A-EON Technology secures graphic card support for AmigaOS 4

[spirantho]

I think it's £29, which given the sheer amount of work Hans has done, is a very fair price.

What I don't understand is why people are saying the drivers should be part of the OS, as though they are in other OS!?  Microsoft do not write graphics card drivers - of course not, the manufacturers do. Are drivers free on the PC? Again, of course not - they're included in the price of the hardware so it's invisible.  Yet somehow some people think Hyperion should write drivers for all the graphics card - yet they can't possibly do that at the same time as develop the OS, given the size of the company.

What an OS maker should do isn't write the driver, but they should provide the API, which is what Hyperion do. Writing the API allows the graphics card manufacturer - or in this case, A-Eon, because AMD aren't going to do it - to support the cards.

In this case, if you don't want the latest graphics support, you don't need these drivers, you can stick with the current ones. And new systems from A-Eon come with the new drivers included anyway. So it's not costing anyone anything unless they happen to want the latest card support.

The alternative is simple - no support for later graphics cards at all. I think I prefer this option somehow.

[spirantho]

Love 'em or hate 'em, MOS guys got it right going after the extremely cheap and extremely available PPC Mac hardware.  I only wish OS4 would go that way too - a lot more people would get a chance to use a real fun little OS at a reasonable price.

Actually, I think they both got it right.

I'd hate to be limited to Macs to run my NG AmigaOS, and Hyperion's decision not to use Macs (which would obliterate the hardware NG scene) means I can do that. MOS team's decision to use Macs means we get the best of both worlds.

I like to use new hardware built for the purpose, and I'm willing to pay for that - AOS gives me that opportunity. Other people don't care about the hardware and just want something to run their NG OS - MOS gives them that opportunity.

Hyperion and MOS have given us choice, and that can't be a bad thing. What is a bad thing is when one side start telling the other side what they should be doing, when it's an entirely subjective argument.

[spirantho]

Working on the OS. In the same way as MS writes an OS, not drivers. And Apple the same. And pretty much every other OS in history...

It's not the OS writer's responsibility to write drivers, it's the OS writer's responsibility to write an API.

[spirantho]

But Windows is not bundled/connected with only one or two hardware companies offering highprice computers

I'm not sure I see the relevance. OK, so Windows has 1000s of companies, and AmigaOS has two, that doesn't shift responsibility. Hyperion are still a very small company who are busily working on the core OS. They don't have the time to do drivers as well, so someone else has to do it - and that someone is Trevor.

It is not Hyperion's responsibility to write drivers, only the API.

And incidentally, many Windows machines are a lot  more expensive than the X1000. The X1000 is cheap compared to a lot of systems.