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Amiga Forever

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Re: Amiga Forever

#151

Post by Cockbrand »

guenthert wrote: post #125
JohnBooty wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I had no idea that the ST had 100hz modes. That's so cool. Folks who grew up in the post-CRT era might not realize what a difference 100hz vs. 60hz could make with CRT monitors when you were staring at a screen for 8+ hours a day.

Not sure what the graphics controller was capable of, but the 'paperwhite' monochrome monitor which was offered then supported 72Hz refresh rate. That was a lot then and most people won't notice the remaining flicker, but it's not 100Hz. Op might be misremembering. (I'm a bit sensitive -- around that time, I removed a connection on the MB of my Schneider, nee Amstrad, CPC 464 so that it would think it's the NTSC vers…

This is true, the monochrome monitor only did a bit over 70Hz. I was corrected in another comment in this thread.

Re: Amiga Forever

#152

Post by EvanAnderson »

bitwize wrote: post #130
EvanAnderson wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best part of the whole "Jack Tramiel leaves Commodore, buys Atari" story is the part about Atari floating debt to Amiga. The debt was coming due around the time Tramiel bought Atari and, at the last minute, Commodore acquired Amiga and Atari was paid-off. There was litigation following-- Tramiel was never one to let something go quietly-- but in the end we got the Commodore Amiga. In some alternate universe there…

Probably a Commodore ST, though.

My understanding is that Commodore had a Z8000 machine in development. It would have been neat to see what they came up with, in light of the fact that Shiraz Shivji went to Tramel Tech / Atari. All silly speculation, but it is so neat that, effectively, two major players in a market “swapped” their engineering staff. Surely that’s an odd scenario.

Re: Amiga Forever

#153

Post by cmrdporcupine »

lproven wrote: post #145
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it was a bad decision, it was inevitable they had to switch as Motorola left 68k customers in the lurch. The actual bad decision was not investing in better OS development in the 80s. Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was tec…

> the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down Yes and no. I mean, the Mac is a cut-down Lisa. But you're right, cut down too far. (Aside: the Lisa was a 68000 as well, I am fairly sure. No MMU, but it did have multitasking.) I think the problems were in scaling it down far enough to get the price down to vaguely reasonabl…

The Lisa had a custom MMU, if I recall. There were other 68000 based systems that were similar.

My key point is around the operating system. They had a system in LisaOS that had multitasking, memory protection, proper dynamic allocation, etc. It was a better OS than what was shipped on the Mac. It was unfortunate they threw it away. Likely due to personal & organizational politics more than technical and cost reasons (Jobs hated the Lisa). A few years later they were running Mac OS on old Lisa hardware.

Re: Amiga Forever

#154

Post by AndrejXY »

bni wrote: post #149
dark-star wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's just one of the reasons why Cloanto has kind of a bad reputation among Amiga enthusiasts. Don't use them unless you want that warm and fuzzy feeling of having legally obtained the Kickstart ROMs instead of just grabbing them from archive.org...

Also Cloanto say they own the ROMs, but they can't prove this. I think Gateway, and then Acer owns it, but who knows. I used https://aminet.net/package/util/misc/GrabKickDisk to grab ROMs from my Amigas. But you can just as well grab them from random internet site, check the checksum and be happy and guilt free about it.

"Who knows?" Playing the FUD game?

Acer never owned anything Amiga. The copyrights and trademarks can easily be looked up, while the patents expired before Acer even bought Gateway.

https://www.copyright.gov/ https://www.uspto.gov/

Re: Amiga Forever

#155

Post by AndrejXY »

dark-star wrote: post #133
AndrejXY wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I am afraid you are wrong on two points: there was indeed a license agreement with every Amiga sold (whether enforceable or not, I don't know), but more importantly there were no rights to be waived in the first place.

System ROMs were protected copyrighted works well before the release of Amiga in 1985. See the case of Apple vs. clone maker Franklin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....

What you describe is piracy. Your other comment about legality having a "bad reputation among Amiga enthusiasts" makes it seem like the Amiga community is one of criminals. That is sheer madness.

Re: Amiga Forever

#156

Post by AndrejXY »

snvzz wrote: post #135
bogantech wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where did Cloanto ever refer to this as "encryption"? It is a simple XOR, and it is open source. They always said they were "encoded" because Amiga International or Gateway asked them to. ROM encoding has been supported by UAE since 1997.

(Interesting takeover attempt by the usual "anti Cloanto" trolls.)

Post Scriptum - Found some info here:

https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/16-128

Re: Amiga Forever

#157

Post by bni »

AndrejXY wrote: post #154
bni wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Cloanto say they own the ROMs, but they can't prove this. I think Gateway, and then Acer owns it, but who knows. I used https://aminet.net/package/util/misc/GrabKickDisk to grab ROMs from my Amigas. But you can just as well grab them from random internet site, check the checksum and be happy and guilt free about it.

"Who knows?" Playing the FUD game? Acer never owned anything Amiga. The copyrights and trademarks can easily be looked up, while the patents expired before Acer even bought Gateway. https://www.copyright.gov/ https://www.uspto.gov/

No FUD. Nothing I have seen convince me Cloanto own the ROMs. Trademark on "Amiga" got nothing to do with that.

Re: Amiga Forever

#158

Post by AndrejXY »

bni wrote: post #157
AndrejXY wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who knows?" Playing the FUD game? Acer never owned anything Amiga. The copyrights and trademarks can easily be looked up, while the patents expired before Acer even bought Gateway. https://www.copyright.gov/ https://www.uspto.gov/

No FUD. Nothing I have seen convince me Cloanto own the ROMs. Trademark on "Amiga" got nothing to do with that.

You are right in that this has nothing to do with trademarks. Copyright assignments can be researched on this US Government site (here a sample output for "Cloanto"):

https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/doctitles.cgi?V3626D795 https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/doctitles.cgi?V9946D337 https://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/doctitles.cgi?V9943D475

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