little wrote:
2. Legal: (A inc)
Let's review history please.
1. Back in the day PC clones had a phoenix bios to avoid paying IBM royalties for their IVM PC bios ang guess what, there was never a demand from big blue against those doing clones even though they took the market from them. The bios shipped with the minimig is the PIC controller program released under the GPL.
2. When apple clones arrived, companies were lazy and never created an MacOS compatible bios, the result? Steve Jobs returned to apple and prohibited these companies from bundling the bios or their operative system with the machines. Guess what, the miniming will not be bundled neither with the bios nor the operative system property of A inc.
IMO it would be the last nail on this legal issue if someone writes some verylog code so the miniming runs another 68k era computer, the Atari ST for example, so the minimig would be a generic 16 bit emulation solution.
Um.. wrong on both points.
1) The "BIOS" in the Amiga is the AmigaOS itself! The PIC loader is there to load this BIOS as well as the FPGA programming.
2) Incorrect here as well. Mac's used (until they switched to Intel) OpenFirmware, same thing the Pegasos used. OF, mind you, is an industry standard, IEEE-1275. Anyone can impliment it. Apple locked out the clones by killing access with custom chips, also by refusing to sell Mac OS seperately. Some of the clone makers held on, but with no OS, they too fell.
