@Hans

i agree. I would buy AmigaOS right now,if it was available for PS3.
A port to x86 would take to long,but a VM version for it would be fine for now.

I would of course love to buy a SAM(or better) But with that price,my girlfriend would go into "kill me" mode.

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@BigD

Why would porting OS4 to x86 bankrupt Hyperion? It would actually open a new market up for them and increase the sales of OS 4considerably.

Unless you are the banker or chief financial officer for Hyperion. which you aren't, you should stop making such irresponsible statements. Even AROS was ported to PPC from x86 within a matter of a few months by one man, Michal Schulz. It isn't inconceivable that Hyperion could port OS4 to x86 in even less time since they have more programmers and resources available than Michal did.

@ferrels

Quote:

ferrels wrote: @BigD Unless you are the banker or chief financial officer for Hyperion. which you aren't, you should stop making such irresponsible statements. Even AROS was ported to PPC from x86 within a matter of a few months by one man, Michal Schulz. It isn't inconceivable that Hyperion could port OS4 to x86 in even less time since they have more programmers and resources available than Michal did.

If BigD is the chief financial officer, you must be their personel officer seeing as you know so much about their staffing....

Simon

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Simon

Comments made by me on any public fora are not representative of, or on behalf of, any company I may have, or assumed by the reader to have, any association with.

Any comments are a personal opinion, and should be accepted as such.

@rigo

I know they have more than one programmer which is obviously more than you know. And Michal ported AROS in his free time as a hobby. Hyperion is in the OS business and has the staff and resources to port OS4 to x86 if they see fit.

@ferrels

Quote:

ferrels wrote: @BigD Why would porting OS4 to x86 bankrupt Hyperion? It would actually open a new market up for them and increase the sales of OS 4considerably.

Who's going to pay to keep the lights on at Hyperion, and pay for development over the period of time during which they work on the port? You think bankers are going to line up to fund it?

Quote:

Unless you are the banker or chief financial officer for Hyperion. which you aren't, you should stop making such irresponsible statements. Even AROS was ported to PPC from x86 within a matter of a few months by one man, Michal Schulz. It isn't inconceivable that Hyperion could port OS4 to x86 in even less time since they have more programmers and resources available than Michal did.

IIRC, AROS was designed to be code compatible on multiple platforms right from the start, so it wasn't a one-man job in two months. I also don't remember Michal porting to x86 at all, but to x64 (and SAM?). This is porting an OS designed for source portability to a similar platform for an already existing version.

Anyway, I'm sure that the Friedens could get the kernel running on x86 inside a few months. However, then what? That's just one part of the system; you still can't do anything with it. There's a huge amount of other stuff that would need to be done before it's a saleable product. If we were going to dump backward compatibility like a lot of people suggest then we end up with an OS and no apps. If the time is taken to develop an emulator in order to run at least PowerPC code, then that adds significantly to the development time.

It's not a quickie port.

Hans

Last edited by Hans on 22-Mar-2009 at 12:39 AM.

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@ferrels

Quote:

@rigo I know they have more than one programmer which is obviously more than you know.

You're just showing yourself up now.

@Hans

I didn't say it was a one man job that took 2 months. I said it took Michal several months in his spare time just as he reported in his blog.

And all this talk of staying with PPC, the cell processor, PS3, and Nintendo is a dead end. People buy those systems to play games..period.. There's no market for AmigaOS on that hardware. Potential sales are what drives investors and businesses to develop and sell a product. I don't see any console users out there demanding AmigaOS for their game consoles and the SAM is ridiculously underpowered and over priced. I do hear a lot of people asking for OS4 on x86/AMD. There's a market there and I hope Hyperion pursues it. Sticking with PPC or living in a fantasy world where we hope OS4 magically gets ported to a game console is bordering on lunacy. Amiga users can stupidly cling to a dead architecture (PPC) and continue to see OS4 die a slow death or they can contact Hyperion and let them know they want OS4 to have a future on modern hardware....all this wishing and whining about cell processors, PPC, and game consoles is ridiculous.

@ferrels

Quote:

all this wishing and whining about cell processors, PPC, and game consoles is ridiculous.

That sentence works just as well if you substitute Cell, PPC and consoles with X86.

@Rob

You must be a SAM dealer or sell game consoles..

Last edited by ferrels on 22-Mar-2009 at 01:54 AM.

@ferrels

Quote:

ferrels wrote: @rigo I know they have more than one programmer which is obviously more than you know. And Michal ported AROS in his free time as a hobby. Hyperion is in the OS business and has the staff and resources to port OS4 to x86 if they see fit.

Hint: There are several people involved or tied closely to the OS4 dev team on this thread.

You might want to not make assumptions that somehow you know more than some of the statements made in this thread.

Last edited by wegster on 22-Mar-2009 at 02:01 AM.

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@wegster

I stand by my comments. No assumptions were made. Hyperion has more than one programmer and they're certainly skilled enough to port OS4 to another platform if Hyperion decides to move in that direction. I won't assume that Hyperion will port to x86 although I hope they do....period.

@ferrels

Quote:

I stand by my comments. No assumptions were made.

How about the part about knowing more than rigo.

@Rob

...and yes, I know more than Rigo. You can go back to selling SAMs and game consoles now.

@ferrels

Quote:

ferrels wrote: @Hans I didn't say it was a one man job that took 2 months. I said it took Michal several months in his spare time just as he reported in his blog.

What Michal did is not what you're expecting Hyperion to do.

Quote:

I don't see any console users out there demanding AmigaOS for their game consoles and the SAM is ridiculously underpowered and over priced. I do hear a lot of people asking for OS4 on x86/AMD. There's a market there and I hope Hyperion pursues it.

Actually, I have heard a number of people asking for OS4 on PowerPC gaming consoles. But here's the thing, there being a potential market does not mean that one can reach it. For example:
- Porting to x86 requires huge resources that are not available.
- Creating a decent port to PS3 would require access to graphics chip documentation that is not available, or significant resources to get the SPE's to fake HW accelerated graphics.

Chasing every potential market will kill progress on the OS itself, which would be bad.

Hans

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@Hans

ferrals is right.. PS3 or any console is designed for a gaming market - and porting OS4 to it is a limited market..... though porting OS4 to x86 is pretty much the future - as the hardware is cheap and readily available anywhere. My view is that the current PPC H/W is too expensive, limited based on location, warranty returns, etc.. and people take that all into account. Personally I would not invest anything into the PPC market. If OS4 was available on x86 I would of purchased it - I said the same thing back in 2001. Until then I am sticking to my WinUAE with OS3.9

@drandazzo

Quote:

drandazzo wrote: @Hans ferrals is right.. PS3 or any console is designed for a gaming market - and porting OS4 to it is a limited market.....

If you look at my previous post, you'll see that I said that a PS3 port wasn't all that feasible either. I'm not particularly interested in porting to consoles either, but it is an option because plenty of ex Amiga fans/techies already have one. I doubt that people using Linux on the PS3 are doing it for the games, so whether the machine was designed for gaming or not is irrelevant

Quote:

though porting OS4 to x86 is pretty much the future - as the hardware is cheap and readily available anywhere. My view is that the current PPC H/W is too expensive, limited based on location, warranty returns, etc.. and people take that all into account. Personally I would not invest anything into the PPC market. If OS4 was available on x86 I would of purchased it - I said the same thing back in 2001. Until then I am sticking to my WinUAE with OS3.9

Okay, I'll repeat myself once more: it's not about whether the market exists and is big or not, but whether entering that market is achievable.

Let's go through the issues:
- Porting to x86 will take a significant amount of time and resources
- During the time that the port is done, there will be zero income, so money will have to come from elsewhere
- Where will the money come from before the port is ready and on sale
- There is a choice between spending more time and money on backward compatibility, or trying to sell an OS with zero apps

Being able to make a profit of millions in two/three years time is irrelevant if you go bankrupt before then.

Contrast the above with the following:
- Porting to another PowerPC motherboard can be done in a modest amount of time
- The potential market is smaller, but the costs of development are lower, and sales will come much sooner
- There is the opportunity to actually enhance the OS, instead of spending all resources on porting
- There are already apps available for new users of the OS

Hans

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What's a "reasonnable" timeframe ?

It took 5 or 6 years to port the OS (or should I say rewrite ? As a lot of things have been rewritten anyway) to PPC. Now there are not more than a few hundreds of active users/developers. There are not any more companies developing software for the Amiga.

There's nothing to loose by going x86. All current users will follow no matter what happens anyway.

The OS needs to be written from scratch to become modern. What better time than now for that ?

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@BigD

Who will pay for Sony's Dev licence?

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@Hans

Quote:

Creating a decent port to PS3 would require access to graphics chip documentation that is not available, or significant resources to get the SPE's to fake HW accelerated graphics

I'm confused. I know you and others are working diligently on improving OS4's graphics subsystem, but someone really needs to explain to all the lay people why the ECS and AGA chipsets are good enough for OS4 while the PS3's virtual frame buffer is not. Honestly, no one's buying that.

The Cell/BE PPE should be fast enough--certainly faster than the 603e and 604e used in the Blizzard and Cyberstorm accelerators. From the benchmarks I've seen, the 440EP is only 2.5x to 3x faster than the 603e, depending on the clock speed. I'm sure Cell/BE PPE performance has been adequately covered in other threads.

None of us outside Hyperion's inner circle know why they've made the choices they've made, but I'm sure they were in Hyperion's best interests. It's obvious from the general discontent within the community that those choices were not in the best interests of their OS4 customers. (At least, not yet.)

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When Amiga first announced OS4/5 and Amiga Anywhere, it sounded like they were onto a good thing. The thought of being able to purchase off-the-shelf components and assembling a system built to a minimum or recommended hardware specification. Finally the prospect of an affordable x86 option appeared within reach.

Then, as plans progressed and the AmigaOne system was formulated, it became apparent that PPC was the preferred platform, and then it progressed to the stage where there would be a hardware lockdown tying it down to specific platform. Oops - wrong bet!

Well the mistakes were made, and now we have a situation where at least we have OS4.1 running on new hardware, albeit under-powered and over-priced. If Hyperion had been developing OS4 for x86 instead of PPC, then at least there would be the potential for a larger market.

But where to from here? It's probably too little, too late, to enter into the mammoth job required to port to and support x86 from such a small company for such a small user base, so there are some advantages towards the idea of developing for PS3.

Why? A fixed, reference design with a chipset not so dissimilar as x86, which would simplify development, that has some good modern hardware specifications, a reasonable price due to the scale of manufacturing from an established company, and confirmed future availability due to Sony's product life cycle indications.

But realistically, nothing will happen on further development of the OS until Hyperion actually can be assured of rights to continue and/or expand development.

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