Why no Amiga equiv to Firebee?

[Heiroglyph]

For one thing, the Atari community opened up their OS way sooner than Amiga did.  AROS is still decades behind them on usability.

It's hard to build new hardware when all the driver documentation is locked way by the owners.

Pretty much every forward thinking API in the Amiga is kept from us either out of spite or greed, regardless of whether they still sell products or not.

[Heiroglyph]

If that's the case, what are you going to do about it? You can choose to improve the situation if you wish, it's up to you.

Code, money, and hardware development.  Since you asked, how about you?

My point was a simple fact. They had a viable OS replacement under their control back in the 90's and we're still trying to get there.

Perhaps it's because they could actually get along.

[Heiroglyph]

I really wasn't trying to put down AROS or derail this thread.  The Atari guys just got control of their platform earlier.

Since everything Amiga is so closed, you have to basically reverse engineer existing hardware and make your's look like the original to get anywhere.  For some reason our OS developers want to write every driver themselves.

I'm not even singling out any one OS. Other than AROS, it seems that they are all this way.  Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

As someone who has/is actually working on a hardware project, I'm just trying to tell the hurdles I've hit.

1. Amiga custom chipset makes the system timing sensitive in ways that Atari's aren't.
2. PowerUP/WarpUP type CPU cards are undocumented and even the OS owners won't give you any information on them.
3. You can't make a new video card without reverse engineering or writing a new RTG stack.
4. Same for USB.  As much as I love my Deneb, they will probably become as rare as PPC cards.
5. Existing card slots are extremely buggy, forcing most of your time into workarounds rather than developing your own hardware/drivers and making the final design as slow as a device from 1995.

Basically you spend more time hacking into the system than making new hardware.

This is the only platform I'm aware of where the OS developers actively try to prevent you from making new hardware.

[Heiroglyph]

I know, and I agree, the Atari guys did get control of their platform earlier. However, I think you're missing my point; the reason the Atari guys got hold of their platform earlier is because they saw the benefits of open-source earlier. Amiga fans had this chance around the same time too, when AROS was announced, but largely chose to ignore the opportunity instead. That's the point I'm making.

That's a very valid point, but closed source doesn't normally preclude writing drivers for hardware.

In the Amiga case, writing drivers for any hardware not supported by plain OS3.1 is essentially impossible without some degree of illegality and reverse engineering.

In my experience, this is unique to Amiga derived systems.

AHI and OpenPCI only get you so far and these are our rare examples of how to do closed source mostly right.

I did have to work out how to get the source and permission to distribute OpenPCI because I wanted to create a new backplane with better throughput.

The only reason for that was because OpenPCI supports the Mediator which again doesn't have a public driver SDK.

When/if I distribute an updated OpenPCI, it will have to be a fork that doesn't work with Mediators because I don't agree with their terms.

Anyway, I'm interested in learning more about your hardware project, any chance of some info? What kind of hardware are you trying to build?

You can guess some of the failures from my comments in this thread, but beyond that I'd rather not comment in case my work-around projects come to fruition.

I've got NO problem with people making money from their OS development, it's hard and they deserve to make some money from their efforts, but they are shooting us all in the foot with their constant locking down of the hardware platform.