Ok, first of all a little background about Amiga. Amiga Inc. does not play a major role in the technological developement of the new Amiga platforms. Amiga Inc. holds the rights for the brand name Amiga. People who are not familiar with Amiga might think of Amiga as if it were a company, which it was not in the past. When you refer to Amiga, you do so in the same way as if you would refer to Macintosh, as a product. Commodore Amiga and Apple Macintosh - that is technically comparable. Commodore was the company that made the Amiga big, as Apple is the company behind the Macintosh. When Commodore had to give up in 1994, Amiga - as a platform - lost the "guidance" just as Macintosh would likely have, if there wouldn't always have been Apple to maintain it, and instead it would just be promoted by a bunch of companies which all bought a bit of its technological potential, and the trusty fans of the system. Today, there is not a single Amiga cooperation or united user base that would represent Amiga, just many comparably little groups and companies.

There are two new groups now that try to push their products onto the market. One consists of Hyperion (Amiga OS 4.0) and Eyetech Group Ltd (AmigaOne). The other is Genesi who sell both MorphOS and the Pegasos. Both groups have their own motherboards and use the PPC architecture. Amiga OS 4.0 and MorphOS depend on their specific boards: the AmigaOne and the Pegasos II. The two new computers are sold together with the OS and also mostly include Debian Linux. MorphOS is compatible with Amiga Software and although the GUI looks much fresher then the good old AmiOS (Yes, they seem to have learned a big deal about design from Apple ;)), you can still clearly see that the two are close related. I should also mention that while AmigaOS 4.0 is still quite incomplete, MorphOS is already usable and several projects on Sourceforge started to port their programms to the new platform. Genesi seems to be more open with their dev-tools in general.

After all I think that there is no "real" Amiga computer anymore, but indeed there are two projects that look promising.

So anyway, yesterday I traveled to Essen in order to visit the "Amiga OS 4.0 Event" and I managed to be there right on time, when they opened the gates to the Triple Z center where the whole event took place. Ever since I heard that the new Pegasos and AmigaOne computers would run on G4 processors I was interested, especially since I didn't hear anything from Amiga for a long time and then all of a sudden there's big news like that. In fact they had been working on their new systems for quite a while now, but unlike bigger companies they could not instantly spread the news, so it took a while before a friend of mine finally informed me about this.

And yet we have two systems now and with that two rivaling companies that also seem to split the Amiga fans into two new fractions. One that prefers MorphOS running on the Pegasos and one that eagerly waits for Amiga OS 4.0 to be released on the AmigaOne. I was able to play around with an early version of Amiga OS 4.0 running on a case modded AmigaOne. Unfortunately there wasn't much to do on the system, since there was no real software installed on the test machines. What I could do was play Quake I (which took ages to load, assumingly because of the missing/incomplete 68k emulation support) and I watched some people play Freespace; both ran smoothly once they were loaded. There were also some other small games and Frodo (the C-64 emulator) as well as a bunch of system tools to configure everything. The GUI itself looked ok - it had a transparent dock filled with useful little applications called "Dockies" that looked a little like Konfabulator Widgets for the dock. Adding them to the dock was simply done by Drag&Drop.

A little later I had a chat with Davy Wenzler from the Netherlands, the developer of Audio Evolution who ported his program to Amiga OS 4.0 already. The program itself looked a bit like Cubase. He told me that he worked on the program in his free time. It ran stable and for a program he's programming in his spare time it really looked impressive.

From another guy, I got the information that MacOS 10.3 could be started on a Pegasos, by using PegXMac which sports a LiveCD and a configured version of MacOnLinux. So in practice you can use Linux, MorphOS and MacOS with a Pegasos II, that's quite cool. In theory the same can be done on the AmigaOne.

Alan Redhouse from Eyetech held a little speech also and talked about his company's future plans for the Amiga One. He said that they would have good chances in the chinese market, which I found a little difficult to believe since the chinese market is dominated by PCs already (as far as I know). All the fans, businessmen and developers that filled the room looked somehow unimpressed by his speech and began to ask questions like "Why should I buy a AmigaOne and not a Pegasos?", since the Pegasos is much cheaper; You can get a complete Pegasos II G3 system for about 700 € (excluding a monitor), while only the board and the G4 processor of the AmigaOne will cost you around 800 €. The answer esentially was that higher quality has a higher price. In fact they used Apple as an example: people pay more for better quality. However both systems are based on the same processor, even if the AmigaOne has it's own board. The answer didn't fully satisfy everyone in the room.

Another thing I noticed was that Amiga OS 4.0 was fully commercial - they didn't have much open-source software on it, although especially for a small company like that, open-source would help a lot to get a quick start. And for the time being they didn't even have a standard Web browser for their system, at least on the one I tested. I think Mozilla would be more than glad to help them out if they only had the chance.

I was curious: What do the die hard Amiga fans really think about all this? So I grabbed one of them, went into the cafe and started a chat with him. He explained that Hyperion (Amiga OS 4.0) and Genesi (MorphOS) have sued each other and fought about the rights of various components of AmigaOS for quite some time now. MorphOS partly lost and so you now have to buy a AmigaOS CD to install certain drivers in order to remain compatible with the Amiga. Hyperion told us that "Amiga OS 4.0 Pre-Release" would be released on the 21st of May and Wolfgang (The Amiga person I dragged to the cafe) agreed with me that if they would release it the way they presented it today, they would crash with it and probably wouldn't get up again either.

My opinion is that Hyperion is too sure that the brand name Amiga will save them, no matter what they do. That can be a fatal mistake, because the Amiga users are expecting them to deliver quality products, just like Commodore did (a long time) before. They will not be happy with a pre-beta version of a OS that will cost them a bunch of money and is basicly far from being usable. The Amiga fans themselves are a cool bunch all together, they're friendly, they hate Microsoft to death and they seem to like Apple. I would be glad to see them back in action with good hardware and a new OS. They at least are ready for the future, as always.