OS4 Release Questions...

[SamuraiCrow]

nyteschayde wrote:
I don't really understand the argument that OS4 needs to wait until new PPC hardware is released. I understand that ideally the OS will run best on new hardware but from what I understand it runs great on the thousands of PPC enabled classic machines. It *was* designed to support the classic machines so what's the deal?

It has to be corporate red tape. So my question is, how do we fix it? We should be able to appeal to the company holding back whether its Hyperion or AInc or whomever. How do we get them to understand that money coming in for classic machines and people who just want to stock up or support the OS can *only* help?!

The idea is to have a big rollout when AmigaOS 4 is finally released.  There will be advertizing and everything.  It wouldn't make sense to advertise a system that cannot sell to new users because of no new hardware would it?

As for the Mac, they use custom chipsets made explicitly by Apple for the Macintosh.  To build an OS to support it you'd need reference materials and permission from Apple to do it.  Reverse engineering works for open-source freeware operating systems like AROS because there is no money behind the designers and essentially nobody for Apple to sue.

Who wants to be stuck for the rest of their lives trying to find old machines that may fail at any minute when they can have a brand new machine instead.  I for one am thankful that there are new boards coming out other than the AmigaOne line since that means we may have some reliable machines at last.

[nyteschayde]

@DJBase

Do you honestly think the number of new Amiga hardware owners are greater than the number of classic PPC owners? I find it a little hard to believe.

@SamuraiCrow

C'mon man. Many many distributions of Linux exist including Darwin which is released by Apple all boot and run and have hardware acceleration, etc... for existing Mac machines. There is no lack of documentation on doing what would be required. Furthermore I would be very surprised if they don't have a working version of it for mac hardware, the only thing that would need to be dropped (assuming they do) is the requirement for the amiga TPM hardware built in to the A1s/A1 compatibles.

[itix]

@SamuraiCrow

The idea is to have a big rollout when AmigaOS 4 is finally released. There will be advertizing and everything.

It indeed would be futile have TV commercials on MTV now when hardware is not available.

[xeron]

You can at last get the serial of the BPPC/CSPPC with Scout or WhichAmiga output.

Oh cool. The one thing that had stopped me registering so far was that i'd have to open my A4000 to get at the serial number!

[CHR_ZD]

Soemthing for sure... if os4 will ever be released it will be a big laughingstock. Why? Because PPC is dead. An OS that can't run on x86 is a deadstock already. Amiga wasn't meant to be some obscure geek thing. It was a computer for the masses. Their policy is to destroy it forever.

[nyteschayde]

@CHR_ZD

On one hand I'd like to see linux or even MacOS on either the PS3 or the XBOX360 since both have a high chance of being compatible and since both platforms will be the greatest perpetuator of the PPC platform for mass consumers at the moment.

On the other hand, I'd be extremely worried that OS4 wouldn't be taken seriously at all on either of these consoles unless other major OSes were ported first. It's a shame both of those consoles have more processing power than many home machines and at a fraction of the cost.

@all

I really think the OS should come out sooner than later. They can make up the cost of development on classic users and deploy the OS in an advertised and possibly even patched and more functional version on the new hardware when it becomes available. I have heard from multiple sources that the OS is basically ready for a release and would have been released were it not for the lack of hardware.