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Amiga Forever

amigaforever.com

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Re: Amiga Forever

#131

Post by richrichardsson »

AndrejXY wrote: post #115
richrichardsson wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still own Amigas, I have no qualms in using the downloaded ROMs since I could in theory rip them myself, so it doesn't feel like I'm committing any kind of offence (not a lawyer though).

You mean it would be legal to copy Windows 11 from one PC, and put the copy on a barebone system? :-D

If I'm not using the original PC why not? At this time my Amigas are ~1500 miles away, I'm not sure when I'll manage to reunite with them, but in the meantime I wanted to get back into demo coding again with emulators.

Re: Amiga Forever

#132

Post by trinsic2 »

btbuildem wrote: post #80
indymike wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat memory mode and other differences that would have made a port of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series co…

It blew my mind when I was able to set the viewport pointer to where my program code was, and SEE THE CODE AS IT RAN. Like, watch the bits flip as counters incremented, etc etc. It was a wonderful, impactful lesson in foundations of software engineering, before I even knew what any of that meant.

A lot of that "before I knew what that meant" going on for me looking back at that time. It seems like even though we have better technology now we somehow back slid into the worst uses for it.

Re: Amiga Forever

#133

Post by dark-star »

AndrejXY wrote: post #115
richrichardsson wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still own Amigas, I have no qualms in using the downloaded ROMs since I could in theory rip them myself, so it doesn't feel like I'm committing any kind of offence (not a lawyer though).

You mean it would be legal to copy Windows 11 from one PC, and put the copy on a barebone system? :-D

You didn't have to accept an EULA waiving these rights when you bought your Amiga

Re: Amiga Forever

#134

Post by snvzz »

indymike wrote: post #79
zozbot234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISTM that if Microsoft had managed to add preemptive multitasking to Windows 3.x in a backward-compatible way, this would've given us as close to an Amiga-like OS as one could ever hope to run on 8086 and 286 hardware. Perhaps even more so, if hardware could be expected to have multimedia capabilities as a standard, without relying on 3rd-party drivers - PC had this on the PCjr, and later Tandy.

> ISTM that if Microsoft had managed to add preemptive multitasking to Windows 3.x in a backward-compatible way, this would've given us as close to an Amiga-like OS as one could ever hope to run on 8086 and 286 hardware. 8086 didn't have the instruction set to do preemptive, and the 286's memory model was 64kb pages... and barely good enough. The enabler for MPC (Multimedia PC) was the combination of 386 (and 386sx)…

>8086 didn't have the instruction set to do preemptive

Can you elaborate of that?

AIUI all you need is interrupts (CPU has them) and a timer (the PC platform has them).

Re: Amiga Forever

#135

Post by snvzz »

bogantech wrote: post #17
chris_j wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks. (I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.) EDIT: typo.

It seems they offer an .iso download link now alongside the one for the .msi The kickstart ROMs are still encrypted on the ISO and AF stores unencrypted versions on disk after you run it but if you're on a Mac/Linux you can use romtool to decrypt them https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/romtool.html

>Encrypted ROMs

Which of course protects nothing, and is easily worked around. But it is still evil.

People will go on to claim that Cloanto isn't evil, and that the only reason they haven't open sourced AmigaOS is Hyperion.

Yet Cloanto does shit like this. I wonder if these same people can explain how this helps.

Re: Amiga Forever

#136

Post by snvzz »

AndrejXY wrote: post #107
snvzz wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will respect Cloanto when they respect AmigaOS by publishing the source code under an Open Source license. It is a shame that they are still bickering about this historical piece of software, not allowing the community to move on. Meantime, our Atari friends are enjoying emuTOS + MiNT.

You are blaming the wrong people. Amiga wanted (wants) to make an open source branch. Cloanto said the same on multiple occasions. I know people who saw settlement drafts with Hyperion, the provision was there. Ask the 3.1.4 developers in the forums. Hyperion lawyer-owner Ben Hermans, who is an "experienced IT litigator" is the one who keeps blocking it, like he keeps blocking the 2019 acquisition and the transfer of…

Cloanto is no saint[0]. From where I stand, both sides are trash.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34064176

Re: Amiga Forever

#137

Post by rbanffy »

amiga386 wrote: post #69
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior). Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.

I say this with respect, but I don't think it would. The x86 architecture had an absolute paucity of registers, the mixture of MMIO and PMIO was insane, and it just didn't have any PC-relative addressing modes. Relocation for a flat address space would be an annoyance. Prior to PCs becoming about a billion times faster and the compact encoding coming into its own, x86 code is not fun to write. Saying "some programs w…

> that coupling became the downfall when the computer hardware moved faster than Amiga software could be brought along.

Both hardware and software moved ahead while Commodore invested in the wrong things. Amiga was late to adopt VGA monitors and PCs quickly surpassed its capabilities. When I mentioned porting AmigaDOS and Intuition to 2/386's, it would be to keep the OS compatible at the C source level as much as possible, with workarounds for hardware when it's different, but always at OS API level so that non-game software (or non-Amiga-like games) could be ported from source.

I don't think it'd have saved Commodore or the Amiga (I think the Sun deal, where Sun would sell 3000/UX boxes was a better bet for that, or maybe not ditching the CBM 900 but, instead, building Amiga with Coherent instead of AmigaDOS).

Anyway, it'd have been fun.

Re: Amiga Forever

#138

Post by rbanffy »

mgk123 wrote: post #105
actionfromafar wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa! That's a rudimentary compression scheme to decrease latency.

If you want to know the details of how it works, see US patent 4851826: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4851826A/en BBoAH has a pic of an actual A2024: https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863 There was also a separate video card containing the framebuffer hardware, that could be connected to a "normal" high-res mono monitor: http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/moniterm

There are brilliant hacks and terrible kludges. This is the latter.

Yikes!

Re: Amiga Forever

#139

Post by rbanffy »

runjake wrote: post #71
rbanffy wrote: post #20

At the time Commodore made PCs, it could have been worthy to port AmigaOS to x86 (8088 was a bit too puny, but 286 and 386 could compare to 68K). An earlier lost opportunity was when Sun approached the offering to market the 3000/UX as a low-cost Unix workstation. The world could be a lot different had Commodore management been so boneheaded. OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those deci…

> OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense. I don't think you are. At the time, we in the Amiga community were wondering wtf was going on back then, when it was happening. It was pretty clear the leadership were making bad decisions, when they weren't absent.

They were still investing in 8-bit computers because they thought they'd recoup the investment. They did the 128, the 128D, and almost did a laptop and the C-65.

At the time it seemed like a sane thing to do while now we know they probably should have bet the farm on the Amigas (and take that Sun deal for the 3000/UX)

Re: Amiga Forever

#140

Post by rbanffy »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #73
Aloha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont think the platform move was.. a cause of Apple's troubles, it was mostly poor product planing, marketing and OS related issues (which were not really made better or worse by the ISA move)

I don't think it was a unitary cause, sure. But I think in retrospect it's clear Apple could not afford this kind of ISA move in addition to all the crazy OS work they were doing (and never finishing). It was half-baked until OS 8. In 1996 I helped administrated a group of MacOS boxen, all PowerPC. At that point in time only half the applications were running native PowerPC, and it was buggy as hell. If I recall, eve…

> even parts of the OS were still running 68k emulated.

Up until MacOS 8.5 you could move some system extensions to 68K Macs and they'd work.

I had my Color Classic have MacOS 8 looks (even running on 7.5) that way.

Apple couldn't stay on the 68K though - Motorola was mothballing the 68K line and investing on their own 88000 and, being faced with an OS rewrite, Apple did the rational thing - find out who has the best chance of making something better.

> Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.

I remember that, when MacOS 9x seemed like a dead end, Apple published MkLinux. It was my first Linux desktop.

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