Why was there nothing after os 3.9?

[guest11527]

Mike you are right os 3.9 is actually a hack/patch fest lmao. Thats why they called them Hack and patch instead of Haage and partner.

No, not really. While it is certainly true that 3.9 included many utlities that came from Aminet, it is also true that 3.9 did not contain patches. The typical Aminet patch has been developed by ignoring system specs or without enough knowledge of the insides of AOS, and is hacked into the system, 3.9 improvements were made from the 3.1 and 3.5 Os sources. Nothing had to be patched - the software was reviewed, improved and corrected. 3.9 math libraries is such a case, the workbench was created this way, so did the FFS.

It is not a new model to buy third party software and include it in the Os. AREXX was such a case (except that CBM never paid for it, shame on them!), AmigaBasic is such a case, the NanoEmacs is, BRU is... So, don't look down on 3.9 because the added software did not come from CBM. It could not. CBM was dead - for the better.

[matthey]

If anything he can create another bootable partition and put the hack fest bb 3 and 4 on that and keep his stable system intact.

The "unofficial" Boing Bag 3 is mostly a collection of bug fixes for AmigaOS 3.9 that had occurred over the years with an easy to use installer. It's stable and I highly recommended it to every AmigaOS 3.9 owner. The "unofficial" Boing Bag 4 is a work in progress with some new fixes and enhancements but also some new bugs. Modules are removed if they are found to be problems. It's more for users that are willing to live with a little less stability but want more enhancements. These users are basically beta testers and it's helpful if they report bugs and wishes to Gulliver and Minuous.

[wawrzon]

I don't think that this is really the case. The problem is that the various owners of Amiga technology (Escom, Gateway...) all tried to "milk" the platform and squeeze money out of a system that was already dead to begin with. There wasn't any money to make on Amiga back then, except that the various investors and owners did not understand this. It would have required a massive investment to bring the technology up to date, and none of the "investors" actually had enough interest to actually invest into it, including CBM. Amiga was lacking behind already, CBM just tried to sell the old hardware without investment, and all "investors" afterwards tried the same - not realizing the death of the platfom.

has this ever really changed?

[psxphill]

CBM just tried to sell the old hardware without investment

That isn't entirely true. They were investing, just not in the right things.
AAA was started in 1988 and dragged on and on. It's been said that AAA didn't get enough investment, but IMO it shouldn't have gotten any investment at all.
 
AGA was done in a year by a couple of engineers who decided that AAA was going nowhere and that something else needed to be done.
 
If AGA had been started in 1988 then commodores future would be different.

[stefcep2]

I don't think that this is really the case. The problem is that the various owners of Amiga technology (Escom, Gateway...) all tried to "milk" the platform and squeeze money out of a system

YES

that was already dead to begin with. There wasn't any money to make on Amiga back then, except that the various investors and owners did not understand this.

Disagree. If you have paying customers, you can make money.  Amiga had the most loyal fan base of any platform.  All they needed to do was find a way to run Doom at 486 levels- eg an A1300 with 68030 50 mhz and CDROM as the base model, and 68040/68060 RTG support eg CV64 plus TV output built in for the professional market.  This would have bought them time and satisfied the user for a while.

It would have required a massive investment to bring the technology up to date, and none of the "investors" actually had enough interest to actually invest into it, including CBM. Amiga was lacking behind already, CBM just tried to sell the old hardware without investment, and all "investors" afterwards tried the same - not realizing the death of the platform.

Its true everyone wanted to milk Amiga's reputation from the 80's.

But they could have kept going with the 68060 for a while if they managed to contain costs to Apple Quadra levels levels.  That would have bought them time to port the OS to PPC.  The PPC CHRP hardware was already there for them to use-they could have fitted the machines with 604's and high end graphics cards- Amigans always would pay to be ahead of the curve-Amiga at launch was not cheap!  Later economies of scale lets you compete on price too

[stefcep2]

No, not really. While it is certainly true that 3.9 included many utlities that came from Aminet, it is also true that 3.9 did not contain patches. The typical Aminet patch has been developed by ignoring system specs or without enough knowledge of the insides of AOS, and is hacked into the system, 3.9 improvements were made from the 3.1 and 3.5 Os sources. Nothing had to be patched - the software was reviewed, improved and corrected. 3.9 math libraries is such a case, the workbench was created this way, so did the FFS.

I didn't know the math libraries had changed.

What is different about the Maths libraries in 3.9? Are they any faster?

[matthey]

I didn't know the math libraries had changed.

What is different about the Maths libraries in 3.9? Are they any faster?

The big change is 6888x instructions using the fpsp.resource instead of trapping for the 68040 and 68060. This is faster and more multitasking friendly (although not as fast as CPU specific math libraries). There are also various bug fixes for cos, exp, log, acos, asin, pow, etc. The problems serious enough that the developer (it looks like ThoR's *work*) wrote about pow:

"I don't know who wrote this, but I recommend taking a basic course in mathematics and numerics before writing math libraries."

[Sean Cunningham]

But they could have kept going with the 68060 for a while if they managed to contain costs to Apple Quadra levels levels.  That would have bought them time to port the OS to PPC.  The PPC CHRP hardware was already there for them to use-they could have fitted the machines with 604's and high end graphics cards- Amigans always would pay to be ahead of the curve-Amiga at launch was not cheap!  Later economies of scale lets you compete on price too

I'm thinking you're misremembering the price of Quadras.  The Quadra 700, the most directly equivalent product to the Amiga 4000, though released the year prior, was $6000 base price, over $2000 more than the Amiga.  The Quadra 950, released the same year as the A4000 was $7200.  

The Amiga was always cheaper than a roughly equivalent Mac.  Amigans, some, spent a lot of money on peripherals but not on their base systems, relative to what competing Mac and name-brand Intel boxes cost.  But still, Amigans were not really spenders.  And they were rampant pirates.  This, and Commodore's disinterest in its dealer base, made it practically impossible for the small, independent Amiga dealer to exist anymore by the early 1990s.

AGA was done in a year by a couple of engineers who decided that AAA was going nowhere and that something else needed to be done.

It was just too little, too late.  Once games looked better and played better on DOS machines it was all over.  It didn't really matter that for some specific animation and motion graphics based work the AGA offered slight performance and capabilities not to be found on any Mac or PC.  I didn't give a crap about DOOM but I do remember being particularly depressed when I first saw how much better Syndicate was on a garden variety VGA system.

[guest11527]

Disagree. If you have paying customers, you can make money.  Amiga had the most loyal fan base of any platform.  

A loyal fan basis yes. Paying customers, no. That was exactly the problem with CBM - CBM only targetted the hobbyist market, and they were neither willing nor able to pay the prices to make the business profitable. CBM failed to get a foot into the business market (as IBM did) or into the creative market (as Apple did). Failure of marketting - probably CBM thought that good technology sells by itself. That's simply not true. Good marketing and a brand name sells.  

But they could have kept going with the 68060 for a while if they managed to contain costs to Apple Quadra levels levels.  That would have bought them time to port the OS to PPC.  The PPC CHRP hardware was already there for them to use-they could have fitted the machines with 604's and high end graphics cards- Amigans always would pay to be ahead of the curve-Amiga at launch was not cheap!  Later economies of scale lets you compete on price too

Except that the user basis would have been unable to pay the prices of Apple Quadra, and except that PPC is/was another dead end. Rewriting the Os is a major undertaking, AOS has a considerable amount of design flaws, one of them being too tightly bound to the hardware, with too much assembly in it. Yes, the cycle counter party will again argue that it is faster this way, but it also means that it failed faster by making it hard to port. If CBM would have used proper abstraction and would have been stayed away from low-level assembly, porting to PPC or (better) x86 would have been pretty smooth.

[Sean Cunningham]

CBM failed to get a foot into the business market (as IBM did) or into the creative market (as Apple did)...

That bolded part isn't true.  The Amiga owned the desktop video market, at the hobbyist level as well as professional level thanks in no small part to NewTek.  However difficult it was to sell an Amiga to your average computer user for...whatever...VideoToasters sold as fast as NewTek could produce them.  You only need one "killer app" or suite to dominate a particular niche market and the Amiga had it.  NewTek was the tide that lifted all boats where animation and video were concerned.

Commodore going belly up created a significant problem for NewTek in this regard because the demand for the VideoToaster was only going up when all of a sudden you couldn't get any more host Amigas.  The demand was so high that VideoToaster resellers were buying dead Amiga 4000s for up to $1500 in Los Angeles in 1994 and 1995 so that they could cobble together working systems (the same as we were doing at Digital Domain to keep as many of our Personal Animation Recorder stations up as possible...what a crap model the A4000 turned out to be).  It was 1999 before the NT version of the Toaster was released.  Uncoupling Lightwave from the Toaster in 1994 is likely just about all that kept revenue flowing though I'm betting the days of Ferraris and private jets was behind them.

At the time two major primetime series had visual effects done by Amigas (Babylon 5 and SeaQuest DSV).  It would be a few years later, after the Amiga was out of the picture, before the Mac made real inroads in these areas once dominated by the Amiga.  Commodore themselves more or less behaved as if they were unaware of this phenomenon but had they fully embraced just this one facet (while improving gaming performance) and not tripped over their own mis-managed feet they'd have been okay.  

In 1994, when they went under, there was nothing even close to the VT on any other platform and, in fact, neither Apple, SGI or the Windows market had the depth of both software and hardware solutions for this market performing at the standards and quality of what was available on the Amiga.  SGI tried coming out with video capable boards and they were a complete joke.  The best way to get high quality video in and out of an SGI in 1994 was for it to be networked to an Amiga with the hardware and software available on that platform (without spending a $250K for a Flame or better).  Commodore could not have picked a more ironic time to go out of business because it was when they were the absolute strongest in a very new, very lucrative market.

[psxphill]

Commodore could not have picked a more ironic time to go out of business because it was when they were the absolute strongest in a very new, very lucrative market.

Commodore never controlled their destiny after Jack left, it was just luck for the most part. Newtek took them surprise, Commodore didn't have a clue why they were selling so many A2500's when the A3000 had just come out. Commodore management refused to produce the A2631 to replace the A2630 & A2091 that they were shipping in the A2500.
 
Bottom line is they picked the wrong case for the A3000.

[Sean Cunningham]

No.  It wasn't luck their not paying attention to and then embracing, both barrels, all eggs in the basket that NewTek delivered, strip-o-gram style, right to their doorstep.  That's mis-management and bad decision making.  That's continued lack of intelligence across two generations of VideoToaster.  

They went out of business during the Toaster4000 era and NewTek's expansion into NLE and experiments with supercomputer acceleration for Lightwave when it was still exclusively bundled with the Toaster.  The A3000 was already a long discontinued product and not an issue, ultimately.  You're talking about a phenomenon years before they went out of business, during the initial VT craze.  Plus, enterprising folks got VTs working in A3000s.  We had one in the Media Lab at CalArts I'm pretty sure, though I may be confusing that with one of the TA's personal systems.  Nothing A2x00-based was viable passed 1993, no matter what you put into it and '030s definitely need not apply, unless you're talking really low end, switcher-only type work.

During this time you had two different interesting phenomenons happening as well, both of which Commodore benefitted from that had no connection to anything (or nothing) they were doing to try and sell Amigas.  First, for the original VT, if you were actually using it as a switcher and video effects box the Amiga was essentially just a power supply for the thing folks really wanted to be using.  So you had a lot of people who wouldn't have otherwise bought an Amiga, or computer at all, doing so just so they could run the VideoToaster and do what it did.  Then you also had people buying VideoToasters, and Amigas, with no interest in the video switching capabilities of the Toaster whatsoever and had it functioning, basically, as a dongle for running Lightwave which, for a period, had no peer on the microcomputer level.

To still not get it, two years after the A3000 is discontinued, they simply failed to understand what was actually being done with their own product which meant they couldn't capitalize or expand on that.  That's got SFA to do with "luck".  That's what you call "stupid".

[Minuous]

@magnetic:

If your a1200 is stable id recommend NOT to install these bb3 and 4.

Why spread baseless FUD? A system with BB4 is more stable than one with BB2, not less, due to the number of known BB2 bugs that have been fixed. Some of the initial beta releases had issues but this was a long time ago, recent versions are very stable. There are hundreds of users who can testify to this.

Hey Brian, this is the download location recommended by EAB

Actually that location is just a mirror and sometimes is not the latest version. Official release page is http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/

[mrmoonlight]

Mr moonlight
If your a1200 is stable id recommend NOT to install these bb3 and 4.

Hi magnetic one day I might stop to listen to some very good advice, as I just had to go and load b3 and b4 and I went from a very stable A1200 to a very none booting sick A1200 and I am awfully glad I made an  emergency   disc that got me back up and running so if ever you hear me mention boing bags again please remind me what an idiot I was ,sorry to the creators of the boing bags I mean no offence on your part as I appreciate how much work you must have put in but no balls for me, very best wishes Brian.

[magnetic]

@magnetic:



Why spread baseless FUD?

FUD? For what reason would I do that. One, its based on my experience with patching/hacking amiga os which naturally leads to instability. And secondly its from reading many threads about user problems when I considered going to BB3. So far from "baseless"

[magnetic]

Mr. Moonlight

I'm so sorry man i tried to tell you.

But I was just "trolling" and "baseless" what a farce.