AmigaOS 4.1 SDK 53.34 and AmigaOS 3.2.1 Available Now

Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes: Hyperion Entertainment announced the immediate availability of a new and updated Software Developer Kit (SDK) for the latest version of AmigaOS 4.1 (PPC Amigas). (i.e. after applying all the publicly released updates).

Also on December 21, 2021, Hyperion Entertainment released the first free update for AmigaOS 3.2 (68k classic Amigas). AmigaOS 3.2.1 fixes several bugs and additionally comes with new features.

Yawn

[registrations_suck]

It amazes me that people STILL care about Amiga stuff.

Re:Yawn

[drinkypoo]

It was the last of a breed, end of an era whatever. The next closest thing to be mass produced after the Amigas was the BeBox, and it was really just an off the shelf dev board and the "Geek Port" was just a port provided for hw dev on that board. Awesome case though, I regret trading mine for an Indigo.

Anyway the Amiga seems to have been the last great place for asm programming, it was the last place for heavy custom chips on a desktop computer, it was one of the last fully documented computers with schematics provided that had components big enough to easily hack on... as a hobby system it has no peer.

Re:

[Bert64]

It was also technologically superior to most if not all of its peers, so it appealed to the subset of people who value merit over flashy marketing.

Re:

[50000BTU_barbecue]

"It was also technologically superior to most if not all of its peers"

Maybe for a year or two. Commodore was unbelievably short-sighted and reacted way too slowly to the rest of the world, and stretched out the Amiga chips for WAY too long. I mean seriously, 8 bit audio even on the 4000? Low density floppy controller hacked to "work" as a HD controller by the amazing solution of spinning the disk at half the speed? Wow.

Cheap, cheap, cheap. And when they did finally attempt something. it was the usual cluste

Re:

[Mike Bouma]

Compared to PCs it was clearly superior in terms of graphics, sound and GUI/multi-tasking all through the 80s at least.

Some examples:

Amiga VS PC (DOS) games
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Amiga vs PC 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

The Amiga experience - Amiga vs PC - IBM 8550 - Amiga 500
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Re:

[NateFromMich]

Yeah it was slightly superior. In those videos though, they are purposely showing just the CGA version of the DOS games. I owned a Tandy from 1985 that didn't suffer from CGA, to say nothing of people that bought an EGA card.

Re:

[Bert64]

How much did a 1985 PC with EGA cost?
There was always hardware far more powerful than the Amiga (eg high end unix workstations), but not at a comparable price point. The A500 offered very good price/performance.

Re:

[NateFromMich]

How much did a 1985 PC with EGA cost?

A lot, that's why I had the Tandy.

The A500 offered very good price/performance.

I know, and I said it was slightly superior.

Re: Yawn

[drinkypoo]

It was superior in literally every way at the time. Not just that, but notably superior. That is not slight. It was massively better.

Re:

[BardBollocks]

It blew away PC's at the time. PC's didn't approach Amiga levels until Amiga was long in the tooth.

Re: Yawn

[registrations_suck]

But why does that matter? I mean, it died out. Millions of people are still using Windows and Macs, for real, every day work. Amigas, not so much.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

There's no question that C= squandered their market position by wimping out on the next generation of Amiga with AGA instead of AAA. 16 bit sound was less important, but yeah, the 8bit was also a miss. But PCs got so cheap in the next generation that the Amiga would have gotten creamed anyway. PC motherboards started to come out that had everything onboard for way less than a high end Amiga, way way less than it would have cost if it had been all that it could have been, and it didn't matter that the Amiga

Re:

[Bert64]

Yeah the A4000 was clearly too little too late...
But the A1000, A500 etc were well ahead of the competition at the time.

Re:

[jwhyche]

The custom chipset that the Amiga relied on for graphics were also a major Achillies heel of the architecture. When it first came out it gave the Amiga a temporary advantage. But a few years later and the chipset was showing its age. Unlike the PC you couldn't upgrade the graphics by just popping in a new card. You had to replace the whole computer.

Even new chipsets didn't bring much to the table over the old chipset. Even the AGA didn't bring much to the table and brought nothing over what the PC

Re: Yawn

[drinkypoo]

You could just pop in a new card. But they were expensive so few did so. The PC was crap in its early days but the architecture turned out to be a massive advantage because it used a minor variation on an already popular bus which had about as much bandwidth as the competition. As such it was cheaper to make add-on cards for in many cases.

Re:

[jwhyche]

You could but only for the most expensive models. If you had a low end Amiga you were just shit out of luck. But for the time some of those cards were really nice. I choose to up grade to an Amiga 3000 instead of the 4000. Despite having a faster processor and AGA graphics I found the Amiga 3000 to be a much better computer. To this day I think the Amiga 3000 was one of the best looking and best built Amiga made.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Yeah I used to have a desktop A3000 and I regret letting it go, it was arguably the most practical of all Amiga models.

I've had about five or six Amigas so far and they were great fun, but most of them are too impractical to bother with any more IMO. But then I'm space-limited.

Re:

[jwhyche]

I was using my Amiga 3000 for a door stop when I switch to a PC. Finally, I was able to donate it to a computer collector. The last time I saw it, it was still puttering along.

I had one of the first A3000s, one of the soft kickstart. It was also the last computer I owned that I actively developed for. I can still bring up VS and write programs in C++/C# for windows. The Amiga was the last computer I programmed on just for the joy of it.

Re: Yawn

[registrations_suck]

Yeah. That's what the Amiga people keep saying.

It's also a big "was".

The world has moved on man.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Clearly, not everyone has. The software release and the hype around it, however small it might be, already prove you are incorrect. Why do you care? Why be a hater, "man" ?

Re: Yawn

[Kelxin]

You don't feel that the raspberry pi has taken it's place as far as the hackable, user moddable experimental machine?

Re:

[Mike Bouma]

You can turn the Pi4 into a Pimiga 2.0 (2479 times faster than an Amiga 600):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Nice!

Re:

[drinkypoo]

It's easier to add stuff onto Pi but harder to change how the system fundamentally works with its required blobs and its very fine pitch electronics. With Amiga you could easily lift pins and such. A friend of mine built his own Zorro II expansion for his Amiga 500 for example.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

He doesn't even know what a Zorro II slot is, I'd wager. People seem to want to hate not only on the Amiga, but more on the old-guy retro enthusiasm it generates. I'm not sure if they feel threatened by that or it's just general hate-because-you-are-happy-about-something. The idea that a computer with a full schematic is wonderful doesn't occur to a lot of younger folks simply because they wouldn't know what to do with one if they had one. They are still trying to figure out the GPIO pins on their RPI and t

Re:

[Faw]

I still liked the AmigaSDK they made based on TAO's Intent OS [c2.com]. It was like a hardware-independent QNX. Crazy fast VM OS that could be compiled to native code. To me it was as revolutionary as AmigaOS was when it was released. Obviously it was ignored. A shame. I still have the manual around.

Re:

[Darinbob]

The opposite of the PC at the time. The PC market seemed to undervalue the microcomputer, as a poor cousin to a real computer, whereas Amiga wanted to do the best possible with the resources available. So Amiga has multitasking on day 1, the PC at most had terminate-and-stay-ready, some of the alternatives to DOS or early Windows had cooperative multitasking maybe. Amiga came with color by default, including 64K colors on screen at once, back when the PC was considered fancy if it had hercules black and w

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

If you got an R4k Indigo with a working keyboard & mouse I'd say you got the better deal. The BeBox was cool, but not "appeared in Jurassic Park" cool :-) Gotta disagree a little bit on "last great place for ASM" though. I'd call it the best place to start, except for maybe MACRO32 on the Vax. There is nothing dead about ASM. It is quite an "alive" skill as our corporate jobs page illustrates rather vividly. It's just that we deal with a lot more packed operations in SIMD now that before (mostly a good

Re:

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Look into the Commodore 64 scene. Someone just made Sonic for the 64 with min. 256K RAM expansion!

https://youtu.be/_Cg8r-VmeMk [youtu.be]

Etc... Someone just paid 2000$ on eBay for a SuperCPU accelerator for the 64, so at least one person cares about an even older computer...

Re: Yawn

[backslashdot]

64 KB ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:

[Quarters]

Yet you cared enough about not caring to make a useless post illuminating your continued investment in expressing your opinion of not caring...

Re:

[Ostracus]

Makes people wonder what should be on our approved "do care" list. Wouldn't want to be out of step with the latest fashion.

Re: Yawn

[registrations_suck]

I was on the toilet.

Seems appropriate for archaic computer system thoughts.

Re:

[Quarters]

Thanks for pointing out that you're so much of an attention whore that you read/post to the internet while on the toilet to garner the external affirmations you so desperately need in your empty life.

Re: Yawn

[registrations_suck]

Oh, you're welcome.

Re:

[Ostracus]

Better support than Windows.

Re:

[bsmith0]

Not even close.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[znrt]

it's just a niche product, for nostalgia and collectors. this isn't for hobbyists, tinkerers or hackers, arduino, raspberry pi, etc fill that role much better.

Re:Yawn

[NateFromMich]

It amazes me that people STILL care about Amiga stuff.

I know right? You'd think they'd have moved on to OS/2 by now.

Re:

[BardBollocks]

Pre-backdoored technology is always going to be of interest.

Re: Yawn

[Provocateur]

I know, but can't we just call this the Tri Amiga os and move on

More to come in 2022

[Mike Bouma]

AmigaOS4 betatester Roman Kargin (aka kas1e) has posted a youtube video [youtube.com] demonstrating the latest betatest AmigaOS4 kernel (v54.43, 24-11-21) with the latest RadeonRX driver found in A-Eon's Enhancer Software 2.1 [amiga.org]. He shows the performance improvements of games he has ported to AmigaOS4. For example on his AmigaOne X5000 with Saphire Pulse Radeon RX 560 2Gb he receives ~50 additional FPS (1920x1080, max settings) in Quake 3 (up from ~80 FPS in total previously).

The ExecSG team is currently working [amiga-news.de] (slides from AmiWest) on multicore support. Also Trevor Dickinson gives an update on cheaper PowerPC hardware that A-EON Technology Ltd and ACube Systems srl are currently developing in the current issue of Amiga Future [amigafuture.de] (the AmigaOne A1222 motherboard).

Kas1e also posted a youtube video [youtube.com] demonstrating a betatest version of NovaBridge. This is a layer between old Warp3D/MiniGL apps and Warp3DNova which was written by Hans de Ruiter [hdrlab.org.nz]. So all applications written for old Warp3D and MiniGL works on Warp3DNova based cards such as Radeon HD and Radeon RX.

Kas1e demonstrates older Amiga PPC games like Heretic 2, Shogo and WipeOut 2097 running seamlessly on AmigaOS4. Kas1e can be found at the Amigans.net [amigans.net] community portal. NovaBridge will become available through a future Enhancer Software release.

For more AmigaOS4 games have a look at this youtube video [youtube.com]. It shows games including Descent: Freespace, Hurrican, M.A.C.E., Spencer and Tower 57 running on AmigaOS4.

Re:

[Mike Bouma]

The NovaBridge video by kas1e is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Excuse for the typo.

Re:

[NateFromMich]

Isn't it interesting how someone's nostalgia just seems pathetic to the outsider?
I should cheer these people on for what they've accomplished, even if they are all fighting amongst each other, but instead I just sort of shake my head.

Wassup?

[AndyKron]

Not as an NFT?