Amiga packages, but ridiculuously feature free.

If I'm drawing original, bitmapped web graphics, I use an emulated copy of Amiga software - although, now that phoitogenics is out for linux, that can finally begin to change.

This is something NEW, folks

Why is almost everyone here bringing up the long-gone-and-deadness of the old Amiga machines, and then in the same breath writing the SDK off as DOA?

This SDK has nothing to do with the old Amiga machines. They kept the name, but that and maybe a certain degree of technical unconventionality are about all this has in common with what Amiga used to be.

This is a cross-platform, hosted application environment. It has a virtual-processor architecture, such that the same binary will work for all platforms (through dynamic recompilation). Everything is based around the Taos kernel, which is (supposedly) the only thing that actually has to be ported to a new architecture for the entire system to support it.

So what this really is is something like Java on steroids, or GNUstep [gnustep.org] sans native binaries. I love that the core system is quite compact (apparently the Taos kernel is 12kB!), and that it is highly geared toward efficient parallel processing. That the whole thing is called Amiga is a bit odd, but looking into this, one explanation becomes clear: What Amiga boxen were to the hardware peers of its day, this seems to be to the software of today. This really does look like advanced stuff. Read more about it. [amigasdk.com]

I am disappointed, however, that the system is proprietary. Don't wanna go there. But then, hey, these guys are way ahead of the curve. And who knows, maybe the AROS [aros.org] folks will begin their own implemetation of the new API once they finish with the old one :-)

Re:Is it really an OS?

It can run unhosted. Yes it's an OS.

License / Royalty Agreement

Well, I *am* a developer who purchased the SDK, curious to see where they were going with it. However, I didn't get much farther than the ridiculous license agreement which has some pretty serious implications for software built with it in terms of "royalties". 10% ($3.00 min)per copy of any app purchased/downloaded, unless you get "special permission" via a "freeware exemption".

Talk about throwing a bucket of ice water on people hot to do something really interesting with the SDK! That and the fact that the Elate OS stuff is heavily patent-encumbered (I wonder if the guy who developed/patented the VM ever heard of UCSD p-code) leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Oh well, it is interesting to look at until the next SDK from someone completely different is released with a more developer-friendly attitude (and license!). Fortunately, it didn't cost too much, so I don't feel cheated. I'll get my $80 out of it at some point.

Note- yes, I realize that there is a license on their web site that does not contain the royalty requirements. However, that license is not properly written to supercede the one on the disk. First, it does not reference any particular product (the "product listed above" is not listed at all). Second, the original license says that the royalty requirements may change and those changes are to be found at http://www.amigadev.net/royalties [amigadev.net], which does not exist. Thus, I don't see, legally, how the royalty requirement has been dispensed with (properly). It doesn't matter if they claim that they won't sue for royalties; as long as the legal loophole exists, developers are at risk.

I wonder how many of the other 14,999 developers are feeling the same way. Further, I also am curious how many of them don't realize that they are at risk of being sued for said royalties, if "Amiga" decides to be nasty about it.

Re:License / Royalty Agreement

That license was acknowledged to be bad, and Amiga, Inc released a new agreement. Check the page or the mailing list. That was long since past.

I remember the day...

...when the Amiga 1000 was simply astounding. The mac hadnt gone that far, I still owned an apple IIc, windows was a joke, and PCs were referred to as IBM-compatible.

My friend's amiga 1000 had games that made my moth drop open. With most people stuck in CGA and EGA world, the graphics on the machine would blow ones mind. Add to that a windowing environment that beat everything up to about Win95 and OS7. Multitasking! On a PC! An OS for which the GUI and CLI made sense together.

Back then, PC operating systems were a joke compared to the amiga. If amiga had business apps back then, the choice would have been clear.

A comeback seems absurd today, but I remember that in grade school the amiga was a miracle. Who knows?

Competition of ideas is good but...

It hurts the "root for the underdog" part of me, but Amiga has no momentum, and the best thing you can do with one is install Linux on it.

Well, OK, I'm overstating things a bit -- it's a viable platform for people who won't budge off it. However I don't see any NEW people moving onto it, Lightwave is gone, and most of the specialized, creative applications have since moved onto NT.

What I *really* wish Amiga had done was manufacture PowerPC-based boxes that could easily be refitted with Linux. Nothing against Apple, but I just want CHEAP POWERPC motherboards. My x86 boxes are so hot, and noisy, that I'm tempted to wear headphones in this room, and I hate headphones. I think Amiga could have made a much better run in the Linux workstation market than say SGI...

On the offchance that this gets moderated up, I'd like to THANK MOTOROLA for the lack of off the shelf PowerPC motherboards. Motorola pushes embedded Linux on [gasp!] Intel processors, their server line is Intel-based, and and you can't buy off the shelf PowerPC motherboards.

What corporate vision. They seem about as efficent as General Motors.

*sigh* Maybe my raise will allow me to get one of those G4 Cubes without wincing. They would make sweet Linux boxes.

Re:Go Apple ][ !

> and machine-language monitor.

Just a bit of history, for all the people that didn't grow up on the apple (computer):

The Apple ][, ][+, //e, and //c (basically all models) had a built-in disassember (371 bytes! $F8D0-$FA43, with the 3 character mnemonics bit-packed.)

The Apple ][ (orginal), //e (enhanced), //c (enhanced) also had a mini-assembler (317 bytes! $F500-$F666) that had no symbols, only absolute hex or decimal addresses and constants. There were also step and trace facilities.
Woz says:

I then wrote a 256 byte "Monitor" program which watched the keyboard for hex data entry (address:data data data) and hex display and program initiation ("Run").

The only way to get the mini-assembler on the Apple ][+, //e (unenhanced), //c (unenhanced) was to load Integer Basic.

The enhanced //e, and the enhanced //c, (via rom upgrades), added the mini-assembler back in.

i.e.

]CALL -151

At the asterisk Monitor prompt, request the Mini-Assembler:

*!

Which is the same as doing:

*F666G

You can see the source for the mini-assembler here [delphi.com].

An interesting read of the Apple (computer) history can be read here [hypermall.com].