AOS4 & Amigaone

[Waccoon]

MskoDestny:  I don't understand why it's so important to you that the folks at Hyperion declare OS4 finished.

Neither do I.  Software is never "finished."  :-)

Besides, once it's "finished," people who don't own an AmigaOne will just continue to complain about how many things are missing, which means we enter Windows territory:  patch mania.

Come on.  When I bought my Mac mini, the first thing I had to do was connect to Apple Update and download 300+ Megs of pathces and updates.  Yes, that's right.  300MB.

jkirk:  without a large production run the cost is high.

Of course.  But, somebody felt the PPC decision was the right way to go, and had to realize that supply would be a problem -- and didn't care.

Hyperion et al are looking beyond the Amiga community to make money.  That's what makes it so puzzling to me why PPC was the only real choice as the platform.  If they are looking towards potential markets where backwards compatibility with existing PPC Amiga software is a non-issue, why focus on a CPU that is really only popular in servers, routers, and game machines?  Surely companies involved in these markets already have OS partners of their own, using systems far more powerful and robust than OS4.

Isn't this against everything Amiga Inc. told us about DE (or AA, or WhatEver)?  Funny how they are trying to sell most of their pocket games on ARM machines while their future OS runs on PPC.  OS4 on the Playstation3?  The PSP is based on MIPS.

Maybe instead of making an expensive PPC board and port a "lightweight" OS to it, they should have used x86 and stuck 2 Gigs of RAM in it.  It would still be cheaper!  :-)

Lando:  That is part of the reason OS4 is ~3 years late - the time it's taken them to work around the broken aspects of the Articia.

I don't buy that for a second.  Hyperion simply overcommitted to a very huge task.  Porting an OS is a lot more complicated than porting a game.

Didn't they have to pause OS4 development for a while becuase they needed to work on other projects to make some money?

Tigger:  Sure you do, to get rid of the cache coherancy issue (and other issues with the Articia) Hyperion hacked the drivers, slowing the entire DMA system down, its great you don't see a problem it doesnt mean the systems DMA isn't dog slow because of the hack.

I buy this.  As a PC user, I notice hard drive throughput right away on each system I use, while CPU speed is pretty much irrelevent.  Most people I know blame the CPU for everything, and easily don't notice performance issues that are releated to the motherboard.  Yet another reason why "budget" comptuers can sell with such high-end CPUs, and still offer lousy performance (and provide mucho fuel for x86 bashers).  People just don't realize that the whole system has to be matched and tuned to get good performance, and that the chipset makes a HUGE difference.

Besides, to what will an ArticaS board be compared?  It's not like there's a hundred PPC boards out there available for benchmarks, like in the PC world, and good, x86 vs PPC benchmarks are rarely unbiased.  ArticaS follows hardware standards several years old, too.  Is is fair to compare it to a brand new PC, or do we compare it to a Pentium3?

[Waccoon]

Mangar:  Why are the developers of AOS4 tying the OS to specific hardware. This is how the Amiga got in this mess in the first place by not allowing Amiga-Compatible computers.

I guess they're trying to mimic Apple, but with little success.  Apple stays in business by selling apps, services, and other goodies with their computers, not just hardware and a raw OS.

Hyperion also mentioned piracy as having a major role in the decision.  By avoiding x86, the likliness of getting OS4 running on unlicensed hardware is less.  Of course, any platform developer will tell you that by restricting the volume, you almost guarantee that critical mass cannot be reached.  Everyone pirates Photoshop and Flash, yet, these are the kind of world-standard applications that drive the Internet.

Let's face it.  Flash is the greatest media format invented so far this century.  It runs on anything, and far, far better than Sun ever promised Java could.  It includes a good scripting system that may evolve into a real programming language, and it's only a matter of time until Macromedia adds 3D graphics to replace all those "fake" 3D tools people have already been using for years.

Mangar:  They could make a lot more money off the OS than with hardware. Palm realized this when they started to license their OS to Sony and other PDA manufacturers.

Again, I find it amusing that Hyperion is looking towards other PPC platforms to make money.  OS4 may be lean on resources while operating, but it's also lean on capabilites.  My brother-in-law works on Java-powered cell phones, and I can tell you right now that OS4 doesn't have a chance breaking into markets where such a low-porformance, resource-hungry platform like Java running on Linux is making an explosion.

Interoperability is more important than resources, and always has been.  Make a 200GB hard drive, and software developers will find a way to fill it up.  Apple makes an OS that has a 12 Gig installation and runs poorly with less than 512MB of RAM, and people are buying in excess of "1,000 a day."

Seehund:  As for AInc, they don't seem to have given a {NRRRT!} about AmigaOS when they accepted Eyetech's compulsory licensing idea

Why bother with a new AmigaOS when intent already runs fine on Linux?

Seehund:  Officially AInc do claim to welcome new hardware vendor licensees. In reality, everyone who so far has enquired and even negotiated (even to the point of a missing signature on the licensing agreement!) has been ignored or eventually turned down.

When I bought my SDK, I found it impossible to contact Amiga Inc. to register.  After a month, I gave up.

This was about the same time their phones were shut off.  :-)

Tigger:  If one of your directors writes you a bad contract, and you sign it, saying its not your companies fault is an incorrect premise in my belief system.

I feel this way about the hardware issue.  If everyone had tested things more thouroughly first, or bought from a reputible manufacturer, maybe these problems wouldn't have been so severe.

That's the way it is in small, proprietary markets, as my experience with using Kodak photographic workstations shows.  $5,000 for a 400Mhz dual-Xeon workstation with striped SCSI drives, which is less powerful than my $1,000 single-CPU 2.4Ghz P4 with a Western Digital SATA drive?  Oh, please -- enter the 21st century!  Also, that workstation price is only for the hardware, not the additional $35,000 software license, which was based on WinNT 4 (the company claims their software wouldn't even run on Win2000).

Tigger:  Sorry Paul, I'm not wrong, as has been pointed out by me, and half a dozen others who actually design hardware for a living half of the things that Eyetech blame the Via chip for, don't even go through the southbridge.

While I haven't bothered to research any of the causes of the AmigaOne issues, I can say that it's all too easy to blame VIA due to their reputation.  People blame VIA for hardware issues like they blame Microsoft for software issues.

Given that Mai Logic's website hasn't been updated in a long time, and has lots of b0rken links and images, it really looks like their venture into PPC chipsets hasn't gone too well.  That's all I really need to know to avoid the company.

Tigger:  ...thats why the Terrasoft people didnt sell the board, thats why all the Linux builds abandoned the board, you think they are all wrong and you are right??

Either that, or they don't want to bother.  There's other plaforms to support, now that Mai seems to be MIA.

[Waccoon]

reflect:  It seems to me that just cause some people don't like the hardware for one reason or another, they try their hardest to discourage others (and to my knowledge, not one of these 'die-hard anti-advocates' even owns an A1). Makes you wonder, doesn't it.

For people who believe the AmigaOne is an update to a classic Amiga, then, yes, I suppose it's worth it, especially given the prices of the alternatives.  For those who want a new Amiga that will be viable in the future, AmigaOne doesn't cut it.  Compared to non-official solutions like Pegasos, AmigaOne still doesn't cut it.

I'm sure most people are looking for a bright future for Amiga, not a re-hash of 90's technology and software.  We've had a looooooong time to deal with Amiga since Commodore went under.  It's time to move forward with new systems, or dump all this marketting nonsense that attempts to woo PC users to the Amiga platform, like Hyperion's "20 Reasons" list.

No matter what, there's just not enough interest to justify further development.  I know I keep saying "critical mass" over and over, but that's precicely the problem.  So long as Amiga makes money, the platform can live.  Whether they make money depends on demand, and with no future support, there is no demand.

What about people who bought AmigaOne as a replacement for their classic Amigas?  Are they going to continue to run their classic applications, and avoid buying any "new" Amiga hardware?  Re-releases have short-term profit potential, like the Atari Flashback, but that's no way to establish a solid market.

Tigger:  The production Teron boards and the Production A1's are the same hardware, built from the same raw PWB, with the same parts list, Eyetech just reflashes the ROM so OS4 will run on it, something monkeys or even Alan can be trained to do.

My impression is that the Teron was semi-modular, allowing certain changes without a complere redesign and recertification (made-to-order, if you will).  Replacing a flashable EEPROM with a ROM is one example.  With so little official information available, I've all but gotten lost regarding the manufacturing details, but I have heard that Eyetech had to contract a manufacturer to build the boards based on Mai's design, and they did have certain "substitutions", such as the ROM lock.

I believe you're right that a redesign wasn't used for the AmigaOne, but it's not strictly a stock Teron board.  People did just have an argument recently about whether the AmigaOne's on-board audio works or not, and found that some AmigaOnes have the audio chip, while others do not.  Or, did that only apply to the AmigaOne Micro?

Maybe the audio chips just fell off in transit, and Eyetech decided to sell the boards, anyway.

Dammy:  Regardless if the software is disabling some/all the faulty MAI chipset's DMA capabilities, it's what the prospective customers are thinking about that matters.

Yup.  Based on Mai Logic's broken website, it doesn't appear the company is very active.  So, where do we go from here?  How can I feel confident about AmigaOne when its only hardware supplier is playing dead?

Dammy:  So much so, I'm betting Hyperion is in no hurry to release anything but "beta" code in fear of having a hord of coders wanting their long due monies

Now this is unfair.  How long has OS4 been in the testing phase and has seen active development after the prerelease?  This is not a "beta" project.

Hyperion is probably the only company that has given a damn about the Amiga over the last decade.  Arguably, even longer, given how much Commodore screwed it up.

Seehund:  In case anyone would care, personally I'm not trying to discourage others from buying an "AmigaOne". Go on, have fun.

Yes.  The reason for complaining is so companies get the message that they could be doing things better.  If you're happy with AmigaOne, then good for you.  But, it just could be so much more, and could sell much more, too.

Not to mention work properly.

Seehund:  Macs and Pegasoses is the glaringly obvious answer to the question "if one makes a consumer PPC desktop OS, for which hardware would one try to sell it?" They're perfectly capable of running AmigaOS. It's AmigaOS, or whatever other OS, that needs to be adapted to hardware, not vice versa.

The holy grail of computing is turning hardware into software.  I don't care about the hardware so long as it doesn't suck and is affordable.  It's AmigaOS I want.

Well, sort of.  I'm becoming more and more aware of severe design flaws in UNIX and other OSes, and AmigaOS isn't exactly a gem, either.  I guess what I should say is I want something new that resembles AmigaOS.

I miss being able to have fun with a computer without resorting to playing games.