Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: InTheSand on March 27, 2006, 09:56:47 PM
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Hi,
Thought some of you might like to know that OSNews has posted an article stating some opinions on the future of Amiga Inc, Hyperion and OS4 here (http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14118).
It's not the most objective piece but does have some valid points.
- Ali
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I read this a while ago, and I think it is completely objective. What makes it so is that it comes from someone outside the Amiga scene. Someone without an agenda, someone without a like / dislike for any or the parties involved. Someone who is simply interested in using Amiga OS 4 but can't because of Amiga Inc's stupidity and short-sightedness.
The sad thing is that he may as well be talking to a brick wall. Amiga Inc don't give a **** about AmigaOS and never have. Since the day they took over their motivation was to coax Amiga developers away from the Amiga and into coding games for Tao Elate.
Amiga users are nothing but a mild irritation to Amiga Inc when they bring up things Amiga Inc would prefer forgotten, or when they are bombarded by emails from 'True Amigans' asking about Amiga Inc's plans (as if they have any) for AmigaOne / OS4.
They will carry on selling their Casino games for Pocket PC, and carry on ignoring the irrelevant Amiga users.
It seems like this is finally starting to pay off for them - they've sold ~1000 copies of that Casino game over at Handango (it may even pay for the bike).
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The thread of this on AW is hilarious, paranoia, insults, attacks etc. The article poster touched a raw nerve and ended up himself feeling the wrath of the aw crowd.
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''Yet, only three men and a cow are able to actually run the damn thing.''
at least he has humor...
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more than three men and a cow can run aros there are some pigs too.:-D
most of the computing world can run it.
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I just read about half of the AW thread. What is wrong with some of those folks? :crazy:
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spihunter wrote:
I just read about half of the AW thread. What is wrong with some of those folks? :crazy:
As long as they stay there and don't come back here I don't care. :-D
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spihunter wrote:
I just read about half of the AW thread. What is wrong with some of those folks? :crazy:
you actually WANT to read that??? I just can't be bothered.
I'd love to see HW that can run OS4. but whining about it doesn't get anything done. OS4 is 99.9999% done and just needs a good motherboard. believe me, if i see an oportunity to have that happen, i'll do something. but until then, no point in talking.
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An interesting Fleecy quote I noticed linked from that thread on aw.net
A formal approach for the AmigaOS would first of all require that the product be a PPC platform. It would then require that the device actually be available and selling in numbers that provide a business opportunity.
Looking at those criteria, it seems a product must be available and selling in numbers before they can even approach Amiga Inc for an OS4 licence.
Looks like Powervixxen and Amy'05 are both dead in the water then. They'd have to release them with no OS / no use whatsoever (apart from an expensive ornament), and sell in them sufficient numbers (think tens of thousands) to provide a business opportunity, and THEN approach Amiga Inc to ask for an OS4 licence.
Certainly seems like AROS is the best hope for any kind of future. Just needs more people pulling in that direction.
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@cecilia,
Yea, There must be something wrong with me for actually reading that much of it. :lol: :lol:
Its like a cheesy novel that I just cant put down :-D
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Pure Amigaworld gold. The worst part is, it is not supposed to be a comedy thread but the usual aw contributers deliver cracking performaces and really make you feel sorry for them.
Think of a traditional love story, involving "true Amigans" and Hyperion :lol:
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Savan wrote:
Pure Amigaworld gold. The worst part is, it is not supposed to be a comedy thread but the usual aw contributers deliver cracking performaces and really make you feel sorry for them.
Think of a traditional love story, involving "true Amigans" and Hyperion :lol:
"Hyperion, Hyperion! Wherefore art though Operating System?" ;-)
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@md..er Nicholas
I think Macbeth is more fitting than Romeo and Juliet..
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing
:cry:
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Savan wrote:
Pure Amigaworld gold. The worst part is, it is not supposed to be a comedy thread but the usual aw contributers deliver cracking performaces and really make you feel sorry for them.
Think of a traditional love story, involving "true Amigans" and Hyperion :lol:
And here we have a typical Amiga.org thread bashing an AW thread. Really? Which one is more sad? :roll:
Come on guys. I visit both sites. Amiga.org for my classic needs and AW for my OS4 fix.
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@Doobrey: very apt!
- Ali
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Yeah they're having quite a time on AW.net and OSNews.
:violin:
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redfox
''Yet, only three men and a cow are able to actually run the damn thing.'' ...;-)
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why does politics come and ruin everything, its all business mans bollocks this..
if it werent for managers trying some scheme or shell company crap, we would have an amiga on every desk and probably the moon as well!
the article is written by a non amigan, his views are totally valid.
as it stands the amiga OS market is shrinking, there is no way im going to by a different platform eg ppc i just dont have the space or money, amiga could really have gone some where without people trying to extract as much capital out of it as they can, e.g. custom motherboards.
THE DECISION TO PORT TO PEGASOS OR NOT IS NOT HYPERION'S.
theyre probably just as annoyed as me and not being able do the OS for X86.
Gahh! %*&#$#!!!
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Doobrey wrote:
I think Macbeth is more fitting than Romeo and Juliet..
Didn't you know Shattered Dreams by 80's popsters Johnny Hates Jazz is the official theme song? I can imagine it being sung by tearful geeks while hugging their computers. (But Fleecy, you said I was "special", that this MEANT something! Where's your orthogonal persistance when I need it?)
So much for your promises
They died the day you let me go
Caught up in a web of lies
But it was just too late to know
I thought it was you
Who would stand by my side
And now you’ve given me, given me
Nothing but shattered dreams, shattered dreams
Feel like I could run away, run away
From this empty heart
You said you’d die for me
Woke up to reality
And found the future not so bright
I dreamt the impossible
That maybe things could work out right...
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nadoom: as it stands the amiga OS market is shrinking, there is no way im going to by a different platform eg ppc i just dont have the space or money, amiga could really have gone some where without people trying to extract as much capital out of it as they can, e.g. custom motherboards.
Custom and low-volume hardware is usually expensive and prone to design flaws. People don't notice the flaws as much just because there's fewer people looking for problems. Trying to extract as much cash from this kind of hardware is a popular idea (like, Kodak charging $5,000 for a "workstation" with dual 800Mhz CPUS, while single-CPU 2Ghz machines sell for $1,000), but it rarely works well.
uncharted: Where's your orthogonal persistance when I need it?
The current buzzphrase is "transparrent persistence." Funny how the software that does its job properly is always supposed to be invisible. Doesn't make it easy to market, does it? Well, unless you hype something that doesn't really do anything. :-)
I can't imagine anyone getting upset over this review. It doesn't say that much, even from a newbie's perspective.
From the article: Another problem is that going the x86 route means you suddenly have a lot more competition: Linux, BSD, Zeta/Haiku, and maybe even SkyOS and Syllable. And last but not least, it would introduce the concept of piracy to Amiga OS4, depriving Hyperion of possible sales.
I find both points rediculous. First, OS4 is going to compete against these OSes no matter what. It's about the features of the OS, not the hardware on which it runs. Apple is x86, now. Oh noes! Teh Mac is squashed by eevil M$?!
As for piracy, I think people should try using some of the software I used to use at work. Most of the software required some low-level drivers that would only work with one specific kind of machine. Getting that software to run on generic hardware was a real challenge. Besides, there are plenty of Macs out there. Why isn't a bootleg copy of OS4 already available for Macintosh? Piracy isn't just an x86 problem, and EFI has all sorts of new DRM options. Hell, how many generic PC motherboards out there use EFI? That alone would be an effective lockout mechanism, at least for the time being.
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Waccoon wrote:
From the article: Another problem is that going the x86 route means you suddenly have a lot more competition: Linux, BSD, Zeta/Haiku, and maybe even SkyOS and Syllable. And last but not least, it would introduce the concept of piracy to Amiga OS4, depriving Hyperion of possible sales.
I find both points rediculous. First, OS4 is going to compete against these OSes no matter what. It's about the features of the OS, not the hardware on which it runs. Apple is x86, now. Oh noes! Teh Mac is squashed by eevil M$?!
Something I rather like is that Piracy is cited as a method that will "kill" AOS4... I really fail to understand how people using an OS kills it... since the sucess of an OS is defined by the number of users!!!!
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Doobrey wrote:
@md..er Nicholas
I think Macbeth is more fitting than Romeo and Juliet..
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing
:cry:
You have a point there! :lol:
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From the article: Another problem is that going the x86 route
means you suddenly have a lot more competition: Linux, BSD,
Zeta/Haiku, and maybe even SkyOS and Syllable. And last but not least,
it would introduce the concept of piracy to Amiga OS4, depriving
Hyperion of possible sales.
I find both points rediculous. First, OS4 is going to compete against these OSes no matter what.
True and false. Selling an OS product in x86 world is extremely difficult when it is saturated by good, efficient and free OS choices. You get compared to OS'es with better driver and hardware support.
But on the other side if this was the case OS4 (and MOS) should shine on PPC now when the main competitor, Apple, is leaving. And there are people who rather run Linux on their A1/Peg because it has got better applications. And there are users who rather use Windows than OS4/MOS because it has got better applications. So competition is there no matter what.
There is also another problem: we are competing in hardware too. When users are buying new hardware they wish to upgrade, not downgrade.
It's about the features of the OS, not the hardware on which it runs. Apple is x86, now. Oh noes! Teh Mac is squashed by eevil M$?!
It is starting to look like Genesi is the 2nd largest PPC desktop company and when Apple is gone Genesi is maybe the largest. We are winners ;-) ;-) ;-)
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The opinion piece is pretty much dead on. This is probably what the Amiga market looks like from a casual viewer. The only difference is, to the casual viewer there are a lot of nuts among the users. :lol:
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itix wrote:
It is starting to look like Genesi is the 2nd largest PPC desktop company and when Apple is gone Genesi is maybe the largest. We are winners ;-) ;-) ;-)
Hahaha. :lol: King of the PPC desktop hill. Let's celebrate. :pint:
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redrumloa wrote:
The only difference is, to the casual viewer there are a lot of nuts among the users. :lol:
I'm happy being nuts doesn't hurt :crazy:
Staf.
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Options
1. Port AOS4 to pegasos
2. Slowly disappear
3. Open source the whole lot, and set up some kind of service related business. Possibly making even more money, than licences. Imagine if the AOS4 ran on the pc. Selling 25,000 books would be no problem.
4. Port to a pc architecture, support ONLY mainstream quality components say Intel boards only, Radeon graphic cards, soundblaster, etc. I'd be very very happy with this.
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wonea wrote:
4. Port to a pc architecture, support ONLY mainstream quality components say Intel boards only, Radeon graphic cards, soundblaster, etc. I'd be very very happy with this.
I'd be happy too! They could lessen the support / hardware issues even further by picking a platform where all the key bits are already included, such as a VIA EPIA mini-ITX motherboard that already contains the CPU, graphics, network, etc. And it'd be a nice small size, allowing for some very neat cases...
But I feel this is never going to happen...
- Ali
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As much as x86 makes all sorts of sense financially (and perhaps even thermally, these days), I don't see it making a lot of sense technically, especially after the horrendous investment made to actually Do Neat Things on PowerPC.
If anything's going to save the ship other than some secret project none of us know about, it'll be one of:
-A third party setting up a 'buffer' company between 'blue' hardware and 'red' software -- Who wants to play Dell for our little scene?
-Any unknown and unrelated manufacturer considering an EFIKA or Vixxen-esque system; after all, these are essentially reference designs, not to denigrate the work that goes into producing working ones.
-Or, my personal favorite if I haven't forgotten major details, someone finding a use for Cell. This *would* require some further software effort, but given the supposedly lackluster performance of the PPC core, something as light as AmigaOS might be a boon to throughput through the streaming units. Hard to say, though, as I haven't paid attention to that ecology in a while.
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@BobW
Ditto. I dont write much in none of them, but I read both a lot (my three first links in IBrowse are ANN, AW and AOrg), and I find this rather sad... :-(
Saluditos,
Ferrán.
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itix: True and false. Selling an OS product in x86 world is extremely difficult when it is saturated by good, efficient and free OS choices. You get compared to OS'es with better driver and hardware support.
Linux is free. I don't use it. Why? Because I hate how it works. Again, the OS is judged by its features. The hardware only matters if it has special features, and AmigaOne doesn't have anything on even a budget x86 board. Neither does PowerVixxen or whatevertheotherboardiscalled.
Bloodline: Something I rather like is that Piracy is cited as a method that will "kill" AOS4... I really fail to understand how people using an OS kills it... since the sucess of an OS is defined by the number of users!!!!
I seem to recall a lot of people blame piracy for killing the original Amiga, as if Commodore's inability to properly update the chipset had nothing to do with it.
Fun fact: I have originals for all my favorite Amiga games, but I have the cracked versions, anyway. Why? Copy protection on the Amiga has to be the most aggressive I've ever seen on any platform, to the point where A500 games didn't always run on an A500 (not to mention the fact that floppies sucked, so making copies was pretty much mandatory). The horrible copy protection is what made the Amiga piracy scene so popular to begin with, in my opinion. Copy protection shouldn't really be that aggressive, because these days it's only effective on people that are too lazy to do a few google searches. :roll:
Look up "Starforce". *shudder* Oh yeah, let's all have low-level drivers installed as background services on our computers, and have a different one for each game. Blue Screens of Death waiting to happen, and they'll run even when the game isn't! Will that thwart piracy? It'll probably just make both legal and illegal users mad, but take a guess as to which of those two groups will be hurt more.
wonea: Port to a pc architecture, support ONLY mainstream quality components say Intel boards only, Radeon graphic cards, soundblaster, etc. I'd be very very happy with this.
I'd have no problem buying one of, say, three or four boards (rather than one chipset spanning several dozen boards). I just won't pay $800 for it if it can't beat my current P4 setup, which is worth about $180.
Value is important to the whole world. Why Amiga companies think this rule doesn't apply to them is beyond me, especially if they really want to go beyond the hobby market. Even Apple could not sell computers this way, and you know how extrememly loyal Mac users are. Hell, look how much Mac people complained after the x86 announcement. There were hardly people setting fires to cars and throwing bottles on the streets.
Floid: As much as x86 makes all sorts of sense financially (and perhaps even thermally, these days), I don't see it making a lot of sense technically, especially after the horrendous investment made to actually Do Neat Things on PowerPC.
What neat things?
Porting to different CPUs requires developers to look for a baseline of commonality, and develop abstraction layers as appropriate. There's no need to hard-code for VMX (IBM's version of Altivenc). I think Hyperion is being stubborn about this either to save themselves some work (ie, from actually doing it properly), or they just don't have enough experience outside the 68K and PPC communities to really know what they have to do. This kind of development would be unacceptable in the "real" OS market, and will probably give Hyperions some major problems down the road. I see this all the time when tryint to get UNIX Perl scripts to work on Windows. Most of the time, the UNIX-specific features are completely unnecessary, but people use them anyway because they don't know better, and that makes it tough to get them working on Windows servers. When I write scripts, they work perfectly on IIS or Apache, on either Windows or Linux, because I'm familiar with both types of servers. In the long run, that makes things much, much easier for everyone, and reduces a lot of unexpected behavior.
Always keep your options open. Hardware is a very unpredictable market.
JoannaK: Opensourcing is out, cause Hyperion don't *own* rights to old 3.X code and they have publicly admitted using it while making 4.0 ... So they are forever stuck to whoever happens to own 3.X rights ..
That's the other major problem with AmigaOS. Too many different companies claim ownership over certain parts. If everything were to go bust tomorrow, it's hard to say how long it would take to unify all the properties, legally.
I do a lot of refactoring, and no matter what, there comes a time when you really need to start over from scratch. If Hyperion has something in mind for OS5, let's hope they survive long enough to actually work on it.
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Gee, all this talk of supporting cheap hardware and porting to platform xyz...
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makes me think
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maybe they current Amiga owners have it right with the Amiga Anywhere virtual machine philosophy!
...AND...
you've all been to blind to accept it!
:flame:
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lou_dias wrote:
Gee, all this talk of supporting cheap hardware and porting to platform xyz...
...
makes me think
...
maybe they current Amiga owners have it right with the Amiga Anywhere virtual machine philosophy!
...AND...
you've all been to blind to accept it!
:flame:
AmigaDE was simply useless. It served no purpose. I don't see what this has to do with AmigaOS porting? AmigaDE was a bunch of API extensions for TAO Intent. As far as I can tell their main use was for drawing alpha-blended rectangles on a Windows desktop.
Five years of AmigaDE's existence and there currently exists 13 titles at ShopAmiga.com, the vast majority of which barely on a par with an Amiga 500 PD game circa 1988. There seems to be about 1 new title a year.
And if it's 'run the same binary anywhere' why do you have to choose between a separate Pocket PC and Windows Mobile Smartphone versions when you download Casino? And why does gobbler have separate versions for Pocket PC and Windows? And why do most of the other say that they only work on Pocket PC?
Surely if you download a supposedly _portable_ 'AmigaAnywhere' binary, you simply take the memory card out of your pocket PC PDA and plug it into your Windows laptop or Symbian phone, or Windows Mobile Smartphone and carry on playing? Apparently not.
Amnyway, people still want to use AmigaOS. I haven't seen *any* posts asking about progress on AmigaDE - in contrast to the hundreds of threads or forum posts asking about OS4 progress / release date.
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maybe they current Amiga owners have it right with the Amiga Anywhere virtual machine philosophy!
The virtual machine philosophy is flawed. It's more like having an OS on an OS, and as Java has shown, version control is a huge problem. Virtual processing is a better way of thinking, but there's less opportunity to "lock in" the end-user.
Also, there's too much emphasis on making VP code work everywhere. Some people just want to use special features of hardware. Whether a program is universal, it isn't at all, or simply uses optimizations for a specific platform, should be entirely up to the programmer. Forcing universal compatibility doesn't really work, especially on proprietary embedded devices where features differ considerably. No wonder there's so many cheezy puzzle games for AA.
I was very interested in DE when it was announced, and bought the SDK, but it's obviously going nowhere at this point. That's a real shame.
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Even though the implimentation maybe bad, the ideal is a good one. Fine, let's just all support AROS as it seems to have the potential everyone is looking for.
Why not define a new Amiga reference platform? To heck with backwards compatibility, we have UAE for that. Why do people still expect software written 20 years ago to work today on modern and completely different hardware?
The look & feel of AOS is what people appreciate. Who cares what hardware is behind it? What is an OS? Is it a kernal? Is it a filesystem? Is it a gui filemanager? The only thing I see the Amiga doing today that Windows still doesn't is screen dragging. It's not that Windows can't be programmed to do so, it's just what's the point really. Not much use these days.
Hardware is a cheap comodity, look & feel is what matters to most.
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Waccoon wrote:
Linux is free. I don't use it. Why? Because I hate how it works. Again, the OS is judged by its features.
You should suck it up and try Ubuntu sometime; I've finally found something as decent as OS/2 from a user's standpoint. Once Xgl and its ilk properly appears (is that slated for 6.4?), some rather interesting "features" will be there.
Floid: As much as x86 makes all sorts of sense financially (and perhaps even thermally, these days), I don't see it making a lot of sense technically, especially after the horrendous investment made to actually Do Neat Things on PowerPC.
What neat things?
Petunia, which may be of limited utility due to the 'small' library of RTG software, but still plays a role in keeping continuity and satisfying what real legacy users remain...
Per Álmos, "Changing to other type of processor which is not PowerPC machine code compatible is pointless and almost impossible, because all the emulation code were made of PowerPC assembly and tied closely to this architecture."
There's no need to hard-code for VMX (IBM's version of Altivenc).
...Unless you've got a fairly complicated chunk of platform-emulation code that needs to 'compete' on performance with whatever MorphOS has got. Of course, you could always ditch it...
I think Hyperion is being stubborn about this either to save themselves some work (ie, from actually doing it properly), or they just don't have enough experience outside the 68K and PPC communities to really know what they have to do. This kind of development would be unacceptable in the "real" OS market, and will probably give Hyperions some major problems down the road.
I think you've missed something; everything points to OS4 being pretty portable, but PowerPC has been the main target for all the obvious reasons (presumed better 68k emulation performance, the fact that hardware was supposed to be available)... Still, with the PowerPC version wrapped up and running, I imagine it'd be cheaper and more profitable to go out and design some PPC hardware and sell it 'immediately' than to shelf everything and declare x86 the new standard just in time to delay things even longer.
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Problems are:
1. New hardware would still need to be licensed by Amiga Inc and as such, someone needs to cough up alot of cash up front.
2. Front loading the costs of R&D and then production means someone is going to cough up a lot of money.
3. Performance of previous sales of the A1s show there is no significant market to recoup licensing, R&D and production costs.
Dammy
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Floid wrote:
Still, with the PowerPC version wrapped up and running, I imagine it'd be cheaper and more profitable to go out and design some PPC hardware and sell it 'immediately' than to shelf everything and declare x86 the new standard just in time to delay things even longer.
That makes no sense!! you basicly just said it's easier to fix something in hardware than it is in software!
Which do you think is easier and cheaper?
1) Get a standard PC, any PC, no special requirements... just get the cheapest POS from Dell. Write a new HAL, just use parts of AROS, change a compiler option... hit enter. Spend a couple of weeks getting AOS4 to compile.. sell.
2) Choose a memory controller chip that is compatible with one of the current PPC compatible chips... the 7447 looks like a good option. Design a Motherboard around this memory controller, run out a detailed spec of the components you want to use,do some prototyping. Spend the next few weeks reworking and making a few more prototypes. Once that works, get an FCC licence... go back to the design rework it to meet the FCC... run a few more prototypes, and work out a few more bugs, ensure that the suppliers can meet the quantities you need at the specification for all the components you use. If not, go back to the design stage and rework it... more prototypes... once that's done. Find a manufacturer that will be able to meet your order within a resonable timeframe, at a price which you can still sell and make a profit... rewrite the AOS4 HAL to usethe new memory controller... spend a week or so getting it to work... sell.