@eXec

Quote:

And why did they refused cooperation with C= ? What else lies behind that act of ignorance?

Well obviously I'm not privy to the details of those discussions. But I personally think that porting AmigaOS 4.1 to the hardware sold by CUSA would not be a good idea.

Before I explain why, I just want to say - as a new Amigan, I'm starting to think that going to commodity hardware could be good for AmigaOS. Not in the sense of trying to port it to everything, so you can run it on any old PC - I mean picking a couple of suitable X86 boards and porting to those (and selling AmigaOne-branded systems built around them).

I know that's a controversial claim (and a depressing one, because I enjoy the uniqueness of my new Sam) but that's another conversation. I only raise it now so you know that I'm not religiously opposed to the idea of ditching PowerPC in general.

Going to CUSA's hardware, however, would not benefit AmigaOS 4.1 in my eyes.

The potential market for CUSA products (and I agree there is one) wants the retro cool of Amiga without the pain of using a non-standard OS.

I think Linux is very advanced now, and an Ubuntu-based OS would be pain-free for the average user.

But I don't think your hypothetical CUSA customer would be especially keen on any one of the Amiga OSes (including AROS) because they want to be able to do the whole suite of home computing including BBC iPlayer, Youtube (without a workaround), OpenOffice, etc., etc..

With that in mind, even if you'd ported AmigaOS 4.1 to CUSA's new computers, it would need to be dual booted with (at the very least) a stable, user-friendly Linux distro.

In that case, I think 99% of CUSA's potential userbase would either ignore the AOS option, or else try it once and give up on it.

So I think porting to CUSA's hardware would be a lot of effort, and increase the number of people who nominally had AOS on their machines, but not really increase the amount of people using or developing for it. I suspect Hyperion would have had to pay towards porting it, because if Barry Altman has business sense (and clearly he does), he wouldn't pay a huge amount of money to port a niche OS to hardware which (as far as I can tell) he wants to sell to the nostalgic masses.

If the port happened, Hyperion would get a royalty for each unit sold but I think CUSA would soon realise it wasn't adding value and ditch it.

In future, if Open Office Lite were available and Timberwolf, it might be a more plausible proposal.

Personally, I think for the time being, Hyperion should focus on the current small market of AmigaOS enthusiasts who are prepared to pay more money for a slower machine, as long as it runs AOS. They need to stop that community shrinking and keep it as happy as possible. I think there might be a time for them to do something bolder, but realistically it will be when AOS has (e.g.) office software.

I think there's huge potential for AOS but regard now as a time for Hyperion to be keeping its powder dry and making sure it doesn't go out of business (in fact my only concern about the X1000 is that it's too big a gamble... I think they should have kept supporting A-Cube, who have already delivered, and embarked on the MAP once stuff like USB 2.0 and office software was available).

But obviously, all that is just my personal opinion.

Quote:

You are getting me a bit wrong. I am not working for C= or promoting them with some benefits. I just see them as a light on the end of the long and dark tunnel that has swallowed Amiga for years. To gather Amiga and Commodore name and logo on the very same way as it once was is a major success today.

I found this post very telling. If you don't mind me saying, it sounds like you're nostalgic for the brand and want to support Amiga almost like a football team. You don't especially care who the players are or what the formation is - you just want to see them scoring goals, and lifting the trophy of being successful and relevant again.

Apologies if I've got that wrong, but that's what it sounds like. Which is fine. There are some bands I'd like to see reformed, even if they only had one of the original musicians in the line-up. There's nothing wrong with nostalgia.

But there are lots of people who don't care about brands and success. They just want to use a particular operating system in a particular way, and are pleased that small companies like Hyperion keep that experience going.

Some care so little about the brand that they've gone to Morphos, which doesn't even have the word "Amiga" in its name (let alone Commodore).

So, surely you appreciate that they aren't part of CUSA's business strategy and shouldn't expect them to care about or embrace it? If you try to rub their faces in it, you'll only antagonise them (and I would give the same advice to an AOS user who did the same to you). We don't have to convert each other

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@number6

"Please don't try to counter that with Barry's quote from Commodore-amiga.org about how good this IContain thing is for everyone...
His statement on amiga.org more truly represents his immediate reaction to this I'm sure"

Sounds interesting - what was it?

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@jas_mc

Quote:

Sounds interesting - what was it?

Source

But let's keep in mind that Bill may have been the messenger on this one.
Grzymala is trying to get Kouri's money back and was behind the IContain deal, as noted in the original news story. It's possible Grzymala made the license deal with C= as well. I've not cared to look into it.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 07-May-2011 at 11:16 PM.
Last edited by number6 on 07-May-2011 at 11:09 PM.
Last edited by number6 on 07-May-2011 at 11:07 PM.

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@jas_mc

nice post, we have some compatible views in general.
much of it you said stands in its place. i agree with the most of it.
AROS would be a great thing to go but there is (from what was spoken around here)
an Issue with Hyperion. So, if they don`t want to collaborate with C=, why are they
stopping AROS being delivered with new C= machines?

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@eXec

Quote:

So, if they don`t want to collaborate with C=, why are they stopping AROS being delivered with new C= machines?

Hyperion aren't stopping Commodore USA from bundling AROS with their new machines.

@Rob

No but the legal threats from them is. ;)

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@terminills

What legal threat?

Hyperion has copyright over AOS 4.1 CUSA claims not to be interested at all.

Well, retro geek + Linux sounds nuce but since audience must be quite dumb, not only nostalgic, I&I believe its quite a mustake not to bundle at least Win 7 Basic. Time will tell. And as observed, their Ubuntu is just downloadable Ubuntu,even not the latest. Much much effort they have put in the case ....

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@vox

Quote:

vox wrote: @terminills What legal threat? Hyperion has copyright over AOS 4.1 CUSA claims not to be interested at all. Well, retro geek + Linux sounds nuce but since audience must be quite dumb, not only nostalgic, I&I believe its quite a mustake not to bundle at least Win 7 Basic. Time will tell. And as observed, their Ubuntu is just downloadable Ubuntu,even not the latest. Much much effort they have put in the case ....

Before you say such nonsense about AROS and C=, check for the
real state of the matter.

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@Rob

Quote:

Hyperion aren't stopping Commodore USA from bundling AROS with their new machines.

Hyperion not, but the September 30 Settlement Agreement between Amiga.Inc and Hyperion yes.

According to the Agreement Amiga.Inc can´t market software similar to OS4 - eg. probably also licence Amiga brand to computer bundled with AROS.

Last edited by pavlor on 08-May-2011 at 10:15 AM.

@_ThEcRoW
Quote:

Could you explain once and for all why?

It's not about a licence to the letters A- M- I- G- A in this sequence that can make you related to Amiga or not, it's an umbilical cord with the past.
Cusa has no right to technology that has to do with the past, nor the right to evolve it, placing a sticker on a camouflaged Linux distro doesn't apply.

Moreover what Dave Haynie did recently (although it started as the exact opposite) was helping cementing the fact that the X1000 is truly what Amiga would have become.
He confirmed that they were going PPC (Alpha was also mentioned but he also said it costed too much and executives would have never approved it) that Hombre was not a fixed chipset but a "GFX Card"/ Add-On fitted in a PCI bus (and that used the RTG library).
The AmigaOne X1000 is a designed from scratch Hardware featuring a very peculiar PPC CPU. For example its conexium tecnology allows for pretty neat stuff including real time connection to external units, and in our case it is connected on one side to a RT dual core coprocessor and on the other to the Xorro bus.
Like the next Amiga that never were, we have PCI (Express 16X) and no it won't be using hombre because it's obsolete.

But most prominently this custom designed computer runs the latest version of the Amiga Operating System, and it's designed from scratch specifically for it.
AmigaOS4.1 it's the end product of 25 years of evolution of the same source code ( LINK ) something that it's not challenged by Amiga Inc., nor members of the original team (such as Carl Sassenrath and Dale Luck), and ultimately the next step in a computer platform that it's behind (yes) and that we want to see back to viability once again (mainstream dreams are now gone).

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@pavlor

Quote:

Hyperion not, but the September 30 Settlement Agreement between Amiga.Inc and Hyperion yes.

Nothing in that agreement can stop Commodore USA from bundling AROS with a their non Amiga branded computers.

@DAX

Quote:

Moreover what Dave Haynie did recently (although it started as the exact opposite) was helping cementing the fact that the X1000 is truly what Amiga would have become.

Yes, but that goes for period till year 2005. From year 2005 Amiga should be dropping
PPC and slowly going onto x86, you forgot to mention that. Though, Dave said that the
x86 is the actual hardware. So, not to forget that.

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@Rob

Quote:

Nothing in that agreement can stop Commodore USA from bundling AROS with a their non Amiga branded computers.

Of course.

@eXec

Quote:

From year 2005 Amiga should be dropping PPC and slowly going onto x86

Exactly.

However, as I wrote many times before, I don´t think Hyperion has enough time, resources and developers to do such great task.

Quote:

Nothing in that agreement can stop Commodore USA from bundling AROS with a their non Amiga branded computers.

It has been discussed months ago.
Some people think Amiga/Hyperion's agreeement prohibits the use of AROS on an Amiga branded computer, some other don't think so.

In my opinion C=USA can't use AROS, and in the case they did, there would be another long lawsuit with Hyperion.
C=USA itself said they cannot use AROS for legal reasons.

It's quite clear anyway, that C=USA's computer are Linux PCs, and not Amigas.
But everyone is free to have his opinion about a Linux PC called "Amiga".

Last edited by andres on 08-May-2011 at 12:09 PM.

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@eXec
What Dave said was refering to the fact that Apple was alone in the PPC desktop market and couldn't justify enough orders for desktop oriented CPUs (enough orders to make them cheap).
Thus they never asked for another one and switched to x86 (although any big company like Sony or MS can go to IBM and ask for a powerful PPC piece in case they guarantee orders in the millions).
But Commodore didn't go bankrupt because of Amiga, it went bankrupt on its own accounts, thus we should ask ourselves the question, what would have happened if Tramiel/Gould's Commodore stayed TOP of the game as it was in the 80s? In that case you would have had 2 big companies making PPC desktops (Apple and Commodore) generating larger orders of desktop CPUs, making G6, G7 G8 (and so on) a clear possibility.
Moreover the fact that powerful home consoles sold in millions of units would be based on IBM's power architecture was a mistery even to Apple.
All in all with Commodore as stron as ever, we would have had 4 huge companies asking IBM for millions of powerful PPC CPUs, something that would have kept Amiga on PPC.
A Power7 based (and competitively priced) Amiga? Why not. And besides, Power8 is in the making as we speak (I'm not saying it's possible today, but in the scenario I described above).

Alas another surprise might help us out. intel is entering the embedded market and is challenging free scale directly with embedded i5 and i7. This has prompted FreeScale to announce more powerful cores featuring a brand new Altivec unit and I'm sure the news won't be limited to that. They were alone in the hi-end embedd market, now they are no more, and if they want to keep their customer, pumping out the best (and most powerful) CPUs they can is in their best interest.
I'm truly eager to read about the next 60x0 series.

Last edited by DAX on 08-May-2011 at 12:22 PM.

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@DAX

Quote:

What Dave said was refering to the fact that Apple was alone in the PPC desktop market and couldn't justify enough orders for desktop oriented CPUs (enough orders to make them cheap). Thus they never asked for another one and switched to x86 (although any big company like Sony or MS can go to IBM and ask for a powerful PPC piece in case they guarantee orders in the millions).

Apple switched to x86 because IBM/Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel/AMD. PPC chips were getting too hot and used too much power(G5).

Quote:

intel is entering the embedded market and is challenging free scale directly with embedded i5 and i7. This has prompted FreeScale to announce more powerful cores featuring a brand new Altivec unit and I'm sure the news won't be limited to that.

Freescale will be crushed by Intel if they decide to play power-on-power with them.
Simply put, x86 and ARM are too competitive now. Luckily for Freescale they are an ARM licensee.

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@WolfToTheMoon
Quote:

Apple switched to x86 because IBM/Motorola couldn't keep up with Intel/AMD. PPC chips were getting too hot and used too much power(G5).

Nope, that's not what Dave said nor what really happened I believe.
As for what companies state it's always #### most of the time, you must hear from the engineers. Look at Squaresoft jump from Nintendo to Sony back in 1996, they said it was because of the medium but everybody knows now there were exclusivity deals underneath paid by Sony with millions.
I won't enter speulations on intel making pressures on Apple in the same way they did with Dell (for which they have been found guilty and now paying hefty amounts to AMD) however don't think for a moment IBM couldn't rectify the power consumption/thermal problem, they have stellar R&D, trust me on this one.
The problem comes when I tell you (IBM) "your previous design (G5) runs hot and consumes too much, let me see your next one and let me know the price".
At this point even if IBM could produce a new G6 which improved on power consumption and thermal conditions (while still providing quite more data crunching power than G5) the price issue would still remain.
For the latter only the presence of a second Huge company placing orders for the same CPUs was a possible solution.

Quote:

Freescale will be crushed by Intel if they decide to play power-on-power with them. Simply put, x86 and ARM are too competitive now. Luckily for Freescale they are an ARM licensee.

All we have left is to see how it entails, don't we then? (popcorn in hand... ).

Last edited by DAX on 08-May-2011 at 12:54 PM.

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@DAX

Quote:

Nope, that's not what Dave said nor what really happened I believe.

well, that's exactly what happend. Apple wasn't satisfied with the tempo of PPC development, especially regarding the heat and power issues which made them particularly non-competitive on the mobile market. That's the reason they switched.

Quote:

however don't think for a moment IBM couldn't rectify the power consumption/thermal problem, they have stellar R&D, trust me on this one.

Well, Apple didn't think they could. Not fast enough, that is.

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@DAX

"But most prominently this custom designed computer runs the latest version of the Amiga Operating System, and it's designed from scratch specifically for it".

What makes os4 more Amiga, than the rest amigoid oses, if they(hyperion) never used the 3.1 sources?.

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