Ano de 2005
Sistema Operacional Amiga OS4.0
Amiga one IBM PowerPC
Hyperion Site oficial
Compatibilidade de hardware
The Amiga computer was a machine ahead of its time. When it was
released in 1985, its color screen (4096 colors in HAM mode!),
four-channel sampled stereo sound, preemptive multitasking GUI, and
custom chips to accelerate both sound and graphics made the year-old
Macintosh seem antiquated and the PC positively Paleolithic. Steve Jobs
was reported to be extremely worried about the Amiga, but fortunately
for him and Apple, Commodore had absolutely no idea what they were doing.
Many jokes have been made about Commodore being unable to sell water
to a dying man in the desert, and sadly, these jokes were not that far
from the truth. After a showy introduction at the Lincoln Center, which
included pop star Deborah Harry and artist Andy Warhol, Commodore
stopped all production and advertising of the Amiga 1000, in
anticipation of the imminent release of the new 2000 and cost-reduced
500 models. These didn't appear until 1987, and much early momentum was
lost. Commodore continued to make terrible mistakes, suffered
financially from declining C-64 sales, and eventually went bankrupt in
April 1994.
The Amiga, by this time, had carved out a small but devoted niche,
especially in digital video. The Video Toaster, closely tied to the
Amiga hardware, replaced hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of TV
editing equipment for under US$8,000. Bundled with this hardware was
Lightwave, a 3D modeling and rendering program that was used to make the
pilot and first season of Babylon 5 (in the remaining seasons, they
continued to use Lightwave, but this time on Alpha and Intel computers).
Third-party developers, not willing to wait for the protracted
Commodore bankruptcy to resolve itself, developed add-ons for the Amiga
giving it access to the new 24-bit SVGA graphics cards coming from the
PC world, freeing the dependence on the now-aging custom graphics chips,
as well as PowerPC upgrade cards that worked like massive coprocessors
for applications rewritten to support them.
However, the lack of a new Amiga computer hurt the platform greatly.
Commodore was bought at liquidation by Escom AG, a German PC firm who
wanted only the Commodore brand name and logo, and had no interest in
the Amiga. Escom itself went bankrupt a few years later, and the Amiga
was briefly bought out by set-top manufacturer VISCorp, before they too
filed for liquidation.
Its third owner was none other than Gateway Computers, who were
interested mainly in Commodore's old patent portfolio, but claimed to be
interested in resurrecting the platform. However it became increasingly
clear that Gateway was never going to do anything with the Amiga, so a
consortium of investors calling themselves Amino Development bought out
the rights to the Amiga hardware and OS in 1999. The new company was
called Amiga, Inc., the same name as the original group headed by Jay
Miner that had started the computer company in 1982 before Commodore
bought them out. Amiga had come full circle!
In the heady days of the dot-com boom, Amiga Inc. had all sorts of
grandiose plans for resurrecting the platform. A new OS based on QNX,
then Linux, as well as a Java-like "Amiga Anywhere" development
environment or AmigaDE were proposed. Of these three, only the last ever
came to fruition before Amiga Inc. ran out of money when the bubble
burst. There had been some talk of a new, PowerPC-based version of the
classic AmigaOS, version 4.0, but as Amiga, Inc. had no more resources,
everyone assumed it was dead. WIRED magazine even gave OS4 a special
vaporware award, beating out even Duke Nukem Forever!
But an amazing thing was happening. Three companies were actually
working on a new Amiga platform. One, bplan Gbmh (formed from the ashes
of Phase 5, an Amiga accelerator card company) was originally going to
be a licensee of Amiga Inc. and produce hardware to run OS4. They had a
falling-out with the moribund Amiga Inc., merged with Thendic to became
Genesi, and decided instead to produce both the hardware and an "Amiga-like"
OS themselves. These were released as the PegasosPPC motherboard and
MorphOS in late 2001.
A second company, Eyetech UK, was to be the second licensee of OS4.
Eyetech had been an Amiga hardware and add-on distributor, and formed a
partnership with a Taiwanese company to produce modified Teron PowerPC
motherboards. The third company, Hyperion Entertainment, was hired by
Amiga, Inc. to write OS4 itself. As Amiga, Inc. had no money, Hyperion
signed a contract that would give them the rights to OS4 if Amiga, Inc.
went bankrupt. Hyperion was a small company that produced ports of
Windows games for the Macintosh, Amiga and Linux market.
The first AmigaOne motherboards were released in 2002, but there was
no OS4 to go with them, so they shipped with Debian PPC Linux instead.
Was Hyperion too small a company to manage this massive task, the first
operating system project they had ever attempted? While MorphOS gained a
small but dedicated following, AmigaOne owners anxiously awaited any
kind of news. Finally, after an agonizing 18-month wait, the first
Developer Prerelease CD of OS4 was shipped to AmigaOne owners worldwide.
Eyetech, meanwhile, had announced a new batch of AmigaOne motherboards,
this time coming in the tiny mini-ITX form factor. An update to OS4 was
delivered to coincide with their release. The prospect of exploring a
brand new operating system plus the possibilities of doing hardware
design around a tiny, low-power motherboard were too much for me and I
bit the bullet and ordered an AmigaOne Micro with OS4 on November 2004.
The Motherboard
The AmigaOne Micro "C" model measures 17cm x 17cm and contains an
800MHz IBM PPC 750FX or GX CPU (commonly known as the G3). This CPU is
on a removable daughter card so it can be replaced with a G4 (PPC 74xx)
module (800MHz ones are available now, faster ones are in development,
including a 1.5GHz G4 from Freescale). It comes with 256MB of PC-133 RAM
onboard, plus an extra SO-DIMM slot. Onboard graphics are provided by a
Radeon 7000 with 32 megabytes of memory.
Sound (Cmedia), 10/100 Ethernet (3com) and two USB 1.1 ports are also
onboard, as well as PS/2 connectors for a mouse and keyboard, serial,
parallel and game ports. Motherboard ribbon connectors are provided for
one extra serial and two extra USB ports.
The motherboard is a modified Teron Mini design. It uses a VIA
82C686B northbridge chipset and an Artica-S southbridge. It has a single
PCI slot and two IDE connectors, one for standard IDE cables, the other
for laptop-sized 2.5" drives. There is no connector for a floppy drive.
The Micro AmigaOne, in its shipping box
The BIOS for the motherboard is called UBoot, and was written by
Hyperion themselves. It allows both menu-based and command-line
interaction, and is quite powerful. It includes a built-in bootloader
that allows the user to select multiple operating systems, such as OS4,
Debian Linux, SUSE Linux, and Yellow Dog. Apparently you can even run
Mac OS X on top of Debian using the program "Mac On Linux" although I
have not tested this out personally.
The price for the motherboard varies depending on the dealer you are
purchasing from (yes, there still Amiga dealers in existence!) but is
around US$700. This includes the motherboard with CPU, 256 megabytes of
RAM, and a licensed copy of OS4, the final version of which will be
shipped out to owners when it is finished. While this is clearly much
higher than equivalent PC or even Macintosh hardware prices, one has to
remember that economies of scale come into play at the low volumes of a
project like this. Basically, these are "early adopter" prices.
Hardware compatibility
OS4 runs only on Eyetech AmigaOne boards, including the ATX form
factor AmigaOne XE-G3 and XE-G4 models, and the new Micro AmigaOne "C"
model that is reviewed in this article. Many people have asked whether
or not they can install OS4 on their Macintosh, since both use PowerPC
hardware. The answer is no, as OS4 requires a custom ROM embedded on all
AmigaOne motherboards in order to boot. This was done under agreement
between Eyetech and Hyperion, in order to cut down on piracy and to
reduce the number of hardware combinations that Hyperion needed to test
and support. However, Hyperion is working on versions of OS4 for classic
Amigas (such as the A1200) that have been enhanced with PowerPC upgrade
boards such as the Blizzard and Cyberstorm.
The reason Eyetech and Hyperion chose to go with PowerPC-based
motherboards over x86-based ones mostly comes down to compatibility:
there are many applications for the Classic Amiga that were enhanced
with PowerPC code to run on the various accelerator boards mentioned
previously. The goal is to be able to run all of these apps without
recompiling or modification under OS4. However there are some other
advantages to this choice, such as the extremely low power draw of chips
like the IBM 750FX (less than 10W under maximum load!)
As far as add-on cards, the AmigaOne comes with standard PCI slots
and the XE-G3 and XE-G4 come with an AGP slot for adding graphics cards.
Currently OS4 supports only ATI Radeon cards and 3DFX Voodoo cards, but
a driver for NVIDIA GeForce cards is in the works. Most Soundblaster and
C-Media sound cards are supported, as are about a half-dozen models of
Ethernet cards. Wireless PCI cards using the Prism chipset are supported
thanks to an OS4 driver ported over from Linux. For a complete hardware
compatibility list,
click here.
Installing OS4
OS4 came on a single, self-booting CD-ROM. Installation was quite
straightforward. Complete instructions along with screenshots were
provided from Hyperion
at this website. Older AmigaOnes required a firmware update to UBoot,
but my A1 Micro already came with the latest version of UBoot installed,
so I did not have to go through that step.
The installer, like all Amiga installers, allows three levels of
interaction: Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Advanced mode merely
allows the confirmation of some of the hardware drivers, for example the
Radeon driver, whereas the other modes install them automatically. The
only confusing part was the need to check the new partition as bootable
in the partition manager. This could probably be done automatically in
future releases, at least in beginner and intermediate modes.
There is a single reboot involved if you have repartitioned a blank
hard drive. The only technical input that was required (apart from
partitioning) was the refresh rate of my monitor; however, the default
setting would have worked even if I did not know how to do this. I was
prompted for my location, allowed to set up my keyboard and mouse
preferences and set my time zone. Interestingly, unlike OS X, there is
an option for both Canadian — French and Canadian — English! The
whole process was remarkably painless and took less than half an hour.
The installation guide was also available on the CD for those without an
Internet connection or who didn't want to print it out.
The OS4.0 instalation screen
The OS4 environment
OS4 boots remarkably quickly. From a cold boot, including waiting for
power up, BIOS messages, straight to a usable desktop took slightly over
30 seconds. A "warm boot," which bypasses the BIOS startup and merely
reloads the operating system, takes slightly over 10 seconds. (You
initiate the warm boot by holding down Ctrl and tapping the left and
right Windows keys.) From there you are presented with the minimalist
OS4 desktop:
The default OS4 desktop on first boot
AmiDock
The first thing you notice when you boot to the OS4 desktop is the
Dock-like floating bar on the right hand side of the screen. This is
called AmiDock, but hold the phone to Apple's lawyers: this is a refined
version of the same AmiDock that was released with OS 3.9, the last
update to the "Classic" Amiga OS that Amiga, Inc. released in 2000.
AmiDock can be resized, hidden, moved to any edge of the screen, and
the transparency of the background is adjustable as well. Icons do not
bounce, but they do glow briefly when you click them. Program icons can
be dragged onto the dock, but not dragged off, for that you must right
click the dock and select "Edit..." to enter the AmiDock properties
dialog.
Another new feature of the Dock is the ability to run small applets
called "Dockies." These are icons similar to the docklings of Mac OS X
10.0 that can be dragged to the Dock and perform special features, such
as a clock that shows the current time, a screen magnifier, or even a
sub-dock object that opens other docks inside it. New Dockies are being
written all the time.
Mousing
The default mouse pointer is a red arrow, as it was on the very first
Amiga. This is often easier to spot than a black (Macintosh) or white
(Windows) pointer, but the user can change the mouse pointer to any
image and color they want, using the built-in pointer editor. Scrollbars
on windows are on the right hand side by default, and are proportional.
Like in NeXTstep, the up and down scroll arrows are next to each other
right below the scroll bar. However, these don't get much use when one
has a scroll wheel, which in this release works only with USB mice, but
in the final release will work on PS/2 mice as well.
Desktop and drawers
There are two icons on the OS4 desktop by default. One is the icon
representing your hard disk, which looks like a drive with a little red
and white Boing ball in front of it. The other is the RAM Disk icon.
AmigaOS has always had a built-in RAM disk, long before it ever had
virtual memory, and many applications assume its presence. Items in the
Clipboard, for example, will appear here.
Clicking on your hard disk icon opens up the "root directory" of the
Amiga file system. By default, there are nine folders (called "Drawers"
in Amiga jargon) available. Devs contains things like printer drivers,
Ethernet drivers, and something called "Datatypes," which was a pretty
unique Amiga invention. Datatypes allow new file formats to be added to
the OS that all applications can then recognize and use. So, for example,
if you had an old graphics viewer that came out before PNG files existed,
all you have to do is add the PNG datatype to the OS and now this app
can load, display and save PNG files.
The next drawer is called Internet, and performs much the same
functionality as Network Connections in Windows. Clicking "New
Connection" will bring up the Internet Connection wizard, allowing the
user to set up dial-up, LAN or router-based internet access. Except that
on an Amiga, there really is a wizard!
The OS4 Internet Connection Wizard
Next comes the MUI Drawer. MUI stands for Magic User Interface and is
a set of libraries developed as an add-on to classic AmigaOS and ported
to OS4. MUI allows all kinds of customizations., allowing the user of
MUI applications to change the appearance and behavior of all kinds of
aspects of the GUI, from scrollbar preferences to popup bubble help to
the default behavior of screens.
Example of a Magic User Interface Settings screen
AmigaOS has always supported running applications on separate screens.
The idea was that you could open up new applications using any
resolution and color depth you wanted, sort of the way games on Windows
open up a new screen at the resolution you have specified for that
particular game. On the Amiga, all applications have this ability.
One feature of the original custom Amiga graphics chips was that you
could "pull" down screens with the mouse to see screens that were behind
them. This feature, called "draggable screens," was never duplicated by
any graphics card manufacturer since, so sadly it is not available on
the AmigaOne. However, you can still switch between screens using the
Left-Amiga-N and Left-Amiga-M control keys (The left and right Windows
key substitute for the left and right Amiga keys on the classic Amiga
keyboard. Keyboards without a right Windows key can map the Right Mouse
Button key to perform the same function.)
Another interesting feature of AmigaOS is the way menus work. Like
the Macintosh, programs use a single menubar at the top of the screen,
but it is hidden by default until the user moves to the Workbench
titlebar and holds down the right mouse button. However, if you click
the right mouse button anywhere else on the screen, the application's
full menu list is available from a popup menu. In terms of Fitt's Law,
this is even more efficient than a top menubar, but for people who
prefer using the menubar, there is a system setting to turn this off and
have the right mouse button only pop up contextual menus that are
relevant to the object clicked on.
The next icon is Prefs, the equivalent of the Control Panel or System
Settings. Here you can adjust settings for the mouse, joystick, sound
output, printers, USB, video modes, and miscellaneous Workbench features.
(Workbench is the name of the AmigaOS shell, its Windows equivalent
would be Windows Explorer) You can also manage fonts from this area. OS4
supports Bitstream, classic Amiga and TrueType fonts, and supports
anti-aliasing, but not subpixel AA rendering (aka Cleartype)
After Prefs comes Storage, which is kind of a duplicate of Devs, then
System, which contains some utilities like Find (a Search tool), Format,
GrimReaper (a program crash analyzer), and the AmigaDOS shell.
AmigaDOS shell
The shell is fairly standard, with command history and tab completion.
AmigaDOS commands, however are not quite DOS commands and not quite Unix
commands. Jay Miner once wrote that he wished AmigaDOS could have
changed its commands to be more like DOS commands, as he felt it would
have helped new users out.
For example, the COPY command's syntax is COPY FROM sourcedir/file TO
destdir/file. Instead of cd .. to go up one directory, the command is cd
/. The directory command is dir, but a single-column directory is list.
Over the years, many Amigans who use multiple systems have created an
elaborate system of aliases to make the AmigaDOS commands more closely
resemble DOS or Unix ones.
One nifty feature that you can see in the above screenshot is that
any file that you have downloaded shows the full URL of the downloaded
file on the right hand side in single-column view. This is very handy
whenever someone asks you "where did you find that file?" Just copy and
paste! The standard Amiga cut and paste shortcuts are right-Amiga-C and
Right-Amiga-V, so they work everywhere, even in the shell.
The AmigaDOS shell
Tools
After System comes the Tools drawer, full of small utilities like the
partition manager, calculator, Trash can, Dockies (mentioned earlier)
and Commodities. Commodities are small utilities that change the default
behavior of Workbench. They can be loaded by double clicking on their
icons, or loaded in a startup script.
The AmigaOS Commodities drawer
Windowing
Windows in AmigaOS work somewhat differently to those in other
windowing operating systems. The windowing system in AmigaOS is called
Intuition, and was developed in 1985. The widget in the upper left side
of each window is a standard close widget, but the two on the right are
not what they would seem.
The AmigaOS standard window widgets
The first alternates the window size and position between the last
two settings the user has selected. This is sort of like the "green"
widget in OS X. The second, however, is unique to AmigaOS, but those of
you who have used desktop publishing programs will understand it
instantly. It alternates between "Push to back" and "Pull to Front."
Windows can be moved up and down the stack in this way, which is
somewhat surprising the first time you use it, but quickly becomes a
natural way of working. Windows can be selected with a left mouse click
and they become active (the titlebar and window frame turn from grey to
blue) and usable even if they aren't at the front. However, sometimes
you want to pull a window to the front when the widgets aren't visible,
and that's where the Commodities come in.
Activating the commodity Click To Front will make any window pop to
the front of the stack with a double left click. You can click anywhere
on the window, not just the titlebar. Another Commodity, AutoPoint,
mimics the default behavior of X Windows by automatically shifting the
window focus whenever the mouse hovers over a new window. Still more
commodities control the behavior of right clicking (discussed earlier)
and the function keys.
After the Tools drawer is Utilities, which for now contains just a
clock, the native PDF viewer AmiPDF, the Postscript clone Ghostscript,
Notepad, and Multiview, a graphics and text viewer integrated into the
Workbench. The last drawer is WBStartup, which along with text-based
startup scripts, allows the user to automatically run applications and
utilities when Workbench starts.
The icons are nicely drawn and fairly minimalist. All Amiga icons
have two states, one closed and one opened, so a drawer icon will appear
open if the window is open somewhere. OS4 adds a halo effect (nothing to
do with iPods, sorry!) around selected and opened icons as well. Apple
users who marveled at OS X's ability to use huge, oversized icons will
be interested to know that said feature actually originated in AmigaOS
1.2, circa 1985. It remains in AmigaOS to this day, allowing application
vendors to create large, attractive icons that stand apart from the
standard system ones.
An interesting feature of Workbench is that it does not automatically
show all files in a directory. Only files that have a second file with
an .info extension present will show up in Workbench windows by default.
This allows application installers to present a clean window with only
the necessary files visible for the user. On a per-drawer basis, the
user can turn "Show All Files" on. Now all files appear as icons in the
drawer, with the formerly hidden files semi-transparent:
A drawer before "Show All Files" is selected
A drawer after "Show All Files" is selected
Amiga OS 4.0 Architecture
The original AmigaOS was designed to work on a 7.14MHz 68000. While
it was small and fast and supported full preemptive multitasking, there
was no memory management hardware (or MMU) to support virtual memory and
memory protection. Fatal crashes were common and every Amiga user got to
know the funny error message in the flashing orange box: "Software
failure. Guru Meditation. Press left or right mouse button to continue."
(Neither button ever did anything useful at that point.)
Unfortunately, just as happened with the classic Macintosh OS, a
large software base arose that assumed that it could have full control
over the machine, and adding full protected memory was basically
impossible without either breaking tons of legacy applications or
becoming completely unstable or both, as Apple's doomed Copland project
realized. Apple eventually solved the problem by brute force, loading a
complete copy of the old operating system in a virtual machine every
time the user needed to run a Classic application in OS X.
Hyperion realized that with the current state of the Amiga
applications market, asking developers to write for a completely new
operating system was unrealistic. After all, if you are going to do that,
you might as well write for the Windows market and have your old users
run old Amiga applications in an 68k Amiga emulator such as the
excellent WinUAE. Instead, Hyperion decided to rewrite the old Exec
kernel from AmigaOS 3.1 in PPC code, supporting virtual memory and
memory protection, but leave the memory protection features turned off
by default. This allows application developers to easily port their old
68k Amiga apps to PPC and 4.0 native code, often with a single recompile.
The current plan is to introduce memory protection for OS4 apps in
version 4.1. However, the kernel can watch for illegal memory accesses
and when it finds them, it displays a "Grim Reaper" dialog that allows
the user to kill the offending application.
Legacy Amiga applications, such as games, that were written to access
the old custom chipset hardware directly, will not run in OS4.0. However,
a port of WinUAE for OS4, called E-UAE, has been produced that will
allow these games to be run as well. So-called "system friendly" legacy
Amiga applications, the kind that were able to use PC-based graphics
cards, run directly from the OS4 shell. The operating system launches a
68020 emulator seamlessly in the background when the application's icon
is double-clicked. In this release of the OS, the emulator is
interpretive only, and provides the speed of about a 50MHz 68040 on the
800Mhz AmigaOne hardware.
As many legacy Amiga applications were designed to run well on a
12MHz 68020 (the CPU of the popular Amiga 1200), this is often fast
enough for undemanding apps. However, a JIT-compiled 68020 emulator
engine called Petunia has been completed and is now in beta-testing.
This will be included in the full release of OS4. The JIT adds a six- to
seven-fold speedup to emulated applications.
Legacy apps run under the assumption that they have full access to
system memory, and buggy applications can currently take down the entire
system, similar to 16-bit Windows applications under the Windows 9x
series. Applications that have already been programmed to take advantage
of a PPC add-on card will be supported through the use of the WarpUP
library, however, this is still being beta tested and was not available
in this release of OS4.
AmigaOS features and applications
This prerelease of AmigaOS4 does not come with many applications by
default. There is NotePad, for simple documents, a graphical port of
Emacs, a graphical de-archiver shell called Unarc, AmiPDF for PDF
viewing, PlayCD to play audio CDs, and on the install CD but not
installed by default is a demo version of the web browser iBrowse. The
demo has a 30-minute time limit for browsing, but is friendly enough to
allow the user to exit and restart for another 30 minutes. The full
version of iBrowse supports features such as tabbed browsing.
Another Amiga web browser, AWEB, has been open-sourced and has been
recompiled for OS4. It is a fast and highly configurable browser. Every
keystroke and menu option can be defined by the user. However, both
iBrowse and AWEB are quite dated by current browser standards. Neither
browser supports CSS, for example, which on many websites merely
degrades the appearance somewhat, but on some sites messes up the
formatting completely. Also, some poorly-coded Javascript code will
sometimes cause problems with AWeb and iBrowse.
The AWEB PPC web browser, surfing the OSY forums
However, help is on the way. The AWEB team has taken the KHTML code (the
same code that Apple used as the core of their Safari browser) and is
working on integrating it with the AWEB interface. The iBrowse team is
also working on a CSS-compatible rendering engine for the next update of
their browser. There is also an effort underway to port Firefox and
Mozilla, and a bounty of over US$9,000 has been raised for the first
coder who is able to do so. So far, the porting process has been
extremely slow, but as more people buy AmigaOnes and OS4, it is likely
to improve.
Flash support is somewhat limited. A legacy Amiga OS 3.x Flash viewer/player
is available, and someone has already recompiled it for OS4, although
the OS4 version does not yet support sound. QuickTime support and a DivX
player have been demonstrated on a more recent build of OS4, but I have
not had a chance to test them myself.
For chatting purposes, WookieChat is a nice, basic free IRC
application that has been recompiled for OS4 and works well. For more
advanced features there is AMIRC, which is still a Classic application
but runs very quickly on OS4. Mail can be read with classic applications
such as YAM, and Usenet news by apps such as New York and NewsRog. FTP
support is built into the shell, and Classic versions of graphical FTP
utilities are available, although the one I tried, AmiFTP, did not work
on this release of OS4. There are also messenger applications that can
use the AIM, MSN and ICQ networks.
WookieChat, a simple IRC application.
MP3 files can be played by a number of Amiga players, such as
AMPlifier and AmigaAMP. These two mimic WinAMP's functionality and can
even use WinAMP skins. While they are both 68k applications, someone has
helpfully updated the mpega.library used to decode MP3 files to PPC code.
Installing these applications showed the flexibility of OS4 when it
comes to moving from a Classic environment — both apps launched and
played seamlessly, and all I had to do to update the decoder engine is
drag and drop the new mpega.library file into the Libs: directory. I was
still playing MP3s, but I no longer had the performance hit from
emulating a 68020 to decode them.
The AmigaAMP MP3 player
Video files can be played using multiple player programs. The program
AMP2 will play most video formats, including DivX, although I was only
able to test it with MPEG1 video files. DVPlayer will play DVDs and
MPEG2 files.
Text editing is handled expertly with the well-renowned CygnusEd,
which runs very quickly even in emulated mode. Desktop publishing can be
done with Pagestream, a classic Amiga application that is still being
updated today, including an OS4-native version currently in the works.
Graphics manipulation can be handled by several Classic Amiga programs
including Photogenics (a Photoshop clone), fxpaint and ImageFX (the
latter is currently available in PPC-enhanced version, but a true OS4
version is not available yet).
The one really sore spot in the applications department is in Word
Processing and Office-style programs. The legendary Final Writer does
not currently work under this build of OS4, and neither does AmigaWriter.
Papyrus software has announced an Amiga version of its office suite but
as they do not offer a demo version I was unable to test it for this
review. There has been talk of porting over OpenOffice, but the
gargantuan task of moving over hundreds of megabytes of strange source
code has so far proven too daunting for Amiga enthusiasts.
OS4-native games are quite rare at this point, although the porting
of the Linux SDL graphics and sound library has allowed a ton of 2D
sidescroller ports. An OS4 version of Freespace 1 is available from
Hyperion today, and they expect to port the rest of their Amiga game
library (which includes titles like Shogo, SiN, and others) as soon as
they can. Quake I and II have been ported, along with other old classics
like Duke Nukem 3D. Emulators such as MAME, the Ultima 7 emulator Exult,
the LucasArts emulator SCUMMVM and the PlayStation emulator FPSE have
also been ported to OS4.
Performance
Many people, upon reading the hardware specs of the Micro Amiga One,
will feel that the performance (800MHz PowerPC 750FX, SDR RAM) is far
below modern gear. This is true to a certain extent, but it does not
give the whole picture. AmigaOS was originally written for a 7.14 MHz
68000, and the last Classic version released by Commodore, 3.1, was
optimized for a 12 MHz 68020 platform. According to Hyperion, over 90%
of the OS code has been converted from 68k to PPC, and the only code yet
to be translated (serial port code, AREXX macro routines), does not
typically impact on performance.
Because the OS is so small (About 60MB on disk for a complete install),
it fits very nicely in 256MB of RAM, with room for several applications,
most of which have a similarly small memory footprint. This means that
you can run the OS and multitask between several applications without
ever swapping to the disk. In fact, although the new ExecSG kernel in
OS4 supports virtual memory, it appears to be turned off in this build.
Running the OS and all its apps completely in memory provides a very
different user experience than one is used to from modern operating
systems. Switching applications is instantaneous, as is switching
screens (providing you are running separate screens at the same monitor
resolution, otherwise you have to wait for your monitor to resync).
Scrolling is about as fast as on my 2.4GHz P4 PC. While the PC
clearly blows away the AmigaOne on pure CPU performance (for example,
unarchiving files, or ripping to MP3), for general use they "feel" about
the same. The A1 feels much faster than my 733MHz Pentium 3 running XP,
and makes my poor 500MHz G3 iBook running OS X feel like a pig stuck in
molasses.
There are some areas in which the OS is slower than modern operating
systems such as OSX and Windows — the TCP/IP stack in particular seems
rather slow at this point in time. A completely unscientific test had an
FTP download taking over twice as long on my AmigaOne as on my PC (although
to be fair, the PC was being used as a router for the Amiga, so I do not
consider these timings strictly accurate). However, this is still a beta
OS and things should improve over time.
Of course all this speed is addictive and fun, but the lack of proper
memory protection (and the fact that this is a beta OS with many issues
still to be worked out) can be extremely annoying. The saving grace is
that with a three-finger salute (Ctrl-Windows-Windows) the operating
system can be back up again in less than ten seconds. I liken OS4 at
this point to the dune buggy in Half Life 2 — it's a blast to drive, but
you're going to flip it over often.
Conclusions
By Jeremy Reimer
I was not a classic Amiga owner in the old days, although I was aware
of the existence of the platform. It was my desire to learn more about
the history of Commodore and the Amiga that led me to Panorama, the
Vancouver chapter of the Commodore Computer Users Club, which still
exists to this day. One of the club members donated a fully loaded Amiga
500 with 30 megabyte hard drive to me, along with a huge stack of old
Amiga magazines to help me with my research for my book I had decided to
write about the computer and its history.
Playing with the old Amiga was fun, but hearing about the new
AmigaOne and OS4 really piqued my interest. The sheer audacity of
attempting to revive a platform that everyone in the world had
long-since pronounced dead and buried is interesting in itself, but as I
began to play with a friend's A1 at club meetings I realized something
else, something that perhaps has allowed the new mystery company KMOS to
find investors that allowed it to purchase the moribund Amiga, Inc.
outright.
The AmigaOS is small (tiny, even!) fast, and Internet-ready, yet
already has a large library of supported applications, exactly what is
needed for the next generation of cell phones and other handheld devices.
I have been playing around with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, and have
installed the OS (as you can see from the screenshots, the OS plus all
the applications and data I was testing took up only 377 megabytes) onto
a 512MB compact flash card for a prototype wireless tablet I am
developing.
Will Amiga, Inc. and KMOS succeed where Be, Inc. and so many others
have failed? It is perhaps too soon to tell, but the story has been more
than interesting thus far.
At the moment OS4 is not pretending to be anything more than an
enthusiast OS for a niche market. Both Eyetech and Hyperion have other
projects that have bankrolled them this far (peripherals for Eyetech and
game ports for Hyperion), and they do not expect A1/OS4 sales to fund
their companies any time soon. In speeches around the world, Alan
Redhouse of Eyetech always opens by saying that everyone always asks
them: "Why are you doing this?" And the answer he gives, with a smile,
is "We don't know!" There is an infectious enthusiasm among Amiga users,
who have waited almost a decade for a new Amiga, and are very excited to
have one.
However, as cell phones, PDAs and living room set-top media boxes
become more prevalent in the future, there is a chance that the A1 and
OS4 could find a profitable niche. I have used PDAs that have similar
CPU and RAM capacities as my AmigaOne and they do not provide the same
speed and functionality that is already available in OS4. OS4 feels like
a full desktop, yet has the resource requirements of a handheld. There
is a chance, albeit a small one, that the Amiga might play a small role
in this arena.
Clearly, OS4 as it stands today is not ready for general public
consumption. There are many rough edges with this version of the OS,
stability is still an issue, and the web browsing situation clearly
needs to be improved. For Classic Amiga owners with a large library of
older applications that they would like to run on more modern hardware,
it is almost a no-brainer, but it has less to offer "switchers" from the
PC or Macintosh camps at this point in time.
However, a curious thing happened as I began writing this article on
my AmigaOne. I found I was switching less and less from the A1 back to
the PC, and I was enjoying my typical PC using experience (browsing,
writing and chatting on IRC) more than I typically did. Had I succumbed
to a particularly virulent form of Amiga madness? Perhaps, but it is a
madness that I recognize from days gone by and thought was gone forever:
the sheer joy of computing and the fun of discovering a new platform.
Postscript
Just prior to publication, Hyperion announced that the second major
update of OS4 was available for registered owners to download. I have
not had a chance to test this out yet, but I am told it adds support for
mass-storage USB devices (such as digital cameras) and includes an
update to the kernel, display drivers and many other subsystems, as well
as a bundled PPC movie player called MooVid.
A História da Amiga Commodore
1980/2002
