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Amiga

A-EON Talks About The Future of The Amiga Platform (www.exec.pl) 156

Posted by EditorDavid from the Commodore-resurrected dept.
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) tipped us off to "Amiga present and future," an interview with Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology, a group funding ongoing hardware and software development for the Amiga community. "Amongst the topics are the still in betatest Mini-ITX and quad-core PPC Amiga motherboards. Trevor regularly writes editorials for the Amiga Future print magazine [English-translated version here] and his company will be attending and is sponsoring the Amiga34 event in Neuss Germany on the 12th and 13th of October 2019."

A-EON now has about 50 part-time developers and beta-testers working on software projects for Classic and Next-Generation AmigaOS, Dickinson reveals: I've been a Commodore and Amiga enthusiast since the late 1970s but only really got involved in the business side of Amiga in 2007 when I provided funding to Michael Battilana of Cloanto to help fast track the development of 'Amiga Forever'. [An Amiga preservation, emulation and support package] The funding allowed Michael to hire Nicola Morocutti, the 'Bitplane' magazine Editor, to embark on a major project to catalogue the tens of thousands of Amiga games and software titles which lead to the development of the one-click 'Retro-Platform' player which made its debut in 'Amiga Forever 2008' and the subsequent development 'C64 Forever' in May 2009. But, if you discount my Hardware donation scheme, it was the 'AmigaOne X1000' project [a PowerPC-based personal computer from A-Eon Technology CVBA intended as a high-end platform for AmigaOS 4] that was my first Amiga next-generation funding...

I've always said as long as Amigans keep supporting A-EON by buying the hardware and software we develop, we will keep developing both for AmigaOS. The motherboards names, 'Nemo', 'Cyrus' and 'Tabor' are characters and place names from the Jules Verne novel, "The Mysterious Islands". There are plenty more names available in that book.
Dickinson also discusses various projects that are attempting to build a portable Amiga laptop -- and his own early efforts to fund hardware donations to encourage Amiga developers to write productivity software, games and applications for AmigaOS 4.0. ("I resorted to buying second hand AmigaOne machines from eBay and other online sources...")

He also describes ongoing efforts to bring Libre Office and better web browsers to the Amiga. "Anyone who has the coding skills and is interested in helping out on such projects should contact me."
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A-EON Talks About The Future of The Amiga Platform More

A-EON Talks About The Future of The Amiga Platform

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  • It's gone (Score:3, Informative)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @02:40PM (#58505954)

    Those days are over and you're living in nostalgia.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well, ArchieBunker, those were the daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyys.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      No! 2020 will finally be the year of the Amiga Desktop!

      • Well, no one is stopping you?

      • At least AmigaOS users enjoy what they have, while Desktop Linux users wallow in dependency hell issues and poor hardware support while waiting for new applications to become available for their distro and version combination in the repos, all in the name of FOSS. In plain English, AmigaOS might not be popular or cutting edge, but at least it's fun.

    • It's only natural to have nostalgia when the present sucks and the past was better.

    • Re:It's gone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Psion ( 2244 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @03:29PM (#58506170)
      There's nothing wrong with a developmental niche like this exploring alternatives. It's like using a Raspberry Pi for development, or organizing a Linux distribution with a specific, though obscure purpose. The very process of updating a functional, lightweight environment like AmigaOS using modern software tools and running it on modern hardware could yield insights that would benefit computing in a wider range. Will AmigaOS return to any sort of prominence? Very unlikely, but it suits the needs of a few, dedicated computing hobbyists.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        AmigaOS has some nice apps... Mostly because modern UI designers seem to have forgotten some of the lessons of the past.

        I'm more interested in the hardware though. The classic Amiga chipset is endless fun to play with, even today. Rather than a modern quad core desktop I'd rather see an 80s era 68000 based machine with custom chipset. If I ever get around to teaching myself FPGAs it's my long term goal.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Look up minimig, MIST, and MISTer. These projects all have a central goal of emulating the 68K amiga with a FPGA to do exactly what you're saying. The latter two FPGA the 68K core itself, and can also do the Atari ST, Sega Genesis and so forth.

        The only reason you won't see a "joystick shitbox" is because those "joystick" consoles are basically just a raspberry pi with mostly stolen games in them. The Nintendo/Super Nintendo/Sega "mini" consoles being flogged on eBay are all loaded with stolen games. To do o

        • The only reason you won't see a "joystick shitbox" is because those "joystick" consoles are basically just a raspberry pi with mostly stolen games in them.

          Most of them. There was a real c64 though, and a real... NES? SNES? Genesis? I forget. The only all-in-one console I've had was Golden Tee Golf. Got good money for that one when I sold off my collection, too. It's fairly rare.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:It's gone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @11:26PM (#58507718)

      You've confused having a future with dominating the market. Products don't have to dominate their market to have a future.

      Vinyl records will never dominate the music market again, but there is a market for them and they aren't going away.

      8 bit video games will never dominate the video game market again, but there is a market for them and they aren't going away.

      The Amiga OS won't dominate the computer market, but it doesn't have to in order to have a future. It's been around in various versions for 34 years at this point, so it's probably not going away anytime soon.

    • ...but you're right. It's over.

      If it runs old 68000 games, it's an Amiga. You can buy one on eBay and have some fun being nostalgic. I totally get that. I still own my 2000. It's fun to relive the early days once in a while.

      But these new machines? They're not Amigas. They don't run the old software, and their speed isn't anything like any other new machine you can buy...so why bother?

      I just don't see what itch these new Amiga branded boxes are trying to scratch.

    • I LOVED using my Amiga 500. I still love it, but it has nothing to offer anymore. The engineering was absolutely brilliant, but the idea of coordinating multiple moving parts is dead and gone. It is conceptually easier for the average engineer to do one thing at a time very very fast, so it looks like there are multiple moving parts. It disgusts me, but here we are.

      You are correct. That era is gone and the Amiga and its concepts are as dead as it is possible to be, while still being remembered fondly.

  • I wish them luck (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @02:41PM (#58505960)

    Between Windows becoming a spyware OS, Apple dumbing down their OS and only selling sub-par hardware at luxury prices and all the various Linux groups still working basically against each other after two decades instead of working together... we really need a strong, stable 4th option.

    • YES!

    • we really need a strong, stable 4th option.
      Would that not be the Transputer based Atari OS?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      all the various Linux groups still working basically against each other after two decades instead of working together

      You fail to understand the way that Open Source and Free software are developed. The vendors are cooperating together, for the most part.

      The process, which sometimes involves forking and replacing one package with another, can be disconcerting to network administrators. Updates, however minor come flying in for various packages at an alarming rate. Conflicts between developers and philosophies are out in the open, instead of behind closed proprietary doors. It is like watching sausage being made.

      • And you fail to understand my original point. Instead of having 100 engineers working on small and weak airplanes, together they could be building spaceships.

        It doesn't matter if the open source philosophy means you'll get maybe 10 or 15 excellent airplanes in the end, because what we need is better spaceships.

        • No. He pointed out that you have no point because you have no clue what you are talking about. If you want homogenous systems use Windows Petri Dish v10. We in the know understand the benefits of heterogeneity. You have to have literally zero understanding of the FOSS development model to fail to understand why everyone doesn't all come together under one umbrella and agree to abandon innovation in favor of "the one true right approach." One assumes your slash ID is intentionally ironic?
          • DO we really need 500 different package managers? No, especially when the entire concept of repository based package management is flawed. There is killing innovation and then there is needlessly reinventing the wheel.
            • Repository based package management is flawed? I can't wait to hear your justification for that absurd claim. I'm sure I'll have to though since it is an absurd assertion with zero merit.

              • dependency hell for one. Non-existent repositories for another. With Mac and Windows applications are shipped with their needed dependencies and they can exist along side different versions. In linux applications can fail to install because I have a dependency that has the slightly wrong version. Have you tried working with a release that is more than a few years old? The repository servers are gone and the new ones don't support your version anymore. So you are fucked. Whereas I can get an old Windows PC t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      This is why I'm not excited about computers these days for years. I still use old stuff like my 64-bit W7 HPE SP1, Windows XP Pro. SP3, Debian oldstable/Jessie v8, analog stuff, DVI, VGA, PS2, Belkin OmniCube KVM from Y2K, etc. I prefer the old stuff. Get off my lawn! :P

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by leonbev ( 111395 )

      I'd think that most people would consider Linux to be the #4 OS right now, behind ChromeOS but before FreeBSD in market share. The AmigaOS is probably still behind OS/2 and a few other obscure OS's at this point.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      If Apple are selling sub-par hardware at luxury prices, have you taken a look at the powerpc amiga boards that are on sale?

      A strong stable 4th option would be great, but amigaos isn't going to be it.

  • Platform (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @02:44PM (#58505970)

    Is there something AmigaOS excels at that makes it a preferable option to another OS?

    If it's just the UI, then why spend time porting stuff to AmigaOS, when you could focus on getting Amiwm, and related tools, running solid in Linux?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Not any more.

      There used to be. In its day, it was astonishingly lightweight for what it did, and it was ahead of its time in the consumer space by around a decade, featuring things like preemptive multitasking, long filenames, and digital sound long before IBM compatibles had those things.

      But Moore's Law made the first point a non-factor by the mid 1990's, and software improvements did the same to the second point around the same time.

      It's a dead end in the technology tree. It had great promise, and for q

      • The IBM PC was designed around the concept that the customers didn't want quality, and as long as a spreadsheet would run then it was good enough. The Amiga actually felt like an evolution of the home microcomputer market and was bringing in stuff that was commonplace in the professional world, whereas IBM PC was just more of the same.

        • The IBM PC was designed around common off-the-shelf components and an open architecture. When it came out, it was produced by the 'Entry Systems' division because they expected to use it as a smart terminal to connect to their mainframes to do real work. Also, in it's original implementation, it had 4 rows of 16K DRAM on the motherboard for a total of 64K. Additional memory had to be installed in cards on the I/O channel and there were only five card slots in the first IBM PC.

          I am not sure where 'didn't

          • It was a souped up variant of an 8080 S100 style system running CP/M. OS didn't get any better, hardware was only marginally better. Amiga certainly had faults, but it tried to be smarter in lots of ways; an easier bus to plug stuff into, a more modern OS, and an API that's easy to work with.

            • But the PC wasn't lacking in quality. They were very well built systems and offered the features that the target demographic, businesses, cared about. You can't really compare early PC's to the home micros of the era because they are meant for completely different tasks. The PC's came in big sturdy metal cases meant to hold up and last, they had dedicated monitors, great keyboards and loads of expansion allowing for first and third party addons to do whatever your business needed. The home micros were small

              • Hardware wise, yes, the PC was an advance. Software wise, it wasn't. Since they outsourced this it seems they may not have been prepared on this side of things.

                • Sure DOS was simplistic at the time but don't tell me the ZX spectrum, Apple ][ pr TRS-80 had great OS's. They effectively didn't have them at all. Amiga did and it was advanced for the time but it never had the applications that DOS and then later Windows had. And at the end of the day that's what moves units. PC's had the software, they had Lotus, they had games. Amiga, Atari and the rest had table scraps.

                  • I'm not saying those other operating sytems were good. But DOS wasn't a significant improvement over them. The Amiga operating system was a large leap forward.

                    When I first got an Amiga, there were three computers competing for the "better than a PC" title. Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIgs. They all had better hardware than the PC, but the Atari and Apple still essentially had the same simplistic operating system. (this was in the US anyway, possibly the Acorn Archimedes should be in the list)

      • The thing is, AmigaDOS *wasn't* really "true preemptive multitasking". Sure, it was the closest thing we had to it in 1986, but it was really just an odd hybrid of cooperative & interrupt-driven multasking.

        Screens were implemented with display lists, but sliding them up/down was handled during vblank & thus preemptive. Intuition's chrome-drawing & mouse/keyboard-handling was vblank/preemptive, but content-rendring was cooperative. That's why an app could crash & leave you with a non-updatin

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Megol ( 3135005 )

          Perhaps you should look at the definition of preemptative multitasking before writing something like that. Amiga OS have no protection and no kernel level privilege which means user programs can disable the multitasking if they want however the OS is a true preemptative system.

          PS is that you Linus?

        • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @07:55PM (#58507032)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • My argument is that Windows (at least, with a suitable video card) can do the Amiga equivalent of forcibly-multitasking crack screen intros... the acid test of software UN-cooperative (and in fact, positively 100% hostile) to multitasking of any kind. At least, since some point after Win2k or XP... I think the PC97 spec officially required a video card that could give each app its seemingly-own dedicated block of framebuffer ram & control registers, and render it into a Window at full-native speed. Like

            • multitasking something like Shadow of the Beast and Lemmings would have been utterly flat-out IMPOSSIBLE

              Most Amiga games halt OS and multitasking as soon as they start. With WHDLoad and enough RAM, you can probably get around this for most popular games even on old hardware.

              Amiga's windowing felt a lot smoother than Windows

              Amiga Intuition's preemptive multitasking, coupled with the (memory unsafe) interprocess communication, is what allowed the UI to be so responsive. I still miss on every other OS i

          • > But, let's suppose you had been right, and that each process had to grab some kind of lock, manipulate the screen, and then release the lock, each time they wanted to do anything on screen.

            Isn't that ... this? LockLayer / UnlockLayer [elowar.com]

            I guess this could be called, not preemptive, but a sort of "antisocial" multitasking case, though, in that locking a layer by task A apparently makes it unavailable to other tasks.

            "If multiple tasks are manipulating layers on the same display they will be sharing a Layer

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Quarters ( 18322 )

          No, your statement is wrong. AmigaOS was truly preemptive. There was no expectation that programs had to voluntarily pause and free the OS to process another task. There are no cooperative multitasking API calls for applications to utilize. Time sharing was fully handled at the OS level, not by the applications.

          Now, granted, the lack of memory protection made multitasking more brittle than it should've been, but that, again, was an OS level issue.

          Your comment about two 'cracktros' running simultaneously is

    • Is there something AmigaOS excels at that makes it a preferable option to another OS?

      Nostalgia. It's also a great alternative for those who think Linux on the desktop has become too mainstream.

    • AmigaOS doesn't use systemd. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 28, 2019 @03:04PM (#58506094)

      A big benefit of AmigaOS is that, unlike Linux, it doesn't use systemd. As anyone who has used Linux recently knows, systemd is a frequent source of problems, while giving pretty much no, in my opinion, benefits over what it replaced.

      An OS like AmigaOS, which doesn't use systemd, gets an inherent reliability and usability boost just because systemd isn't present.

    • Is there something AmigaOS excels at that makes it a preferable option to another OS?

      There was, in its day. It really was pretty much the best desktop OS at the time. The only important thing it was missing was protected memory, but none of the other desktop systems of the day had it either except the PC — which made little use of it at the time. Meanwhile it was a microkernel-based OS, and version 2 had scalable fonts and support for pluggable file formats.

      BeOS was essentially the AmigaOS of its day, so if you want the equivalent modern experience, you should probably play with Haiku

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 3seas ( 184403 )

      Has all three primary user interfaces standard. The command line, the GUI and the side door port, the IPC port commonly known as the Arexx port but it does not need Arexx to be useful. Currently, the AI industry is complaining about a lack of diversity but that is actually the fault of the tech industry following microsofts lead of "to become wealthy, make people need you" and of course doing so by not allowing the end users to automate things for themselves. You can correctly call it Karma. see http://3sea [3seas.org]

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday April 28, 2019 @08:03PM (#58507076)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • The CPUs around in the 1980s meant that AmigaOS's architecture was always going to have those flaws. The only way to fix them, and still end up with something looking like AmigaOS, would either be to switch to a CPU that tracks pointers (thee aren't any), or to use a VM approach like Java.

        The 68030 had a slot for an MMU and the 68040 had an MMU built in.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Quarters ( 18322 )

      Assuming that people who want to work on Amiga OS are just wasting their time by not devoting their efforts to a *window manager* is a highly dismissive viewpoint. Is there something a Ford model T excels at? How about a post WWII Telefunken stereo, or a pre-Chinese buyout Milwaukee power tool? Not really to all of them. Yet, there are robust communities of people that covet those items and strive to maintain working examples of them. Why should computing be any different? So a group wants to devote time to

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      once upon a time yes, now - no.
      this is not about world domination, all amigans know the platform is just a hobby.
      but it is cool to have new stuff, keeping the scene interesting, otherwise it would just be people using old stuff out of nostalgia (like you get with all the consoles).

    • Is there something AmigaOS excels at that makes it a preferable option to another OS?

      The OS was not particularly special; although it was more rationally designed than other consumer operating systems. What made the Amiga special was the hardware. There were multiple moving parts all affecting and effecting other moving parts and together, it was a dance of beauty.

      Needless to say, the OS was beautiful too because it was designed in the same manner as the hardware. Likely, the most elegant operating system ever delivered to consumers now and for the foreseeable future.

  • I still believe. Make something beautiful again, we love and miss AmigaOS! But please make it something that competes with other computers, tables or phones and not the equivalent hardware CPU of a modern Jet Ski.

  • Why not just emulate? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A modern PC can emulate an Amiga orders of magnitude faster than the actual machines were, even the fastest 68060 variants.

    Why not just run AmigaOS on an emulator on Linux, if you want to use it? Custom chip emulation, everything, it's all there if you want it, and as a bonus you get a useful range of Linux tools to deal with the emulation.

    • The fastest Amiga is a dual-core 2 GHz PowerPC. You can emulate a PPC Amiga under Windows, but I don't think you can in Linux.

      Mine's not that fast - I have an 800 Mhz model - but it's a lot of fun to futz with.

      And that's the point, really. It's not a terribly practical machine, but it's fun.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Does amigaos actually make use of the second core yet?

        Apple had 2.5ghz quad core PowerPC models in 2006, IBM has 4ghz+ PowerPC hardware.

        • I actually don't know what the multicore support is like in AmigaOS 4.2 beta; I don't have one of the dual core machines.

          That said, even AmigaOS 3.x supported multiple (mismatched!) CPUs via assorted kludges. 68040/PPC and 68060/MIPS machines existed.

          My wild-ass uninformed guess is that the second core is probably accessible but not automatically used by the scheduler yet, but that's just a gut feeling based on years of 'it should, but...' with Amiga crapola.

          What I'd really like to see is a port of AmigaOS

  • To have with amigaOS (or BeOS, or MultiTOS)

    Have a look at this comparison, POWER9 is adequate for a modern machine :

    https://www.phoronix.com/scan.... [phoronix.com]

    Prices for consumers are here :

    https://raptorcs.com/content/b... [raptorcs.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Starting at $5,575.00

      That's not really consumer pricing...

  • The Disco Stu of computing (Score:3)

    by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday April 29, 2019 @06:12AM (#58508590)
    The Amiga was an awesome platform. I had several over my time and was poised to buy an A4000 when they went bust. Lucky for me I guess that I didn't.

    It's instructive to look at what happened in the comp.sys.amiga.advocacy after the platform collapsed. Some of the more ardent "fans" adopted a siege / cult mentality, an unshakable belief that sketchy-photo-of-nextgen-Amiga would revive the product's fortunes. Of course it never did and the company would go bust soon after only to be replaced by another. Commodore and Amiga became cursed brands like out of a Japanese horror movie where everyone who tried to commercialize them would suffer a horrible fate.

    At this point the brand is a joke. Whatever claims to be an "Amiga" is likely to be a board and Linux dist of some kind. Big whoop. If you want to run an Amiga, just get the ROMs and games from its heyday and run it on an emulator like UAE. If somebody genuinely wants to capitalize on that nostalgia they should sell an Amiga-mini with licensed ROMs where the device boots into the emulator with a bunch of games and people can use SD cards like floppies to add their own.

  • I can't help thinking if they'd focused their efforts on Amiga Forever and worked on expanding the capabilities of UAE, instead of continuing to mess around with eccentric hardware, that the (virtual) platform would be in a better place now. I mean, yes, there's a performance penalty associated with emulation, but it's a penalty they'd only have to pay once. And it's not like the specialized hardware is holding its own in performance against the PC platform either. It's just costing a lot of money and co

  • Good time to go BIG with Amiga (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Now that Apple has thoroughly screwed the pooch, borked it up, gone utterly fubar, it's actually a great time to try and grow a new Amiga platform. A fully modern Amiga platform. Take a look at what Apple has screwed-up, from the now awful UIs to the idiotic hardware designs (useless keyboard, anyone? anyone?), and then don't make those same mistakes. Make compelling hardware that isn't obsessed with thin over function. Make a UI that is easy to see, easy to use, and consistent, instead of being "random shi

  • 85,252? Pah.

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