Amiga's Grand Plans Revealed

[System]

Ummmmm......I just read it and all I can say is.....I'm confused....

ET: And that if you want AmigaOS, "you're not allowed to buy it. You have to buy a new Teron board."        
Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

This isnt how I understand it....I thought it was posted that the only way to get a copy of OS4 is to purchase it with a PPC MoBo..."There will be NO shrink wrapped versions of OS4.0"

Also I though that OS4 wouldnt be out until Q1 2003...Why is he saying 3 weeks?

Not to sound bad but I am starting to get the impression that Bill McEwen is answering questions before he knows the correct answers.....Like when he said you could get Bernithalon and you couldnt.

P.S.  I guess we see that as far as he is concerned there will be other platforms that the OS will be ported to...Or is he Mixing AmigaDE with Amiga OS?

[System]

Uhm usually I would defend Amiga, but I think a lot of the things Bill has said are untrue.

Second he doesn't give respect where its due. No mention of Hyperion or Eyetechs labour of love to get OS4 off the ground.

 So what's going on with the Amiga One, and who is EyeTech?

Bill McEwen: EyeTech is one of the larger computer resellers in England, and they licensed the right to take the project over. The Amiga One is our spec, our design, but they built it.

Way to belittle Eyetech, who on their own back went out and made sure Amiga One hardware would exist, Maybe Amiga aren't aware of the work they've put in?

OS4 is the next version of the Amiga OS, it's a total rewrite of the operating system. It's brand new from the ground up, rewritten for the PPC hardware.

This statement is immediatey contradicted with the next statement.

ET: Did you just throw everything out and start over?

Bill McEwen: Well, major portions of the code are still being used.

You've got over 40,000 Amiga applications that will run on the machine without any changes

Lie lie lie, Only applications that behave will run and you and I know there are some really dodgy ones out there, I very much doubt 40,000 would run, add to that the availability, if they all did run you'd have to pirate most of them cos they just aren't available.

ET: Wasn't your vision for Amiga that it should be cross platform? Why does the desktop version only run on a custom, modified PowerPC system?

Bill McEwen: The idea is that we can run on any piece of hardware, we architected it that way. First we'll get it running on Power PC, then go from there and expand to other chipsets.

I wish people would make up their minds first its one way and then the other, is it platform agnostic or not.?

ET: What about Pentium 4?

Bill McEwen: Not with OS4, but it will with our next version, OS5 due out within 12 months from when OS4 ships. We'll merge the code-bases and go cross-platform

Again thats a new one on us, we were told no x86 , hyperion said they wouldn't do it, I wonder whose going to make this come true.

ET: What's the status of Amiga OS on other platforms today?

Bill McEwen: We're shipping today on PocketPC and the PocketPC phone edition. You can head right on over to our website and buy an entertainment or software pack that downloads right to those devices.

Uhm this isn't AmigaOS confusing the matter isn't going to help sure from a markettign point of view it reinforces the brand but essentially it will just give customers false expectations.

ET: But those[amiga anywhere content] apps won't run on the desktop version?

Bill McEwen: not until OS5.

Thats funny cos hyperion seem to say the next version of Amiga will have Amiga anywhere running on it, thats 4.2 or 4.5 not version 5, wrong again

ET: After our news story, we had a pretty strong posting on our website. Our member said that Amiga OS "will apply some form of hardware-license mechanism, a dongle to his hardware."

Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

Well essentially in that semantic construction it is untrue AmigaOS does no such thing, the AmigaOne however does have to have a dongle to allow AmigaOS to run on it.
A partial truth but its not one thats going to win you any favours.

I'm sorry but Bill is either clearly ill informed or is lying, I'm more in the loop than him.

[System]

I'm pretty sure 64k does not mean c64, but for instance 64k intros. IE, even tricky demoscene stuff runs on AmigaOS4. And about you all being upset about the "untrue" statements. No, you don't need to buy a AmigaOne to get AmigaOS4, although, atm, it's the only solution. But afaiu, what you HAVE to do is have amiga certified hardware. Not really a big deal, "no, we won't let you use OS4 on stuff we don't know if it works well on" kinda. And about the AmigaOne design, the AmigaOne isn't just the Teron motherboard you know. Read the specs that Amiga have on the AmigaOne, Amiga set up those specs and someone else builds it.

[System]

Whabang: No, 702 bytes is 351 words (one word equals 2 bytes, or 16 bits), or 175.5 long words (32 bits)  ;-)

[System]

"ET: And that if you want AmigaOS, "you're not allowed to buy it. You have to buy a new Teron board."
Bill McEwen: That's untrue. "

"This isnt how I understand it....I thought it was posted that the only way to get a copy of OS4 is to purchase it with a PPC MoBo..."There will be NO shrink wrapped versions of OS4.0""

Yes. This has been "clarified" so many times by himself, fleecy, Gary Peake, Alan Redhouse and Ben Hermans. I hope that's not a word-for-word quote of McEwen, as what he says is simply "untrue." *)"

Hardly. Seehund do your research they have
constantly stated that PowerUP boards will
have an exception from the licensing scheme.

This will be the only shrink wrapped version of
AOS4.

Jeez, another thing "conveniently forgotten"?

As for the rest of the interview: No comment.

[System]

Seehund

Well things like this will happen if you "Edit" while Im launching a new browser window to copy and paste from. That bit wasnt there I swear it!

Sheesh! ;-)

Blade