12 years away....

[Cyberus]

Hi,
I'm afraid it's one of those "I'm new to this site" posts. I recently stumbled across my old amiga and hd in the loft and thought it's time to get back into this again! I was into the amiga in quite a big way at the end of the eighties. I still have a copy of blitz basic somewhere and a load of 'grapevine' disk-zines, but much of my stuff has long since vanished/been ruined by damp/been thrown away.
Obviously I can do a bit of research on the net, but is there anywhere I can catch up with what's been happening over the last 12-14 years (I vaguely remember Escom buying Amiga and then going bust, and people starting to put there a1200s into towers, but that's about it...)
Also, I have one of those GVP hard disks with the edge connectors (impact series II), and I was wondering:
a) what's a good way of dusting the insides without zapping the ICs with static
b)what kind of scuzzie drive do I need to replace the 52mb unit that's sitting there now? It says Quantum ProDrive LPS
***Just got the thing apart, its's a 50-pin unit right?***
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, many thanks....

[SlimJim]

Welcome!
 
12 years? Oh man... you have some serious catching up to
do...
 
... or not, depending on who you ask. :-P
 
At any rate, you'd better read back so you understand
the current intrigues and who the major players are.
Welcome [back] to the zoo that is Amiga world!
 
I'm sure someone will adress your hardware questions in a
heartbeat.
.
SlimJim

[Nick]

Welcome to this place. Make your self at home.

Yes I think you have some reading to do. Yes there are people who create/spread rumours. DOn`t listen to them. They are weirdos who just like to stir things up. MOST Amiga users are great, theres just a few rotten apples.

[downix]

@Cyberius

a)  Compressed air, can be bought in a can.

b)  Pretty much any SCSI drive will work, might need an adaptor tho, but those are easy to find.

As for catching up on the community:

Amiga is owned by Amiga, Inc, who do software for Microsoft.

AmigaOS is being enhanced by Hyperion, ported to PowerPC, etc.  Will be released... sometime this year they predict.

PowerPC motherboards are availible from Eyetech and Genesi.  Eyetech's is a rebadged board from Mai called the Teron.  Genesi designed their own, called the Pegasos.

Genesi makes MorphOS, which is the finished result of the PowerAmiga project from the Escom days.

There is Amithlon, which is an Amiga emulator on top of the Linux kernel.

There is AmigaOS XL, which is the same as Amithlon but on top of QNX.

There is AROS, which is a clone of AmigaOS.

For information about all of these, in order:

http://www.amiga.com
http://os.amiga.com
http://www.eyetech.co.uk
http://www.pegasosppc.com
http://www.morphos.de
don't know Amithlon and AmigaoS XL's homepages
http://www.aros.org

There's a lot of schism in the community right now, I'm sorry to say.  Blaming someone for it is pointless at this time, but I felt you should be warned.  The Amiga community is fighting amongst themselves over who is right.... about what I'm not sure anymore.

[Atheist]

Amiga, Inc is still promoting and attempting to bring an Amiga to market. It should be available within 6 months of today. The AmigaOne using a PPC @600 or 800 MHz cpu (you select which), Amiga Operating System 4.0 (AOS4.0).
It doesn't support OCS/ECS.
It doesn't support AGA.
BUT it CAN/WILL in the future, 3 to 9 months (this timeframe is what I hope for).


Genesi makes MorphOS, which is finished and some claim it's buggy, others say rock solid. I don't know, but it wasn't made from the original source code but AOS4.0 IS from the original code.

Amithlon is in tatters. The company selling this, had AmigaOS XL on the same cd. Apparently, they wouldn't pay AInc. royalties, for the copies they sold, and kept the author, Bernd Meyer, from releasing it on his own, and also threatened him legally from producing a second version to come out. The situation is currently at a standstill. It was for pc's (pentiums). There was a boycott of sorts, leveled at the makers of AmigaOS XL because of this. Bernd would like to make a second version, and actually, is mostly (90%?) finished, but not allowd to release it.
Not from the original source code, it emulates the 680x0 cpu's. I don't think it supports AGA.

AROS, I believe, will be available for a few different CPU's, but the most work has been done on the x86  version. It, sadly, might take 1  year or more to finish. It has a high likelyhood of being free. They don't have access to the source code. They are making a version that will boot right from the hard drive, no linux, windows, anything, necessary. I don't think it supports AGA.

The 800MHz model may be able to replace the cpu with a 1.42 GHz G4, when available. It comes on a removable board. Max ram, 2 Gigs. Maybe the new boards can have ram sockets of their own with an Articia P chip on it.

I am an adherent to AOS4.0.

Amiga! "You'll always remember me", says Amy the mascot.

[Dan]

AROS,  I don't think it supports AGA.

Oh yes it does, if it´s run on an A1200 or A4000 that is :-)
But not on other hardware to my knowledge.

[strobe]

12 years? Oh man... you have some serious catching up to
do...

Not really :roll:

[Quixote]

@Cyberus:

;-) Drivers for your GVP Impact! series II controller can be found at http://www.L8R.net/install, if you need them.  They may also have documentation for it, as well.

That site has gone to the trouble of obtaining permission from the respective copyright holders, so the software they host is legal, and free.  They specialize in drivers for obsolete hardware.

:-( As for putting a new hard drive into the unit, be aware that Workbench versions from the late eighties used 32-bit addressing, and are thus limited to hard drives of 4 Gigabytes and smaller, with partitions limited to 2 gigs for most directory utilities.  It's a file system issue.

;-) Later versions of Workbench (3.5, 3.9), and some of the filesystems found on Aminet, however, don't share this limitation.  Armed with one of these,  you should be able to use any sized SCSI drive you can find.  And, yes, it's a 50-pin unit, so they're kind of rare, now.  Try locating a computer recycling center near you.  They may have them cheap.

[bloodline]

I think the above comments have actually covered everything worth knowing!!!

But to summerise:

Amiga Inc. are making (contracting) a new PPC based motherboard, they have done the same with AmigaOS, which is being ported as we speak by Hyperion. Hyperion state that the project is in a quite advanced state, but this has not been demonstrated to the public yet. Hyperion also claim to be having problems running 68k (original) Amiga programs in the new OS at the moment, due to emulator problems. Does not attempt to emulate Amiga custom hardware.

MorphOS is a new OS designed to run on another PPC based motherboard called Pegasos. MorphOS is not finished, but can run 68K code. The Pegasos board with an early version of MorphOS is avaiable to buy now, with future updates to the OS free (IIRC). Some AROS code has been used in this project. Does not attempt to emulate Amiga custom hardware.

AROS is a free AmigaOS clone, it was written from scratch to the original AmigaOS specifications. It is portable to virtually any CPU and/or architecture, notably x86 and 68k at the moment (with limited PPC, ARM, etc.. work already done). It does not attempt to run 68K code on non 68K systems. When run on an Amiga it can replace AmigaOS without the user being aware of this. Any existing AmigaOS C source code should run fine on it. AROS is not finished yet. Does not attempt to emulate Amiga custom hardware.

All three project are great, and have chose totally different paths to achive an AmigaOS style environment. AmigaOS and MorphOS are compeating in the PPC market and are comercial (you have to pay for them).
While most of the AROS development has been for the x86 (Athlon, Pentium etc..) and the Palm hand-held  device, with the dev team looking at the Athlon64. AROS is non comercial (free to download and use).

I hope that covers the so called "OS Wars", which don't really exist, except in the minds of a few " Unenlightened Amiga Users"  :-P

I should also mention "Am1thc0n" (R) (Edit:-name changed to protect Amiga.org), and Ill fated project. Basicly and Emulator which ran on top of an x86 CPU and made it look like a 68K. This allows AmigaOS 3.1 to run on a PC without realising it is a PC (it makes AmigaOS think it's running on an Amiga without the Custom Harware)... A realy nice idea, though not as fast as a native OS. This was Poject was "killed" by the small mindedness of some of the parties involved.
The original author may or may not release a new project called Umilator which is a very similar idea, but with improvments.
This project is very similar to UAE, but faster, without the custom hardware emulation and is a comercial project.

I must appologise for any bias in this document as I am involved with one of the projects, but I have tried to be as objective as possible.

[lempkee]

since alot of people here really just remebers a few days at a time i might share that there is alot more happened the last decade..

like elbox , check their site at Elbox.com , they gave us pci for the amiga , which handles all from GFX cards (voodoo3->5) to sound (sb128+fm801) + ethernet 10/100 , tvcards and USb (2.0).

Also they have a Sharkppc board which will start shipping when os4 is ready, this is a G3 or G4 board and is an addon for a pci slot, ie anyone with a mediator will and can use it , this is the same cpu as in the AmigaOnes and pegasos more or less, and will run os4 (it seems) ..

You can also run Os4 on your a1200 or bigbox amiga if you have an Blizzardppc or Cybersppc , theese boards was made by Phase5 which later was renamed (or bought up)to DCE.. theese boards is 603 and 604 based cards and was firstly shown in 97, theese boards was the first outing into the ppc community, sadly it took many years before a real os came and there still aint one , it uses such as WOS (which is supported in os4 and in morphos) and PUP (which is more or less abandoned now (THANK GOd!), wos made its biggest appearence in 99, and thats when there finally was a reason to buy a ppc board, before that....there was more or less no reason at all...

There is 2 more pci boards on amiga but one of em is canned by now and its called the G-REXx (DCe) , there is another one called promethus which is only for the a4k , but it seems it never took off in the same way as mediators did. (only one to buy imho is MEDIATOR , as it have the best support and most products supported)

beyond the hw factors there has been abit of software in all of this also, you better check out AMIGA FLAME for more info on that, since mentioning it would take too much space here.

other than that i dont know really, remeber you can use normal IDE drives in any A1200 or A4k ,
all you need is a homemade cable, if you need more info on this let us know as its made within 5 minutes if you have the connectors and a normal iDe cable.

cheers and welcome