Hyperion Confirms Leak Of AmigaOS 3.1 Source Code

[pracedru]

The Amiga OS was great. Very elegant design. It had many Unix like features.
Too bad they never open sourced it.

[Brane215]

The Amiga OS was great. Very elegant design. It had many Unix like features.
Too bad they never open sourced it.

Emphasis on "was". For quite some time it doesn't offer anything new. Why would anyone wish to use it nowadays ?

And BTW, whole point of AmigaOS was to unleash the power of the exceptional HW platform. Which is long dead, let alone crappy.

PC's HW is way more powerful than anything Amiga had to offer, even more, it's quirks ( FAST/CHIP RAM etc) present serious portability nightmare.

Atari platform has at least SMSQ/E that could be reimplemented on PC ( even though it comes from Sinclair's QL heritage line)...

[maligor]

I was quite curious if this was actually a thing. After looking into it a bit, here are my conclusions...

AmigaOS is kinda like Mac was back when it ran on PowerPC only, except far less sophisticated and far less featured. The only hardware you can currently find for AmigaOS is as expensive today as it was back then... perhaps even more. Seriously, look at this: http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...1&currency=USD

That is its current top-end model. Now, granted it might be more geared towards power efficiency. However, if that were the case, DDR3, let alone DDR4, is more power-efficient than DDR2. Having such a large amount of USB2 slots built-in is kinda weird since having an externally powered USB hub is more efficient. It also doesn't support SATA3.

It does have something called a "Xorro" slot which is curious. I can't find a lot of (if any of it is reliable) documentation, but it seems to be a highly configurable interface to what they call the "XMOS" chip integrated into the motherboard. The XMos chip is a co-processor which is explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS

The problem for anyone thinking to check it out is this heap of mostly outdated junk is going for $2700 stock. I certainly don't plan on experimenting with it at that price. The cheapest hardware I could find for AmigaOS was a very small (and horribly outdated) micro board that went for about $400. It didn't look supported anymore. Frankly, that's rather pathetic as there's also no guarantee that AmigaOS would work on any modern PowerPC CPU.

AmigaOS itself costs about $50, which isn't bad. There is simply no reason for your general consumer, even an enthusiasts, to buy it though.

That said, it's clear that that isn't there goal. Most likely, they only support certain hardware for businesses to avoid public opinion and quality control to happen.

I have a Sam460ex (the outdated microboard you probably refer to) with AmigaOS 4.1 on it. Yes, it's really a shame they're so expensive, but PowerPC chips are rather niche products these days. The X1000 actually had/has one of the more interesting PowerPC chips made for a long while, but PA Semi was bought by Apple to design their ARM chips.

AmigaOS 4 won't work except on specific boards it's ported to. Instead you can use MorphOS, which is quite similar to AmigaOS 4, and it works on a few PowerPC based Mac's, but not all of them.

Oh, and like it's predecessors, AmigaOS 4 doesn't have memory protection. So if you make programs for it, make sure they don't write to the wrong place.

[wizard69]

Emphasis on "was". For quite some time it doesn't offer anything new. Why would anyone wish to use it nowadays ?

People still run Apple 2's, Radio Shack Color Computer and others, why knock me if they get enjoyment out of the old hardware?

And BTW, whole point of AmigaOS was to unleash the power of the exceptional HW platform. Which is long dead, let alone crappy.

It is very crappy by today's standards, but that applies to all computers of the era.

PC's HW is way more powerful than anything Amiga had to offer, even more, it's quirks ( FAST/CHIP RAM etc) present serious portability nightmare.

Yep and a ten year old PC is useless these days. In fact even mainstream Linux is moving away from supporting 32 bit systems.

Atari platform has at least SMSQ/E that could be reimplemented on PC ( even though it comes from Sinclair's QL heritage line)...

I really don't know why you guys are pissing all over the Amiga, sure it is dated but I say let them have their fun. Step back a minute here, would you guys piss all over a guy driving a classic car from the last century even if he has to tinker with it to keep it running? Seriously I don't understand the negativity.

[tuuker]

Too bad that Win 10 source has not leaked yet...

[jacob]

The Amiga OS was great. Very elegant design. It had many Unix like features.
Too bad they never open sourced it.

It was never really great. Compared to the OSes used on micros back then, namely MS-DOS, Atari's TOS and the first versions of MacOS, it had very modern features, but their implementation often looked like a long litany of WTFs. It had multitasking, but there has never been a "proper" way to kill a process; it supported long filenames, but the actual fs was so horrible that it made FAT look like a clean and efficient design; it supported shared libraries but lacked a dynamic linker and so on and so on...

[Chewi]

I've been more or less keeping up with Amiga news and there's more going on than most would expect. The hardware is too expensive for me to justify though and I'm so tied to Linux now that I don't think I could let it go. I never was a fan of dual booting either.

I'm a little surprised they're making such a big deal of this. The code is about 22 years old and the open source AROS project has managed to reimplement it very accurately anyway. The AROS codebase is probably more modern too but that's just a guess.

I wonder why anyone bothered to steal it though. What could they possibly want to do with it?

[discordian]

Amiga Inc really does a good job tarnishing the name of one of the best homecomputers. For those who don`t know, Amiga died in 1993 with Commodore, its been a row of license transfers since them - for now 3 decade old tech (which was once insanely great, but 3 decades is an enternity in tech).

To me, the AmigaOS took inspiration from Unix and other OSes but dont followed them religiously, in many cases avoiding ideological cruft. On the other hand, it was always rushed and had to cover up some blown deals (the filesystem subsystem was originally contracted out, but the contractor got insanely greedy and the end result was a quick replacement). The nice thing ist, that you can easily replace just anything. I used PFS instead of the builtin Filesystem... pretty cutting edge at its time
V2 and V3 where alot better, but most people just remember V1. In many ways it was far ahead of its time, want to support a new image or audio format? - Just drop an codec in a directory and it can be automatically used systemwide and in any app using the system functions.

Add to that, a huge amount of public domain way before this got a thing anywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aminet

But well, the company is dead, and the breakthroughs are forgotten or advertised from other companies/projects nowadays

[utack]

That is one bold way to get attention to their company no one had ever heard of before.

[Kano]

They should see this as free marketing, bad news are better than no news. Nobody even thought that somebody would work on a 20y old OS. I would not care at all if the old code is leaked or not, you could run it only on Amiga emulators/native anyway but not on current pc hardware. If they see the market to sell an updated Amiga OS why not, but i wont buy ppc hardware just to try it ;-)