Aos 3 -> aos 4

[HotRod]

What? That's absolutely the case. You can quite cheaply acquire Mac hardware that competes with basically any PPC Amigoid board except maybe the X1000, and stomps all of them into oblivion where price/performance is concerned. It's not even like there's a shortage - there's still tons of the things popping up on eBay and second-hand retail sites. G4/G5 Macs might not be all that great compared to new PC hardware, but if you want PPC hardware, you can hardly do any better (at least now that the PS3's OtherOS option is gone.)

Oh please... I got 256 MB VRAM on my ancient Radeon 9250 and the best macmini got 64 MB VRAM. The old macs are not all bad but they are just that, old. I as a user want to be able to have an option to buy something new if I'd like to. My powermac is very nice and all but... come on... this is a sad future I would say. "So what do you run AmigaOS on?", "Well I got this old mac that I bought from ebay", "But you can buy it new like if I'd like to get one?", "no, but check ebay, you can get cheap used macs there"... does it sound good to you?

This is true, but it hardly helps your point - OS4 is just as tied to the PPC architecture as MOS, but is confined to an even narrower range of hardware. If you really think PPC is a dead end, why the hell would you pay that kind of money for a machine you think is going to be useless in the near future?

The thing is that my amigaone hasn't been useless and still isn't. I can't help what you're thinking but maybe your thinking is the whole issue? Regarding tied to, the one of the Friedens wrote that it would take them about two weeks to do the inital port to x86 hardware and I don't remember how many months for it to be usable. Now they don't make false statements, at least none that I've read during all those years so I believe it's true. I paid that kind of money because my a4k was coming to an end and I wanted to continue using AOS. Guess what, I haven't regreted that for a second. Maybe if you had something to run it on you would know?

Case in point. Yes, PPC Macs are going to be dead and gone eventually - but so are the OS4 specialty boards.

True, I haven't said anything else. You and I will be dead and gone eventually too so I don't really know what your point is. I've made my point above, read it.

[HotRod]

I have used AOS4.x a little bit on the "classics" and could tell you that (forget about price and all those issues) the good news is that they did a remarkable job of making an 3.9 + Visual Prefs, Birdie2000 and MUI type of system work a whole lot easier, stable and quick, even on these old PPC machines.

The bad news is they did a remarkable job of making an 3.9 + Visual Prefs, Birdie2000 and MUI type of system work a whole lot easier, stable and quick, even on these old PPC machines.

Meaning, they would not break ranks and move on to offer something very new and different. And that is partly all our fault, sending the wrong messages that it should be a very 68K AOS but just faster and with more Aminet junk added on.

So, to me, they did a good job giving you what you asked for, as a 'community' voice / consensus.

I will never really go for the rabble of "NG Amiga" banter. They are lost. Amiga 68K however is finally picking up steam like the C64 scene and I'm reading about Assembly language! That crap is hard...

One thing here is that you can get rid of the hacks and they will be implemented to the system in a clean way. Also you can now drag windows outside the screen, change the side from any direction and other little things that are nice to have. Screendraging are back and so on, and that is just 4.0. I know that there's a hack for draging windows outside the screenborders for 3.x but AFAICR I never had much luck getting it to work. There are tons of other improvements than those that you listed.

[commodorejohn]

The thing is that my amigaone hasn't been useless and still isn't. I  can't help what you're thinking but maybe your thinking is the whole  issue? Regarding tied to, the one of the Friedens wrote that it would  take them about two weeks to do the inital port to x86 hardware and I  don't remember how many months for it to be usable. Now they don't make  false statements, at least none that I've read during all those years so  I believe it's true. I paid that kind of money because my a4k was  coming to an end and I wanted to continue using AOS. Guess what, I  haven't regreted that for a second. Maybe if you had something to run it  on you would know?

Maybe I would, but as an accelerator for my 3000 will set me back a half-grand easy, and a dedicated board will be quite a bit more than that, I'm not that motivated to find out. Maybe at some point when I've nabbed a cheap PPC Mac I'll give MorphOS a try, instead.

[SamuraiCrow]

Maybe at some point when I've nabbed a cheap PPC Mac I'll give MorphOS a try, instead.

Been there, done that.  It's ok but nothing to write home about.  It's a small, fast OS that's stuck on PPC.  If you're in the market for a Mac, don't settle for a bad one if you can afford to buy one that's over 1 GHz.  I have a 500 MHz PowerMac G4 and still don't have the money to buy a Radeon card nor a compatible network adapter.  I'll be impressed if they ever get shader support for the Radeon graphics cards.

[SamuraiCrow]

One thing here is that you can get rid of the hacks and they will be implemented to the system in a clean way. Also you can now drag windows outside the screen, change the side from any direction and other little things that are nice to have. Screendraging are back and so on, and that is just 4.0. I know that there's a hack for draging windows outside the screenborders for 3.x but AFAICR I never had much luck getting it to work. There are tons of other improvements than those that you listed.

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IExec->AllocVec(bufsize);vs.

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AllocVec(bufsize);and that is getting rid of the hacks in a clean way?

I realize that having the interfaces load into different registers based on what other libraries they call is faster but couldn't they have just used a custom calling convention for library calls?  Sheesh!

[TheGoose]

One thing here is that you can get rid of the hacks and they will be implemented to the system in a clean way. Also you can now drag windows outside the screen, change the side from any direction and other little things that are nice to have. Screendraging are back and so on, and that is just 4.0. I know that there's a hack for draging windows outside the screenborders for 3.x but AFAICR I never had much luck getting it to work. There are tons of other improvements than those that you listed.

Yes there are, I didn't use it enough to give more justice. The 1 click themeing in AOS4.1 is very cool; unpack, hit the icon and boom you Workbench is Transformed. I also liked how the AOS Title bar was customizable. I could pick out almost any kind of memory info my heart desired. I liked that for the 1st time I could see how much memory was left in the B-vision graphics card. At 800x600 16bit, I had 4 MB free. I could get more back with some tuning I'm sure. I think a lot of people here would love to migrate to it, just can't afford the hardware choices....

Just make a version for Mac mini and I'm back! Do it Hyperion.

[jorkany]

Just make a version for Mac mini and I'm back! Do it Hyperion.

NO - the X1000 is teh future of OS4!
lol

[fishy_fiz]

In answering the original question os4.x doesnt run much of my old favorite software without the use of UAE (and then too slowly as I like to use custom chipset stuff other than basic ocs/ecs floppy based games) and the things it gives me that are different to classic machines can be obtained elsewhere for much cheaper in MOS and AROS. It's not that Im against OS4.x, Im just not willing to pay that sort of money for a similar experience on slower hardware. Love my "amiga" hobby, but I have no loyalty to a trademark name.

[tone007]

Had OS4.1 on an AmigaOne for a few months, it was a cute toy.  Won't do it again, though.

[Piru]

Macs gives you that but for how long?

Likely much longer than Sam/X1000 will.

[drHirudo]

Better performance than a 50Mhz machine... wow! amazing! wonderful! let's bring more popcorn! We would seriously have a problem if performance/price ratio wasn't much better than 7 years ago... what? did I hear you say Pegasos2-G4/1Ghz for 500€? nahhh I'm sure our wonderful 2011 brand new boing ball hardware is way faster and cheaper than that 7 year old hardware released in small batches :-P

I think the overuse of PC hardware damaged some of your perception. The CPU is not the only performing part of the computer. While the Pegasos have similar to the Sam 460 processor (1 GHz), the Sam 460 have better memory controller, PCI express slots, SATA2, better Ethernet and other components that are better performing than on Pegasos. The Pegasos was a nice machine 7 years ago, but the Sam 460 beats it. The Sam 460 is smaller as well. Sorry, but I would prefer to have Sam 460 for little extra (brand new) instead of old Pegasos machine.

The WinUAE advocates probably enjoy having classic software at fast speeds as long as they don't need to use the operating system. Because even highly tuned AmigaOS 3.9 installation I found to be very obsolete compared to what I got used to on AmigaOS 4. But then again most of the AmigaOS 4 components that I take for granted now, and got used to them are lacking in AmigaOS 3.9.

[drHirudo]

Likely much longer than Sam/X1000 will.

Someone manufactures PPC Mac clones? Probably Dave Haynie still have his Mac clone schematics so he will bring them on the market. Until this happens, the new Amiga hardware is getting developed all the time (including the Natami).

For the record - because I have cheap Sega Mega Drive clone I wanted to have an original Sega. To my surprise the Sega Mega Drive (original kinda) is still produced in China and the seller had his logo on the case. Probably some Chinese manufacturer will start producing Mac clones at some stage in the future, that will be compatible with MorphOS.

[TheBilgeRat]

Probably some Chinese manufacturer will start producing Mac clones at some stage in the future, that will be compatible with MorphOS.

Probably at some point China will be forced to abide by copyright :lol:

[ChaosLord]

I'd like to know why people using AOS 3 doesn't jump on the AOS 4 train? What is holding you back exactly?

1. Not compatible

2. High cost of the hardware

3. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include an enhanced Paula.  Or even a plain old 1985 Paula.

4. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include  an enhanced copper.  Or even a plain old 1985 copper.

[drHirudo]

1. Not compatible

More than 80% of the 68K applications I tried on my AmigaOne worked without any glitch. 10% worked with some tricks, and the rest 10% did not work at all and were forced to run under E-UAE. That's good enough for me.

Do you know that many of the 1.3 software is not compatible with KS 2.0+?
Do you multitask on your classic Amiga while playing WHDLoad games?
Well, on my AmigaOne with AmigaOS 4 I can multitask with WHDLoad games and run 1.3 applications as well.
In fact I can set 1.3 applications to be practically transparent to the OS - they write their files on my AmigaOS 4 partition.

2. High cost of the hardware

What's the price of 68060 board nowadays?

3. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include an enhanced Paula.  Or even a plain old 1985 Paula.

Nalle Puh can do the work in software (cheaper).

4. Whoever designed the A1 and Sam forgot to include  an enhanced copper.  Or even a plain old 1985 copper.

Something like Blitzen for copper?

5. Whoever designed the Amiga forgot to include an enchanced SID to replay C64 songs.

Wait, SIDs tunes are replayed nice with DeliTracker and EaglePlayer on classic Amiga machine in software, without the extra cost of SID chip.

[commodorejohn]

Someone manufactures PPC Mac clones? Probably Dave Haynie still have his Mac clone schematics so he will bring them on the market. Until this happens, the new Amiga hardware is getting developed all the time (including the Natami).

You do realize the Mac is entirely a software system, right? That's the whole reason they've managed two architecture changes and one massive ROM alteration so effortlessly, and the whole reason ShapeShifter works. Basically any PPC hardware could be made to run Mac OS 8-X with some modification, or more likely, another OS with a simple compatibility layer for Mac applications.

Probably at some point China will be forced to abide by copyright :lol:

Hah, not as long as we're so dependent on them for cheap manufactured goods, they won't