New Kickstart 3.9.1 68k on the way

[olsen]

The reason why I'm against that ROM-idea is simply because it does not allow users to exchange components. If I have to fiddle-open my machine every time I'm updating a component, chances are better than even that I'll break the ROM socket at some time. A minimal bootstrap ROM could be very stable and would not require a lot of updating. Everything else can be placed on flash, and can be upgraded easily by writing on a regular file system.

The reason why I am skeptical of moving components and in an out of ROM space is that the approach is beholden to 1980'ies/1990'ies design constraints which no longer apply today.

When the original Amiga was designed RAM was still very expensive, the 68000 CPU was in the sweet spot of being both fast and not too expensive (as compared to the 68010/MMU or 68020/MMU combination which Sun Microsystems used in the Sun 2 and Sun 3 workstations), and the common storage medium was the Sony 3.5" double-sided floppy disk.

Loading the ROM operating system components from disk was expensive: the memory required (256 KBytes) cost real money back in 1986. Commodore had to work on producing a cost-reduced design, and switching to a ROM was inevitable.

Loading operating system components from floppy disk was slow (even on the original 64K Apple Macintosh, which arguably had even worse disk performance than the Amiga, at half the storage space -- did you know that it would either compress data in memory or swap it to disk in order to make that 64K memory budget possible, at the expense of killing system performance?), which meant that you could get a performance boost out of sticking as much into the Amiga Kickstart ROM as possible. And this is exactly what happened. Consequently, the Amiga had one of the largest ROMs for personal computers at the time.

Today we have much cheaper, and more RAM available. The primary storage device is no longer the floppy disk, but a hard disk or SSD. Thanks to the modular design of the Amiga operating system almost everything in the ROM can be replaced later at run time at the expense of committing it to RAM. It's technically possible to have your Amiga load replacements for the components in ROM once, reboot, and then run with all new components. This will survive a warm reboot, and it even works on a machine which has no MMU.

So... why cram everything into the ROM? To save the initial cold boot, load and reboot? Your Amiga can probably do this more quickly than you can say "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".

[olsen]

Haven't you been able to contact Heinz Wrobel? Jens spoke to him quite "recently".. well... two years ago. However, you might want to ask him for an email adress or a telefone number?

Contacting Heinz is not the problem, trust me. Having known Heinz since 1995 (we met on what developed into a consulting gig for what became Amiga International GmbH), I expect him to lend his support only to project work which proves to be legally and technically on sound foundations.

His work on the Amiga operating system components, which includes the FFS, the mass storage drivers and more, builds upon existing code which is not owned by him. How the rights of the owners affect what he could do with his work needs to be clear before he could be expected to lend a hand.

[olsen]

@thor
and you are really sure that they are at all actually in a position and beyond that the only ones who can make legal claims about any work you might invest into amiga sources? have you been presented enough evidence to verify this?

besides the stubbornnes with which they have refused any support for amiga in the past doesnt make me think they might reconsider without actually losing the face and they know it.

Please - this is speculation.

How about the following story: you want to build a business by creating a new product which runs on contemporary computer hardware, as opposed to machines which were last manufactured almost 10 years ago, and you invest capital both in porting the old operating system to the new hardware, and you work with the people who make that hardware so you could sell the result. The beginning and the end of this process involves considerable risk, and there is only so much risk your enterprise can tolerate.

Now throw in unhappy events such as software development taking much longer than expected (um, this is an industry-wide problem, actually), a major falling out between the software and hardware partners, expensive and prolonged lawsuits to make everybody miserable, a financial crisis, a recession, you get the picture.

AmigaOS 3.1 for 68k machines was not considered a viable product. There was nobody who could have developed it, provided support, documentation, etc. There was nobody who would have wanted to buy it in sufficient numbers to even sustain development, support, etc.

The situation seems to have changed by now. But given the twisted history of the Amiga as it happened in the last 20 years, it would still need capital and manpower to "resuscitate" AmigaOS 3.1 for 68k, which entails quite some risk.

If there is a genuine appetite for an updated AmigaOS 3.1 for the 68k platform ("classic", emulated or reborn in FPGA), it's up to you (well, not you personally: I mean everybody who would want to see such a project happening) to state what they want from it and let Hyperion know that there is sufficient demand for it.

We can swap stories and speculate all day on this forum. But nothing tangible will happen until you convince the people who can make it happen.

[olsen]

It doesnt matter if they have the evidence or not. Reality shows that about a week ago they allowed a remastered AmigaOS 3.1 kit to be sold, and no one had proof that they could legaly challenge that action (you can now buy this version at AmigaKit). And most importantly, if I am not wrong, I believe they still have a lawyer that doesnt charge a single penny, and is willing to go all the way (Ben Hermans).

I learned that the issue of who owns what and what they can do or cannot do with what they at some point obtained a license for is rather murky for the Amiga in general.

For example, when Amiga Technologies GmbH was slowly starting to bring back Amiga hardware (both from parts made in 1993 and stacked in the Philippines and from new components manufactured), we tried to get the developer material into shape, too. The end result, published after Amiga Technologies GmbH had gone bust, was the Amiga Developer CD 2.1 (1999). But before we went along this path, we actually tried to either get the documentation back into print, or at least obtain the rights to publish it. Turns out that the contracts Commodore signed with the original publishers (Bantam books and Addison-Wesley) were poorly made. It certainly didn't help that nobody at these publishers knew that they used to publish that stuff, although they did still own the publication rights.

When ESCOM went under and the Amiga assets were acquired by Gateway 2000 the new owners didn't realize that they had bought an entire culture along with that important patent on serial communications between computer keyboard and computer (they only wanted a banana, but what they got was the whole jungle, plus a gorilla holding that banana). Contracts made by previously existing legal entities (Commodore, ESCOM, etc.) were not necessarily carried over, licenses were not necessarily revoked, not even all contracts covering licenses, etc. were known.

Which boils down to the fact that multiple parties still have rights to use the Amiga operating system in commercial products, and unless they slug it out in a drawn-out expensive legal match, or buy out everybody else, we'll never see a single entitity controlling everything.

[olsen]

how has the situation changed? os4 market has dried up and one needs to look for something else to ruin? and that needs to be founded yet?

The situation has changed insofar as there is new hardware available on which the 68k software can run well, if not extremely well. Personally, I'm wondering why one couldn't do more with the FPGA-based solutions than just to reuse an existing Kickstart ROM -- why not customize it for a specific purpose and go beyond merely reproducing existing functionality (both the CDTV and the CD32 are customized versions of the existing Amiga operating system platform, to give you an idea of what could be possible by building upon the operating system to deliver something new)? It's certainly possible.

Also, see the ongoing discussion in this very forum. As Cosmos has demonstrated, there is an appetite for an operating system version which is different from and better than what was last cast into ROM images in 1993/1994.

Funny people such as Thomas and me, who were involved in updating previous operating system versions, haven't exactly unlearned how to do that, so there is an option to actually make profound changes to the operating system if this were called for.

This is all hypothetical, of course. It could be done if there were sufficient interest to back an AmigaOS rework if the current technology owner gave its consent, a plan were made, the time, manpower and funding could be found. None of this is impossible.

[olsen]

@olsen

It could be done if there were sufficient interest to back an AmigaOS rework if the current technology owner gave its consent,

And who would that be to the best of your knowledge?
(given the understanding that likely only a court could decide this)

#6

I may be wrong on this, since I didn't pay enough attention at the time, but I seem to remember that the settlement between Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion back in 2009 (?) gave Hyperion exclusive and permanent use of AmigaOS 3.1. This may not cover the rights of 3rd parties who provided CrossDOS, bru and the bitmap/outline fonts included on the Workbench, only those parts owned by Commodore.

My best guess is that Hyperion would be the party to ask for consent.

[olsen]

I find it hilarious that you guys cannot contribute to AROS, it's just mind blowingly silly.

Well, we could try, but there's a risk of tainting the project. AROS is on safer grounds if it's a clean room implementation of the API rather than if people who had access to the original AmigaOS source code had been involved. Personally, I don't want to risk compromising the AROS project.

[olsen]

Thor: yeah, and we all know how well that went for SCO.

It took 6 or 7 years for the boulder rolling downhill to come to a stop, during which time the status and future prospects of Linux as it existed prior to the case going to court was in doubt.

This may look tangential, but there was a case related to this in the early 1990'ies and it concerned BSD Unix. If I remember correctly, AT&T brought claims against the University of California because BSD Unix was likely to use trademarks and contain code which AT&T had claim to. Prior to that case finally coming to court, companies such as Sun Microsystems and SGI were using BSD Unix derived operating systems had switched to AT&T Unix because it was doubtful that the legal standing of BSD Unix would be upheld.

Because no Unix-like operating system was legally available for free during that time, Linux development got a boost. By the time BSD Unix was found not to use trademarks and code which AT&T had claim to, Linux had matured quite a bit and was well on its way to where it is today. But companies such as SGI and Sun Microsystems didn't switch back to BSD Unix. BSD Unix in its final form did not become available until 1993. Remember how far Linux had come during that time?

You don't want to get tangled up in a court case like this. While it may eventually result in a decision in which a jury finds that the initial claim did not have merit, years can pass during which there are side-effects you don't want to go through with.

Laws can change, the law can remain unchanged but the interpretation of it can change, the law can remain unchanged but its effects may be changed by multilateral international agreements. Here in Europe we shouldn't take the current application of laws concerning patentability of software, and how intellectual property rights are applied for granted. These may change, and it may be wise to avoid weakening projects such as AROS by accident. It did happen to BSD Unix, and it did happen to Linux, in spite of the fact that both cases ended in favour of each respective operating system.

[olsen]

Out side of Kickstart switchers, are there any rom boards that would allow the user to add a user rom that would allow the addition of more rom space?

Please note that adding a larger flash ROM than is needed for the Amiga operating system does not by itself allow the Amiga to use the larger space. The flash ROM still needs to fit into the available address space, and the operating system has to know where to look for more operating system components. Where the early system startup looks for components to use is hard-coded.

That said, a larger flash ROM could be very useful if you could switch between different portions of that ROM to be visible. It could provide insurance against flashing an operating system ROM that does not work correctly, and provide you with a backup copy of the last working configuration which you could then switch back to.