How is OS4 ?

[Crumb]

@Crumb
maybe you do need a Peg2 if you are developing an OS for it...

You fail to notice that the broken A1 was replaced by an unsupported machine instead of a Sam440. One year before the decission of porting to that platform was taken core os4 developer prefered using a non supported platform with unfinished drivers instead of Sam440. The testing lasted 3 months as maximum.

And I also see you enjoy 2004/2007 a lot, negating all progress AmigaOS HW and SW has made since your early alphas (what progress? everything is still 1000% identical to OS-0.5,

OS4.1 is an early alpha? OS4 HW hasn't progressed much in 5 years, in fact Sam440 has been a step back compared to Peg2. Software wise there are many cosmetic changes but little deep changes (swap memory is one of the most noticeable although it was possible with 3rd party apps on OS3.x, we are still waiting auto stack enlargement and gfx core rewrite)

and Aos4.5 will be more or less on par with 1.0, if that!!! ) but as I said many times, your blabbering is irrelevant to end-users.

I wonder if you have ever done any constructive post in any thread at amiga.org. It looks like you just have joined amiga.org to spread your blabbering and red troll propaganda.

Get over it, and most of all, the time Aos slept are finished, you will see upgrade upon upgrades from now on both software and HW side, you better start getting acquainted to this new situation...

It seems you live in a candy coloured parallel reality. HW and SW side OS4 is 10 years in the past. Hyperion had the chance to design new APIs or at least port their OS to mainstream hardware so userbase would not shrink to a few users. They failed.

[Crumb]

@Crumb
But really, OS4.1Up2 has a ton of under the hood improvements and nothing went untouched from the early alphas you helped beta test.  

OS4.1 final is an early alpha?

As for Sam, it was a beginning and mostly aimed at people spending thousands on towerized 1200/4000 only to get clunky systems very prone at breaking. It did a great job and the intended audience is happy, those that were searching for a performance beast were not.

I think it failed since there's still more people interested in spending thousands on classic hardware than buying Sams.

I told you many times at AW that support for such initiatives would make newer HW possible,  and now they will make the 460EX which is more capable and aimed at a certain

So what? Sam460 specs would have been ok-ish 5 years ago but now it's just obsolete before being released. I don't see many reasons to be happy about a machine with amiga-market specs from 5 years ago... last 10 years all amiga market has lagged behind x86 market but now it's getting ridiculous since hardware manofacturers seem unable to produce anything that is capable of performing significantly better than 5 year old (cheaper) hardware.

OS4 population. Power-users will get an X1000

ATM they have failed to deliver the machine for the summer as they promised and you blindly believed.

But please Crumb, say there won't be any new HW again (as you did last November) "it doesn't make commercial sense!" You bring luck!

ATM there's just vapourware (we'll see when x1000 is released... perhaps we'll have to wait until 2011). ACube hardware still doesn't make commercial sense anyway. Otherwise ACube would produce 1000 boards and we wouldn't see spamming-news each time they produce 20 boards.

Actually I live in a world where there is no Amiga or Amiga-like OS that justifies preaching about how cool and modern we are (as you seem to do with morphOS a marginally more mature OS that is still ridiculously obsolete), talk about living in candy worlds...

I don't think I ever claimed that anything amiga-ish has any chance to take the world. Reading your claims about your vapourware x1000 taking over the world is funny. Reading your comparisons of vapourware hardware with real tangible solutions is hilarious.

The bad choices of hardware partners are ruining OS4 chances to be moderately successful in the hobby-OS market. The bad management choices like not releasing OS4.x for existing ppc hardware kill the chances of increasing user base (with the honorable exception of Peg2, although Moana would have made more sense)

The "other OSes" amiga-like have an obvious advantage: if you feel nostalgic or are a little curious about amiga things you can try them out easily (without making big investments) and become an user. And that's the biggest problem for OS4, and the detail some OS4 users try to justify with strange arguments. It's not just about technical disadvantages, my point is that it's too expensive. If they had released Moana at least that problem wouldn't exist for people willing to use 2nd hand hardware. And please note that Moana wouldn't prevent the release of sams, x1000 or whatever vapourware thingie is announced because some people want new hardware.

I see potential in AmigaOS as they are now free to form commercial partnerships

The only potential of AmigaOS is disappearing and giving it's name to a modern OS. If Hyperion ever wanted to sell a modern OS they would need to get rid of almost all amigaos API to make it evolve and put a "compatibility box" like OSX guys did. You may claim OSX is MacOS but well... it's just a label and it has little in common

The long term clear public goal of OS4.x should be jumping to x86. PPC is dead on desktop.

and things are starting to move,

I've heard the same magic mantra last 8 years in the OS4 camp. Since you were not in the community 5 years ago you probably won't understand the frustration of seeing announcements with dancing bananas about an unimpressive hardware that is both slower and more expensive than what we had 5 years ago

while I believe the hermit crumb idea first announced to me at Pianeta Amiga by Guruman (in the sense that he told me there would be the MacMini port) didn't seem that hot to me.

A Mac Mini/Peg2 release and the release of new hardware are not mutually exclusive.

But make no mistake, what I saw were 3 OS very far from todays standard, all

Sure, trying to take over the world with AmigaOS API would be ridiculous and won't work. Claiming it's progressing a lot doesn't make much sense since the API limits all the future evolvement of the OS.

have a long road to travel making those differences, quite frankly, highly laughable (and that is what I think every time I see you so adamantly writing about them, get real Crumb).

Then it's strange you don't notice that spending 1000Euros to be able to try out a limited toy OS and claiming that it's evolving a lot, that it's "the real one", that it's based on some unimportant old sources of an 80s OS no one knows and getting nervous when another hobby OS beats it in all benchmarks is no less laughable.

As for your clinging to the past read my lips: from the end of September 2009 (the day they signed the settlement) things have changed, you had a glimpse in the past 6 months, you will notice it even more in the next 12, and if that won't be enough, it will slap you in the face a little further down.

Yeah, I just have noticed how they promised to release a board this summer and they failed. I have also noticed that they released 2 updates for OS4.1 but they are still unable to get USB2.0 working. I have noticed an evaluation motherboard running a FPS at 4fps (wohooo!). I have noticed some cosmetic changes like startup managers and some eyecandy but little deep changes in the core of the OS. In the meanwhile I had to read claims made by people like you praising a vapourware motherboard with unknown specs and praising "new hardware" that is five years late. BTW, the idea of anouncing x1000 using a web-mistery is highly unprofessional and sad. The owners of amigaos think that they have the golden goose, don't realise that the world has evolved last years and try to milk the users.

[Crumb]

last time we talked all you had was OS4 alpha experience since when you became a 4.1 final user?

I have explained it in various posts but it seems you missed it.

And you think wrong, as all Sam533, Sam667 and Sam800 are sold out with a few remaining 733. Much more than towered 4000 system on ebay (very sporadic and selling around 2 pieces per year).

Selling all units isn't difficult when you only produce a handful of boards.

You seem to forget that having a system with no expandable GFX card is way more limiting than the lack of VMX, I would take a powerful PCI-E card over that any day (much more potential, as in INFINITE more potential).

Peg2 has a nice AGP slot (it's the model that was released 5 years before Sam). Mac Mini has AGPx4. FYI PCI-express with 4 lanes has more or less same bandwitch as AGPx4. I'm using a 64MB Radeon on my Mac Mini G4 and never ran out of gfx ram.

I didn't blindly believed anything (ho and summer anyway, finishes September 20th, some 3 months from now).

In case you have missed it, it has been confirmed that x1000 will be for sale around/earlier than christmas

Tell me where you did get the 20 number, I'm curious...

There was an announcement about requiring a low number of people like that (could be 30 perhaps) to produce certain Sam model, otherwise ACube wouldn't do it. Check out old news.

Keep your love for dead ends for yourself

PPC is a dead end and AmigaOS API is a dead end

We'll see about that, 2 of my friends I'm trying to convince to come back tryed Icaros desktop and found it of very little use, while they are interested in AmigaOS, you see "free" not interested at all (maybe not everyone runs his life on 3rd world country budgets as to be that concerned about money).

I don't try to "convince" friends, I just show them the options, tell them the problems they'll find, the cool positive things about the system and let them choose. If you go out on holidays let them have your machine one week to see if that fits their needs. It's more fair than "convincing" them. Most of friends may think AmigaOS3.x+AmiKit/MorphOS/AROS/OS4 is cool but just for a short time... when they get used to the fast response they start to request their usual wintel apps.

You should talk with Vidarh about this, he is not convinced it is the only solution, not one bit.

So PPC is not a dead end? Yeah sure.

Amiga back comers don't care about that, i run Blender a modern software that needs a modern API and it is ROCK SOLID. Never crashes even after an 8 hour render I can pick it up and continue. Guess that many other modern app will work the same without any mystical api change (just what's needed is the motto

It seems you don't understand that any program can overwrite the memory of each other. The API is flawed. It doesn't matter if you port MS Office using MS original sources, AmigaOS API will still be flawed. You can produce decent software for AmigaOS but that won't prevent that any app can overwrite your data.

Both OSs have along way to go, when one will claim it can do anything the "others" can, we'll talk about it. I believe AOS will get there first now that it is free to run and commercial partnerships can be formed, we'll see about this down the line...

Leaving apart that nonsense (in order to modernize AmigaOS core you would need to get rid of AmigaOS API and make an entire new OS that almost doesn't share a line of code)... there's little that indicates that Hyperion is up the task of designing a new modern API for AmigaOS. They seriously lack resources. The gfx system is primitive, audio is the same, WB is slightly updated but these changes are mostly cosmetical, there's still the old reaction... these things are points that Friedens want to update since the beginning but they lack the human resources to do it

Crumb, can you just stop being antagonistic? You know the graphics subsystem isn't there, they were using a 33Mhz radeon 9200 on debug.

A Radeon9200 flies with q3 even if you use a 33Mhz pci slot. It shows that management doesn't know very well what they are doing (or amiga software quality standards are becoming very low).

You know it and keep attacking the X1000, give these guys a break.

Since most os4 users drag that non-existing boards to any conversation and dare to compare its fantasy performance to existing hardware I don't see why not talking about x1000 and discussing its availability and real performance too.

[Crumb]

The problem at amiga.org is that there are some MOS "professionals" spamming every AOS4 thread and deliberately changing the topic, while AmigaOS expert don't visit here since forever (just a very few, maybe because it is becoming similar to moo bunny every day that passes).

There has never been any problem at amiga.org. It's funny because when os4 fanatics find any objection to price/features/performance of OS4 software/hardware they get angry and start to claim the site has a problem.

It seems you just have joined amiga.org to practice some red trolling.

Oh and the reason why people prefer AmigaOS over MOS

It's funny because most of Amiga users I know prefer MorphOS to OS4.

is the same I told Crumb, they all have a modern system,

A G2 cpu five years later than peg2/g4 is "modern"? yeah right.

so they are not as desperate as you think for a feature or two

MorphOS2.0 is more complete featurewise, faster and smoother. Any part of it. It's not just "one feature or two". From Ambient to preferences, from I/O support to bundled tools.

, don't be surprised if they don't care for an unofficial project that runs on Apple scraps.

Running in various hardware platforms and also on Apple hardware is an advantage. I bet you'll never ever use an AmigaOS4.x laptop. Well, AROS users can enjoy that right now. OS3.x users too through emulation. And MorphOS users are probably next.

What they care is for Amiga to have dignified future made of front page news items (see if you can get that with your emac port) and dedicated machines.

They remember Amiga and think about a computer with great price performance ratio that had killer apps and great games. They care (like most people do) about the software they run and its stability. They probably don't care about announcements of announcements, web mistery games, old ppc technology at premium prices and png icons. And you can bet they like to pay for the product they are going to use right now and they are not interested in buying overpriced obsolete hardware to fund future decent hardware

The features will come and i bet that now that AOS is free to run and form commercial partnerships, will reach a "decent point" far earlier than any other Amiga-like option.it's inevitable.

Your vision of amiga market and community is seriously distorted.

What commercial partnerships? Do you honestly think OS4.x has anything commercially interesting? that's naive at best. Any company will prefer to invest on a Linux/BSD distro that can be tuned to do what OS4 does but better instead of being at mercy of a small company that lacks hardware to run on.

What features are you talking about? There are limitations with AmigaOS API that can't be surpassed unless they get rid of compatibility with ALL previous versions and leave that stuff on a "compatibility box".

It's easier that AROS surpasses both OS4 and MorphOS in the future since it runs on x86 (as well as other cpus), the development&user numbers increase... and given it's opensource nature it's possible to test what may never be done on OS4 (or MorphOS) due to lack of resources.

[Crumb]

And the solution is to resign ourselves to the idea that we will never ever get good 3D drivers right?

due to the inability to produce any working 3d driver for anything faster than a Radeon9000PRO there's no much that invites us to believe that there will be great 3D support for more complex modern cards. Existing 3D drivers aren't exactly optimized so expect one half or one third of normal gfx card performance.

Anyway Rogue said their gonna work on expanding OS4 after the X1000 port and he said he knows Graphics are top priority.

And also WB. He has repeated that since A1 times.

I don't actually (but who knows?  Seriously though, I will be glad to buy it for Christmas.

And I hope you can buy it. The hardware manofacturer seems serious but there's little time and I'm unsure about motherboard support. I guess we'll see a plain standard OS4.1.x version without 64bit&SMP support but I would be happy to be wrong.

The whole WILL to design new HW it's not a dead end, PAsemi CPU might come and go, but if there is the "will" they will find new solutions.

As much as I like PPC, it's dead end for desktop. It forces us to use slower and more expensive cpus. My personal favourite when Peg2 was discontinued was MPC8641D or a tetra-g5 but oh well.

When there is no will (or possibility as in MOS case) there can't be solutions.

It seems you don't understand MorphOS Team is not a hardware company. They produce software. The problem for OS4 is that Hyperion Management decided to earn money with hardware and that affected their view, Ben Hermans thought he could get extra money killing Moana and now they are losing users who would never spend more than 500 Euros on a board.

Vidarh is a top programmer.

AFAIK he has not created an AmigaOS compatible OS and it has been explained to him why his ideas wouldn't work. He can be a good programmer but intelligent people also makes mistakes and can take wrong choices.

Antagonistic is when a very smart individual as Crumb (I know he is) start pointing out troubles he knows exactly the reason why.

Nothing wrong with that. The problem is when some people try to convince others these problems don't exist.

Antagonistic is when a guy asks ONLY for OS4 information AFTER he already asked about MOS in another thread (and where the MOS crowd happily participated) and someone hijacks said OS4 thread even after being told by the starter he isn't interested, and after being politely asked by a moderator to quit it (I don't mean Crumb here).

Well, It's normal to reply other users (like Varthal), since the topic is interesting and it's related to the original question (even if some people don't agree) I think it would be odd to stop the conversation suddenly.

The X1000 it's not the original AmigaOne, those making it know the market they're getting into, they know is broken into "factions", they know it's small.

Eyetech also did. They had bad luck with "Escena" and later when the idea of a big motherboard/cpu accelerator that could be attached to an A1200 they used MAI motherboards instead of asking DCE to design and build it. They would have had problems with ArticiaS anyway so it doesn't matter much.

OS4 development was spotty at best during the last several years, everything was frozen and the developers found themselves in a situation where if they worked hard, they could've lost it (for nothing)

wrong. Your part of the development being "frozen" is highly innacurate. It was quite active with new components released *every* day.

so they probably worked at Amiga unrelated stuff for a large part of that time period, giving Amiga some spare time.

AFAIK that's still true for most of them.

Now they own what they are working on,

They always acted like they owned it, releasing it for uA1, Sam and Peg2 even thought they were not exactly allowed to do that... but their management never cared :-)

[Crumb]

Isn't that a completely subjective view? Most Amiga users I know aren't bothered about the "next gen" even one tiny bit. I'm somewhat the odd one out in even having an interest.

Sure it's subjetive, that's why I used "most amigans I know" instead of "most amigans". And yes, there's probably more amigans interested on classics than on any ppc hardware.

@kolla

sure, but even those without MorphOS machines that are more interested on AGA usually agree prefering MorphOS to OS4.

[Crumb]

indeed, refresh my memory

See my previous posts at the profile.

Considering that the last U-boot for sam I got, was downloaded by 600+people and that I know of many that did not (I didn't too for the last up) it would seem that your 20 estimate is a little far fetched, try somewhere near 1000 next time you'll be far closer.
Ah and by the way, even at 20 it would still be far more than classic Amiga system off ebay, which would mean they succeeded just the same.

In case you forgot it we were talking about the number of Sam boards produced on each batch. downloads are not good indicative: I downloaded timberwolf a pair of times, do I count as 2 timberwolf users?

I was talking about emac and mac mini that doesn't support any full lengh modern card.

We were talking about Sam440 being worse than 5 year older hardware. Mac Minis and eMacs are quite cheap and MorphOS manages well gfx memory. Powermac will probably be supported in the next release. If next years I found that I need more gfx ram I could get a cheap powermac or powerbook.

Lack of Vram is the least of the problem those machine have and will have in the future. and the reason MOS isn't going anywhere.

MorphOS/AROS/OS4/OS3 don't have to go anywhere because they are hobby OSes that can't compete with mainstream OSes and AmigaOS API is obsolete.

In the future it will still be easy to find replacement machines to run MorphOS because there are hundreds of thousands out there. If you add powermacs it will be a never ending source of MorphOS hardware.

I expect to run MorphOS on a powerbook G4 in the future. Perhaps Ralph finds a QuadG5 in his attic and decides to add support for it, who knows. Don't worry, if x1000 sold hundreds of thousands they may port MorphOS to it.

BTW, MorphOS has the most efficient AmigaOS gfx system and 32/64MB are enough for it.

And?

Don't you remember what you write? I said x1000 was delayed and that it wouldn't be for sale in summer and you replied that summer finished on september.

This will win as the most detailed and backed up post of the century :lol:

I don't have time to search URLs sorry, you already waste quite a lot of my time.

PPC has so much life in it you cannot even begin to understand.

It's completely dead on desktop.

Not only IBM is developing ne CPus for next generation consoles as we speak (both MS and Nintendo) but they are also developing new ones such as Power7.

And do you think you'll buy desktop computers with Power7? hilarious. The only interest of ppc is that IBM builds custom cores for big customers like console

And there are more in the pipe-line at AMCC as well, next up is a quad core Titan with 2MB cache.
just to name a few...

These are very primitive compared to modern desktop cpus. The PPCs of AMCC are designed for embedded market.

QuadG5s released by Apple are still fastest desktop ppc computers. And when Apple dropped PPC, it died for desktop.

You got me wrong there, I am glad if they come back using ANY flavor (MOS included, but I don't have one) and I suggest to them to try Icaros pointing them to its website.
My cousin is using it a little (he was with me at Pianeta and spoke with Paolone too), others are not interested but are now following the Amiga scene on italian sites (Amiganews in particular).

nice then.

I understand very well, the problem is, well written application don't do that, I invited you several times to go over at natami forums and talk about this with Gunnar.
Anyway talk with Vidarh about implementing MP without re-writing the whole OS, he will enlighten you.

I missed your invitations. All apps would fail with exception of simple command line ones like "ls" or "dir".

I already read Vidarh comments but it doesn't convince me. I already talked with Gunnar long in the past about his fantasy coldfires running existing 68k core (he always ommited that all code had to be rewritten). Both of these coders have been pointed by long time amiga coders that have designed entire OSes that their theories are flawed.

[Crumb]

Must be late, i don't get what priìofile you are talking about and when did you purchase a legal copy of AmigaOS4.1, show me some proof...

FYI betatesters have free copies for their machines Peg2/Peg1/Classic in my case.

Don't delude yourself on the G5 do i have to remind you Mark olsen interview

FYI there weren't plans for Mac Mini in the past but plans changed. I am not waiting for G5, I'm quite happy with my current hardware, I would be glad to run MorphOS on a laptop thought.

Don't hold your breath

I wasn't holding my breath. In contrast with other OSes it's fairly easy to find decent hardware for MorphOS. Even more easier with AROS. And OS3.x emulation is the easiest choice.

Actually the PA6T is a better than G5 design and there are several cores designs ready.

PA6T design is based on G5. G5 has a 1.35Ghz bus and smaller instruction L1 cache but G5 frequency is higher (2.7Ghz).

as for Power7 it is for the future, Verisys might get them in due time.

Power7 in desktops? yeah... sure :-D

Due to no one working on it Crumb, things have changed and you fear this, which is a shame.

I don't fear technology, sorry. But since you started your "Hans de Ruiter is about to release best 2d/3d/video drivers ever" propaganda nothing interesting has happened, we haven't seen much improvements apart from 2d support. Even AROS guys are much more advanced in this aspect right now even if their 3D drivers need to be polished to integrate better with the OS.

I only see like 6 mos supporters here

When I said I know more MorphOS users I mean in person. E.g. in spain MorphOS is quite more popular than OS4.x and the european users I know personally are also pro-MorphOS. In fact most amiga/aros/morphos users I know don't write in forums.

no actually there were the times you describe (yeas when you beta tested) and times where I am 100% right.

I betatested OS4 for 5 years until 2009 (some time after final OS4.1 was released for Peg2) and new versions of components poped up every day. Since you were not betatester and you were using a PC I think you hardly can claim anything about what happened that years.

[Crumb]

i hope you will join. I know you say you just make comparisons, but remember that if a guy asks about the Amiga situation then you're entitled to talk about MOS to this guy, if he however already asked about it in another thread and begs just for AOS information, forcing the thread in certain directions is considered antagonistic and things will turn ugly, with endless discussions.

Well, I have looked at the profile of the starter of the thread. It seems he opened a thread about MorphOS in January and this thread has been opened at the middle of June. I guess that if I said I don't check old threads from 6 months ago and didn't remember he had asked any question about MorphOS some people won't believe me, but it's the truth.

I'm used to long threads with various replies so replying to Varthal was the most normal thing to do. BTW, in our amiga meetings there are a pair of friends who like OS4 and despiting what you may think I don't burn them in a pyre... I help them to solve their issues and talk about amiga stuff while we drink some beers/cider.

[Crumb]

You won't be saying that when the Doom 3 engine goes open source. Everybody will be wanting full OpenGL2 drivers and plenty of VRAM for textures, specular maps, normal maps etc.

I don't need to wait until Doom3 is opensourced, I want full OpenGL2.0 support right now :-D

I was also afraid of Radeon 9200 with 64MB of gfx memory but I never ran out of gfx ram. Simpler 3D games like Quake3 run quite smoothly (around 70fps). There's still room for optimization as Bigfoot showed in a presentation faster drivers are possible

If in the future drivers were available, took advantage of new cores and I needed it I would switch to a 2Ghz powermac with a not so older AGP Radeon like 9800 for example, but I don't think I'm doing that anytime soon.

We still don't take full advantage of older cores like RV280 so I highly doubt we see short term support for more recent models like HD4670 even if you could use it. I expect support for R9600/R9800/... in the next updates