AmigaOS 4.0 for 68k: a viable option forward?

[persia]

The 68K has seen it's day, it just doesn't have the power to run OS/4.  It didn't phenomenal things in it's day, but that day is long gone.

Really truely all you need is to get os 4 running on old Mac PPC equipment.  It's plentiful, cheap as chips and well made.  Moana was close but Hyperion stopped the project.  

And here's another question, can you serious talk about writing another OS?  Look at AROS and it's struggles.  Sadly the AMiga community has shrunk.  Moana would be child's play compared with rewriting OS 4.  

Look at OS X, they had to break billion dollar industry leader Intel's trusted platform module, all the OS 4 needs to break is a boot loader and we can't do it.  

 

[persia]

Apple moved from PPC because IBM's priority is games systems not computers, for every PPC Apple there were at least ten game machines.  The advances in computer chips are coming in the x86 world, you want a multi-core laptop for example?  There isn't a good PPC option for that.  The emphasis is games.

Whilst you could argue that the Amiga is a game machine and fits better in the PPC world you also have to realise that the choice of motherboards and chips is far, far more limited.

With x86 you have the choice of motherboards, faster CPUs, more cores, and the ability to run a "productivity" OS (MS or Apple) at full speed.

That final point is a good one.  I don't think anyone imagines that Amiga is or could become competition to MS or Apple.  Amiga is something that you run in addition to you work machine.  A typical Amiga user will always need a PC or Mac as well, so why not have them in the same box?



RIP Dalek Fred

[persia]

AROS with integrated UAE (not WinUAE, that's the Windows version of UAE) would be an interesting idea.  You could evolve AROS without losing backwards compatibility with 20 year old software.

[persia]

The problem we have is defining the niche that the Amiga or it's successor should aim for.  It's a hobby computer with an interesting past, but who, other than aging Amiga users from the '80s will it appeal to?  Why should Joe Hobbyist bother with it when there's Linux and BSD around?  There's no killer apps for it, you can't use a modern web browser or open a Word document (yes I know Word '97, but lately everyone I work with has been sending docx files and try opening a Word 04 file with tables, comments and the like) and there's no company or organisation supporting it.

The Amiga community is in a sad shape, the fact that even with Moana available we can't make OS4 work on a Mac Mini shows how far we have sunk in terms of skill.  

[persia]

I agree, drivers are the big bugaboo, they don't exist for most modern technology.  When have you last seen a non-USB or non-Firewire device outside the Amiga world.  The lack of USB 2 and Firewire limit the speed you can actually move information from an external device to the Amiga.

Here's an example, I plug my camera into my Mac's firewire port and transfer the video, or I capture live, it doesn't matter.  I can edit real time.  I can feed it back out through my Apple TV which is hooked to my TV's HMDI port.  I can rip video from a DVD, capture internet streaming video and mix and match.  

The Amiga can do none of this.  It's an anachronism, an analogue SDTV device in a digital HDTV world.  The applications primitive at best, have you seen the features in Lightwave 3D v9?  Truly Amazing.  

My camera produces 12 MP Raw image files which I edit with Aperture quite easily, try that on an Amiga.  

I really fail to see a niche for the Amiga outside retro games.  My phone runs OS X, my personal music device Linux.  You can't even drive a modern printer, how is Amiga OS going to drive a phone?  

In the end this is why Amiga Inc is what it is, there's no market, it would take millions of man hours to make Amiga OS modern and then you'd end up with UAE to run the retro games that everyone likes.

Maybe, maybe, maybe the Amiga could be redesigned and upgraded to go against PSP, Wii and XBox, but I get the feeling that there are too many players there already.  

It's too late.  Amiga INcs programmers only know dotNet...

[persia]

I'd like to see a move to Intel architecture, it's cheap and plentiful and you could run virtual Macs and PCs on it for productivity.  There need to be a running in period, where an integrated Amiga classic (68k) would need to run to serve as a bridge until x86 software was developed and the 68K software retired.

In a way I think AROS provides a real option for the future.  AmigaDos is closed source, if KMOS win they will bury the Amiga forever and we will be without a future.  Even if Hyperion win they're going to lock into PPC, which means few options and higher prices and a limited future.  With AROS you have a chance to break free of special hardware and closed source.