liam_on_linux | Entries tagged with amigaos

I thought this was gone forever, like the rest of the late lamented Inq, but I found a copy.

The Amiga is dead. Long live the Amiga!

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36685

AmigaOS 4 launches after last Amiga compatible dies

THE END OF 2006 brought good and bad news for nostalgic geeks.

On the plus side, an unexpected Christmas pressie: on December 24, Amiga, Inc. released AmigaOS 4.0, the all-new PowerPC version of the classic 1980s operating system.

The bad news is rather more serious, though - just a month earlier, the only remaining PowerPC Amiga-compatible went out of production, as Genesi announced that it was ending production of the Pegasos.

So although there is, at long last, a new, modern version of the OS, there's nothing to run it on. Bit of a snag, that.

But all isn't lost. The first successor to the Pegasos, Efika, a low-end motherboard based on a PowerPC system-on-a-chip intended for the embedded market, is sampling and will be available Real Soon Now(TM). Genesi is also considering a more powerful high-end dual-core machine.

Just to complicate things, though, the AmigaOS 4 betas wouldn't run on Pegasos hardware; the only machine the new OS would run on, the AmigaOne, has been out of production for years, and its creators, small British manufacturer Eyetech, have sold off their remaining stock of Amiga bits to Leaman Computing and left the business.

What's an Amiga and why should I care?

Launched in 1985, the Amiga was the first multimedia personal computer. Based like the Mac on a Motorola 68000, it sported 4,096 colour graphics, multichannel digital stereo sound and a fully preemptively-multitasking operating system - in 512K. That's kilobytes, not meg - 0.5MB of RAM and no hard disk. It's hard to convey today how advanced this was, but '85 is the same year that Windows 1.0 was released, when a top-end PC had an 80286, EGA graphics and could go "beep". EGA means sixteen colours at 640x350. My last phone did better than that. Macs of the time offered 512x384 black and white pixels and one channel of sound.

The Amiga dominated multimedia and graphics computing at the time. Babylon 5 was made possible because it used Amiga-generated special effects: cinematic quality at TV programme prices.

But even in today's Windows-dominated world, it's never gone away. The original 68000 OS continued development until 2000 - you can still buy version 3.9 from Haage & Partner in Germany today. You'll need a seriously-uprated Amiga though: recommended specs are a 68030 and 32MB of RAM. Do they think we're made of money?

Hang on - Amiga is still around?

Oh, yes. It never went away. But it's had a rough time of it.

After Commodore went bust in 1994, the Amiga line was sold off to Escom as that company expanded rapidly through multiple acquisitions - including that of British high-street electronics vendor Rumbelows. Escom grew too fast and went under in 1996, and Amiga was sold to Gateway. In 2000, a new company was set up by former Amiga employees Fleecy Moss and Bill McEwen, which licensed the name and rights from Gateway. The OS itself was sold off to KMOS, Inc. in 2003, which subsequently changed its name to Amiga, Inc.

Over the years, Amiga Inc. has tried several times to come up with a new product to recapture the Miggy magic.

The first effort was to be based on the Unix-like embedded OS QNX. It's small, fast and highly efficient, but not very Amiga-like. Negotiations broke down, though since then, QNX has boasted a GUI and multimedia support. Then there was a plan based around the Linux kernel.

Then came AmigaAnywhere, based on Tao Group's remarkable Intent OS. Intent is amazing, like Java on steroids: the entire OS and all apps are compiled for a nonexistent, generalised "Virtual Processor". Code is translated for the actual CPU as it's loaded from disk - no "virtual machine" involved. Complete binary compatibility across every supported marchitecture. It's very clever, but it's not got much to do with the original Amiga and the fans weren't very interested.

Finally, Amiga Inc. came up with an idea to get the fans on board - a new, PowerPC-native version of the Amiga OS: AmigaOS 4. This would run on new PowerPC hardware, but look and feel like an updated version of classic AmigaOS and offer backwards compatibility. Amiga no longer had the manpower to develop this in-house, so the product was licensed to Hyperion, a games house specialising in ports of Windows games for Amiga, Mac and Linux.

Pegasos: the IBM Amiga

The idea of moving to PowerPC came from Phase5, a German maker of accelerator cards for Amigas and Macs. Some of Phase5's later Amiga accelerators, the Blizzard and Cyberstorm range, featured PowerPC processors and some nifty code to allow apps to be compiled for PowerPC but run on the 68K-based Amiga OS.

As the Amiga market withered, Phase5 went under, but a group of its former engineers set up bPlan GmbH. Amongst other products, bPlan agreed to license OS4 from Amiga and make PowerPC-based Amiga-compatibles.

Around the turn of the century, things were looking very bleak for Amiga and little progress was being made. Growing impatient, bPlan set up Genesi with the management of Thendic, a vendor of embedded and Point-Of-Sale equipment, and decided to go it alone. Genesi designed a new PowerPC-based desktop machine, Pegasos, based on OpenFirmware and IBM's Common Hardware Reference Platform - the Mac/PC hybrid that was the basis of some of the last models of licensed Mac clones, which could even run the short-lived PowerPC version of Windows NT.

The Pegasos was designed and built to run Morphos. This started out as an OS for Amigas with PowerPC accelerators and required the presence of classic 68000 AmigaOS. Genesi sponsored development of a stand-alone version of Morphos for the Pegasos. Rather than re-implementing AmigaOS from scratch, this uses an entirely new microkernel, Quark, which hosts an Amiga-compatible environment, ABox. Morphos looks like an updated AmigaOS, provides 68K emulation so that it can run cleanly-written Amiga apps. There's also an emulator for code - like games - which hits the hardware directly.

The Mark 1 Pegasos has problems due to the Articia northbridge chip, causing major arguments between Genesi and chipset designer MAI Logic. Despite production of a patch chip, "April", the Pegasos I was quickly replaced by the Pegasos II with a different chipset.

So what happened with AmigaOS 4, then?

While Genesi worked on the Pegasos, Amiga made its own deal with MAI and announced a new range of PowerPC-based Amigas. The original plan was that the new machines would connect to an original Amiga 1200 or 4000 motherboard, allowing the Miggy's custom chipset to be used - for compatibility with original Amiga apps. That didn't pan out, so a simpler, all-new design was adopted based on MAI's Teron motherboards. These were put into production by Eyetech as the AmigaOne.

The snag is that AmigaOS 4 wasn't ready, so the AmigaOne shipped in 2002 with only Linux. The first public betas of OS4 followed 18 months later.

Unfortunately for Amiga, MAI went bankrupt, and unable to source bridge chips, Eyetech ended production of the AmigaOne in 2005. Only around 1,500 units were shipped.

So as of the end of 2006, AmigaOS 4.0 is finally complete, but there's no currently-shipping hardware to run it on. It's tiny, fast, can run clean classic Amiga apps and is compatible enough with the older version that veteran Amiga users - of which there were hundreds of thousands - will find it instantly familiar. But because Genesi and Amiga Inc. don't exactly see eye to eye, OS4 won't run on Pegasos - only on near-identical official Amiga hardware with Hyperion's "U-Boot" firmware.

And where's the Pegasos gone?

Genesi realised that the Amiga market was not only a small one but potentially crowded, too, and changed the emphasis of the Pegasos II from being an Amiga-compatible to being an open PowerPC desktop machine running Linux - a course that's brought it rather greater success. After Apple's move to Intel processors, the Pegasos II-based Open Desktop Workstation is the main desktop PowerPC machine. But it still runs Morphos and thus Amiga apps.

Now, though, the ODW is the latest victim of RoHS - the Reduction of Hazardous Substances legislation that amongst other things compels European manufacturers to use only lead-free solder. It's hit minority platforms particularly hard and the sad result is the end of Pegasos' flight.

The future

PowerPC was - and is - the main alternative workstation CPU to x86. Indeed, with the Nintendo Wii, Microsoft XBox 360 and Sony Playstation 3 all based on PowerPC derivatives, sales prospects for PowerPC are looking great, despite Apple defecting to Intel processors.

The story of the Amiga isn't over. The successor to Pegasos II has been announced: the Efika. This is a tiny low-end motherboard based on a PowerPC 5200 system-on-a-chip. It's not fast, but it's small, cheap, quiet and cool-running with extremely low power requirements. It's being described as ideal for use in tough or constrained environments, such as Third World education.

Amiga Inc. has also announced a similar product, codenamed "Samantha": again, a small-form-factor, highly-integrated system based around the PPC5200 SoC.

Either way, PowerPC Amigas are interesting machines. Sure, they can run Linux, from Yellow Dog to Ubuntu or Fedora, or even Gentoo if you're masochistic enough. But running Morphos or OS4 they show their real power. These tiny, elegant OSs occupy a few dozen meg of disk space, run happily in 128MB RAM and boot to their graphical desktops in seconds. Both are very fast and relatively full-featured, Internet-capable OSs, fully buzzword-compliant from MP3 to USB. Finally, they share a library of thousands of high-quality apps from the 1980s and 1990s and a lot of experienced users and developers.

The main problem they face now, though, is compatibility with one another. Genesi has done the only sane thing - gone with open standards where they exist and courted the Linux market. Amiga and Hyperion still fear the rife piracy of the 1980s, when kids traded duplicated floppies of Amiga software freely. OS4 only runs on machines with Amiga firmware. It's too late for that now: it has to run on anything with a PowerPC or it's already-meagre chances shrink to nothing. If anything, the best market for OS4 is probably on the PowerPC consoles. They have abundant anti-piracy measures built in.

If you fondly remember your old Miggy but aren't interested in this exotic minority kit, then check out the FOSS project AROS - a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3 for generic x86 hardware. It's not binary-compatible but Amiga code need only be recompiled, and it will be instantly familiar to anyone who knew the classic Amiga.

If plans come together, these future PPC5200 machines will offer a choice of OSs: as well as Linux, both Morphos and AmigaOS 4 - and maybe AROS too. Twenty-two years after its introduction, the Amiga is not quite dead yet. If you need a low-resource, high-performance Internet-ready graphical embedded or kiosk OS, even in 2007, you could do a lot worse than check out the world of the Amiga.

Current Location: Douglas IoM

I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS.

But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago.

RISC OS is a lovely little OS and a joy to use, but it's not very stable. It has no worthwhile memory protection, no virtual memory, no multi-processor support, and true preemptive multitasking is a sort of bolted-on extra (the Task Window). When someone tried to add pre-emption, it broke a lot of existing apps.

It was not some industry-changing work of excellence that would have disrupted everything. It was just barely good enough. Even after 33 years, it doesn't have wifi or bluetooth support, for instance, and although efforts are going on to add multi-processor support, it's a huge amount of work for little gain. There are a whole bunch of memory size limits in RISC OS as it is -- apps using >512MB RAM are very difficult and that requires hackery.

IMHO what Acorn should have done is refocus on laptops for a while -- they could have made world-beating thin, light, long-life, passively-cooled laptops in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, worked with Be on BeOS for a multiprocessor Risc PC 2. I elaborated on that here on this blog.

But RISC OS was already a limitation by 1996 when NT4 came out.

I've learned from Reddit that David Braben (author of Elite and the Archimedes' stunning "Lander" demo and Zarch game) offered to add enhancements to BBC BASIC to make it easier to write games. Acorn declined. Apparently, Sony was also interested in licensing the ARM and RISC OS for a games console -- probably the PS1 -- but Acorn declined. I had no idea. I thought the only 3rd party uses of RISC OS were NCs and STBs. Acorn's platform was, at the time, almost uniquely suitable for this -- a useful Internet client on a diskless machine.

The interesting question, perhaps, is the balance between pragmatic minimalism as opposed to wilful small-mindedness.

I really recommend the Chaos Computer Congress Ultimate Archimedes talk on this subject.

There's a bunch of stuff in the original ARM2/IOC/VIDC/MEMC design (e.g. no DMA, e.g. the 26-bit Program Counter register) that looks odd but reflects pragmatic decisions about simplicity and cost above all else... but a bit like the Amiga design, one year's inspired design decision may turn out, a few years later, to be a horrible millstone around the team's neck. Even the cacheless design which was carefully tuned to the access speeds of mid-1990s FP-mode DRAM.

They achieved greatness by leaving a lot out -- but not just from some sense of conceptual purity. Acorn's Steve Furber said it best: "Acorn gave us two things that nobody else had. No people and no money."

Acorn implemented their new computer on four small, super-simple, chips and a minimalist design, not because they wanted to, but because it was a design team of about a dozen people and almost no budget. They found elegant work-arounds and came up with a clever design because that's all they could do.

I think it may not be a coincidence that a design that was based on COTS parts and components, assembled into an expensive, limited whole eventually evolved into the backbone of the entire computer industry. It was poorly integrated but that meant that parts could be removed and replaced without breaking the whole: the CPU, the display, the storage subsystems, the memory subsystem, in the end the entire motherboard logic and expansion bus.

I refer, of course, to the IBM PC design. It was poor then, but now it's the state of the art. All the better-integrated designs with better CPUs are gone, all the tiny OSes with amazing performance and abilities in a tiny space are gone.

When someone added proper pre-emptive multitasking to RISC OS, it could no longer run most existing apps. If CBM had added 68030 memory management to AmigaOS, it would have broken inter-app communication.

Actually, the much-maligned Atari ST's TOS got further, with each module re-implemented by different teams in order to give it better display support, multitasking etc. while remaining compatible. TOS became MINT -- Mint Is Not TOS -- and then MINT became TOS 4. It also became the proprietary MaGiC OS-in-a-VM for Mac and PC, and later, volunteers integrated 3rd party modules to create a fully GPL edition, AFROS.

But it doesn't take full advantage of later CPUs and so on -- partly because Atari didn't.

Apple famously tried to improve MacOS into something with proper multitasking, nearly went bankrupt doing so, bought their co-founder's company NeXT and ended up totally dumping their own OS, frameworks, APIs and tooling -- and most of the developers -- and switching to a UNIX.

Sony could doubtless have done wonderful stuff with RISC OS on a games console -- but note that the Playstation 4 runs Orbis, which is based on FreeBSD 9, but none of Sony's improvements have made it back to FreeBSD.

Apple macOS is also in part based on FreeBSD, and none of its improvements have made it back upstream. macOS has a better init system, launchd, and a networked metadata directory, netinfo, and a fantastic PDF-based display server, Quartz, as well as some radical filesystem tech.

You won't find any of that in FreeBSD. It may have some driver stuff but the PC version is the same ugly old UNIX OS.

If Acorn made its BASIC into a games engine, that would have reduced its legitimacy in the sciences market. Gamers don't buy expensive kit, universities and laboratories do. Games consoles sell at a loss, like inkjet printers -- the makers earn a profit on the games or ink cartridges. It's called the Gilette razors model.

As a keen user, it greatly saddened me when Acorn closed down its workstations division, but the OS was by then a huge handicap, and there simply wasn't an available replacement by then. As I noted in that blog post I linked to, they could have done attractive laptops, but it wouldn't have helped workstation sales, not back then.

The Phoebe, the cancelled RISC PC 2, had PCI and dual-processor support. Acorn could have sold SMP PCs way cheaper than any x86 vendor, for most of whom the CPU was the single most expensive component. But it wasn't an option, because RISC OS couldn't use 2 CPUs and still can't. If they'd licensed BeOS, and maybe saved Be, who knows -- a decade as the world's leading vendor of inexpensive multiprocessor workstations doesn't sound so bad -- well, the resultant machines would have been very nice, but they wouldn't be RISC PCs because they wouldn't run Archimedes apps, and in 1998 the overheads of running RISC OS in a VM would have been prohibitive. Apple made it work, but some 5 years later, when it was normal for a desktop Mac to come with 128MB or 256MB of RAM and a few gigs of disk, and it was doable to load a 32-64MB VM with another few hundred megs of legacy OS in it. That was rather less true in 1997 or 1998, when a high-end PC had 32 or 64MB of RAM, a gig of disk, and could only take a single CPU running at a couple of hundred megahertz.

I reckon Acorn and Be could have done it -- BeOS was tiny and fast, RISC OS was positively minute and blisteringly fast -- but whether they could have done it in time to save them both is much more doubtful.

I'd love to have seen it. I think there was a niche there. I'm a huge admirer of Neal Stephenson and his seminal essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line is essential reading. It dissects some of the reasons Unix is the way it is and accurately depicts Linux as the marvel it was around the turn of the century. He lauds BeOS, and rightly so. Few ever saw it but it was breathtaking at the time.

Amiga fans loved their machine, not only for its graphics and sound, but multitasking too. This rather cheesy 1987 video does show why...

Just a couple of years later, the Archimedes did pretty much all that and more and it did it with raw CPU grunt, not fancy chips. There are reasons its OS is still alive and still in use. Now, it runs on a mass-market £25 computer. AmigaOS is still around, but all the old apps only run under emulation and it runs on niche kit that costs 5-10x more than a PC of comparable spec.

A decade later, PCs had taken over and were stale and boring. Sluggish and unresponsive despite their immense power. Acorn computers weren't, but x86 PCs were by then significantly more powerful, had true preemptive multitasking, built-in networking and WWW capabilities and so on. But no pizazz. They chugged. They were boring office kit, and they felt like it.

But take a vanilla PC and put BeOS on it, and suddenly, it booted in seconds, ran dozens of apps with ease without flicker or hesitation, played back multiple video streams while rendering them onto OpenGL 3D solids. And, like the Archimedes did a decade before, all in software, without hardware acceleration. All the Amiga's "wow factor" long after we'd given up ever seeing it again.

This, at the time when Linux hadn't even got a free desktop GUI yet, required hand-tuning thousands of lines of config files like OS/2 at its worst, and had no productivity apps.

But would this have been enough to keep A&B going until mass-market multi-core x86 chips came along and stomped them? Honestly, I really doubt it. If Apple had bought Be, it would have got a lovely next-gen OS, but it wouldn't have got Steve Jobs, and it wouldn't have been able to tempt classic MacOS devs to the new OS with amazing next-gen dev tools. I reckon it would have died not long after.

If Acorn and Be had done a deal, or merged or whatever, would there have been enough appeal in the cheapest dual-processor RISC workstation, with amazing media abilities, in the industry? (Presumably, soon after, quad-CPU and even 6- or 8- CPU boxes.)

I hate to admit it, but I really doubt it.

I am told it's lovely to use. Sadly, it only runs on obscure PowerPC-based kit that costs a couple of thousand pounds and can be out-performed by
a £300 PC.

AmigaOS's owners -- Hyperion, I believe -- chose the wrong platform.

On a Raspberry Pi or something, it would be great. On obscure expensive PowerPC kit, no.

Also, saying that, I got my first Amiga in the early 2000s. If I'd had one 15y earlier, I'd probably have loved it, but I bought a 2nd hand
Archimedes instead (and still think it was the right choice for a non-gamer and dabbler in programming).

A few years ago, with a LOT of work using 3 OSes and 3rd-party disk-management tools, I managed to coax MorphOS onto my Mac mini G4.
Dear hypothetical gods, that was a hard install.

It's... well, I mean, it's fairly fast, but... no Wifi? No Bluetooth?

And the desktop. It got hit hard with the ugly stick. I mean, OK, it's not as bad as KDE, but... ick.

Learning AmigaOS when you already know more modern OSes -- OS X, Linux, gods help us, even Windows -- well, the Amiga seems pretty
weird, and often for no good reason. E.g. a graphical file manager, but not all files have icons. They're not hidden, they just don't have
icons, so if you want to see them, you have to do a second show-all operation. And the dependence on RAMdisks, which are a historical curiosity now. And the needing to right-click to show the menu-bar when it's on a screen edge.

A lot of pointless arcana, just so Apple didn't sue, AFAICT.

I understand the love if one loved it back then. But now? Yeeeeeeaaaaaah, not so much.

Not that I'm proclaiming RISC OS to be the business now. I like it, but it's weird too. But AmigaOS does seem a bit primitive now. OTOH, if they sorted out multiprocessor support and memory protection and it ran on cheap ARM kit, then yeah, I'd be interested.