This seems a re-occurring theme. Most of us acknowledge that none of the AOS-like OSes (OS4, MOS, AROS, UAE/3.X) aren't terribly likely to take the desktop world by storm any day soon, and lately, TMHG and others want to point to some device or another for MOS (or other AOS-like) possibilities....while the Friedens have been chanting 'embedded' for years.

But, embedded devices can be nearly anything, basically anything with a CPU that's not a desktop, and _usually_ doesn't have an integrated or desktop like display. It could be a network appliance - routers, switches, WiFi access points, an STB, or others. Some 'appliances' or novelty/mini systems sort of cross that line or definition, like LimePC. It could be an ECU in an automotive computer, in a microwave or refrigerator, a cell phone, or MP3 player, something like the GP32X, or something not mentioned.

But...why _would_ someone choose an AOS-like system over other options? PPC? Linux has been there, as well as others. Size? Damn Small Linux is 50MB or so, and will run with 16-32MB of RAM. OS4 at least in the desktop version, is larger than that, both in storage and RAM requirements. (No idea offhand how large the out of the box distros for MOS and AROS are, anyone?) This isn't entirely fair, as things can be removed, or aren't needed for specific uses, much like Apple pared down OSX to run on the iPhone.

This is NOT meant as a 'My OS is better than your OS' thread, nor a legal discussion one. What applies to one of these _could_ apply equally, or nearly so, to all of the others in most cases.

Bernd/umisef and others have mentioned 'the killer app,' while TMHG made a slight departure from that, and proposed the 'entire system' (hw, packaging, software) could potentially BE that 'killer app.'

Thoughts?

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@wegster

Maybe if something like this get's build. Note; this doesn't have to be MOS, it can also be OS4 and AROS too. Get it:
http://www.morphzone.org/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5600&forum=11#54267

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@wegster

Have you ever seen MacTV?

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@Srbin

I think some of the numbers might be questionable, but would depend on quantity. As the guys doing the Amiga keyboard-like case found out, it's not cheap to have custom casework done in low numbers. Other than that, there's obviously the software that's missing, but it's certainly as good an idea as many others.

Maybe you'd like to paste the contents from your post there here? (Basically, an Efika2 based portable media center, but you should read the whole post).

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@NutsAboutAmiga

Quote:

NutsAboutAmiga wrote: @wegster Have you ever seen MacTV?

Actually, no. I'll assume it's TV on demand or via iTunes? Not selling very well from what I gather..although I do certainly believe one of the next money makers and convenience techs will be digital on demand but not priced like insane cable companies per movie rates..

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@wegster

I double-checked the prices and it is like that. It is a long read, and english is not my native, but try to read it 2-3 times, you will see that $120 is way too much. And 20.000 units is nothing. More NEO DVD's (crap) are sold just in Serbia, not to mention rest of Europe/World.

I didn't want to copy&paste whole post; that would be rude to take 3 pages of text. Not all can be interested in the story.

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@wegster

http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/nostore.woa/wa/RSLID?mco=7E4F2D7D&nclm=AppleTV

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@wegster

Quote:

But...why _would_ someone choose an AOS-like system over other options? PPC? Linux has been there, as well as others. Size? Damn Small Linux is 50MB or so, and will run with 16-32MB of RAM.

That is not damn small. That is damn bloat. But so is MorphOS.

Quote:

OS4 at least in the desktop version, is larger than that, both in storage and RAM requirements. (No idea offhand how large the out of the box distros for MOS and AROS are, anyone?)

Tens of megabytes i.e. same order of magnitude.

Quote:

This isn't entirely fair, as things can be removed, or aren't needed for specific uses, much like Apple pared down OSX to run on the iPhone.

That is easy because iPhone is Apple's own product. It wouldnt work so well if iPhone was coming from other company.

Current Amiga offerings are, in my opinion, too clumsy and feature rich to be used in most embedded applications. No display? Then you must be able to throw away whole gfx subsystem with GUI libraries. No mass storage? Delete DOS and filesystems.

As far as Amiga goes it needs more modularity if someone wants to use it on embedded devices. They often lack display so you can let gfx.lib, intuition, p96/cgx and reaction/mui go. Some devices dont have mass storage so you can let DOS with filesystems go as well.

What is really needed is only Exec and some services like TCP/IP or USB stack. For example Texas Instruments offers BSD compatible TCP/IP stack for their DSP/BIOS operating system and that OS has even less features than Exec of Kickstart 1. But the point is that you have very tiny and efficient kernel which you can efficiently extend with modules you need.

Then there must be good development tools. Good development tools for Windows, or at least for Linux. If you are going to develop for PPC embedded board you dont develop on PPC but on your x86 PC you have at your office.

So I dont think Amiga has any kind of success in small embedded devices. To make Amiga even remotely useful you need a device with display so that you can utilize relatively rich but efficient GUI libraries. Something like navigators could suffice but running Linux or Amiga on it could be overkill, still. And of course why pay royalties for proprietary operating system when Linux is free and comes with source code and code slaves?

Quote:

Bernd/umisef and others have mentioned 'the killer app,'

There cant be the killer app because all the software is already done.

Quote:

while TMHG made a slight departure from that, and proposed the 'entire system' (hw, packaging, software) could potentially BE that 'killer app.'

That can have some success but it is not really easy to find customers from embedded industry. Startup companies are usually small and poor while older companies usually have found their solutions.

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@wegster

Like I said in the Eee PC thread, Amigalike operating systems, with no virtual memory, would be great in situations where you need to minimise writes to the disk when the OS is installed on a flash drive.

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@itix

Quote:

That is not damn small. That is damn bloat. But so is MorphOS.

Well, yeah --- but it's a case of "so what?".

1G of flash currently has an end user price of less than A$10; Unless one is trying to build A$19.95 keyring digital photo frames (I kid you not --- 128x128 resolution....), the cost of 0.05 gigs of flash is not a problem; And if you design your product to use 32M flash chips, you might actually find that you end up paying *more* rather than less --- maybe not today, but in a year's time, almost certainly. Try buying PC100 RAM today....

And it's always a trade-off between money saved per unit, and time spent on doing so (even assuming that all else is the same). In my previous job, I spent a couple of weeks getting the linux distribution for information displays to fit into 128M CF cards instead of 256M ones (this required a pretty full Perl, Java, lots of comms stuff, and a bunch of local databases). And it *might* have been a worthwhile thing to do for 200 units if we had actually rolled them out according to schedule (24 minutes of my time per 128-instead-of-256M-CF); Seeing as the schedule slipped, it was a bleeding waste of effort, because considerably before the end of the project, the company started using 256M cards after all, because they simply were more readily available and didn't cost any more.


A comparable situation exists (in most places) with long distance/international calls. Being a German living in Oz, I am quite familiar with the issue :). It used to be that things were horrendously expensive, and one would make a list of items-to-talk-about before calling, as well as thoroughly investigate what time to call at, and using what carrier/phone card. Heck, at one point, I even sent a whole lot of Australian 20 cent coins to a friend in Germany --- the German phone booths of the time would often mistake them for DM5 coins (worth about 25 times as much).
Nowadays, I usually don't even bother going for a cheap provider. The differences are so small, and the absolute cost per minute is so low, that it really doesn't matter anymore. And if it takes an hour to catch up, oh well, so what?

@umisef

Quote:

Well, yeah --- but it's a case of "so what?". 1G of flash currently has an end user price of less than A$10; Unless one is trying to build A$19.95 keyring digital photo frames (I kid you not --- 128x128 resolution....), the cost of 0.05 gigs of flash is not a problem;

Sure... but we can not allocate so much ram to run an operating system. When you are grabbing video frames at relatively high frame rates (from 50 to 1000 fps) you are quickly filling up ram. Allocating 50-100MB from gigabytes of ram is not much but why waste so much precious ram when you can run everything on a simple operating system which only needs less than 1MB?

Oh, and that operating system must be efficient enough to capture and process (analyze) all those frames in real time. Having seen how bad Linux is on embedded CPUs I dont have much faith on it. Amiga solution could work there but we dont need an OS that uses MMU or relies on BIOS to setup hardware. Like there was any hardware to setup, we have only an array of CPUs with plenty of ram and few communication chips. It is quite amazing how much you can get done only with barebone Exec implementation.

Quote:

In my previous job, I spent a couple of weeks getting the linux distribution for information displays to fit into 128M CF cards instead of 256M ones (this required a pretty full Perl, Java, lots of comms stuff, and a bunch of local databases).

To me that is more closer to desktop systems than embedded. On those systems you probably really do prefer a desktop operating system over simpler embedded ones. Databases on the embedded, pffft

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@wegster

I've thought for at least 10 years now that AOS (and now, AROS and MOS as well) would be an ideal OS for a true tablet device, like the current crop of UMPCs. With Workbench (and the AROS and MOS versions) you can do damn near anything just using the pointer, and the Amiga screens capability allows for a pop-up on-screen keyboard that is still unobtrusive, and also allows for multiple apps that don't fight for pixels. The OS is 'light' enough where you can watch videos. The graphics library allows for odd-sized screens (and possibly easy rotation of the tablet). And, with a product something like AmigaVision, you could even do some programming without a keyboard.

Of course, the RMB menu is a slight problem.

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People who generalize are always wrong.


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@itix

Quote:

When you are grabbing video frames at relatively high frame rates (from 50 to 1000 fps) you are quickly filling up ram. Allocating 50-100MB from gigabytes of ram is not much but why waste so much precious ram when you can run everything on a simple operating system which only needs less than 1MB?

Well, 50MB of RAM (let's for the sake of the argument say that all the OS gets loaded into RAM), at A$30 per gig, is A$1.50 worth of RAM. How much does that small, proprietary OS cost per license?

50MB is about 50ms worth of video grabbing memory at 1000fps. Realistically, you almost certainly want a full second as the minimum you have RAM for. So you are going to put at least a gig in there, anyway, at which point 50MB is far from "so much precious ram"; It's less than the difference between a binary gigabyte and a decimal gigabyte....

Quote:

Having seen how bad Linux is on embedded CPUs I dont have much faith on it. Amiga solution could work there but we dont need an OS that uses MMU or relies on BIOS to setup hardware

So the "Amiga solution" has nothing to do with AmigaOS, or Amiga hardware. Hmmm....

And actually, linux does pretty well for embedded applications; When you can capture, analyse and forward 3 million network packets per second, reliably, that's pretty good in my book. Of course, it *does* require a bit of hand-holding (aka application-space-appropriate programming techniques) from the app programmer; Current linux kernels are certainly written with a thought spared for the worst case --- something which AmigaOS cannot historically claim (its designers fondness for the simple linked list is legendary, and we all know how long it takes to find something in one of them...).

Quote:

But...why _would_ someone choose an AOS-like system over other options?

Can't put it in words properly, but AOS is lightweight, fast and just works.

So why not put it on a tablet that boots in 10 seconds?
Why not use it in a SAT DVR?
Why not use it for a next generation VideoToaster / DraCo?
Why not use it for a cheap small computer that boots fast and you can use it for E-Mail, Browsing, .torrent, Emulators (Amiga / PSX ...) an need much less than power than 160 Watt when doing *nothing*.

My PC mostly needs longer to boot than i then need to check my emails or forums.

Last edited by Donar on 13-Jan-2008 at 10:27 AM.

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@Donar

Quote:

So why not put it on a tablet that boots in 10 seconds?

To run what? No touchscreen recognition software out there for any of the AOS-alikes, is there?

Quote:

Why not use it in a SAT DVR?

No consumer grade media frontend, can't do HDCP content..

Quote:

Why not use it for a next generation VideoToaster / DraCo?

NewTek already has working hardware - creating 'new' hardware to be custom vs off the shelf really isn't economically feasible for smaller companies, and why would bigger companies bother? (serious question, and sort of the subject of this topic..)

Quote:

Why not use it for a cheap small computer that boots fast and you can use it for E-Mail, Browsing, .torrent, Emulators (Amiga / PSX ...) an need much less than power than 160 Watt when doing *nothing*.

email - nothing comparable to Thunderbird or Exchange
Browsing - nothing comparable to Firefox or Safari

Without those two pegged solidly, it's of little use to most for a desktop or desktop-like system.

If Epistula, Sputnik/OWB/others mature far enough along, or someone does a decent media management setup (and drivers for HDCP capable cards, which means AFAIK, only a small handful of PCIE cards right now..?) then..maybe.

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Are we not done with the same silly arguments and flames yet??!

This is meandering a bit, but despite all the poo poos about AA2, if executed properly it does have a much more viable market than a desktop OS.

Java is very useful in many contexts, but for things like multimedia and particularly game development there really aren't many multi-platform options outside of Flash.

Consider the Nintendo DS market alone at close to 50 million units, then add the XBOX, PS3 and Wii. Then consider mobile devices, set top boxes and kiosks. Being able to seemlessly deploy a product on all of these systems would be a significant coup.

@itix

Quote:

There cant be the killer app because all the software is already done.

You are mistaken there. Many new applications will appear (regardless of the platform) for which people do not foresee a need at this time but won't be able to live without once they know it exists.

I bet you didn't think you'd need a web browser in 1990 and don't think yet that you need a molecular alignment optimizer, but in 2020 you might very well be taking it for granted

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@wegster
Quote:

To run what? No touchscreen recognition software out there for any of the AOS-alikes, is there?.

Sorry but if a company is going to do a tablet based on a AOS style system i expect them to write the needed subsystem on their own if needed.

Quote:

No consumer grade media frontend, can't do HDCP content..

See above, and you need HDCP only for HD (or just ignore the broadcast flag and transfer up to 720p over DVI.

Quote:

NewTek already has working hardware - creating 'new' hardware to be custom vs off the shelf really isn't economically feasible for smaller companies, and why would bigger companies bother? (serious question, and sort of the subject of this topic..)

Discreetfx has the source for the Amiga Video Toaster and they could start from there...

Quote:

email - nothing comparable to Thunderbird or Exchange Browsing - nothing comparable to Firefox or Safari

I only use very basic capabilities of Outlook, and browsers are on their way (as you mentioned already)

You are right, if everybody will do nothing there, is no sense in using a Amiga style system.

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Quote:

My PC mostly needs longer to boot than i then need to check my emails or forums.

My PC doesn't reboot every hour (or so) because program 'x' did a bad thing...

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@Leo
I simply turn mine of when i do not use it. Or won't use it for the next x hours.
If you are fine with your PC using 160 Watt's an hour 24/7 365 days a year - fine i'm not.

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