![]() ![]() No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR today - in almost 2016 - and it only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless companies. Or that they'll somehow sell enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment. It's like the IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and software that will sweep the world.if only they hold on to the licenses for 30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. The Atari 8-bit computer scene, for example, produces lots of weird custom hardware that the makers usually sell for parts + labor + shipping, but I can't recall ever hearing of license fees for a new DOS (there are many DOSs for the old 8-bits). While there are certainly people who make things for the various scenes and sell them, usually they're just trying to cover manufacturing cost of physical product. Most of the Amiga OSs run on ancient PowerPC hardware and aren't useful in a modern sense for much more than simple web browsing and IRC. It really is mostly for the novelty/nostalgia factor. that there are several shows alone that pull in north of a thousand people. You'd be surprised at how big the retrocomputing/retrogaming enthusiast market is. Commodore only made so many Amiga systems, and Amiga only made so many Amiga One systems and they are expensive. But people are still wanting to use them and pay for a modern operating system or hardware upgrade for them. The number of Amigas has shrunk over time because they wear out. I agree open sourcing it and porting it to Intel PCs would get more users and they could then focus on writing apps for it and make money on an app store. AmigaOS 4.0 was contracted out to Hyperion and there were lawsuits over the rights to it. The 2.0 era kind of killed compatibility, and by the time AmigaOS 3.0 came out the big names stopped writing software for it. Most of the golden age AmigaDOS stuff was Kickstart 1.3 or 1.2 when EA and others made games for them. I use Amiga emulators, you can set the floppy drive speed to a faster speed to speed up the loading of programs. I later got an Amiga 500 at a convention for a good price but gave it away to a friend later who was making a computer museum. Replacements were expensive so I got a 386 clone and ran DOS and Windows for less than the cost of fixing the Amiga 1000. My Amiga 1000 broke apart, first the keyboard failed and then the floppy drive. Whomever is doing AmigaOS or MorphOS or whatever wants to be another Apple with hardware lock in, and following the old Apple business plan of the PowerMac instead of the new Apple business plan of merging with a Unix OS and going open source ala Darwin. It all ended in the early 1990s when Commodore went out of business. There is still a niche market for retro tech. Even if the Amiga One uses that SAM440 chip used in Microwave Ovens it runs very fast because of the low overhead of AmigaOS. There are CPU accelerators for every Amiga out there to replace the 68K CPU with a PowerPC or 68040 emulated custom chip. AmigaOS runs on a low memory footprint and uses low CPU cycles. These people love their Amigas because they don't have the bloat or crap that modern systems have. The more modern AmigaOS 3.1 and up have more apps for them via open source and shareware. The old Amigas were very reliable, and the Guru Errors got fixed as of Kickstart 2.0 and up. Martin uses a DOS machine with Wordstar because he finds it more reliable than Windows. Some people use DOS machines with a Pentium 1 or 486 chip because they were made before backdoors got added. ![]() Most of those people using an Amiga don't like Apple or Microsoft and want an alternative that is not Linux or used with a modern computer that might have an NSA backdoor in it.Įven if they used Linux the BIOS might have some sort of backdoor in it. ![]()
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