Hyperion bankrupt?

[wawrzon]

I would also pay for an "official" update of 68k OS3.9. It has the largest user base and could be made very usable on fast FPGA accelerators that are around the corner.

pay whom and for what is the question.

[wawrzon]

I wouldn't care much who made it,

i would, because of track of record, expected support, that kind of things, also the circumstances should be fair. so far yu have your unofficial boing bags you can enjoy. i think ist as far as it gets within limits, im not sure what else to demand, than that the community takes their issues in their own hands, like that:

most of users consider them as official update for AmigaOS do why not make 3.9.1.

so, its there, just in form of patches and not as official as few would like. consider this an obstacle thrown in your way. whose fault is this?

[wawrzon]

How about a ROM that can find a CDRom to boot so I can ditch my slowly decaying boot floppies?

An OS that has Thors updates to layers?
All those improvements that are in OS4 only that just need to be compiled for 68k?
Picasso96 officially built in with the improvements in OS4?

There are a ton of things that could be done without a huge investment if someone had the rights to do so.

aros kick can boot from had or cd. otherwise i would be grateful to have this all improvements without being forced to use reimplemented wheel. we can complain in the open, but what does that change?

[wawrzon]

My original point was that there were avenues to making a little money that have been written off.

It just seems incomprehensible that 68k users were only seen as a pool of users to court as opposed to addressing their needs.

It's like making them come to you vs. going to them.

to be blunt, the amiga users were seen as a pool to recruit os4 users or get lost.

[wawrzon]

@Olafs3

A-EON owns Warp3D now.  I know upgrading it for 68k would be something of interest. All of A-EON's new software technologies developed will be back ported to AmigaOS 3 if the hardware can support it.

yes i think everybody would have guessed, after numerous hints...
it would have been the right thing to do in the late years of last decade, when still some simple open software could be ported to this, gaining some public attention. but are you sure its worth the investment today? especially there is wazp3d, open, free of charge and concerning the circumstances, rather tested? warp3d in my humble opinion is today a legacy issue, a standard, that might have been followed if it had succeed, but on low level basis has been implemented in user unfriendly outdated way. its success on amiga is limited by what it has beenn able to gather on os4 and it doesnt seem to be much. we were asking for w3d radeon drivers for years in order just to keep the standard going. it isnt your fault this has been refused and i dont blame the coders who wouldnt do to do that for free, but this is the effect, as correctly recognized by those who wanted to declare it obsolete, since it failed to catch ground.

[wawrzon]

Well, apparently, Hyperion sees the 68K as competitor to their PPC machines, i.e. block development on 68K to drive PPC. I believe this is not a very wise decision. You cannot behave as if you are the new Microsoft and at the same time see 68K as competitor. If you want the former, you should create more powerful machines, more powerful than PPC can deliver.

Instead, Hyperion is stuck between two fronts, the PC machines that are lightyears ahead of everything they do, and the 68K "oldtimer" users that have a PC anyhow and don't need a "slow incompatible" PPC. Doing so is not only ignoring the market, it is also just ignoring a good part of the potential customer basis for products that could be developed jointly on both platforms; then finally, let the user basis decide which system they want to invest to, and take the money from both groups. That would IMHO be a much smarter decision because you have much more room to "navigate" your company in.

psst! dont tell them. they might reconsider. then what?

[wawrzon]

Is it perhaps possible that we come to a kind of cooperation between Aros camp and Aeon/Amigakit? Perhaps that it would be possible to use developments from you in my distribution and you using Aros developments on your side? I think it would be benficial for both sides.

aros has wazp3d in their contribs. it doesnt work well with 68k but you can substitute it with the original wazp from aminet with no problem. on x86 there isnt any w3d software available. nor would that make sense, because mesa can be used directly. what w3d software would you want to port to aros?

[wawrzon]

@Olafs3

I personally would very much like to see Radeon R200 support available for Classic AmigaOS 3 on the Mediator.  If you have a proposal so we can support that, I will be very much interested.

i assume you talk about w3d driver for radeon 9xxx since 2d is already supported by elbox as you sure know. well, you can certainly port it from os4. i dont know what else would there be to propose.

[wawrzon]

Yes I am referring to 3D support.  Does Aros support Mediator ?

its a long time i have looked into that. afair there might have been some basic support, i recall that pci tool might have recognized the cards. but it wasnt complete and working, it lacked interrupts or so.

i can check it again, but why and what for do you need here aros at all?

[wawrzon]

Do tell, it sounds like the IP to 3.1 is now held by Cloanto so why can't the Open Source it?

wanna approach them with that proposal?

OS3.9/4 added different things to the 3.1 source. I'm not going to enumerate all of the changes here.

http://www.amigaos.net/content/1/features

most of the changes are rather cosmetic, and aros incorporates comparable functionality anyway except of things like interfaces or so objects factualy dimnishing backwards compatibility.  

I'm not certain what you mean by "name follower". I've played with AROS multiple times but not found it stable when I was testing it. I don't have anything against AROS but we are fragmenting into AROS, MorphOS, legacy 3.1, and 3.9/4.0.

the fragmentation is a fact we cant do anything about. whats up to everybody is to choose alternative that is most promising. while i dont resign on genuine os for my amigas for the time being i see no alternative to improve it without patching other than aros68k.

I still maintain it would be nice to have an official Open Source AmigaOS/Workbench(don't care the name) project from the current I.P. holder. Perhaps, AROS could even benefit from access to the original source code itself.

perhaps, but is is out of question, so why bother?

BTW - Why the attack?

-Nyle

sorry if being sharp. the owners or licensees of os4 stated repeatedly that open source is not an option. live with it, why return to it over and over?

[wawrzon]

I've tried AROS multiple times over the years and even had a few friends who like alternative OSs play with it. It's a neat project but it might too benefit from access to the source code. Heck, perhaps the two projects could be melded into one project. I don't know how much of the AROS project being based on 3.1 would be possible to port into a new Open Source OS with the original 3.1 code as reference.

It certainly doesn't sound like it would hurt.

aros is in many ways more advanced than os4. as example it has working gallium. if it does make sense on 68k is another matter, it doesnt fully work on this platform anyway.

gaining access to genuine 3.x sources might be  nice but might be also a handicap. that ip is contaminated with complicated and uncertain ownership, which might pose a threat for an open project.

[wawrzon]

We need to either get AmigaOS 3 back or fix AROS up for the 68k.

first one isnt an option, and second one is always being dismissed with disinterest, so it isnt looking good.

[wawrzon]

This is certainly not true. It exists in a repository Olsen has, and a couple of people have copies of the repository.

But that is not even the problem. The problem is that Hyperion sees attempts to update the legacy 68K version as competitions to their own Amiga Os 4.0 - instead of a complementary extension of their product portfolio. That's part of the story I don't get, but then again, I don't have to finance it (but then again, I wasn't declared bankrupt either.).

if they ported it to amiga none would buy this broken ppc hardware and the people could check out what os4 is without investing fortunes. they couldnt be caught to remain loyal if they didnt like it.

[wawrzon]

I think the best way forward is to wherever possible* develop for both AmigaOS 3 and 4 in future.

If there are any OS 3 coders out there who are interested in working on Warp3D in future please get in contact.

* dependent on hardware capabilities

you can probably count these devs on fingers of one hand, just to name the obvious one: karlos. then alain, the autor of wazp. then there are at least two experienced aros devs who got in touch with the matter , but i dont expect them interested.

just to be clear, warp3d is now courtesy of aeon. plain and clear. is that right?

[wawrzon]

Hyperion posted a new blog today. Interesting stuff. Doesn't act like a company that's "out of business". Just glancing at it since I saw it pop up on Google+, thought I'd throw it out here for you guys to chew over.

 

for me they have not acted much like a "company" at any time, in or out of business, but now surely its important to give an intact impression. we have still some days left to see.

[wawrzon]

@Heiroglyph

if they survive long enough to make it work and it might set precedence for other AOS like platforms.

depending how you define the precedence. apparently arix, an unseen derivate of aros has set a precenedce on it some time ago. and knowing some devs who achieved it, especially jason i trust it being a fact.
http://www.arixfoundation.com/screenshots/
the other thing is how much of advantage it is when actually implemented. since it isnt of any actual use but rather a handicap for software available so far, it sounds rather like a technical excersize, a proof of concept, if you will. same as the extended memory support os4 seems to provide beyond the 2 gig barrier or the x-core chip. stuff someone has put effort into and you like to read about, but will never use.