OS for the X1000

[amigadave]

There is nothing awesome about this, the thing failed on planning/design stage already (that performance to that price), and actually pushing it through to a real PCB is nothing but moronic. It won't do anything at all for Amiga. It won't even do anything at all for OS4 either, other than showing the world that *if this* was what they had to offer, then there is no serious plan for OS4, no sustainable future, etc, and the people behind the OS4 project are sitting in a stasis field with tin-foil hats to shield them off from the reality the rest of the world lives in.

I am an avid MorphOS supporter and I do not agree with your statements above at all.  Yes, the AmigaOne X1000 is under powered and over priced.  That is well documented and debated and no one seems to be trying to refute that fact, but this product does help the Amiga community as a whole and specifically the OS4 group, as it is a significant step up from the SAM boards they are currently using and more than that, it is a show of determination by a few individuals, regardless of the money they may lose on their efforts.  The people that are invested in the X1000 project know that there is very little chance to recover even a fraction of the total investment to get to this point and the number of sales will likely be only in the low hundreds, not the thousands that they would need to break even.  But still they are determined to follow through and complete this project to produce the fastest and most modern AmigaOne for OS4 users and developers.

I have many disagreements with some of the aggressive and blindly faithful OS4 fanboys who spout crap and outright lies on many of the forum sites, but I do not object to the legitimate Amiga fans and users that only want to run the OS of their choice on the fastest and best hardware that they can get their hands on.  Trevor is  a great Amiga fan and a nice guy.  In my opinion, and the opinion of some others, he might have been mislead and made some choices that have not turned out to be the best for a possible financial gain, or even break even on this project, but I give him a whole lot of credit for completing it.  He wanted the best AmigaOne OS4 machine he could get and has persevered to the end regardless of what it is going to cost him, or all the negative comments from the many naysayers who have criticized his choices.  He is a true Amiga fan that took a chance and all of us on the sidelines can either criticize him or cheer him on (I have done both from time to time).

I would not buy any SAM board and most likely will not buy an X1000, but I am willing to look at what they have to offer and listen to their arguments for why they (the OS4 users and developers) think anyone should buy their systems and OS instead of the other Amiga alternatives.  If they can convince me that they have a better system, hardware, software, OS, development tools, support, etc., then someday I might switch to their side and buy an OS4 system.  Until that time, I will stick with what I now use and enjoy in while keeping an eye open to what all other alternatives are doing and also still enjoying my old Classic systems and watching what the Natami, Minimig & FPGA Arcade guys are doing.

It is a great time for Amiga users, because they have so many choices to satisfy their Amiga addiction.  Now all we need is more developers to make more and better software for all of us to use.  A key factor to this happening is cooperation between developers for cross-platform development.

[amigadave]

If you don't find it worth the asking price, don't buy one, lol.  I love my SAM and OS 4.1, but the x1000 is far out of my pricerange and wouldn't do anything my lowly SAM 440ep wouldn't do.

For the sake of the X1000 buyers and Trevor, I hope that the X1000 can do many things that your SAM 440EP can't do!

[amigadave]

Unless the X1000 and SAM460 boards inspire more development and additions to the Hyperion OS4 Team, I think the continuing development of OS4 is on shaky ground.

My choice of Next Gen AmigaOS, MorphOS, is not on much better ground and could cease to be developed at any time, if the MorphOS Development Team started to fall apart and lose interest.  I hope, and don't think that this is about to happen, but could happen in the not too distant future, if they decide that it is too much work and not worth the effort to finally move to a different architecture AND there is no reasonable new PPC hardware to port to in the near future. Edit: By near future, I mean the next few years.  The MorphOS Dev. Team has plenty of work to do on the existing ports of MorphOS2.x on G4 hardware and might decide to go forward with porting to the G5 PowerMacs and maybe the G5 iMac's too, so they have plenty of work to do for at least a couple of years before they start running out of improvements for the G4 & G5 and need to make a decision about which CPU to port to next, or if they want to stop development and do something different.  There is also a chance that a fast, new PPC CPU will be created within the next couple of years for the embedded market that is fast enough and cheap enough to make porting MorphOS to it a worthwhile effort.  End Edit:

Since this thread is supposed to be about the OS for the X1000, I wonder if the AROS Team will consider porting AROS to the X1000?  AROS has a higher probability to survive into the future than any of the other Next Gen choices, because it is Open Source and already runs on a wider range of hardware than any of the other choices.

It will be interesting to see what happens when one, or both of the current Amiga PPC OSes stops development, where the existing users will go.  Will they switch to the other remaining PPC alternative, or will they finally switch to AROS?  Or possibly they will give up on Next Gen Amiga OSes and revert to enjoying Classic AmigaOS3.x and earlier versions, just for fun and forget about using any kind of Amiga experience for anything except playing and writing code for 68k games, which they can enjoy on their modern PC's with WinUAE, or EUAE, or on their antique 68k Classic Amiga hardware if it is still running.

[amigadave]

@itix & commodorejohn,

Both MorphOS and OS4 CAN run many Amiga 68k binaries natively, the ones that are OS3.x friendly and do not bang the hardware.  For all other Amiga 68k programs, such as hardware banging games, UAE can be integrated into both OS4 and MorphOS very seamlessly with just a bit of scripting.  All of the above has been available for a long time, so your posts are surprisingly uninformed.  Check out a OS4, or MorphOS forum some time and you will learn a lot more.

[amigadave]

Yes, my post was uninformed, because I don't use and have no real interest in OS4 or MorphOS. But as itix wasn't discussing either, I'm not sure that's really all too relevant.

I admit I made a mistake regarding itix, but your reply;

Yeah, but it's still a separate emulator, right? Something like the  OS-integrated emulation on Power Macs would be nice for use with  OS-friendly apps.

To Duce and Dreamcast270mhz was not about AROS as they were both writing about OS4 and MorphOS, which is where I then replied to your post above and mistakenly included itix as well, as I thought the conversation was about OS4 and MorphOS at that point.