Call for Amiga Developers from A-EON Technology

[matthey]

The following text at http://www.amigadeveloper.com/ states.

We have established the infrastructure to make sure the right environment for Amiga development exists such as development forums, SVN server, developer mailing lists and Wiki.

Any chance of giving links to the development forums, web based SVN server and Wiki mentioned?

[matthey]

This wiki has been available for ages...

http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Main_Page

It is not that I can't find the resources but rather that it should be easier for everyone at http://www.amigadeveloper.com/ to find the resources.

[matthey]

this effort is obviously primarily aimed at attracting developers for os4 applications to be distributed via amistore, if there is any intention to provide infrastructure for amiga development, let alone a cross platform, i suspect it is secondary.

I sincerely believe A-Eon wants to encourage Amiga development albeit with a focus on AmigaOS 4 and PPC. They need to convert more 68k Amiga users and developers to expand their user and developer base. I doubt that the AmigaNG is competitive enough to attract many outside users and developers.

[matthey]

amiga api is very different to what people learn and use today. There are no outside devs with experience with it except perhaps some old ones but I doubt that they want to get involved again

The Raspberry Pi was a new system with weak CPU performance (~300MHz Pentium II single core performance) and now has thousands of developers, good "official" compiler support and about 30 operating systems have been developed for it. Cheap hardware attracts users and users attract developers. Learning new APIs and hardware doesn't seem to be a problem when there is plentiful cheap and standard hardware.

[matthey]

It is not a matter of competition, it is a matter of being attractive.

Please... stop pretending that Amiga is a "market" and that Apple and Microsoft etc are "competition", it only makes you look delusional.

The Amiga (A-EON and Hyperion) is a niche market competitor of Apple and Microsoft. They all produce computer hardware and develop operating systems. They can all gain or lose market share to the other competitors. Attractiveness changes supply and demand of products sold which affects market share. Delusional would be to ignore an unprofitable and unsustainable business model for the Amiga.

The call for developers covers all Amiga flavours. The wiki referred to in the A-EON news release is the A-EON specific developer wiki not the excellent AmigaOS 4 wiki.  The A-EON wiki is for developers working our specific 68k and PowerPC applications.

The news release was fine as brief is better. The web page it refers to at http://www.amigadeveloper.com/ was rather useless after reading the news release. Maybe a web developer is one of the openings though .

[matthey]

That is exactly what I wrote then Olsen and Broadblues says otherwise and then clarified.
I'm not complaining, I just think that Classics programmers need proper docs too as for Cloanto for now I just saw them as money makers around Emulation. Preserving stuff is one thing sharing them another.

IIRC the 3rd edition do not cover 3.x stuff a Classic wiki could be updated this way.
Kamelito

Does A-EON want to encourage Amiga development or not? Does A-EON want to make Amiga development easier? If so, then IMO:

1) Development documentation should be freely distributable (retaining copyrights is expected).

2) AmigaOS 68k should be further developed and the API brought closer to AmigaOS 4 to make Amiga development easier. The 68k is a bigger market and growing with new FPGA hardware. I wouldn't be surprised if Amiga capable FPGA hardware is outselling Amiga PPC hardware yet this larger potential market is practically ignored even as PPC is dying.

[matthey]

While I do agree with you regarding further development of AOS3.x, I wonder how they should find the resources to do so. Especially since they have problems keeping up desired development pace of AOS4. Many will probably just think; we got BetterWB and other upgrade packages for WB3.x, so why bother.

But for getting max impact for software releases, it makes sense having better cohesion between classic and NG OS versions.

Just curious about how you forsee it being done..?

There are 2 challenges for a 68k AmigaOS 4.x to be successful.

1) The cost needs to be lower than for the PPC AmigaOS.
2) The efficiency needs to be better than for the PPC AmigaOS.

Much of AmigaOS 4 PPC has already been developed which should lower the cost of developing AmigaOS 4 for the 68k. The AmigaOS 4 68k cost needs to be affordable and in line with lower cost 68k hardware for the masses instead of the classes. Efficiency is nearly as important as new features to 68k value. Compiler 68k support is generally old but poor compiler support didn't stop the AmigaOS from having good efficiency up to AmigaOS 3.1. I believe the efficiency could be brought back but the early versions of AmigaOS 4 68k would likely be slower. Perhaps the first step toward AmigaOS 4 68k development would be to allow developers to work on and release AmigaOS 3.x bug fixes and minor enhancements which improve compatibility with the AmigaOS 4 API for free. If the developers were successful at improving the 68k AmigaOS, then Amiga users would be happy to pay a reasonable cost to encourage comprehensive 68k updates. This would require allowing the 68k developers full access to the AmigaOS 4 sources. It would not be open source but hopefully it could be open enough to attract developers. I have worked on vbcc enhancements for free but the source is open (even though copyrights are maintained). It may be worthwhile to pay someone highly experienced like Olsen or ThoR to manage the project while doing some work themselves. Quality development on a budget is not easy. AROS is more attractive to open source developers which A-EON would have to compete with in making AmigaOS 4 68k development attractive. The way it is now, it feels like AmigaOS 68k development is being blocked.

[matthey]

Hyperion could do it if they wanted, though I really doubt they do.

We know Hyperion's position was to only develop AmigaOS for PPC until the end but that end came and they were bailed out by A-EON. Hyperion may only be a software house for A-EON now. If A-EON is not smart and bets only on a dying one trick pony then someone else will end up with the technology.

It wouldn't solve anything though, as you would still get loads on non upgraders and grumbled at for not back porting your software, even though makes use of the new and cool things that come along in a growing (even if slower than we;d like) OS.

AmigaOS 4 has become bloated and slow even for PPC (MorphOS is significantly faster in most benchmarks). This is a challenge for a 68k AmigaOS where users care more about efficiency. Change is needed but there is a resistance to change so the AmigaOS will likely die on PPC in the hands of a small group called Hyperion doing the same things that forced them into bankruptcy before they were rescued. All aboard for developers outside this time warp bubble to somehow rescue them though.

[matthey]

But when your 68K has multi-core, can run at over 2 GHz, can run 64 bit code, or address the amount of memory modern processor can, let me know.

The AmigaOS used to be efficient enough and scalable enough to run on a 68000@7.14MHz with 256kB of memory. Now we need a 2 GHz clock speed and more than 4 GB of memory?

Sure, port Amiga OS4.1 to the 68K, where it will be too slow to run properly.
And once OS4.2 is released, it will be obsolete.

Different build scripts and conditional preprocessor directives would be necessary in some cases but most of the high level OS components should compile as is. I would hope AmigaOS 4 doesn't use a bunch of GCCisms as other compilers may generate better quality code for the 68k.

AND X64 IS the eventual goal, but not right now.

I hope not but it would be good to make the AmigaOS more portable in case of a processor switch. IMO, moving to x86_64 would divide what is left of the Amiga even more, a 64 bit little endian AmigaOS with SMP support would not be compatible with anything and the Amiga would lose most of what is left of its uniqueness.

Real 68k is ancient crap slower than first pentium.

My g4 is still faster than the slowest new PC laptops.

The 68060 is on par with a Pentium and the G4 is on par with a Pentium III. The only new laptops/netbooks as weak as a G4 are Atom or ARM based. Any feel of a G4 being faster than modern PC laptops is probably due to a more efficient OS. If you want to further talk hardware, please use the thread Eliyahu created for that purpose.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=69986&page=4

[matthey]

@fondpondforever & ciVic
I hope one of you is a web developer .

@A-EON
Jim Drew is a famous Amiga developer who needs the P96 driver developer kit for FPGA Arcade development.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=80349

Encouraging development means not wasting developer's time as well as getting them the resources they need.

[matthey]

I don't know about "famous", notorious perhaps...  

Outlaws can be famous too. Maybe not all of your notoriety was positive but there were "circumstances" and the bad guys were in the management at C=. You have one of the most recognizable 3rd party Amiga developer names behind maybe Tim Jenson .

I think it would be wise for A-EON to support OS3 and the 68K CPUs.  After working on iFUSION and some PowerMacs, I can tell you that I don't want anything to do with the PPC platform.  There are some products coming  that will convert an 040/060 CPU pin platform into a raging FPGA based monster.  So, I can see some new life for the older machines coming down the pike.  I would definitely be interested in helping with 68K projects.

So many of us love the little old 68k that could but wasn't allowed to. Maybe they will notice when there are more FPGA 68k Amigas that there are PPC Amigas. Then maybe they will realize they don't have a product or support for the bigger market they blocked. I guess it depends on what you want to be famous for but not everyone has the foresight or power to change the future.