Amiga flavors.

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@CroCrew
OS4 itself is being worked on full time by a small team of developers, and part time by a larger group of developers. The OS4 team wouldn't continue if they didn't have plans to get OS4 out there on available hardware in the near future.

There are two publically announced projects to bring out PPC hardware for OS4 (ACK and Troika), which a lot of people are very skeptical of (understandibly), and the OS4 team have hinted at other deals in the pipeline.

Basically, a lot of people think OS4 is now totally dead, a lot of other people don't agree.

Welcome to the Amiga world ;-)

Personally, I'm a beta tester and I can see for myself that OS4 development hasn't stalled (there are still new updates nearly every day for betatesters). I also have a bit more faith than most that Adam (the guy behind some new OS4 hardware) will actually get some hardware out, but i'll leave that up to you to judge.

BTW: MorphOS is kind-of in the total opposite situation; hardware is out there and available, but the next major update to it (1.5) has been "due for release any time soon" for quite a while now, and a fair few MOS users have totally given up hope for it to ever appear. But there have been a lot of small updates released, as well as unofficial updates from end-users.

[xeron]

@Piru
"When its done"? ;-)

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@pierre
OS4 pre releases were released with the AmigaOne, so "no OS has been released" is completely wrong, and various different people say various different things about MOS 1.5, but if Piru is confident it will be released, I guess it probably will be some day.

[xeron]

"a dev version"? Its a pre-release version of OS4, but its in no-way restricted. It has all the functionality you would expect of AmigaOS, is very useable and isn't just used by developers.

[xeron]

You didn't say that. You said there has been no OS release, which is patent rubbish. When my AmigaOne boots it is running an operating system. That operating system is OS4. This is true for ALL amigaone owners with OS4 pre-releases installed.

They are running the OS4 operating system which was released to them through the pre-release programme.

Edit: And you had an opportunity to buy an OS4 computer before the uA1's sold out, but clearly you didn't take that opportunity. There will be future opportunities to buy OS4 and hardware in the future, too (IMHO), so if you miss out again, it'll be your fault. Again.

[xeron]

Adam of ACK controls has stated that he is working on at least two new boards with the aim of running OS4.

The first of which is the PowerVixxen LT. This is an accelerator for towerised Amiga 1200 computers. It attaches to the trapdoor slot, and provides a PPC processor, mobility radeon graphics, and maybe some other goodies like USB and ethernet. This board has a lower end PPC CPU soldered on and will allow OS4 to run, while giving programs access to the original chipset for maximum compatibility.

The second board is the PowerVixxen TL, which is a standalone motherboard like the A1. It is said that it will have a CPU socket into which you can put an AmigaOne compatible CPU card (which Adam is also producing). This board is supposed to have a lot of expandability, and not so many features built into the board. I don't know too much of the specifics for this board, but apparently it has a faster memory bus and things which will make it run rings around existing AmigaOne boards.

Whether they actually are going to arrive or not is a subject of extremely heated debate... personally I don't know, but I'm optimistic. Possibly more optimistic than I should be, but then I reeeeally like OS4 and i'm hoping SOME sort of solution to the hardware problem happens.

[xeron]

@CroCrew
The Amithlon story is a pretty sad one. I might have some facts wrong, because I was never particularily interested in Amithlon, but basically I think it happened like this:

Bernd Meyer started creating an emulator for AmigaOS3.x that ran on top of a minimal linux kernel, which to the end-user would appear like you were running 68K AmigaOS directly on an x86 to all intents and purposes. The system allowed you to run both 68k and x86 native code, and has x86 native drivers for some gfx and sound cards.

As I understand it, he teamed up with Harald Frank who contributed some code to the project. It was sold commercially by Haage & Partner. At this point Bernd was under the impression that H&P had licensed AmigaOS from Amiga, Inc. and everything was hunky dorey.

It turned out that Amiga, Inc. didn't agree and tried to force H&P to stop selling the product. H&P didn't agree, and Harald also thought everything was legit. Bernd didn't want to sell an unlicensed product and it caused a big falling out and the product eventually was cancelled.

There have been continued updates from other people, but mostly the Amithlon project is seen to be dead by most people in Amigaland.

The story is no doubt more complex than this, and I'd suggest a google search for amithlon.