Poll: Is Amiga development heading in the right direction

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  1. #41
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    Burger Time Champion, Sonic Champion Harrison's Avatar
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    The open source NeXTSTEP underpinnings of OSX definitely helped. Even before Apple took over and turned it into OSX it was already running on Motorola 68K, RISC and most importantly Intel x86 CPUs, so Apple already had a head start in the x86 code development. Plus, as you say, Apple is a huge company (now second only to Microsoft by a small margin in terms of cash wealth and the success of the iPod and iPhone).

    And it makes perfect sense to the rest of the world to make Amiga OS open source. If anyone was being realistic about the OS, it is in no way mainstream. How many copies of Amiga OS 4 and 4.1 have been sold? That number is limited to the number of working PPC powered Amigas still in operation at the most, which can't be that many. Hyperion therefore have a very finite marketplace to sell their OS to, although I would say they can guarantee that all current PPC Amiga users are likely to purchase a copy of each new version, so they do at least have that. Although that is always being to be a very limited market with no room for real expansion or commercial success.

    However, hasn't the ability to port Amiga OS to other platforms been held up until now by the on going dispute between Amiga Inc and Hyperion? In the settlement statement they stated:

    "Hyperion is granted an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market AmigaOS 4.x (and subsequent versions of AmigaOS including without limitation AmigaOS 5) in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform under the exclusive trademark “AmigaOS” (Amiga operating system) and using other associated trademarks (such as the “BoingBall” logo)."

    For me, the crucial wording in that statement is "in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform". This would indicate the license now grants them the right to port the OS over to other hardware platforms, which sounds like they were not able to do before.

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  2. #42
    ELITE Kin Hell's Avatar
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    The problem with PPC on the Amiga is it got mis-directed whilst C= were still in business.

    Some of you guys may have read my remarks about Amiga & PPC elsewhere on the Web, so I'll be brief here, to save beating my gums all over again.

    The very idea of having a PPC chip in your Amiga back in the day, was for Paralell processing & that got buried with the final demise of C= and those infamous words thereafter: "....just 2 more weeks.
    Those 2 more weeks got turned into summat like 7 years before the Classic Amiga ever saw OS4 in the guise of "OS4.0 Classic", which left the Amiga raped of an awful lot of hardware supported under the Bastardised OS when it was released.
    Because OS4.0 had been made to run on Pee Cee based hardware for those 7 years, Hyperion Entertainment basically ported this crap over to run on the Classic Amigas with PPC cards & left the Amiga flapping around in the wind like a crippled cripple.
    Under OS4.0 Classic, 060 based stuff is emulated in a shocking way, meaning an 060 running OS3.9 will absolutely annihilate a 240Mhz PPC using iBrowse 2.4 etc etc, basically because it cant emulate jack.....

    If any re-direction could be found, OS4.0/4.1 for the Classic Amigas needs re-writing to run under 68XXX code & utilise the PPC chip in Paralell to accelerate the program being run. In a nutshell, Im' sure its the Pee Cee architecture/OS4.0 coding that cocks everything up, as the way the memory is addressed on OS4.0/4.1 Classic is very different to the 68XXX side of things.
    I feel that if they could re-code OS Classic to function faster, the limited bandwidth of the Amiga would still make it too damned chuggy, even if Stan in Poland upgrades your PPC to 333Mhz. He's a darling btw & I have a lot of respect for what this guy has done for the Amiga scene in recent years.

    With the recent addition of the up and coming PPC card using an 040 with USB & VGA onboard, I'm sure my comments about the Amiga's lack of bandwidth should register with the more astute of you, but I bet paralell processing isn't even on the agenda with this new card. If it could be done, your 68XXX/PPC based amiga would absolutely fly.

    Tbh, the direction of the PPC based OS4.0 classic was wrong from the start, but 7 years of "just 2 more weeks" kinda screwed things beyond imagination
    Last edited by Kin Hell; 13th June 2012 at 14:52.
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  3. #43
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    Quote Originally Posted by Harrison View Post
    However, hasn't the ability to port Amiga OS to other platforms been held up until now by the on going dispute between Amiga Inc and Hyperion? In the settlement statement they stated:

    "Hyperion is granted an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide right to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to use, develop, modify, commercialize, distribute and market AmigaOS 4.x (and subsequent versions of AmigaOS including without limitation AmigaOS 5) in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform under the exclusive trademark “AmigaOS” (Amiga operating system) and using other associated trademarks (such as the “BoingBall” logo)."

    For me, the crucial wording in that statement is "in any form, on any medium and for any current or future hardware platform". This would indicate the license now grants them the right to port the OS over to other hardware platforms, which sounds like they were not able to do before.
    They own the name and the source code. Personally, I'm more of an AROS developer nowadays anyway... AROS has new source code with chipset independent Graphics.library that is backward compatible to CyberGrafX 3 for graphics card support. It also has a different name that is nearly as well recognized as Amiga is any more.

    Other than that, it runs most Amiga software in the 68k version. Once the Copper support is added and GCC or Clang compilers debugged and optimized for 68k, it'll replace AmigaOS anyway. What do we need the name or old source code for.

    When AmigaOS 4.x came out, Hyperion added an interface data structure to the library handle of every PPC shared library. This is supported by a slow addressing mode on PPC. It makes the OS slower than it has to be. MorphOS is better but still not completely compatible with chipset emulation.

    I suspect now the game-changer for the Classic Amiga is FPGA-based processor softcores. This could bring us 250 MHz+ performance out of an '060 compatible processor.

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