It all ended in the early 1990s when Commodore went out of business. Amiga got sold and then resold, etc.
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.
My Amiga 1000 broke apart, first the keyboard failed and then the floppy drive. Replacements were expensive so I got a 386 clone and ran DOS and Windows for less than the cost of fixing the Amiga 1000. 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.
I use Amiga emulators, you can set the floppy drive speed to a faster speed to speed up the loading of programs.
Most of the golden age AmigaDOS stuff was Kickstart 1.3 or 1.2 when EA and others made games for them. 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. AmigaOS 4.0 was contracted out to Hyperion and there were lawsuits over the rights to it.
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.
The number of Amigas has shrunk over time because they wear out. But people are still wanting to use them and pay for a modern operating system or hardware upgrade for them. Commodore only made so many Amiga systems, and Amiga only made so many Amiga One systems and they are expensive.
> merging with a Unix OS and going open source ala Darwin.
So basically let the "community" do the grunt work, then slap some UI libs on top and tie it to an expensive dongle (sometimes called a laptop or desktop).
Apple could not program their way out of a paper bag to make a modern day OS as Mac OS9 failed and Copeland was vaporware and a big failure. They had to buy out Next to get Steve Jobs back and base the OS on Unix and open source projects.
What is known as Apple now is basically what Next used to be the old Apple is dead and the new Apple is based on Next. Steve Jobs canceled all of the projects that lost money, and made new projects that earned more money that the ones that got canceled.
Darwin is the open source part of OSX, the GUI is not a part of it. Apple uses open source code and the community to save money on R&D of the OS.
> 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.
This space is already taken by AROS or emulators with AmigaOS 3.x. The people who want to move to x86 already have at this point. It's not clear that an official AmigaOS port would get any users at all - it's all very emotionally driven at this point.
>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
These plans were orthogonal to each other. Darwin would still run on top of PowerPC if it didn't fall behind x86-64 in performance per watt.
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.
My Amiga 1000 broke apart, first the keyboard failed and then the floppy drive. Replacements were expensive so I got a 386 clone and ran DOS and Windows for less than the cost of fixing the Amiga 1000. 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.
I use Amiga emulators, you can set the floppy drive speed to a faster speed to speed up the loading of programs.
Most of the golden age AmigaDOS stuff was Kickstart 1.3 or 1.2 when EA and others made games for them. 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. AmigaOS 4.0 was contracted out to Hyperion and there were lawsuits over the rights to it.
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.
The number of Amigas has shrunk over time because they wear out. But people are still wanting to use them and pay for a modern operating system or hardware upgrade for them. Commodore only made so many Amiga systems, and Amiga only made so many Amiga One systems and they are expensive.