We know a lot about the hardware being worked on - AAA/Acutiator, CD1200 et al. at the time C= closed.

Can y'all help me make a list of what operating system software was being worked on at the time as well, the original plans for whatever OS3.2 or later would have been?

The ones I know of or can guess are:

- Expanding the realtime library and the vaunted specialfx library for allowing OS friendly chipset access for optimised game type features

- The application library that would make it easier to build applications

- More BOOPSI gadgets of the sort we eventually got with ClassAct/Reaction

- More DataTypes, and more importantly more features for playing and managing data using datatypes, rather than the basic 'convert to an IFF format and display'. Hopefully something more akin to QuickTime would have been in the works

- Better cdrom support than the basic support in the CD32

Was there anything else planned we know of?


Plus of course there's AS225 and Envoy, both of which were largely 'finished' when they were licensed out to third parties to distribute.

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@Mobileconnect

As I remember, they were going to ditch AmigaOS for Unix, or WindowsNT on the Hombre machine.

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I sold my SAM460ex lite... waiting for money to buy a Raspberry Pi... or a Classic A1000 with Buffee... or an A1222... and OS4.3 FE update 11

@PhantomInterrogative

You are right, if C= would have managed to get Hombre running (as a game console or PC) they planned to use WindowsNT.

But it is not actually clear if Hombre should have replaced the Amiga, become a part of Amiga or being the new Amiga.

@Mobileconnect

You are only thinking about details that would have been necessary for AmigaOS support of AAA and some few improvement, it would still have been outdated around 2000.

If there would have ever been a improved an heavily modernized AmigaOS it would have had so many changes under the hood, that it would have been a totally different system with an Amiga themed GUI on top and some backwards compatibility over a sandbox (or none).

You're both correct, it's also not what I asked.

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Quote:

Mobileconnect wrote: ClassAct/Reaction

Some people here forgot where Reaction came from, it was not Amiga until HP integrated it into AOS3.5 AFAIK because their compilers supported it in the IDE, I don't know how Hyperion got it's hand on it but you will recognize on AOS3.x programs if the programmer came from the red or the blue camp.

One can see what was being worked on from the source dump that leaked way back when (and which was the basis for further development). And… not much; C:Wait got the FILE option (which it now has) and something about C:Sort iirc. Also there seemed to be work going on with supporting Japanese character sets, something that perhaps indicates some sort of marketing strategy… and yeah, a few boopsi classes/inages…

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@Mobileconnect

I like this question.

As with any moving target, there are usually plans for the near, middle, and far distances. Some of the evolutionary improvements are almost no-brainers, but I too would be keen to know what some of the more revolutionary thinking might have been gracing the Amiga OS team's whiteboards back in 1993.

Would it have followed the Windows path of continuous evolution with lots of backward compatibility, or would it have followed the MacOS path and have a clean break between old-world systems and new-world systems? Would Amiga OS architects and engineers have the foresight to avoid their own "Copeland" failure?

In our timeline, we do know that the McBill/Fleecy's vision for AmigaOS 5 was going to break compatibility with software written for AmigaOS 4 and prior.

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@agami

fun fact I met fleecy moss and the tao group people in a mobile phone industry context circa 2002. They straight up admitted they had no interest or plans to do anything with AmigaOS.

I would like to think there was still some life left in the roadmap, after all original MacOS took another 5 years to die and got some good stuff. Even if by then people were already well aware they were going to need an all new kernel to support the protected memory / virtual memory / multi user security / SMP future that was coming.

@kolla

you're right I also remember a work in progress japanese support being mentioned, and apparently there was some work done to add chinese support after C= closed by ex C= people hired by the prospective chinese buyer of the platform, for STB use. Of course this was still pre-unicode and 16bit chars.

Re: ClassAct/Reaction - HP only licensed it. The original developers Christopher Aldi et al later sold the rights in full to Hyperion first for OS4 then for OS3.

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@Mobileconnect

Read the Amiga Devcon from 93 (Denver). A superfx.library was also in the pipe.
Here an excerpt, I remember a doc that Hyperion made public that Cloanto asked to be removed, I son’t remember what was in there.
http://obligement.free.fr/files/devcon93.pdf

Last edited by kamelito on 26-Sep-2024 at 06:50 AM.

@kamelito

That's wonderful thanks. I must have had a copy somewhere but never read it. Even after all these years I've yet to pore over every amigamail and devcon doc.

It's to their credit that pretty much everything in here that remains relevant today has been implemented by Reaction and/or the OS3.2 team.

The notable item here we have never got (outside of MUI anyway) is the dragger object. Universal drag and drop closer to how RiscOS did it rather than the rather limited Workbench Appwindow mechanism would be very desirable.

I had interaction with Martin some 20 years ago, when he allowed me to make TurboText free for everyone. Unfortunately he neither had the code any more and it was anyway written in Modula2, but I do think it's pretty much the most perfect 'lightweight' text editor on the platform, by which I mean it's not meant to be in the same class as say, GoldEd. LinkedIn says he works for Microsoft these days on the .Net platform.

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I found it interesting in Amiga Forever they included AmigaOs 3.2 Roms, which was the planned upgrade for Amiga Walker that Escom was working on, mainly improving Hard Drive support, Cd-Rom support and I guess tweaks for that scraped system.

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@Mobileconnect

I do not think there was much development on OS features. As I understand it Dave Haynie was one of the last engineers doing development and he worked on the AAA chipset. There were PDF with strange ideas... like PARISC, Windows NT and a new incompatible chipset. In my view it would have failed commercially if becoming real. There were no reports about OS. If you look how much work was needed to get it compiled straight with one system I not assume there was any development.

Mobileconnect Quote:

@kolla you're right I also remember a work in progress japanese support being mentioned, and apparently there was some work done to add chinese support after C= closed by ex C= people hired by the prospective chinese buyer of the platform, for STB use. Of course this was still pre-unicode and 16bit chars.

The original Unicode standard is very old. I believe Amiga fonts use fixed width character Unicode internally. The Amiga Japanese support did not use Unicode but neither did most Japanese support. The Amiga used EUC and had conversions for JIS and Shift-JIS which were variable width character text encodings that were more popular than fat Unicode fixed width character encodings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Unix_Code
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS

Japanese support was mostly working which allowed font display, text input and commodity support. Some incompatibility and bugs would remain a problem though as variable width character handling sometimes has additional requirements beyond traditional 8-bit fixed character width text handling. Most support is now UTF-8 which is the variable character width Unicode text encoding that dominates today and for other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

Many of the Japanese variable character support changes are likely necessary for UTF-8 support to modernize the AmigaOS today. I have doubts that the experimental Japanese support changes were introduced into the main AmigaOS sources though. My understanding was that many AmigaOS hooks (function SetPatches?) were used. Maybe Michele Battilana has the sources along with the AA+ chipset core sources in the huge archive of CBM docs he received.

Amiga RTG support was another long on going feature being worked on. Memory pools were introduced about the same time as the Japanese support (1993).

Mobileconnect Quote:

Re: ClassAct/Reaction - HP only licensed it. The original developers Christopher Aldi et al later sold the rights in full to Hyperion first for OS4 then for OS3.

Right. ClassAct (later Reaction) was originally a 3rd party Boopsi GUI system.

https://aminet.net/package/dev/gui/classact33
https://aminet.net/package/dev/gui/ClassAct2Demo Quote:

ClassAct is a set of over 30 BOOPSI classes co-authored by Christopher Aldi, Timothy Aston, Osma Ahvenlampi, and Petter Nilsen. Its now being published by Finale Development, Inc. ClassAct provides object-oriented building blocks for your application in the form of Intuition BOOPSI classes available as either shared run-time or link-time libraries. As they are standard classes, they may be used with any application environment supporting BOOPSI. ClassAct is a complete GUI system in its own right, supporting everything from simple buttons to an advanced list management class, and includes a complete window GUI layout system classes that lets you create font-sensitive and resizable interfaces quickly and easily, including any preferenced window backfill pattern loadable via the system DataTypes. Programs that use ClassAct can be made freely distributable, shareware, commercial, etc. and there is NO FEE for users. When you purchase ClassAct, users of your software get to use all the preferences functions of our system. ClassAct a powerful and time-saving choice for software developers, and an affordable and convenient one as well. Since ClassAct classes are BOOPSI, they automatically support all kinds of great features such as window relatively (resizability), 3.x help, notification, and interconnections with other BOOPSI classes (which do not necessarily have to be ClassAct classes). ClassAct classes are "standard" AmigaOS BOOPSI class libraries, much like the colorwheel and gradient sliders that come with release 3.x of the Amiga's operating system. ClassAct classes are built for speed, power, efficiency and stability. ClassAct is compatible with 2.04 (V37) thru 3.1 (V40) releases of the Amiga operating system and take advantage of performance increases available in release 3.x (V39+). ClassAct has been tested with ECS, AGA, CyberGraphics, Retina, Picasso II and EGS Spectrum. ClassAct is an expanding project, providing you with the graphical user interface tools you need to write your application. ClassAct is currently over 30 different classes, and the list is growing all the time!

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@OneTimer1

Quote:

Some people here forgot where Reaction came from, it was not Amiga until HP integrated it into AOS3.5 AFAIK

ClassAct/Reaction was based on principles laid out by Commodore's Amiga OS developers, so something similar would probably have been included in the next release after 3.1.

Quote:

I don't know how Hyperion got it's hand on it but you will recognize on AOS3.x programs if the programmer came from the red or the blue camp.

Hyperion signed agreements with most of the developers that worked on 3.5 & 3.9.

Unicode wasn't a standard until 1991/92, far too late for the Amiga to use it. and UTF8 came much later. Amiga used ISO standards that extended ASCII, Latin-1 code tables IIRC. At Symbian, where I worked, they introduced Unicode in version 5, around the year 1998, which also meant a code compatibility break between version 3 used on the Psion devices, and version 5 and up, with the first phones to reach the public being based on version 6. Which is one reason Psion devices stayed stuck on version 3.

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Mobileconnect Quote:

Unicode wasn't a standard until 1991/92, far too late for the Amiga to use it. and UTF8 came much later. Amiga used ISO standards that extended ASCII, Latin-1 code tables IIRC. At Symbian, where I worked, they introduced Unicode in version 5, around the year 1998, which also meant a code compatibility break between version 3 used on the Psion devices, and version 5 and up, with the first phones to reach the public being based on version 6. Which is one reason Psion devices stayed stuck on version 3.

Unicode was around in the late 1980s but how much of a standard it was is debatable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Consortium#Founding Quote:

The project to develop a universal character encoding scheme called Unicode was initiated in 1987 by Joe Becker, Lee Collins, and Mark Davis.

As I recall, the first Unicode character set was fixed 16 bit width (UCS-2, UTF-16). It was reasonably practical and adopted for Windows, Java and JavaScript. Some developers complained that not all characters of in use languages were available which led to the 32 bit fixed width standard (UCS-4, UTF-32) but it was very wasteful of resources (like 32-bit fixed length ISA encodings). Many computers for Asian languages did not support Unicode but chose to support various variable character width encodings. UTF-8 was presented in 1993 and finally accomplished the mission of a popular and standard universal language character set.



I couldn't find where Amiga fonts used Unicode internally which may have been too early as you mentioned. AmigaDOS commands BuildMapTable and CharSetConvert have Unicode support and the former is a map for the diskfont.library.

https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS_Manual:_AmigaDOS_Command_Reference

The Amiga codesets.library has become more and more important as UTF-8 has.

https://aminet.net/package/util/libs/codesets-6.22

I would expect better AmigaOS UTF-8 support would be a priority but this is Amiga Neverland. Just two more weeks and it should arrive with SMP support.

@matthey

That’s OS4 stuff.

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@PhantomInterrogative

Quote:

As I remember, they were going to ditch AmigaOS for Unix, or WindowsNT on the Hombre machine.

This was discussed recently somewhere but I can't find where again. This looks to be an misleading rumour that spread so much it's taken as fact. It's like the Gates 640KB memory line which he's reported to deny.

There's a few problems:
1. It would have ousted the consumer base who used AmigaOS, not Windows, where most would have terminated Windows with extreme prejudice.

2. HP RISC was big endian. Not until it evolved into Itanium did it become biendian. And Windows targeted little endian. On early PowerPC port WindowsNT ran in little endian. Decades later on XBox a customised WindowsNT ran in big endian.

3. The HP RISC was mainly for use as a GPU but the system still needed a CPU.

@agami

Quote:

In our timeline, we do know that the McBill/Fleecy's vision for AmigaOS 5 was going to break compatibility with software written for AmigaOS 4 and prior.

I don't think so. The OS4 they proposed was to be a bridge to OS5. Although it never came out, the OS4 they proposed was an Amiga OS4 x86 developer OS. Targeted to run on x86 only but a bridge to OS5 based on it that would run on other CPU platforms. Personally I thought it was a ruse, and if it ever came out, then OS4 was a plan to push us all onto x86 while OS5 would have been x86 only. The only evidence of OS5 I know of is AmigaDE. Technically, based on Intent, is said to support PowerPC and a host of other current CPUs. In reality, AmigaDE developer release (forget exact name) didn't even a support Amiga at all, not even Amiga supported through WarpOS PPC. It was a an x86 PC only product with no Amiga support. It was a sign for the future had they produced it.

Last edited by Hypex on 27-Sep-2024 at 04:45 PM.

@matthey

Unicode really didn't exist until late 1991. Before that it was a concept existing on paper only. Until unicode, all platforms used 7 (ascii) or 8 bit (ascii + whatever codetable for the upper half, or JIS etc.)

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