Why doesn't Genesi make any mention of Amiga OS on their web site? Just curious.

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@JayCee

They never supported AmigaOS, Hyperion ported AmigaOS 4.1 for Pegasos II in 2009 a long time after Pegasus II was out of production, Pegasos II was discontinued in 2006, due to EU laws and RoHS, Genesi have also stopped supporting the product, no new firmware.

Pegasos II is EOL.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 03-Jan-2015 at 01:51 AM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 03-Jan-2015 at 01:45 AM.

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Let's say that MorphOS is a different form of Amiga... I doubt Genesi mention MorphOS either. I believe that you cannot buy ANY hardware from Genesi any more. I remember Pegasos III was planned but never materialised. For me, Genesi + MorphOS was a good team and after all these years Peg2 motherboards still fetch a good price.

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@Everblue
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I doubt Genesi mention MorphOS either.

Actually, they do. Not that it changes anything really, these days.

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@Everblue

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I remember Pegasos III was planned but never materialised.

Yes that one was going to be ARM based, clearly the MorphOS team and Gensi did not talk a lot to etch other, because MorphOS was only for PowerPC, rewriting MorphOS to ARM based platform would have been huge undertaking.

Trance the JIT compiler in MorphOS would have need complete rewrite, anyone who has followed JIT development in EUAE knows how time consuming that effort is.

It was simply easier to port MorphOS to Appel hardware, and less expensive for the users.
http://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=6355&forum=3

In a parallel universe; Eyetech & Mai Logic went bankrupt, there was a lack of hardware for few years, instead of spending time on Appel hardware, they (A-EON and ACube-Systems) decided to continue make hardware for AmigaOS, and big effort was put into supporting new hardware like Radeon HD cards, and PCIe the current bus standard.

AmigaOS was also ported to Pegasos II, Hyperion-entertainment is not into producing hardware them self, and as there where many users who was interested in AmigaOS that owned a Pegasos II, it made sense. Just like, they support BlizzardPPC and CyberStormPPC.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 03-Jan-2015 at 06:33 PM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Freescale dumped all their desktop visions so there was no more business opportunities with PPC.

A-Cube did not exist at that time. To my understanding it was formed to rescue OS4 venture.

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@itix

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Freescale dumped all their desktop visions so there was no more business opportunities with PPC.

AMCC 460 chips is not that bad, it is not a multimedia chip, but that does not stop anyone from using it as that. In combination with BCM70015 / BCM970015 Broadcom Crystal HD Video Decoder chips, it might be excellent for playing videos.

AltiVec is nice but requires developers know to use it; for the most part older GCC we are using cannot optimize code automatically for AltiVec.

There is also GPU aided video decoding VDPAU/UVD.

So if some invested a few bucks on that, who knows.

Desktop chip's it used to be 486's at one point in time

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A-Cube did not exist at that time. To my understanding it was formed to rescue OS4 venture.

Eyetech retired from Amiga market in 2005

Matthew Leaman: Matthew is also the founder and Managing Director of AmigaKit, a trading division of Leaman Computing Ltd, which in 2006 acquired the stock of Eyetech Group Ltd.

ACube Systems Srl is a company that started in January 2007 from the synergy of the Italian companies Alternative Holding Group Srl, Soft3 and Virtual Works.[1]

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Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 03-Jan-2015 at 06:00 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 03-Jan-2015 at 05:41 PM.

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@JayCee

Quote:

JayCee wrote: Why doesn't Genesi make any mention of Amiga OS on their web site? Just curious.

Why would they?



Is Genesi even alive today except from a website?

@TRIPOS

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Is Genesi even alive today except from a website?

Genesi is doing very well actually.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

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NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @Everblue Quote: I remember Pegasos III was planned but never materialised. Yes that one was going to be ARM based

No "Pegasos Class" ( =desktop) computer from Genesi would have been based on ARM I believe. ARM came much later. IIRC they had several concepts of motherboards who could have been labeled (and sometimes was) "Pegasos 3" in various stages of development over the years ranging from simple evaluation drawing board designs to actual PCB prototypes, including designs based on the Freescale MPC8641D, MPC8610 and IBM 970MP CPU's. I suppose everything is still there in forum posts and blogs.

What they did with ARM was more like "Efika Class" i.e. thin client and netbook. I recall some products existed and was sold for a while. Had nothing to do with MorphOS though. Obviously.

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because MorphOS was only for PowerPC, rewriting MorphOS to ARM based platform would have been huge undertaking.

By going the AROS way (Amiga 3.1 source compatibility rather than binary compatibility and UAE for the rest) it could probably have been done in a few weeks.

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Trance the JIT compiler in MorphOS would have need complete rewrite, anyone who has followed JIT development in EUAE knows how time consuming that effort is.

Indeed a new "Trance" would have to be developed if a MorphOS version for a different ISA would become reality. At least if you want it to be Amiga "native" in the sense of MorphOS PPC / OS4 PPC (full binary compatibility). That would have been a challenge for sure. But the biggest obstacle in such a scenario would have been related to endianness. Not so much the code as the data.

Rumors say that the MorphOS team is working on a new version that will not only migrate to another ISA but also introduce new things like 64-bit, SMP, resource tracking and so on. This will probably put it closer to the AROS concept than the current Amiga 3.1 binary compatible MorphOS concept. But this is only rumors.

As is AmigaOS 4.2 which faces the same obstacles.

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It was simply easier to port MorphOS to Appel hardware, and less expensive for the users.

In the end when time has passed and we know the results, it turned out that this was a great success!

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In a parallel universe; Eyetech & Mai Logic went bankrupt, there was a lack of hardware for few years, instead of spending time on Appel hardware, they (A-EON and ACube-Systems) decided to continue make hardware for AmigaOS, and big effort was put into supporting new hardware

In the end when time has passed and we know the results, it turned out that this was a great failure in comparison!

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AmigaOS was also ported to Pegasos II

The OS4 Pegasos 2 port was only released after the computer had been officially discontinued or at least very close to this after the problems with continued Pegasos 2 production had been made public (the Pegasos 2 was effectively killed by the EU RoHS Directive) .

For political reasons probably.

Hyperion knew all the time the quality of the Pegasos 2 hardware and what it would mean for OS4 since there was nothing else for OS4 to run on after the Eyetech/MAI AmigaOne boards crashed and burned. But they didn't want OS4 sales to help the Pegasos effort when it mattered. It's as simple as that. Too bad because many Amigans who was sitting on the fence ready to jump away could have been saved if they had released the OS4 port for Pegasos sooner. At least I think so. :(

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Hyperion-entertainment is not into producing hardware them self

Not entirely true. Or truth with a modification ;)

Companies are people. And after Ben Hermans became the only single "partner" of Hyperion he BECAME the company (the more or less paid third party contractors and unpaid charity workes/volunteers like Steven Solie excluded). And remember that A-Eon though using the same name PUBLICLY was really TWO DIFFERENT companies:

1. Belgian based "A-Eon" with Ben Hermans (Hyprerion) and Trevor Dickinson as partners
2. UK based "A-Eon" with Matt Leaman (AmigaKit) and Trevor Dickinson as partners

So what was that "Most Ambitious Project" of Hyperion again? ;)

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they support BlizzardPPC and CyberStormPPC.

Is anyone really NOT saying this is a bad idea today?

No I thought so!

@damocles

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damocles wrote: @TRIPOS Quote: Is Genesi even alive today except from a website? Genesi is doing very well actually.

And you know this -- how?

Any examples?


I see nothing from Genesi that resembles any signs of life. The powerdeveloper.org forum has been dead for years and so has the bbrv blog been. And no products. And the Morph Zone domain has changed several times during the last years. Why?

@TRIPOS

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And the Morph Zone domain has changed several times during the last years. Why?

The ZONE top level domain had only become available fairly recently. Personally, I like it better than any of the previous domain names, which have all remained operational as well (so far at least).

@TRIPOS

Well I know that people use AmigaOS on Pegasos so I just didn't understand why they would not list all Operating Systems that work on their hardware.

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@TRIPOS

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1. Belgian based "A-Eon" with Ben Hermans (Hyprerion) and Trevor Dickinson as partners

and Anthony Moorley, who is no longer involved.

#6

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@NutsAboutAmiga

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NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @itix Quote: Freescale dumped all their desktop visions so there was no more business opportunities with PPC. AMCC 460 chips is not that bad

Who are you kidding here? Sure, it probably has its uses in various embedded applications, but it for sure doesn't belong in a desktop computer. Firstly the chip lacks functional cache coherency. For a custom embedded application this might not be a big deal, but it sure is for a desktop system. To reconnect with the topic of this thread (Genesi), no working cache coherency was one of the reasons to why Genesi dropped their MPC5121e plans and went for ARM instead. And as a way to try to improve stability OS4 disables the L2 cache writes entirely by default. If this doesn't DISQUALIFY it as "a good and suitable CPU for desktops", then what will? Well, maybe the fact that it has very poor performance, even the old Pegasos 2 runs over it, despite its own bottle necks.

So I disagree, the AMCC 460 chips are TERRIBLE as desktop CPU's.

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it is not a multimedia chip, but that does not stop anyone from using it as that. In combination with BCM70015 / BCM970015 Broadcom Crystal HD Video Decoder chips, it might be excellent for playing videos.

My God! In no way does the requirement to use external HW for computational tasks speak in favor of the AMCC 460, how does this make it a good desktop CPU? A standard A1200 with external HW could play MP3's as well, does this make the 68020 @ 14MHz a suitable desktop CPU? Heck, even a C64 could probably be hacked to initiate both MP3 and movie playbacks using external HW. So the C64 is a good multimedia computer by 2015 standards?

As a reference it could be mentioned that even standard ARM CPU's used in today's smartphones and tablets outperforms anything we have seen on PPC "desktop", and we are talking about raw CPU power here, but they of course also have quite powerful GPU's (that could also be used with CUDA/OpenCL for a tremendous boost), SIMD's and lots of other accelerator controllers on top of that. Not to mention those "around the corner".

PPC is lagging so long behind it hurts! And relative in the limited PPC world, the AMCC 460 is a cripled underachiever!

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AltiVec is nice but requires developers know to use it; for the most part older GCC we are using cannot optimize code automatically for AltiVec.

SIMD units (like AltiVec) can make a huge impact on performance in some circumstances, some more than other. Of course you will need to know how to write programs that makes use of it! And what kind of comment was that anyway? It almost sound like you are trying to belittle the impact of SIMD's just because the AMCC 460 lacks one?! Like remodeling the world to make it fit your map?

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Quote: [quote]In a parallel universe; Eyetech & Mai Logic went bankrupt, there was a lack of hardware for few years, instead of spending time on Appel hardware, they (A-EON and ACube-Systems) decided to continue make hardware for AmigaOS A-Cube did not exist at that time. To my understanding it was formed to rescue OS4 venture.

Eyetech retired from Amiga market in 2005

Matthew Leaman: Matthew is also the founder and Managing Director of AmigaKit, a trading division of Leaman Computing Ltd, which in 2006 acquired the stock of Eyetech Group Ltd.
[/quote]
---

Are you trying some Historical Revisionism here? AmigaKit had NOTHING to do with anything discussed above but you try to make it sound like they saved the show or something back then? They didn't!

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ACube Systems Srl is a company that started in January 2007 from the synergy of the Italian companies Alternative Holding Group Srl, Soft3 and Virtual Works.[1]

Sam 440 was only released in late 2007 (and it was way too weak from the beginning by the way), but it was in 2008 that it started to matter for real. Until then there had been nothing for OS4, so itix was absolutely correct in what he said, Acube was an effort to save the OS4 venture, they played a big part for the continuation of OS4 at that time, and it probably wouldn't have been an OS4.1 version at all, hadn't it been for Acube getting involved back then. There was a long gap of time between the wreck that Eyetech left and the new hope brought by Acube several years later. And not only did they develop HW, AFAIK they also had access to the OS4 sources and participated in the development (at least for making the Sam port), and they also shouldered the sales and distribution of OS4. So without Acube, the OS4 venture would probably have faded away.

@JayCee

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JayCee wrote: @TRIPOS Well I know that people use AmigaOS on Pegasos so I just didn't understand why they would not list all Operating Systems that work on their hardware.

I take it that you weren't around here back then, but there was a point in time where Genesi actually did want OS4 to run on the Pegasos2, but Amiga Inc/Hyperion refused. Genesi was of the opinion that they had already entered an agreement and had a binding contract with Amiga for bringing Amiga's OS (including future revisions, like OS4) to their HW (including future revisions, like the Pegasos2), but Amiga didn't agree. Genesi initiated a lawsuit against Amiga Inc over this, which they actually WON. But this opened the gates to hell and started WW3 on this and similar sites, where hoards of people of the more fanatical kind expressed very loudly and vividly how this raped and mutilated the Amiga and everything good it about it, and how much they hated Genesi for trying this. After winning the lawsuit they wanted Hyperion to start the porting (which they refused), Genesi even claimed that they had managed to get OS4 up and running on the Pegasos 2 themselves, and they actually TRIED to list OS4 as a Pegasos2 OS on their website and in blog posts. But to put it mildly, none of this was very popular among Hyperion/OS4 purists back then. So after a while Genesi simply dropped it and walked away.

Of course, later when the Pegasos2 was discontinued, then OS4 was ported to it. But this only happened when it was too late for the Pegasos2, when it no longer mattered. But then suddenly everyone cheered and was happy about this. Suddenly everyone was fine about OS4 being a Pegasos2 OS. Everyone was actually very happy about it.

But no, there is no mentioning of OS4 on the Genesi website.

Maybe you understand better now?

@TRIPOS

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Sure, it probably has its uses in various embedded applications, but it for sure doesn't belong in a desktop computer.

It would be nice desktop CPU... 13 years ago.

@TRIPOS

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Amiga's OS (including future revisions, like OS4)

If I remember court documents correctly, contract was about "worthless" AmigaDE/AmigaAnywhere. Genesi tried to get OS4 this way and failed.

@number6

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number6 wrote: @TRIPOS Quote: 1. Belgian based "A-Eon" with Ben Hermans (Hyprerion) and Trevor Dickinson as partners and Anthony Moorley, who is no longer involved. #6

Neither is Ben Hermans (Hyperion).

My point was to answer the "Hyperion doesn't make HW" claim. No they don't, but there was a point in time where Ben Hermans set out that Hyperion was facing "the Most Ambitions Project" in the company's history and he partnered up with Trevor (and Anthony if you say so) to do just this -- produce HW! This would happen through a newly founded company called A-Eon. A lot of hype and marketing began. But suddenly, without any products being released, it became obvious that the relationship had crashed and burned. We all remember Trevor's goodbye post on Amiga.org. A post that only a few hours later was discarded as "my account had been hacked, please disregard from anything it said" when Matt Leaman had entered the scene, which resulted in the creation of the second (current) A-Eon company, where Matt Leaman is the shining star. And there are several posts online that testifies about the sour relations between those involved in "A-Eon 2" against "A-Eon 1".

But this was many years after Acube "rescued" OS4, and even more years after the Pegasos2 "rescued" it.

A-Eon and X1000 hasn't "rescued" anything at all, at least not if you don't think buying all SW and all community sites and taking over everything, using money they didn't get from the sales of $3000 computers, since those computers are practically given away as charity without profit in order to help and support the Amiga. There simply isn't anything to rescue anymore. It's way too late. Nothing matters anymore.

The world train moved on a long time ago, and the Amiga was left behind at the station, chained to a pole by a PPC chain.

@pavlor

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pavlor wrote: @TRIPOS Quote: Amiga's OS (including future revisions, like OS4) If I remember court documents correctly, contract was about AmigaDE/AmigaAnywhere.

Just what I said! AmigaDE/AmigaAnywhere WAS Amiga OS as defined by Amiga Inc, OS4 came many years later, which is why Genesi argued it should be considered as part of the Amiga OS evolution path they had a contract for. Remember that AA/OS4 was to be merged down the road into OS5, until then AA and OS4 was merely supposed to be mile stones on that road, and Genesi felt that everything was covered by their contract with Amiga Inc. "Amiga OS", including AmigaAnywhere, including OS4 (4.0, 4.1, 4.2, etc), including OS5. And they did actually win the lawsuit.

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Genesi tried to get OS4 this way and failed.

Another way to look at it is that Genesi succeeded (they won the case, judge ordered Amiga Inc to comply) but Amiga Inc failed to deliver. Which of course could be related to the fact that they wasn't in possession of anything OS4 related. Hyperion was contracted for a few months development work on "OS4", details of exactly what should be done was written down in the contract, and Amiga Inc should pay ... was it $25000 for the trouble? Well, Ben Hermans/Hyperion had different plans, they never delivered anything to Amiga Inc, they just kept on developing and developing, and then started selling the stuff for themselves by calling it "pre-releases" and whatnot. After a few years Amiga Inc grew tired and filed a trade mark infringement lawsuit against Hyperion, which somehow resulted in a settlement that is nothing else but a worm pit of legal dependencies where Intellectual Properties of both companies are forever tightly woven together in a tight knot.

Honestly, I think Genesi wouldn't have minded an OS4 port, but surely they didn't need it. They didn't really care. They had MorphOS. They had Linux. They hoped for a community of active users and developers. OS4 would have been a bonus, but that's all.

Mostly it was about shutting up Ben Hermans, Fleecy Moss and Bill McEwen, when the FUD level they were spreading (about the legality of MorphOS etc) reached the boiling point. That's what the lawsuit was mostly about.

And it worked!

And in the end, OS4 was also ported to the Pegasos2. OS4 didn't help saving the Pegasos2, but the Pegasos2 helped saving OS4!

But as for the topic of this thread, no, I don't think that "AmigaOS" will ever be written on any web page related to Genesi...