Wilse wondered:
What exactly does this 'dongle' on the A1 stop you from doing and in what way is the Pegasos any different?
;-) The way I understand it, AmigaOS 4 and later will look for proprietary code in the motherboard’s BIOS ROM at boot time. If it isn’t there, it will not boot, and you can’t run the OS.
If a manufacturer wishes to add such code to his motherboards, so that his customers can run AOS 4, he will have to license the “dongle code” from Amiga, Inc. The license will require that any board manufactured with such code onboard must be sold with a copy of AmigaOS 4, and not without it.
The sum of these two requirements is that anyone who CAN run AmigaOS 4 will already have a copy, so the pirate has no one to whom to sell his fifty or so burned “backup” copies of AmigaOS 4.
This decision was made by Amiga, Inc., who have more data than most of the rest of us regarding just how many copies of AOS 3.9 are legit, and how many are pirate. Whether the decision to require “dongle code” on the motherboard is a
wise decision or not is another matter, and goes beyond the scope of this thread.
:roll: It’s also been the subject for many flame wars on this and other web sites.
Genesis’ Pegasos doesn’t have Amiga’s code onboard, and so will not be able to run AOS4. MorphOS does not require anything similar to Amiga’s “dongle code” and thus should run on an AmigaOne. (Whether it
will is another matter. Someone will surely try it and let us know.)
