
Amiga OS Kickstart and Workbench source coded leaked - Audiophilip
http://commodore.ninja/amiga-os-kickstart-and-workbench-source-coded-leaked/
======
jdangu
Devs talking about fixing bugs in narrator, the earliest TTS engine in home
computers:
[https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/w...](https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/blob/master/v40_src/workbench/devs/narrator/readme)

~~~
emptybits
SAM (the Software Automatic Mouth) was available in 1982 for Apple, Commodore,
& Atari 8-bit.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Automatic_Mouth)

~~~
vidarh
And it was developed by the same company.

SoftVoice's website still exists, but no idea if the company is still alive:
[http://www.text2speech.com](http://www.text2speech.com)

------
orionblastar
Link is Slashdotted.

Here is another link to the story:
[http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Wor...](http://www.osnews.com/story/29023/Amiga_OS_Kickstart_and_Workbench_source_coded_leaked)

Apparently the file says 3.1 but it is really 4.

~~~
white-flame
Talking with people from "the scene", this is a snapshot from the 90s. It was
leaked before, and now resurfaced for some reason in a more public view.

Nothing from the more recent 3.5, 3.9, and 4.x versions are in there. Those
were developed by external companies long after the vintage of this leaked
snapshot. There's some mention of newer versions, but they're incomplete
implementations from the Commodore Amiga team, not the actual developers of
the newer versions.

It also doesn't compile, isn't 100% complete, and includes a number of
internal business documents, not just code & tech.

------
jug
The timing makes it seem like it may have been an insider leak to let AmigaOS
live on. Either without Hyperion's support, or with their support, only not
officially and so that they have no accountability.

~~~
orionblastar
The AmigaOS and Kickstarter code doesn't work with PCs or Intel Macs. So there
is nothing to be gained unless you have a 68K or PowerPC Amiga or one of the
PowerMacs that could be hacked to run AmigaOS.

Besides there is AROS for PCs and Intel Macs:
[http://aros.sourceforge.net/](http://aros.sourceforge.net/)

It is a rewrite of AmigaOS 3.1 that uses the same API calls.

The link was temporary and was deleted already.

Hyperion and Amiga had been at odds with each other over AmigaOS 4 and other
things. Amiga has changed ownership many times and AmigaOS was only designed
to work on Amiga computers. Had they ported it to Intel PCs it would have been
a different story and been like BeOS then.

If you have a Kickstart 1.0 Floppy disk for an Amiga 1000 it has the source
code on the floppy because someone grabbed the wrong disk to write the
Kickstart 1.0 file to and instead of grabbing a blank disk grabbed one that
had source code on it.

~~~
bane
The Amiga world has _not_ aged gracefully. It's hopelessly fractured with
something like half a dozen OS efforts all built around various philosophies
of ideological purity to the old Amigas each capable of addressing markets
that _might_ number in the hundreds of users.

It's kind of insane that all the various parties just haven't decided to open
source everything and try to grow the community instead of taking smaller and
smaller slices of a very tiny and shrinking pie. I really can't figure it out.
It's just a niche hobbyist thing and charging for the software and rom images
isn't ever going to make any money back for the people who put the effort in.

This is really one of the cases where I think properly open sourcing
everything and just running it like a mature open source effort would be far
more productive.

~~~
stinkytaco
Someone needs to explain the whole Amiga thing to me, because I've lost the
thread. When you say markets might number in the hundreds, I have a hard time
believing even that. Perhaps I'm just ignorant (as I said, I've lost the
thread), but why would anyone run Amiga OS any more other than for the
novelty? Are there still applications that are worth spending money on?

~~~
bane
You'd be surprised at how big the retrocomputing/retrogaming enthusiast market
is. I know in the U.S. that there are _several_ shows alone that pull in north
of a thousand people.

It really is mostly for the novelty/nostalgia factor. Most of the Amiga OSs
run on ancient PowerPC hardware and aren't useful in a modern sense for much
more than simple web browsing and IRC.

While there are certainly people who make things for the various scenes and
sell them, usually they're just trying to cover manufacturing cost of physical
product. Software is usually freeware/opensource. The Atari 8-bit computer
scene, for example, produces lots of weird custom hardware that the makers
usually sell for parts + labor + shipping, but I can't recall ever hearing of
license fees for a new DOS (there are many DOSs for the old 8-bits).

What's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP
still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the
IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions
of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and
software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for
30 year old ROM images a _little_ bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell
enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment.

No joke, AmigaOS 4.1 is actually 30EUR _today_ \-- in almost 2016 -- and it
only runs on bizarro PowerPC hardware that's built out of weird industrial
control system motherboards or something and sold by yet other hopeless
companies. [1][2][3]

If they sell 1,000 licenses a year, their revenue is 30,000EUR.

So I mean, Hyperion Entertainment is supposedly a company and there's probably
more than one person hacking away at the OS, but there's no way they're coming
close to covering costs on this. If I wasn't convinced of the earnestness of
Amiga enthusiasts, I'd almost believe the entire thing is some kind of complex
money laundering operation.

There's even commercial software still developed and licensed: [4][5][6][7]

and even an entire app store! [8]

I really admire the enthusiasm and passion, but I just can't figure out the
money angle or what the point is.

1 - [http://www.amigaos.net/](http://www.amigaos.net/)

2 - [http://www.a-eon.com/](http://www.a-eon.com/)

3 - [http://www.acube-systems.biz/](http://www.acube-systems.biz/)

4 - [http://www.pagestream.org/](http://www.pagestream.org/)

5 - [http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-
engine](http://www.amigaos.net/software/100/amidark-engine)

6 - [http://www.hollywood-mal.com/purchase.html](http://www.hollywood-
mal.com/purchase.html)

7 - [http://www.codebench.co.uk/](http://www.codebench.co.uk/)

8 - [http://www.amistore.net/](http://www.amistore.net/)

~~~
jarcane
_What 's particularly weird about the Amiga scene is how locked down the IP
still is and how that seems to permeate the rest of the scene. It's like the
IP owners think that somehow they'll suddenly come across hundreds of millions
of dollars in VC money and will reignite the Amiga fire with new hardware and
software that will sweep the world...if only they hold on to the licenses for
30 year old ROM images a little bit longer. Or that they'll somehow sell
enough licenses to make up for millions of dollars of development investment._

What I always thought was really weird is, the community _helps_ them with
this. Like, the Amiga scene for some time was about the only retro scene I
know of that _self-policed_ for infringement. Regular Ami fans would take it
upon themselves to scour the web for people hosting the Workbench ROMs and
disks and report them, and would get very very cross about requests. It was as
if they thought if they could only shut down emulation people would just start
rebuying real hardware in droves just to play ancient games. You can't even
practically _build_ an actual high-end Amiga anymore like you can get up and
running in WinUAE with a few clicks, because the accelerator and graphics add-
on hardware is all mostly rarer than gold these days.

It really is the case that there's this hardcore of really obsessive Amiga
fans who're convinced they can somehow force the world to once again go Amiga.
No one else is like this; there's no hardcore Risc OS fans out there waiting
for the day when Acorn arises again and slays Microsoft or something.

It's bizarre.

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "It's bizarre."

I agree, but I can see two good things that came of the actions taken to
protect the ROMs.

1\. A company that supports the Amiga could sell the ROMs for use in
emulation.

[http://www.amigaforever.com/](http://www.amigaforever.com/)

2\. It helped to push for an open source version of the ROMs (AROS 68k).

[http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=56211](http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=56211)

------
amigasource
Mirror here:
[https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/](https://github.com/amigasource/amigaos/)

~~~
i336_
Yay! Thanks. :D

This is undoubtedly going to disappear pretty quickly though.

To anybody reading this:

The original .tar.bz2 would be the ideal source to mirror, because then the
checksums match up and you know you have the copy everyone else has without
verifying each file manually.

FWIW, MEGA repos let you make directories. They can be up to 50GB so you have
plenty of space to upload the original file along with an unpacked copy to
browse. Then we just need somewhere resilient to put the link to the latest
working repo.

I can fairly easily push this onto MEGA if I can get at the .tar.bz2.

My email is in my profile if you don't want to reply here.

One question though: at
[https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888](https://archive.is/2TTKO#post1058888)
someone mentions a small but confusing date issue. Was this file released more
than once?

~~~
amigasource
The one linked to from that forum is still exists on Wayback Machine:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.evers...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151229025031/http://home.eversberg.eu/temp/amiga%20os%20source%20code%203.1.tar.bz2)

It has a date of 20-Aug-2013 13:35, and the download on rol.im, which is also
on Wayback Machine, was identical. So perhaps the date has been modified or
this is a copy of a two year old release? I did not catch the FTP server
releases - which were on the CCC IP address range, I guess part of the 32C3
guest network - before they went down, so I do not know for sure.

~~~
i336_
Hah, I'm out of touch with finding software... I should've thought of that.
I've done that kinda of thing before. (Incidentally, I reckon the reason
Archive.org isn't globally indexable is that it would abruptly cease to exist
all at once if everything out there was discoverable...)

As for the date thing, one of the Amiga threads linked here mentions that this
leak is actually incredibly old and dates to 1997 or so. So... yeah, there's
that.

This definitely goes in my tiny software leak collection next to NT4 and Mac
OS 7 though :D

------
rmtew
There are <a
href="[http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments](http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments)
on</a> one of the Amiga communities most popular forums by a Olaf Barthel, a
developer who modernised a more complete version of the 3.x source code. He
relates that you need several different C compilers for different parts of the
OS, from one that needs to run on a Sun OS to various Amiga-based compilers
(Aztec/Manx).

~~~
i336_
Oh :(

Here's the quote:

> Like kamelito already said: this stuff hasn't been leaked now, it's been
> leaked in the late nineties. Rumors have it that Tyschtschenko handed out
> the sources to a whole bunch of people in Germany (in addition to Phase5,
> which already had them) to make sure they don't get lost during the next
> bankruptcy.

> These sources were all over the warez boards in 1997 or 1998.

> It's the original 3.1 sources from Commodore, they require quite an exotic
> setup to compile (an obscure SunOS/Solaris based Cross-Compiler amongst
> other things, IIRC), Olaf Barthel had to spend quite a few hours to make
> them compile/assemble with modern tools before they could be used as the
> base for OS 3.5+.

Heh.

\--

I love this one from further on in the thread:

> AmigaOS is not designed and implemented in a manner which would facilitate
> testing.

\--

Also, HN (Arc) doesn't use HTML, and got completely confused by the URL.

Worth reading!
[http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875](http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875)

------
Tloewald
Given that, at least back when I still used the Amiga, the community Amiga
Resource Project (ARP) was free, open source, and superior in all respects to
Commodore's "official" AmigaDOS, so much so that it was adopted by Commodore
at one point, why would one want this?

I find it hard to believe Commodore got better at writing system software as
it got worse at everything else and then went bankrupt.

~~~
vidarh
ARP provided an exceedingly tiny set of additional APIs. It's not in any way a
replacement for AmigaOS. AROS is closer, but while it's vastly superior in
some aspects (not least: it runs on pretty much every modern platform you
might care about in some form or other - either native, or hosted under Linux
or other), it's also still not a complete replacement in others.

------
wslh
Finally...

