AmigaOS 4.1: Introduction to the Software Development Kit v54.16, part 1 | Hacker News Reader

AmigaOS 4.1: Introduction to the Software Development Kit v54.16, part 1

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80 pointsdoener14 comments

I was a huge Amiga fan for many years, and well past its best-by date. I’d love to at least play with AmigaOS 4 to see what it’s like, but wish it ran on hardware you can find at Central Computers (or on, say, an ARM Mac).

You can run it (emulated) on at least on Windows[], with Amikit FlowerPot. <https://www.amikit.amiga.sk/
You also, need to buy (legit) roms from amigaforever, and a copy of Amigaos4. Cost <$100 CAD.

[] You need to run Amigaforever on windows at least once to generate the Cyberstorm PPC ROM for AmigaOS4, but it may work on FS-UAE on macos/linux afterwards.

Win-UAE, or FS-UAE is a very accurate emualtor.

If you pick up Amiga-Forever from Cloanto, it is repackaged with a new UI, official ROMS (Cloanto owns the Trademark), and a bunch of pre-configured machines.

Amiga OS 3.X and 4.X are different beasts, and both continue to get updates.

In addition to UAE to run real AmigaOS, there's AROS, which will run on PC hardware or hosted under Linux and a number of other OS's (AROS "boots" to the Workbench on my Linux laptop in a couple of seconds)

AROS also runs on Amiga 680x0 clones such as the Vampire.

Any good guide on getting started with hosted AROS on Linux (Arm64 or x86_64)? I've been able to get to so far was building, being able to run but just getting an unresponsive process that did nothing (didn't debug further, but there was no high CPU utilization), but I could have missed a crucial step or have used a bad revision of the codebase.

It's been years since I built it, and then it just worked, though I think you're less likely to run into problems if you do a 32 bit build (it's not like any of the applications running in it are going to need a larger address space). But if you just want to play with it, it's probably better to look at one of the distributions, like Icaros (I don't like all of the choices made with Icaros, but it's a good starting point to have something functional rather than just a near empty default setup - in particular it includes support for integrating 68k Amiga apps into the host system):

http://icarosdesktop.org/

Icaros can run native (booting directly into it), virtualised, or hosted on Linux (or Windows, but I think that is less than optimal still)

It's unfortunately not open source. Not AmigaOS 4 or even AmigaOS 1.

I find it really hard to support these companies who are keeping these repositories of historical importance under lock and key.

... while bickering about who owns AmigaOS[0].

0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

Why is it like this? There is no commercial value to the software and any patents have expired. If I owned Amiga I’d release all the source and make money licensing the trademark for T-shirt’s. At least it’s be more productive than lawsuits.

> Why is it like this? There is no commercial value to the software and any patents have expired.

Evidently there is some commercial value, they're making enough money off sales of the 30+ year old software they didn't even create to waste it all suing each other all the time

The astonishing thing is how counterproductive it is. The long term health of any minority OS community necessitates open source of some form. There's a wealth of open alternatives for people to pick from.

So you can now compile C on an Amiga OS 4.1. TBH, I didn't know you couldn't do this before. Most of the Amiga community that I have seen run the 3.X branch on 68k classic machines.

I would guess that it was possible, just maybe without up to date official headers for new AmigaOS 4.1 features.

You could do it before. Each version of the 4.0 and 4.1 SDKs came with gcc, but a very very old version (the 4.x series, I believe, ironically enough). What's here is a more recent gcc, as well as VBCC out of box.

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