Amiga Java

http://www.mikekohn.net/micro/amiga_java.php

by aninteger • 7 years ago

159 67 7 years ago

PaulHoule• 7 years ago

Three Billion and One devices run Java.

pavlov• 7 years ago

Seeing "Amiga" and "Java" together reminds me of Amiga Anywhere, a brilliant and completely misunderstood gaming/entertainment VM project twenty years ago:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

It didn't really have anything to do with the original Amiga. It was a rebranding of a strange high-performance VM designed by some very clever people in UK:

"Tao had created a product that was so innovative that few people understood what it actually was. Taos was an operating system that was coded in VP1, an advanced assembly language that used instructions for an imaginary, idealized RISC CPU. When Taos programs were loaded into memory, the system translated the VP1 opcodes into the equivalent ones for whatever CPU it happened to be running on. Taos could run on an x86, a MIPS, a PowerPC, or a transputer, and many more—or even different combinations running at the same time. Because VP1 instructions were more compact than most CPU’s native opcodes, Taos programs would often load and run faster than native ones, even when you included the time it took to do the translation. Taos was a little bit like magic."

Of course HN past has the details on this interesting bit of alternative software history:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9808159

jacobush• 7 years ago

Like Android.

pjc50• 7 years ago

Or Transmeta. Or even WebAssembly. It's an interesting trick but only useful if you demand a very high level of binary portability.

armitron• 7 years ago

You might be interested in https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp by one of the inventors of Taos. It's brilliant.

unixhero• 7 years ago

Whoa.

somesortofsystm• 7 years ago

Isn't it the case that the approach of using a VM to do games goes way back .. in the early 80's it was a common mechanism in games dev, and the tradition has endured such that VM's are often pushed hard, technology-horizon wise, by the game devs.

One of the reasons Lua is all over the place, is its VM code is very well written and easy to integrate in a code-base.

There is still room for VM's to solve a lot of the current platform-war problems.

EvanAnderson• 7 years ago

Zork and the Z-Machine[1] is a great early example of use of a VM in a game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine

Someone• 7 years ago

”the approach of using a VM to do games goes way back .. in the early 80's it was a common mechanism in games dev”

One reason that was done is that it made porting games between CPU architectures (OSes weren’t that much of an issue, as games ran on bare metal) easier.

Zork had one in 1979 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine). I think that ended when games became truly interactive, as opposed to command-based, because, when that happened, performance became a bottleneck.

Another reason could have been is that it made programming easier, as 8-bit CPUs are so weak that running a virtual machine for the convenience of having such luxuries as 16-bit arithmetic sometimes made sense even then (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16)

And of course, there is Forth, the ultimate “give me a VM that is tailored to this specific program” language (every word you define can be seen as a new instruction for your virtual machine)

bitwize2• 7 years ago

This also reminds me of Inferno, which was marketed as an OS for next-gen game consoles and set-top boxes by Lucent back in the 90s. Unfortunately it didn't get very far.

asveikau3• 7 years ago

Never used it, but my recollection was the most radical thing about Inferno was it was based on a high level, JIT, GC'd language runtime.

I don't think Inferno people themselves said this, but I remember one of the things that people said in favor of memory safe JIT language operating systems was that the JIT would be able to optimize across multiple programs, or between kernel and user mode, since it didn't need to care about MMU based protections like a language with arbitrary pointers. And indeed you wouldn't need the high cost of the context switch.

In light of Spectre and meltdown that now sounds like a bad idea to me.

kjs33• 7 years ago

It got far enough to be the operating system for the Lucent 'Brick' line of firewall/VPN appliances. Those were modestly successful in the market. But, yeah, Lucent had big plans for Inferno that never really panned out.

jlarcombe• 7 years ago

Taos was a brief source of excitement on the Acorn platform, there was talk of using it for the never-finished Risc PC 2, although whether that was just marketing talk I'm unsure. I think there was a demo on the front of a magazine?

opless2• 7 years ago

There's an ISO for a Windows (95?) based SDK floating about. It possibly is the very same CD that you mention.

unwind• 7 years ago

It is so weird to see the cool computers of my teens put on a blanketed table. Makes them look like amcient artifacts, to be approached by wizards only. Kind of like how I felt seeing rackfuls of mainfrane hardware, back then. :)

bitwize2• 7 years ago

Kinda like how I felt when the docent at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View passed around an ancient artifact from a bygone civilization for the guests to marvel at: a 5 1/4" floppy disk.

Recently I saw a talk from a twenty-something programmer who as a child didn't believe "real" computers (desktop PCs) could be programmed at all, that was something you could do only with "old" computers like the Apple II. He hacks lisp now for some networking company, so maybe the kids will be all right. :)

rstupek• 7 years ago

Or the 8" floppy disk which I saw when I was a middle school kid learning my first programming on a paper teletype!

perl4ever4• 7 years ago

There's something to be said for computers that came with BASIC built in. But you know, if you have Windows and Office, you still have BASIC built in...

travbrack• 7 years ago

Dug into Java grinder a bit, pretty crazy to see Java code pushing pixels at a decent (20 fps?) framerate on C64 and earlier hardware.

A_No_Name_Mouse4• 7 years ago

What is it with Amiga that people keep tinkering with it and HN is full of Amiga articles? I once had an Amiga 1000 but for me that's just a sweet memory. Why is it different for other people, and why Amiga and not Spectrums or the like?

soneil2• 7 years ago

I think Amiga find themselves at the perfect border of extendable and retro. Mine has 1024x768 (over hdmi/dvi), 128MB of ram, a cpu almost 5x faster than it shipped with (66MHz vs 14MHz), and an ethernet (pcmcia) card. I don't have usb yet, but it's possible. I also have unreasonable amounts of storage (compared to the design) via an sdcard.

Much older and you lose all of this. Much newer, and you just end up replacing a PC with a crap PC.

A_No_Name_Mouse4• 7 years ago

But what do you do with it? Is it just nostalgia or the challenge to make it do something it couldn't do 20 years ago?

vidarh4• 7 years ago

There is a big community of people supporting the 8-bit home computers too. I'm subscribed to r/c64 on Reddit for example, and people recently posted a "top 10 C64 games released in 2019" video, for example.

What makes the Amiga interesting, though, is that it represented a transition from the 8-bit environment to modern machines that is modern enough to resemble modern systems (GUI, multitasking, reasonable graphics, lots of people had harddrives etc.) and that was revolutionary at the time.

At the same time around 5 million Amigas were sold, making it one of the most successful lines of home computers ever; not that many of the alternatives have as large a pool of potential supporters, and many of the rest are "too old" in that their users had one of the earlier ones and moved on to one (or more) of the later ones, and their nostalgia may have another focus.

E.g. we first had a VIC-20 briefly, but I really started with a C64, and while I love the C64 too, you can't imagine the C64 as a replacement for a PC. But my Amiga stood up very favourably to PCs for years, even after Windows gained traction. It was faster for a while. It had better graphics. It had proper pre-emptive multitasking. It had better sound. More of my nostalgia is focused on the Amiga.

Part of it is probably also down to what and how you used them. For the first years we had a C64 I mostly used it for games. I spent more time on my Amiga on creative endeavours, from writing code to drawing in Deluxe Paint, and writing.

And in retrospect there are still aspects of the OS that feels ahead of today. E.g. one of my favourites includes pervasive scripting. OS X comes closest to that with AppleScript, but on the Amiga AREXX become so integral that some applications have their central event bus built around AREXX to they point where every keypress and every menu action gets passed through the same mechanism as the AREXX commands. Another is datatypes: You'll find Amiga applications published in the 90's that happily supports WebP images for example, because someone wrote a datatype library for it, and so every application that supports datatypes can load WebP without modification or recompilation or anything.

But of course there is an element of rose tinted glasses and all that, which I think largely comes down to how big a part of your life it was, and to what extent it was part of your formative years. For me, my computing interest dominated my life (and still does), and so the Amiga dominated my life from I was 13 until I was around 20, and it was practicality more than anything that made me switch (to Linux): I moved to a smaller flat, and I could only fit one machine and needed a Linux machine due to work, and it had to take preference.

A_No_Name_Mouse4• 7 years ago

that was revolutionary at the time. Amen to that. An Acorn Electron was what got me hooked on computers and programming. The Amiga was a giant leap forward and dominated my life as well, during the same period of my life. I guess I'm just not a nostalgic type of person, so I never bothered to make it run again. One of these days I'll have to go up to the attic of my mother's house to see if it is still collecting dust.

uncle_j4• 7 years ago

I have a Vampire 2 Card for My A600. I can do quite a lot of more modern tasks on the machine and connect it to a modern monitor. In my A1200 I have 16GB of storage on a CF card, VGA / DVI and a Music card (I can play back MP3s etc. So it like using a Pentium Era computer.

The OS is pretty decent considering its age and there are plenty of decent applications to use.

I don't find 8bit computers particularly interesting. I had a BBC Micro and a Tantung Einstein (hand me downs) and they are extremely primitive compared to the Amiga. The Amiga is very much like a modern computer.

I really wish there was Amiga OS for a PC computer (I believe MorphOS is being ported) as even the aging OS 3.1 with some extensions is in some ways better than Desktop Linux. But that is highly subjective.

ChickeNES• 7 years ago

even the aging OS 3.1 with some extensions is in some ways better than Desktop Linux.

What do you find better? I'm curious

klez• 7 years ago

I really wish there was Amiga OS for a PC computer

Never used it (neither did I use MorphOS) but doesn't AROS fit the bill?

vidarh4• 7 years ago

I really wish there was Amiga OS for a PC computer

AROS runs both hosted on top of Linux, and natively, on PCs.

Some people also run UAE and run real AmigaOS...

perl4ever4• 7 years ago

It was popular in Europe when people had mostly lost interest in the US. I remember when the magazines I read were withering away, but there were these imported ones from I think the UK that were huge, with ultra-glossy paper and full color.

vidarh4• 7 years ago

Commodore always sold far better in Europe than in the US, even for most of the 8-bit days, and they managed to totally burn their dealer network in the US in the early 80's and never recovered (the final straw was when Tramiel lowered the price of the C64 drastically overnight without warning dealers or offering refunds, leaving dealers with large stocks of C64's bought at the old wholesale price that they'd be unable to sell with much if any margin).

As a result Amiga sales in the US were small and driven by things like the Video Toaster on the high end where people for some time bought Amigas for the Video Toaster rather than the other way around, while sales in Europe were far higher volume and more focused on the low end models that there just wasn't a decent dealer network to handle in the US.

kjs33• 7 years ago

For every classic computer there is someone who fetishizes it (even Spectrums) and a community they can belong to and talk about it (looks at the VAX-11/730 in the corner). I think Amiga's are that mix of cool, still usable (for some values of usable) and nostalgic for those of HNs average age, so you hear a lot about them here.

vortico• 7 years ago

It's funny that someone else on HN just managed to run a C# program on Windows 3.11. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22010159

cbmuser• 7 years ago

FWIW, you can even run the latest OpenJDK on m68k.

In fact, here's is my Amiga 4000 running it on Debian unstable:

  root@elgar:~> dmesg |head
  [    0.000000] Linux version 5.4.0-2-m68k (debian-kernel@lists.debian.org) (gcc version 9.2.1 20191130 (Debian 9.2.1-21)) #1 Debian 5.4.8-1 (2020-01-05)
  [    0.000000] Enabling workaround for errata I14
  [    0.000000] Amiga hardware found: [A4000] VIDEO BLITTER AUDIO FLOPPY A4000_IDE KEYBOARD MOUSE SERIAL PARALLEL A3000_CLK CHIP_RAM PAULA LISA ALICE_PAL ZORRO3
  [    0.000000] On node 0 totalpages: 30720
  [    0.000000]   DMA zone: 300 pages used for memmap
  [    0.000000]   DMA zone: 0 pages reserved
  [    0.000000]   DMA zone: 30720 pages, LIFO batch:7
  [    0.000000] initrd: 06c412a3 - 07800000
  [    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: s0 r0 d32768 u32768 alloc=1*32768
  [    0.000000] pcpu-alloc: [0] 0
  root@elgar:~> cat /proc/cpuinfo
  CPU:            68060
  MMU:            68060
  FPU:            68060
  Clocking:       49.1MHz
  BogoMips:       98.20
  Calibration:    491008 loops
  root@elgar:~> uname -a
  Linux elgar 5.4.0-2-m68k #1 Debian 5.4.8-1 (2020-01-05) m68k GNU/Linux
  root@elgar:~> java --version
  openjdk 11.0.6-ea 2020-01-14
  OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 11.0.6-ea+7-post-Debian-1)
  OpenJDK Zero VM (build 11.0.6-ea+7-post-Debian-1, interpreted mode)
  root@elgar:~>

OpenJDK is built as part of Debian unstable:

https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=openjdk-11&arc...
https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=openjdk-12&arc...
https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=openjdk-13&arc...
https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=openjdk-14&arc...

Amiga Java

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