Aos 3 -> aos 4

[drHirudo]

I stepped into the AmigaOS 4 realm back in January 2005 and never regret it. I used extensively my Amiga 4000 before, but after I got my microAmigaOne I did not switch the A4000 for months and eventually sold it for a bargain price. The fact that the A4000 hard drive worked straight away with all the partitions on AmigaOS 4 helped a lot. I did not have any trouble with the migration. I started to use all the old apps without any trouble. I played all the emulators that were too slow for 68K Amigas - Sam Coupe, MAME, AtariST, GameBoy Advanced.

I used Amiga since 1993 and the AmigaOS 4 was the biggest upgrade I ever saw on the Amigas after the 1.3->2.0 update. At the beginning AmigaOS 4 was still in beta but it was much better than my AmigaOS 3.9 BB2 install in everything. TCP stack without any trouble, transparent startup of 68000 applications and true colors graphics. Okay, you can have true color in classic Amgias, but you need accelerator board, graphic board, network board for ethernet, melody card for good sound etc. Since I was not interested in creating Amiga Frankestein machine that would cost me more than the MicroAmiga, I am more happy with my current Amiga config that works flawlessly for more than 6 years now.

[drHirudo]

I forgot to say that I when I switched to AmigaOS 4 and even today I use Amiga as main machine i.e. it can be considered modern use of computer. Back in 2004 the use of Internet on Amiga 4000 with AGA was terrible. I was browsing without graphics, because the graphics were seen only dithered to 32 color. Switching to 64 colors Workbench rendered the machine useless and lowered the Internet bandwidth speed. I never listened to MP3s, because the decoding took too many resources.

The people who said they are okay with AmigaOS 3 and have no interest in AmigaOS 4 are using their machines for gaming and retro tinkering, not for modern tasks. AmigaOS 3 is just fine for their needs, since they have a laptop PC or Mac Desktop machine nearby to check their g-mail accounts, Facebook and YouTube.

But if use your Amiga for some professional task or want to use it for what is considered modern computing - e-mail, YouTube, Videos, MP3, emulation, c++ coding etc, AmigaOS 4 is a need, not luxury.

While I can not watch TV on my AmigaOne, I happily watch shows that I want to watch on my Amiga with Cyrillic subtitles. While I can not play with Sega D-Pad, I can play with USB joystick with 10 buttons and analog paddles on my AmigaOne. While I can not listen to native Paula sounds, I enjoy full quality Tunenet songs in wide variety of formats, that were very hard to replay on A4000. All this thanks to AmigaOS 4.

[drHirudo]

Hardly. More powerful hardware might be considered a need (though really, you can do a lot more with classic hardware than next-gen evangelists seem to think,)

I know what I can do with classic hardware. I used classic Amigas till 2004 and even at the beginning at 2005. I also know what you can not do (68060 board and melody sound card incompatible). I used my Amiga 4000 to code games for SuperNES, grab TV frames, sample sounds, burn CDs and many other tasks non occasional task. But if I want to use Amiga for better up to date tasks, the AmigaOS 4 offers me much more options than AmigaOS 3. And easier. That's it.

As I said if you want to play Lemmings, draw pixel pictures in Personal Paint (PPaint is much better for me on AmigaOS 4 btw), listen to .MODs and watch demos, check e-mails, IRC, classic Amigas are just fine and I would kept mine if I was interested in only this. But I want more from my Amiga.

[drHirudo]

Surfing the net is vital these days; nothing pre-Aos4 is suitable for internet browsing - sorry iBrowse advocates - but its no longer 1993.

Currently, the only way to legally acquire non time limited version of IBrowse is to buy AmigaOS 4. (works on AmigaOS 3). Oh, the irony.

[drHirudo]

Better performance than a 50Mhz machine... wow! amazing! wonderful! let's bring more popcorn! We would seriously have a problem if performance/price ratio wasn't much better than 7 years ago... what? did I hear you say Pegasos2-G4/1Ghz for 500€? nahhh I'm sure our wonderful 2011 brand new boing ball hardware is way faster and cheaper than that 7 year old hardware released in small batches :-P

I think the overuse of PC hardware damaged some of your perception. The CPU is not the only performing part of the computer. While the Pegasos have similar to the Sam 460 processor (1 GHz), the Sam 460 have better memory controller, PCI express slots, SATA2, better Ethernet and other components that are better performing than on Pegasos. The Pegasos was a nice machine 7 years ago, but the Sam 460 beats it. The Sam 460 is smaller as well. Sorry, but I would prefer to have Sam 460 for little extra (brand new) instead of old Pegasos machine.

The WinUAE advocates probably enjoy having classic software at fast speeds as long as they don't need to use the operating system. Because even highly tuned AmigaOS 3.9 installation I found to be very obsolete compared to what I got used to on AmigaOS 4. But then again most of the AmigaOS 4 components that I take for granted now, and got used to them are lacking in AmigaOS 3.9.

[drHirudo]

Likely much longer than Sam/X1000 will.

Someone manufactures PPC Mac clones? Probably Dave Haynie still have his Mac clone schematics so he will bring them on the market. Until this happens, the new Amiga hardware is getting developed all the time (including the Natami).

For the record - because I have cheap Sega Mega Drive clone I wanted to have an original Sega. To my surprise the Sega Mega Drive (original kinda) is still produced in China and the seller had his logo on the case. Probably some Chinese manufacturer will start producing Mac clones at some stage in the future, that will be compatible with MorphOS.

[drHirudo]

1. Not compatible

More than 80% of the 68K applications I tried on my AmigaOne worked without any glitch. 10% worked with some tricks, and the rest 10% did not work at all and were forced to run under E-UAE. That's good enough for me.

Do you know that many of the 1.3 software is not compatible with KS 2.0+?
Do you multitask on your classic Amiga while playing WHDLoad games?
Well, on my AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4 I can multitask with WHDLoad games and run 1.3 applications as well.
In fact I can set 1.3 applications to be practically transparent to the OS - they write their files on my AmigaOS 4 partition.

2. High cost of the hardware

What's the price of 68060 board nowadays?

3. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include an enhanced Paula.  Or even a plain old 1985 Paula.

Nalle Puh can do the work in software (cheaper).

4. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include  an enhanced copper.  Or even a plain old 1985 copper.

Something like Blitzen for copper?

5. Whoever designed the Amiga forgot to include an enchanced SID to replay C64 songs.

Wait, SIDs tunes are replayed nice with DeliTracker and EaglePlayer on classic Amiga machine in software, without the extra cost of SID chip.

[drHirudo]

You do realize the Mac is entirely a software system, right?

If this was true then MorphOS and AmigaOS would have been ported to PPC Macs overnight. The fact that it took so much time to the Morphosians to port their OS to Mac, either conflicts your theory or speaks about the capabilities of the MOS coders.

[drHirudo]

And OS4 has the same browser MOS does (thanks to Fab).

Firefox?

[drHirudo]

Hmm can't be that: Perhaps you mean this linux^H^H^H^H^Hamiga app called timberwolf?

What's up with this "dll hell" anyway? Doesn't sound very "amiga" to me.

This is just wrong. This is not amiga. I'll take OS and apps that use proper amiga libraries and not some kind of half-as*ed shared object implementation borrowed from linux (on OS4 they aren't even shared, each opener gets their own copy.. fail!). It just can't work without package manager with proper dependency system. This will end badly: "Its just a case of duplicating the listed sobjs in the sobjs drawer and renaming them to match. Once you have done this try again." or "Just make a duplicate copy of it and rename the duplicate to the above and repeat with the other files which are missing.".

Proper shared libraries with per-opener static data are well possible as is proven by numerous such libraries existing in for example in amigaos 3.x and MorphOS. Why AmigaOS4 "designers" chose this lazy route with non-shared shared objects is beyond me.

I would prefer some Linux port working straight on my AmigaOS than having to reboot into Linux or MacOS X just to be able to use Firefox extension that is lacking an AmigaOS equivalent. But may be this is just me, because the MorphOS people would prefer to have MacOS handy when they need to. If I need to change the OS I would prefer Windows over MacOS anytime, because Windows software is much more compatible with itself and there is much more Windows software available (for free or paid) than for MacOS. Many of the Windows apps I had to use are Linux ports (Cygwin or native), but as long as they work, nobody cares from where they come. Hey, thanks to Linux I was able to port some of my games to Windows and MacOS with simple recompile (they are coded on Amiga), so I have nothing against Linux at the moment.

Nice that you are linking thread to a person who is enjoying his Sam460.

May be I shall create a thread with my MorphOS experience on PowerBook ---> Total FAIL, but I have OS X so I did not miss anything.

BTW Firefox works on my machine - AmigaOS 4 Update 2
AmigaOS 4 does not run on Mac machines - but the latest version runs on classic Amiga machines, so the developers wouldn't need to recompile their apps for old machines and new machines (MorphOS 1.x something vs MorphOS 2.x something). On the other hand my Mac games work fine on MacOS X Tiger, but refuse to work on MacOS Snow Leopard (scratches head, go figure), while the Windows compiles does not have any problems with the different Windows versions even if I did not used official Windows devkit, like I did on the Mac.

[drHirudo]

No, it doesn't. Timberwolf does.
And right now most OS4 users are using a version of OWB ported from MorphOS.

I don't. Actually the OWB first came to Amiga, then the Morphosians (one of them I believe) developed it and later it was ported to AmigaOS based on the MorphOS port. OWB is MorphOS app, since when? OWB is non Amiga app that MOSes are proud of, yes/no? Why they are not proud about the Voyager browser, that was developed by some MorphOS developer?

I think most developers (like Piru) object to ports that rely on the use of packages like Cygwin or sloppy recoding for Windows dll dependencies.

Better have such port, than having to reboot into another OS. You don't need to install these ports if you don't want to. But you can Install them and work with AmigaOS 4. On the AROS and MOS you can not, simply because they don't exist. You mention the fellow who opened threads here about his triple, quadriple or whateveriple booting Mac machine. That's the Amiga way of doing things, right - you need some app, you reboot into another OS and then use it. Later you don't need this app - reboot again in Linux, then MorphOS, MacOS. Just like the 2.0 times when we softkicked 1.3 to be able to play the old games. This is sooooo 1990-ies. Good that Amiga had WHDLoad and JST so the constant reboots where avoided at least for games. For AROS, AmigaOS 3.x and MOS users seems the reboots are still necessary. On AmigaOS 4 there is glUAE. On my AmigaOne I have installed only AmigaOS 4, I don't need to quadriple boot.

That would be silly. MorphOS doesn't run on Powerbooks (yet).
You were foolish enough to try?

It was demonstrated on shows, so I decided to give it a try. It was announced back in 2009. Sneak preview on Amiga.org
(almost 2 years ago). Fast development?

Why? Do you think WE have some prejudice?
I like hearing about developments in the second best PPC OS for amiga users.

May be because in every thread about AmigaOS 4, the MorphOS is brought, while it is totally irrelevant. MOS is even more limited than AmigaOS 4. Most of the users however did not had the chance to try both AmigaOS 4 and MOS on same hardware to judge by themselves.

AmigaOS 4 does not run on Mac machines - except for that version that leaked out for the Mac Mini

Broken version. Probably as much working as the MOS version for Powerbooks?

the latest version runs on  classic Amiga machines - no, it runs on machines expanded with third party PPC accelerators

Blah, blah, blah. There are hardware requirements. Some games does not run on 512 KB Amigas. Probably they are not Amiga games by your definition.

so the developers wouldn't need to recompile  their apps for old machines and new machines - Both OS4 and MorphOS will run some legacy apps without recompilation, but far from all of them. And if you're running on a legacy Amiga (with a third party PPC accelerator) you're going to need to reboot to OS3.X to run the rest.

If I want to use AmigaOS 4.1 library functions, I don't need to recompile my software for AmigaOS 4.0 if I want it to run on classic Amiga machines. Because AmigaOS 4.1 is available for classic Amiga machines. With MOS it is not the same case.

Why are OS4 users so defensive?
Is it because most OS3.X users don't want the product?
Or that when OS3.X users examine PPC OS', they frequently choose MorphOS (over OS4).

Defensive? I point obvious mistakes that are always brought to the forums, but as long as you have your AmigaOS 3 machine sitting next to your PC or Mac, I guess you don't need to upgrade.

[drHirudo]

@drHirudo

Fab's OWB is only OWB by name (and I'm quite sure you know that). It's a MUI-browser useing WebKit and as such stands on the same level for being it's own browser as Safari or Chrome.

Then he shall change the name to avoid confusion with the OWB that was ported to Amiga as well.

LimberWolf ? Seen it, and for everyday browsing I'd rather take Voyager,IBrowse or even Aweb (yuk). There is a reason why most OS4-users had 2 or more browsers handy, none of them was good enough to get you through the day.

You are using all these handy Firefox extensions on the other browsers. Can you share how?

MorphOS-PowerBook support was not ANNOUNCED in 2009, actually I'm quite sure it's not even announced today...... See that the difference with the MorphOS-team, they do show quite open what they are working on but the also make it 100% clear that they can't&won't promise specific features/release-dates while still early in the development-cycle.

Then the Mophosians shall not make public previews to unaware people and give them false hopes. AmigaOS 4 for classic Amiga machines was previewed and it is available.

You and me both know that all these MOS previews are mainly from distraction of the Amiga crowd from the AmigaOS 4 development. It was the case in the year 2010 - something for AmigaOS 4 announced, then some random thread - look screenshot of MOS on G5 Mac - that rules bro, it's fast, hurry up and buy G5 because they are cheap, compared to Peg/Sam/Micro.

OS4.1 on PuP exist for 2 reasons (which boil down to 1 if you think about it):
1) lots of the pro-Hyperion crowd have never made the investment in a OS4-supported nextgen

2) Hyperion can't make money of the X1000 yet (well assuming the prepay-scheme-money wasn't redirected) and the SAMs aren't selling in high enough numbers.

Wether it makes sense to waste resources on 10-15 year old HW needing 15-20 year old motherboards performing on a level that wasn't impressive even back than is another question.

It makes sense if there is someone to buy the product.

I rather prefer an OS-team that concentrated on perfecting their OS on given HW and going for supporting easy-2-obtain, cheap and powerfull HW, even more if it includes a laptop...

AmigaOS 4.
Your latest sentence is irrelevant, because as you said there is no MOS for laptops yet! Contradicting yourself, eh?

[drHirudo]

>You are using all these handy Firefox extensions on the other browsers.
> Can you share how?

> Why should I ? I'm 100% sure I can view/use more aspects of the web with OWB than you can do with LimberWolf. So maybe it runs some obscure plugins... so what ? I allways click "Deny" when a webpage tries to install on of those anyways.

Your limited Internet usage probably does not include any automation tools.

>Then the Mophosians shall not make public previews to unaware people
>and give them false hopes.

Yeah they should go with useing stupid acronyms (MAP anyone) posting braindead puzzles on their website and not forget to name dates that have no chance of holding water (you don't have to wait till summer).

Way better PR-wise !!!!!

Some people were enjoying the puzzle and one man had to eat his socks. Better than seeing broken alpha videos.

>You and me both know that all these MOS previews are mainly from
>distraction of the Amiga crowd from the AmigaOS 4 development.

You and me both know that you are running low on the pills against your paranoia ....

The whole idea that the MorphOS-team would care enough bout OS4 to time posting screenshots is so far out it could make the plot for the next CSI/NCIS/Law&Order spinoff.

They have nothing better to do than post stupid screenshots or videos. Months later there is nothing they can offer except for a limited filesystem.

>It makes sense if there is someone to buy the product.
Xactly what I said. Real question is how many would be there to buy the product (OS4 for PuP) if OS4 was available on cheap&powerfull HW.

Something we will never find out.

[sarcasm]We found that MorphOS on Mac hardware sold millions of copies and is used widely everywhere. I saw a man with a Mac in the subway two days ago. While I did not had the chance to look at his screen, I think he was running something resembling MorphOS. Since MorphOS sold millions of copies, there is a great chance that he was running MorphOS, no doubt about it. MorphOS is very
professional operating system, running on wide variety of Mac hardware.
[/sarcasm]
Are you happy now? The Mac/MOS simulation shall speak about the situation of the market.

AmigaOS 4.
Your latest sentence is irrelevant, because as you said there is no MOS for laptops yet! Contradicting yourself, eh?

On the other hand you don't need to wonder what OS I am running on my microAmigaOne.

[drHirudo]

Actually I rather boot to another OS than suffer from abysmally bad performance that results. And BTW something like this was done over 10 years ago already with ixemul. It could be done at any time, but why bother when the performance, UI experience and stability would be far from desirable... You don't need to look far to see how badly these "linux ports" perform on OS4.


Nothing wrong with that I'd say.

You are so 1990-ies. Rebooting in different OSes is something from the past. MorphOS is very 1990-ies as well. But keep rebooting if that makes you happy.
The Linux ports I have on my AmigaOS 4 perform exactly as they perform on Linux, some of them better.

Since when 18 months was 2 years? That's 1.5 years, not 2.

The date of the post says 11-07-2009 (I guess this is american standard then). Shall I dig older posts where PowerBook support was announced. Hurry up to delete them before they are found.

Regardless during those 18 months we've:

• Released MorphOS 2.5
• Released MorphOS 2.6
• Released MorphOS 2.7
• Released MorphOS with support for eMac (various models)
• Released MorphOS with support for PowerMac G4s (various models)
• Showed preview of ongoing work for both PowerBook G4 and PowerMac G5 versions of MorphOS.

Not fast enough for you?

Not a public version for any laptop. All these major numberings are in fact minor updates.
AmigaOS 4 was shown X1000. Does this count or not?

Who have seen it and judge the situation objectively see the truth indeed: MorphOS beats OS4 on the same HW on every area. Whining how "OS4 is not optimized for Pegasos 2" is getting a bit old now. OS4 still has no USB2 and lacks the proper 3D support, not to mention basic things such as proper support for AltiVec unit, working FAT, NTFS, ext2 or XFS filesystems or a proper console. I see no serious competition.

MorphOS is limited. No proper filesystems, no memory protection, no virtual memory, no enough ported applications. Best thing to do with MorphOS is to boot it to another OS.
On the other hand AmigaOS 4 fully replaced my AmigaOS 3 installation. I use AREXX scripts daily, they work the same way as they worked before. That's transparent upgrade.

[drHirudo]

OS 4.1.3 is coming any year now...

As soon as one of the main MOS devs said that he would rather reboot into another OS than having X, Y, Z, I lost interest in purchasing powerful Mac hardware to run the amiga alike OS.

Yeah, I know they don't care.