Amiga OS4 on old (PPC) Macs

[persia]

I just bought one of those flower pot flat screen iMacs off an auction for AU$240/US$200.  It's a 700 MHz G4, has a gig of Ram and a 60 Gig hard drive and a 15 inch flat panel monitor.

My original intention was to put Leopard on it and give it to my son to play with (he's 9) but this thing would make a great Amiga.  I have Leopard running on a Dell box, surely someone has figured out how to run Amiga OS 4 on a old (PPC) Mac?!?!?!

[persia]

Where there's a will there's a way.

Piru wrote:
Leopard doesn't install on 700MHz G4.

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The flower pot iMacs would make neat Amigas.  You could even paint the base so it looked like half a Boing ball!

They cost less than a much slower ppc card for an existing Amiga and are being dumped right now because hey are too slow.  The have a real screen not one of those old clunker crts.

I really don't have the software knowledge but surely there could be some patch to make Amiga OS4 run on these beauties!

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Amiga Inc's soap opera is never ending, either they have exceptionally long outsourcing contracts or they've managed to survive the Amiga Centre fiasco.  Too bad Amiga OS isn't written in C# or they could put their programmers in India on it...

Seriously, kickstart is on the CD so there's really nothing "Amiga" that Amiga OS 4 requires.  There must be something that it checks for, some piece of hardware acting as a dongle.

What is needed is a minimal PPC linux that opens up a UAE that does not try to emulate a motorola chip.  

Flowerpot iMacs and PPC minimacs are abundant and cheap and would knock the socks off of antique 603s.  

[persia]

It's not piracy, if you buy a program it's yours to do with as you please so long as you don't distribute it to others.  Parliament tried to change that in Australia, but in the end the argument was that basically, Holden (or Toyota or ...) can't tell you what to do with your car, why should software manufacturers be a separate category.

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I think we're still working this out.  There has never been a test of the shrink wrap license, at least in Australia.  I walk into a store and say I want to buy a copy of a program, the clerk hands it to me and charges me.  No one outside of IT has ever bought a license.  Even Apple is afraid to test it in court, if they find a mod for OS X that frees it from TPM they bully any site that hosts it, threatening lawsuits.  The threat from big lawyers is enough, it's how Microsoft keeps it's illegal trademarks like "Word," "Powerpoint" and "Windows."  Big money wins over the little guy's rights.

In the end the answer is probably "yes you bought the program but you are going to need deep pockets to defend that purchase."  The big corporations win by force what they cannot win legally.  It's really an open and shut case.  Walk into an Apple Store and ask to buy a copy of Leopard, the clerk hands it to you and runs your credit card - not once is the word license used or heard - case closed.

[persia]

Just went to the Apple Store.  They talk about license in the description but when I actually add it to my cart it reads:

Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
Part Number: MB021Z/A

The same as any other part.  Face it, license was back in the old mainframe days, both parties agreed on terms and they were set forth in a license.  Apple has no more right to tell me what I can or cannot do with Leopard than Toyota has to tell me what to do with my Tarago.

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Trying to enforce Eula is a double edge sword, the jury really could go either way.  On the one hand a lawsuit might scare someone small, but if they threaten someone with big money and it actually goes to court and they loose, eula is dead.  So the key for the software companies is to make it enough of a threat to scare without ever actualy making it to court.

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At this point there have been so many contracts, bankruptcies, name changes and sales I don't know who owns what.  SCOs a good example, the original SCO owned Unix, the new SCO only owned a right to produce Unix System V.  Same name, but the rights to their OS were transfered to Novel.

It'll take years to figure out who owns what.  Hyperion could just release their de-dongled OS 4.  If they lose the court case with Amiga they're toast anyway, they might as well go out in style

[persia]

We are better off with OS 4 on old Macs because you pay US$700 for an Amiga 603e card which makes a G3 look blindingly fast.  You can pick up full PPC (G4 and G5) Macs, Monitor, Keyboard, mouse, for less than that.  It's a way to run OS4 without paying serious money for serious trash.

The future of the the Amiga of course is Intel AROS, but that's a different issue.

[persia]

Patching OS X to run on non-dongled hardware is tim conuming there are hundred megabyte updates monthly that break the patch.  Amiga OS is basically unsupported, things don't get fixed, so once it was setup to run on non-dongled hardware it would be for an indefinite period of time.  

If everyone who wanted to run Amiga OS 4 on a Mac bought a copy and patched it themselves then I see no reason why not to.  Amiga Inc has limited pockets, wouldn't it be neat if they were the ones to lose the first EULA case! and finally free us from the needless worry of stupid shrink wrap?

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And the company that bears the Amiga name this six months just outsources American IT jobs to India.  Are they the ones to decide what Amiga is?  Exacptly what did they buy form the company of the previous six months?  And what did Acer (Gateway) sell to the first incarnation of Amiga Inc?  Did Acer retain anything?

Amiga has passed into the public domain as AROS, just as Unix has passed into the public domain as Linux (and the various BSD incarnations).  Amiga OS 4 is the last gasp of the original, it's like Unix System V, the end of the corporate era for Amiga and the bridge to the public domain era.  

The present is Amiga OS 4, the future is AROS!

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It shouldn't be too hard, the A1 specs talk of 32 MB PCI video cards, one A1 is a Radeon, which some Macs used.  There was some usage of AC97.  It appears that many of the Macs fall within the A1 specs.  What stops Amiga OS 4 from loading on them?

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It would be hard for Amiga to compete without a killer app, actually without any of the "standard" apps let alone a killer app.  It can render web pages, can't handle html mail.  It's video and audio editors are primitive.  You can't open Adobe docs or see flash on youtube.  You can't edit raw images.  You can't edit and host webpages on it.  You can't open a Word document.  Who would buy it and why?  

This is Amiga Inc's problem, they might love the idea of producing a new Amiga, but it can't compete in todays world and it would be a waste of money, so they talk and delay, then delay more and talk more.

[persia]

That's why AROS is the ultimate answer, it will run on multiple platforms but the x86 is the most important because it provides the most "bang for the buck."  One a few people would be willing to buy an OS without real software on expensive equipment, but a whole lot more would be willing to use empty space on an existing machine or use cheap parts.

Look OS 4 which is the subject of this thread, nobody is going to see this on US$700 604e equipment, but if you can run it on a US $200 G4 iMac then a whole lot more would be interested.