I must have missed something here . Our first quarrel? Awwww!

Hi Billsey, long time no read.

The owners of AmigaOne machines have been entitled to download what was called a "developer pre-release" of OS4 for testing/writing software/etc.

Because the release of OS4 has been delayed for so long (mainly because of the lack of suitable hardware), several updates to the original pre-release have been made. Thus we have "Pre-1", "Pre-2" or "Update2", "Update3" and "Update4", which was released early this year.

Hyperion have announced that they hope to make a final release "around the end of this year". Twelve months ago the release was "delayed until new hardware arrives", so we are crossing our fingers that some new hardware becomes available some time this month (December).

The hardware details have been announced by the manufacturers themselves (both on websites and in IRC discussions), and are not private. The manufacturers have (probably) released the details in order to get prospective customers interested.

Amiga Inc have said that they have had discussions with some manufacturers about licenses, although they are non-committal about the results. You might be forgiven for thinking that these hardware details have been made public in order to increase the chances of a manufacturer gaining an OS4 license from Amiga Inc.

There were quite a few News items and other announcements on amigaworld.net in September. Here is a list of them. You might find some interesting data in there, but take it all with a pinch of salt, a lot of the announcements are optimistic, to say the least.

Also in September, Bill McEwen of Amiga Inc answered a set of 20 questions posed by people at amiga.org.
Bill McEwen's responses.

Nice one, Paul.

That makes it so much easier to compare than reading several pages of forum posts. Thank you.

[You might just want to correct the spelling of "Troika" in the column heading]

cheers
tony

That last sentence "Amiga Inc could license a dongle for it" might prove to be the stumbling block.

So far Amiga Inc have not granted a license to run OS4 on any hardware other than the Eyetech AmigaOne. There are other platforms around, and there has been much discussion about this on other boards .

I think you'll find that the P96 developers are not strictly part of the OS4 team but have made native PPC versions for OS4 and support them accordingly. However, they operate at arm's length from the rest of OS4 development.

I don't think anyone answered your original question - which was "why can't you use an emulator to run OS4?"

Contrary to popular opinion, OS4 does not run "on top of" the U-Boot ROM like a BIOS. U-Boot does only what its name suggests - boots the system. By the time you see the "modules loaded, now launching Kickstart" message, U-Boot has been discarded and plays no further part in the boot process.

However, the "dongle code" is stored in the U-Boot ROM and is checked to make sure the OS is running on an A1 and not some other hardware.

Also, all the device drivers (disk drivers, Ethernet, USB, floppy etc) are hard-coded for the addresses of the hardware interfaces in the AmigaOne. All the drivers would have to be re-written for the target platform - or provided with a wrapper for the target platform's own drivers.

So although you could probably emulate the instruction set of the PPC on an x86 (or use the PPC of another platform), there are a lot of hard-coded references to the AmigaOne hardware within the OS, and you would have to find a way around them.

There are quite a few enhancements and improvements that could be added to the Shell/CON/CON-Handler troika (no pun intended).

As you know, we hope to revisit the whole Shell/CON/CON-Handler design one day. It won't be before OS4 release, though.