Does Hyperion own the rights to OS 3.1, 3.5, 3.9?

[the_leander]

It's possible to trap 68K instructions that are invalid for coldfire and "reroute" them. Using this trick make the two about 99.8% compatible. Trouble is these other instructions are not invalid, can't be trapped and will cash Amiga code because of the way they operate.

Coldfire has been demonstrated to work (I remember someone putting a video of the prototype being demoed here on AO). The problem is that with all the bits in place to make the Coldfire fully 68k compatible. It was, even  at several hundred mhz, little quicker than an 040.

--edit--

Found the thread, here. The thumbnails work, but the links to the vids are long gone, sorry

These days I'm thinking porting one of the Amiga like OS's to cheap dual core 1GHZ ARM processors would be a fun project. Picture this... Core_1 doing JIT recompiling and feeding Core_2 that's running a "softcore 68K" emulation. Piece of cake, I should have all that done in what.... two weeks?  

Tbh given the relative performance of ARM processors, even just a single core A9 and have it run a full 68k jit would probably be quite a bit quicker than using any Coldfire.

[the_leander]

Well, you might as well have asked: Is there any *proof* that the IP was transferred to Gateway in the first place?  Of course the documents exist.  Do you expect to find all such legal business documents on the internet?

Isn't that more or less what you've demanded of others here though?

So Gateway decided to hold onto the Amiga OS and kept it a secret?  What are you saying?

The question is which bits went where. The court docs state that Amiga.inc never had the 3.5/9 sources and that Haage and Partner refused to hand over their work (which apparently hadn't been paid for), so Hyperion had to go through Olaf rather than AI to get the 3.1 sources and work from there because they didn't apparently have them either.

[the_leander]

Isn't that more or less what you've demanded of others here though?

No, the implication is that Amiga Inc. has been fooling the entire community for years, including those that are paying them for OS?  Such views are the ones that need to be backed with something other than opinion and speculation that the IP was not transferred to them along with the trademarks, etc.

Because there totally isn't precedent for that sort of thing happening within the alt OS community.

Zeta

Not to mention the T shirt scam and the claims for the better part of a year that OS4 was "on schedule and rocking"... McEwen has a very very dicey relationship with the truth and honesty.

The question is though, if McEwen had the IP as well as the trademark, why didn't they have the sourcecode? The court docs in the battle between hyperion and Amiga.inc show that Hyperion had to go to Olaf Barthal for the sourcecode for 3.1.

[the_leander]

Guys, those that need the OS for their current projects are being very, very careful to do so legally without stealing Amiga Inc IP.  A bunch of gullible fools?  I think not.

I'm sorry, have you even bothered to check out the litany of documented abuse of IP by amiga companies? They have been screwing each other over for the better part of a decade. Hell it's why half of the splits came about - companies all badmouthing each other and using their fanbase as foot soldiers in a PR war.

Lets start with a recent example: Elbox and their ripping off of the guy who wrote the Posieden USB stack.

  Yes, McEwen has quite a history of dishonesty, but that's beside the point.  T-shirts, hockey stadium, etc. are quite funny

You clearly have a very unusual definition of the term "funny".

, but the craziest thing of all would be if Amiga Inc doesn't actually own the IP.  

The claim is that he licensed it from Gateway, not that he owns it. Now, if you're paying millions for the rights to use a name or a given OS, would it not occur to you to, oh I don't know, ask for a copy of the source code?

That would dwarf everything else.  Anything is possible in the world of Amiga, but c'mon. :-)

No I'm pretty certain the death of commodore would still top it. But it'd certainly come a close second.

[the_leander]

Heh, the further back this goes, the more screwed up it appears to become.

[the_leander]

Oh yes, it will work. But eventually it will run into a bit of 1.x-3.x OS or legacy game code with one of these miss interpeded op codes and crash something. We should I suppose distinguish "working" from "completely stable" then.

Plaz

And this is different to the situation faced anyone who has ever owned an 020+ amiga how, exactly? With each successive update of the 68k line, there has been differences, by the 040 they were so great that specific libraries had to be included in AmigaOS to deal with the compatibility issues.

[the_leander]

Still, I don't like and frankly don't accept the notion that 68k machines are a dead-end

Well, clearly they are. The arch, whilst successful and inspirational to other later arches (dragonball and coldfire), is a dead end.

 and either PPC/MorphOS or x86/AROS are the one true "new future" of the Amiga.

I'm going to be blunt about this. Sit down, take a deep breath: Amiga has no future. PPC is as much a dead end arch (as far as the desktop goes) as 68k is. AROS will probably carry on thanks to it being OSS, but really, it's time as anything other than a hobby machine for people who grew up with it and those handful with a retro fetish is long gone.

but I  don't like the idea that 68k machines should just be left by the wayside  to rust

Who said they should? But perhaps rather than trying to break out "new future" Amigas, we should enjoy using them in the same way people enjoy classic cars.

a more intuitive and integrated file manager than Workbench

Opus Magellen 2, for when you absolutely positively have to file every m**********r on the drive, accept no substitute.

[the_leander]

I wasn't intending to imply otherwise. Barring some sort of divine intervention, it's never going to become a mainstream computing platform, but on the other hand, just because it's a "hobby machine" doesn't mean that new development efforts for it aren't worthwhile. I think there has to be some middle ground between a strictly preservationist "classic car" view and the "we'll just slap an Amiga nameplate on any computer hardware we can get" approach.

I'm not advocating a "strict preservationist" view. Classic cars look great in museums but even better on the open road. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone writing new software for the classics nor would I for a second suggest that.

I think in line with that thinking, the MinimigAGA is a great piece of work to show to younger folks who never got to play with Amiga the first time around to get a taste of what the old kit was like, but without the fragility that comes with it being old kit.

I've made my views on AmigaNG clear a couple of times recently, so I see no need to repeat them.

@Tone007

Nice catch :roflmao:

[the_leander]

*sigh*, fine I'll bite.

In know you say that perhaps we should enjoy our Amigas the way people enjoy classic cars,which up to a point is fair comment, but in the same breath you say the Amiga has no future.

It doesn't. The legal situation surrounding Amiga has effectively killed it.

If the Amiga has no future then why do Hyperion continue to develop OS 4.X,

You don't want me to answer that.

 or A-eon develop the X1000,

Vanity. (By Trevor's own admission I should add)

 or why is the Natami or the Minimig still being developed,

Same reason you can buy kit car versions of AC- Cobras and a few select other cars. Some people want to taste what it was like to drive those old cars but don't want to futz around with having an older car. Apply the same reasoning to AROS as well

If you have such a pessimistic  outlook on the Amiga why do you bother with the Amiga at all.

The platform may well be dead. But that doesn't stop me enjoying classic games.

Since Commodore went belly up in 94 and all the crap that has happened in the years since, the Amiga community and those still developing in one way or another for it have proven all those pessimists wrong.

Not really, the realists said that the Amiga is dead and that it wasn't coming back. They were correct. There have been a couple of attempts to kickstart it, the last one being the AmigaNG concept. Quite frankly the way it was handled by the principles all it managed to do was cause a war and rip off a whole bunch of people.

There can't be many other computer systems (if any) that so long after the last machine rolled of the production line still has folk developing for it and a never ending enthusiasm for it such as the Amiga community has shown.

Yeah, except practically every other home computer out there. Have you seen the C= community? It's several orders of magnitude larger than the Amigas and always has been. They however don't have all the legal shite or people at it's head ripping into other heads within the community claiming that theirs is the one true path and using the zealots as shock troops to deliver the message.

As for never ending enthusiasm. Perhaps if the community had been a little more pragmatic and level headed about things, Amiga.Inc wouldn't have been able to scam us and the Hyperion/MorphOS war that tore the heart out of us would have resulted in the community kicking the ego trippers asses as a point of principle. Oh yes, I went there.

I just find it difficult to understand why someone like yourself who's past has shown such a great passion for the Amiga feels now that the Amiga has no future at all...

I know you do, and perhaps I'm not explaining it right. But it doesn't change the fact that the Amiga is dead. Amiga as a platform being dead doesn't stop me from enjoying some of the games I grew up with, sharing my knowledge with people wanting to enjoy that too.

[the_leander]

If coldfire could have been solved that easily, it already would have been. Unfortunately it ran a bit deeper.

Who said it was easy? Regardless - Coldfire has been shown to work already. See the link I gave. Dragon was actually demonstrated live at that Amiga meeting.

[the_leander]

I'd have to guess it was demonstrated on a cafefully selected set of task to avoid known problems. It is too bad that a card wasn't at least released as a dev unit so some of us could have played around and mapped out the good and bad of it all.

Quite possibly. But I guess that's the price you pay for using prototype hardware. It would have been nice though to have seen it move beyond that stage though.

Ho hum.

[the_leander]

It doesn't have to be that way. There are ways to get around this kind of thing, thankfully. While I may have my problems with both MorphOS and AROS, they have the right idea - skirt the whole thing by re-implementing the software cleanly. And Minimig and NatAmi are doing the same thing for the hardware end. The Amiga might have a future without the Amiga name on it, but it may still have a future.

Problem is, virtually no one knows about MorphOS or AROS, same too with minimig. Outside of the community (and to a lesser extent the Alt OS crowd), these projects might as well not exist. Even Amiga's brand name recognition is fading due to time.

There is a generation of kids who were born after the demise of C= who are now preparing to enter higher education (A levels etc), in a few short years they'll be graduating from universities. These kids have never seen or heard of Commodore, Amiga, or anything else of that era and likely never will in their lifetime.

The problem with the whole retro scene is that it's a fad. It'll pass, but more than that other, more modern kit will become the retro systems of choice as time goes on.

It seems to me that you're working off a different definition of "dead" than most of us. Dead as a mainstream computing platform, sure. Maybe even dead as a commercial product (though we'll see about that.)

No, that pretty much covers the definition I'm going on. Add to it the above as well.

But it still has an active community (if not as active as the CBM 8-bitters) pouring time and effort into it, and I don't think you can call anything with that truly dead.

Watch me. Amiga is dead. It has a great retro following I agree. One that'll likely continue to produce some really innovative stuff (see that guy with the ZX Spectrum running a twitter client at the vintage fair, for instance), but ultimately, it's finished.

Sorry if it offends, but that's how I see it.

[the_leander]

Maybe to certain folk the Amiga is nothing more than a hobby, but to me it has been and always will be my only main computer system for well over 20 years, simply put it does everything I need a computer to do

Now that I've found out from various folk here just what I need to get my Amiga online, all I have to do now is buy the netcard and this iMac that I've only had for a few months to see what the internet was all about can go to someone else who has a use for it...

I honestly would hang onto the iMac, just in case your miggy misbehaves.

[the_leander]

Am with Franko.  I have a iMac at home - I will gladly replace it with Amiga X1000 upon its release because all I generally do is read stuff online, use facebook, visit youtube, do some web page design/coding, ftp and email.  If I really want to do some word processing and I can just use work PCs - until OpenOffice Amiga arrives that is.
Well its probably lucky I actually have a Mac Mini as well - which I share between home and work - I can always use it if I really need to use Illustrator, Photoshop or anything similar.

ipv6

[the_leander]

What is ipv6?  Am sure its some sort of TCP/IP protocol standard, but what practical difference does that make?

When it replaces IPV4, it'll mean your Amigas won't be able to use the internet unless they have their TCP/IP stacks replaced.

We'll run out of IPV4 address space in lesss then 12 months.