The final chapter in the Amiga saga.

A history of the Amiga, part 12: Red vs. Blue

Amiga was now an independent company again, but trouble was brewing.

Jeremy Reimer – Mar 29, 2018 8:00 am | 195

Credit: Jeremy Reimer

The year 2000, which once seemed so impossibly futuristic, had finally arrived. Bill McEwen, president of the new Amiga Inc., celebrated with a press release telling the world why he had bought the subsidiary from Gateway Computers.

“Gateway purchased Amiga because of Patents; we purchased Amiga because of the People.” It was a bold statement, the first of many that would come from the fledgling company. Amiga Inc. now owned the name, trademark, logos, all existing inventory (there were still a few Escom-era A1200s and A4000s left), the Amiga OS, and a permanent license to all Amiga-related patents. They had also inherited Jim Collas’ dream of a revolutionary new Amiga device, but none of the talent and resources that Gateway had been able to bring to bear.

“Gateway purchased Amiga because of Patents; we purchased Amiga because of the People.”

To chase this dream, Amiga Inc. would have to look elsewhere. McEwen thought he had found the answer in an obscure British technology startup. This was the Tao Group, started by Francis Charig, a UK businessman, and Chris Hinsley, a talented Atari and Amiga games programmer who wrote in assembler.

Tao operating system running on Windows — The Tao Group’s TAOS operating system, running on Windows.

The Tao Group and Amiga Anywhere

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.

As cool as it was, Taos had a hard time finding buyers in the marketplace. So the group doubled down and added new features to make it more attractive. The people at Taos wrote a graphical user interface and support for multimedia. They wrote a Java virtual machine (JVM) so that users wouldn’t have to write applications in VP1 assembler. There was little money in JVMs, but there was a market for full-fledged operating systems that ran on a tiny amount of resources, could run on different CPUs, and supported Java applications. This was the burgeoning world of personal digital assistants (PDAs).

PDAs were all the rage in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Not quite yet smartphones, they were pocketable devices that could keep track of your appointments, record notes, and sometimes take pictures. Palm was the biggest player in this space, but plenty of other companies wanted in on the action.

Bill McEwen saw the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new market, and he licensed the full stack of Tao Group’s technology. He called it the “Amiga Digital Environment” or AmigaDE, although it would be later branded as “Amiga Anywhere.” McEwen even made an appearance on TechTV with Leo Laporte to demonstrate how you could take a single SD card with an Amiga Anywhere-branded 2D shooter game and run it on Windows and a whole host of incompatible PDAs with different CPU architectures. It was an impressive demo, but what it had to do with the Amiga wasn’t clear exactly.

Amiga Inc. also announced a deal with Hyperion Entertainment—a company that ported older games to Linux, Macintosh, and Amiga systems—to convert its games to the AmigaDE.

Bill McEwen tries to bring the Amiga back.

The split begins

The remaining Amiga community reacted to these announcements with confusion. Amiga Inc. made a vague promise that old software would run on the AmigaDE through emulation, but this didn’t provide a bridge for people with existing hardware.

To mollify the community, Amiga Inc. announced a partnership with Haage & Partner to make a new version of WarpOS that would run the AmigaDE environment. WarpOS wasn’t really an OS at all, but a PowerPC library that sped up certain Amiga programs on PPC accelerator cards. It was a replacement for PowerUP, the library that shipped with Phase5’s PPC accelerators. The divide between WarpOS and PowerUP had been contentious in the past, before both sides had agreed to an uneasy truce. Now, the stage was set for this old rivalry to split the Amiga community in two.

Merlancia

It was a heady time, and the dotcom mania attracted both legitimate and dubious investors. One example of the latter was Ryan Czerwinski, who claimed to be 40 years old, a Ph.D., and the president of Merlancia Industries. He arranged meetings with Amiga Inc. and even hired legendary Commodore engineer Dave Haynie to work on new Amiga PowerPC hardware. It turned out in the end that Czerwinski was a teenager living with his mother, and Merlancia was just a bunch of ideas in his head. Haynie, who was now owed $55,000 for his consulting work, was left scarred by the experience. After the failed PIOS startup and now the Merlancia debacle, his heart was broken. He would never work on Amiga-related technologies again.

MorphOS

In October of 2000, Haage & Partner released the final version of the classic Amiga operating system, AmigaOS 3.9. In the same month, Petro Tyschtschenko announced his retirement and the closing of his office in Germany. All the old Escom A1200s and A4000s were finally gone. It was the end of an era.

Also vanishing by this point was the PowerPC accelerator company Phase 5, which had gone into bankruptcy. But some of the former employees of Phase 5 formed a new company named bPlan and partnered with a software company called Thendic. Thendic was run by Bill Buck, formerly of VIScorp, who had helped pay the salaries of Amiga Technologies employees during the Escom bankruptcy. bPlan and Thendic got to work on a dream they had been imagining since 1995—a fully PowerPC-based Amiga with a native Amiga operating system.

Some of the pieces were already there. The PowerUP library, for one, but there was also the Picasso graphics library that supported non-Amiga display chipsets, a new file system called SFS, and other components from the open-source Amiga Replacement OS (AROS) project. All it really needed was a new microkernel, and when Ralph Schmidt wrote one called Quark, the old PowerUP system had finally morphed into a full operating system in its own right. Thus it became dubbed “MorphOS.”

Amithlon and AmigaOS XL

It could have been called AmigaOS 4.0, but those naming rights were held by Amiga Inc. Bill Buck called up Bill McEwen at Amiga Inc. to try and work out a deal. At the time, Amiga Inc. had just announced new PowerPC Amiga hardware with a company in the UK called Eyetech. Buck wanted to get a license for the old Amiga OS 3.1 source code to fill in the remaining bits of MorphOS and to license the AmigaOS 4.0 name. But Amiga Inc. had now announced its own version of AmigaOS 4.0, which was to be written by Haage & Partner. As of mid-2001, Buck and McEwen had still not come to an agreement.

Haage & Partner, meanwhile, had different ideas about where the future of AmigaOS should go. This turned a two-way disagreement into a three-way split and rocked the tiny Amiga community to its core.

It all started with a new emulator for classic Amiga software, written by Bernd “Bernie” Meyer and Harald Frank. This emulator used “Just-In-Time” (JIT) translation technology to speed up execution. Benchmarks showed that a 1GHz Athlon CPU could run Amiga programs (at least ones that didn’t use the old custom chips) at a speed equivalent to a 450Mhz 68040, which turned a typical PC into an Amiga 4000 that was 10 times faster than the original.

Meyer had integrated the emulator into a custom version of Linux, which would boot directly into the Amiga’s Workbench environment and even translate Amiga OS API calls directly into their Linux equivalents. Haage & Partner was more interested in a solution that used the x86 version of QNX Neutrino as the base operating system. In typical Amiga fashion, the company chose both and shipped two CDs in the same package. The former was called Amithlon, and the latter dubbed AmigaOS XL.

The sudden existence of these two solutions stunned the Amiga community. On one hand, it was great that the community could run its old software much faster on commodity PC hardware. But these emulation solutions had no support for the PowerPC accelerator boards that many people already owned and had no potential for new features in the future. Like all emulators, they were frozen in time, preserving the past but never moving forward.

But the transitional nature of Amithlon and AmigaOS XL wasn’t the biggest problem. Bernd Meyer found out that Haage & Partner had never received a license for the ROMs and operating system from Amiga Inc. Not wanting to expose himself to a lawsuit, Meyer officially withdrew his support from H&P and signed a new contract with Amiga Inc. H&P’s response was to demand that Amiga Inc. transfer ownership of Amithlon or H&P would leave the Amiga market entirely. Amiga Inc. did not agree to this, and H&P made good on its threat.

In a statement, Fleecy Moss said that H&P had done “a good job” with AmigaOS during the Gateway years, but that “there can be only one captain and course to steer.”

With H&P gone, the captain had no crew left to work on the operating system. The company signed a new contract with Hyperion to write AmigaOS 4.0. By this time, several things had happened, both in the world at large and with Amiga Inc. The attacks on September 11 propelled what had been a shaky dotcom market into full-blown collapse. Investors abandoned the fledgling Amiga Inc. Bill McEwen tried to put on a good front, insisting that the company was merely “moving offices,” but what was really happening was that Amiga Inc. existed now in name only. Court documents would later reveal that the company had shrunk to just Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss, whose only income was the rapidly dwindling sales of Amiga Anywhere-compatible PDA game packs from the amiga.com website.

“There can be only one captain and course to steer.”

Hyperion, knowing of Amiga’s financial condition, stipulated in its contract for developing OS 4 that ,if Amiga Inc. were ever to go bankrupt, all rights to the software would revert to Hyperion itself.

Red versus Blue: The AmigaOne and Pegasos

By late 2002, the first AmigaOne motherboards had arrived from Eyetech, but there was no OS 4 ready to run on them. bPlan and Thendic, now merged into a single company called Genesi, had released its own PowerPC motherboards which it called the Pegasos. The Pegasos boards came with a beta version of MorphOS. Both boards were based on a reference design called the Teron, developed by the China-based Mai Logic. Mai had developed the boards for industrial and embedded applications where Linux was the standard. The boards were new and had some rough edges. Bill Buck claimed that Genesi had developed a hardware fix (which the company dubbed “April”) for some of the bugs and used this as a way to plead for a reconciliation of the OS 4/MorphOS divide.

This was the infamous “There is no Mai without April” post. “This market and community is in complete confusion,” Buck wrote. “There is no leadership or vision, and we need both fast or we can forget it. This is a public statement in good faith to Eyetech and Hyperion. Allan and Ben are formidable marketing opponents. We can forget the past if you can. We need to get into the same boat.”

His words fell on deaf ears. Both the red (OS 4) and blue (MorphOS) camps continued with neither willing to compromise with the other. On community forums, people were forced to choose sides.

It was not a large market to begin with, and splitting it only made things worse. Only 400 Pegasos boards were shipped in the first batch alongside a slightly higher number of AmigaOne systems.

OS 4 appears, hardware disappears

In 2004, the first release of Hyperion’s OS 4 was made available as a “Developer Preview.” It ran on the AmigaOne motherboards, but not the Pegasos. Eyetech also announced a small, mini-ITX form-factor board called the Micro AmigaOne, which I bought and reviewed for Ars. While the AmigaOne had some rough edges, it was the first completely new Amiga system released since 1992’s Amiga 4000, and the old Amiga magic was still there for anyone who wanted to see it. I fitted mine with a Flash card connected to a SATA interface, which offered me a brief glimpse into a future of fast SSD-based computers that would boot in under seven seconds.

Unfortunately, this joy was short-lived. Mai Logic went bankrupt, and Eyetech, with nothing left to sell, closed down its business. Now that OS 4 was officially out, there was no hardware left to buy to run it on. Many people begged Hyperion to make an x86 version of OS 4 to run on commodity PC hardware, but chairman Ben Hermans held fast against the idea, calling it “disastrous”.

Hermans had seen how Microsoft had destroyed the market for non-Windows operating systems on the PC. He pointed out that both Be Inc. and the Linux game company Loki had gone out of business. He offered as evidence the fact that Hyperion sold more game ports on the Amiga platform than it did on Linux, despite the latter having a larger installed base by several orders of magnitude. Hyperion’s income mostly came from sales of its Macintosh game ports. However, it kept developing OS 4 as a labor of love and in hope that the market would grow again.

Later that year, Amiga Inc. used some sleight of hand to escape a pending bankruptcy. Amiga sold its assets to a shell company called KMOS—a Delaware firm headquartered in New York—then renamed KMOS back to Amiga Inc. It tried to use these shenanigans to get out of the clause in its contract with Hyperion that would revert ownership of OS 4 if Amiga Inc. ever went under. Then, to top it off, Amiga sued Hyperion for not delivering OS 4 on time and demanded the return of all source code.

As the lawsuit dragged on, Bill McEwen decided the best use of his time was to get Amiga Inc. back in the news by sponsoring the new “Amiga Center at Kent” stadium, home of the Seattle Thunderbirds hockey team. The company did get in the local news, but three months later made even bigger news when it was dropped for failure to make the downpayment. It was an embarrassing moment for all involved.

New hardware and the end of the line for Amiga Inc.

Astoundingly, this wasn’t the end of the Amiga story. While the “parent” firm was clearly no longer a company, work on new hardware and software continued. Hyperion released AmigaOS 4.1, and a company called ACube released a pair of PowerPC motherboards called the Sam440ep and Sam440ex that came bundled with the new OS.

In September 2008, the lawsuit between Hyperion and Amiga Inc. was settled. Hyperion won and was granted complete rights to the Amiga OS 4 operating system. By this time, the Tao Group had also gone bankrupt, leaving Amiga Inc. with nothing at all to sell.

Meanwhile, MorphOS was soldiering on despite troubles of its own. A group of coders claimed that it had not been paid for its work and launched a website to protest against Genesi. When Genesi did not respond, the author of the Ambient desktop (a clone of the Amiga Workbench that MorphOS used) open-sourced the project. Genesi also was forced to stop selling the Pegasos line due to new EU restrictions on lead-based solder. The company did, however, release a new low-end micro-ITX board called the Efika. MorphOS continued to be developed and, for a brief moment, ran on Pegasos boards, the Efika board, some models of PowerPC Macintoshes, and even the Sam440ex. Owners of the latter were the first people to ever successfully dual-boot OS 4 and MorphOS on the same hardware.

In 2010, a new hardware company entered the scene. Partnering with Hyperion, A-Eon technologies announced the Amiga X1000, a high-end Amiga system with a dual-core PowerPC CPU and a mysterious “accelerator” chip called the Xena. A-Eon was founded by Trevor Dickinson, an English entrepreneur who made his fortune bringing technology to the oil and gas industry. In the 1990s, he had used Amigas in his business for graphics work, video, and desktop publishing.

Trevor Dickinson Credit: Trevor Dickinson

In the fall of 2010, I met Trevor at the 25th anniversary of the Amiga, held at the annual AmiWest convention in Sacramento, California. He was an enthusiastic and well-spoken supporter of the Amiga. He admitted that the X1000 and its successor the X5000 were pure passion projects, driven out of the love of the platform rather than any expectation of making money.

“I am first and foremost an Amiga enthusiast and wish to continue the legacy and tradition of the groundbreaking Amiga computer,” he told Ars in an interview. “As long as there are people who, like me, want to keep the dream alive, I will continue to fund Amiga hardware and software development to make it happen.”

Between A-Eon and Hyperion, the Amiga platform finally had new hardware and software for the foreseeable future. Work continues today on software support and drivers for new Radeon graphics cards and a less expensive, small form-factor A1222 motherboard.

“As long as there are people who, like me, want to keep the dream alive, I will continue to fund Amiga hardware and software development to make it happen.”

Where they are now

MorphOS continued to be developed and sold, with the last version, 3.9, coming out in 2015. Genesi, however, pivoted its business to selling ARM-based hardware running Linux to the embedded market. Today, Bill Buck is busy fulfilling contracts with the US military for its technology modernization project.

Haage & Partner still exist today as a distributor for Windows-based utility programs. The company sell a Windows version of Directory Opus, which was a popular file manager for the Amiga.

Hyperion shipped OS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 to coincide with the release of the X5000. Ben Hermans resigned from the board of directors of Hyperion in 2016, although he still owns shares in the company. On its website, Hyperion speculates about the possibility of an OS 4.2 but warns that development depends on the sales of 4.1 Final Edition.

Bill McEwen continued the pretense of owning Amiga until 2016 when he failed to renew the copyrights on the Amiga name. The amiga.com website shut down later that year, becoming a parked domain with only a single email address listed. On his LinkedIn profile, McEwen lists himself as the CEO of Amiga Inc. from 2000 to 2016. He is currently working as the Director of Operations for DC Logistics, a freight forwarding company.

Fleecy Moss has vanished from the Internet.

Eric Schwartz has the last word.

The Amiga dream

It is tempting to dismiss the efforts of Amiga, Inc. in the 21st century as the deranged thrashings of delusional and incompetent people. Yet it is worth examining exactly what it was about the Amiga that drove so many people to try and revive a dwindling market. No other platform has experienced this. Nobody fought bitterly over the control of a successor to the Atari ST. There weren’t multiple efforts to revive and modernize the TRS-80. Why did the Amiga make people behave in this way?

Part of it was the uniqueness of a platform that was literally ten years ahead of its time. You can take an Amiga 1000 from 1985 and use it today as if you were using a modern (albeit slow) computer. It has a graphical user interface, color, stereo sampled sound, long file names, and pre-emptive multitasking. You can even, with the appropriate peripherals, connect it to the Internet. The equivalent Macintosh at the time had only a 9-inch monochrome screen and everything halted as soon as you held down the mouse button. A typical PC from 1985 was even more ancient, usually sporting a text-based display and a command-line only, single-tasking DOS.

To be so far ahead was both a blessing and a curse for the Amiga. The mainstream technology press didn’t quite understand it. The press either pretended like it didn’t even exist or published dismissive screeds claiming that nobody needed color, sound, or multitasking in a business environment. Ten years later when Windows 95 appeared, these same features were touted as innovative and exciting.

So when Commodore’s inept and malicious management imploded the Amiga’s parent company in 1994, fans of the platform were naturally distressed. Things got even worse when successor companies inherited the “Commodore curse” and either died themselves or downsized and sold off the Amiga division.

The dotcom boom of the late ‘90s and early 2000s seemed to give the Amiga one last chance at a rebirth. Investors had tons of money to spend, and the Internet revolution promised the opportunity for a computing world that wasn’t dominated by Microsoft and Windows.

Unfortunately, the two people involved in running the new Amiga Incorporated, Bill McEwen and Fleecy Moss, were not equipped to lead this revolution. They knew that the future belonged to mobile computing, and this led to the partnership with the Tao Group and the Amiga Anywhere platform. However, they didn’t have the skills to manage the transition to a new platform while simultaneously unifying and migrating the old Amiga hardware and software.

Ironically, the new platform nearly survived on its own. One of the most tantalizing licensees of the Tao Group was a Motorola phone, the P1100, running on an 11 MHz ARM processor with a monochrome bitmapped screen. It ran the full Tao Intent stack, including a GUI and downloadable Java applications, featured a large (for the time) touch screen. It was scheduled for release in late 2000. Unfortunately, Motorola cancelled the project. The world might have been very different if the project had stayed alive.

Motorola P1100 Phone Credit: David McQuillan

Ultimately, the Amiga wasn’t just the set of custom chips with names like Agnes, Paula, and Daphne. It wasn’t just the Kickstart ROM chips or the Workbench interface that made up the AmigaOS operating system. The Amiga was an idea. It was the idea of a personal computer that was easy to use and fun, powerful enough to run cutting-edge games and applications, but still understandable by a single person. It was possible to know and recognize every file in the operating system and even comprehend how the custom chips worked on a fundamental level. Today, we have computers that are tens of thousands of times more powerful, but nobody would ever pretend to understand how every part of Windows works. Something has been lost.

The Amiga didn’t just play great games. It offered a glimpse into a sci-fi future, where affordable personal devices could allow ordinary people to edit video and create new three-dimensional worlds in software. But it was more than that. The Amiga, unlike any other computer that followed it, had both a soul and a heart.

The future is wide open

The present-day situation of the Amiga, incredibly, is better than it has been in decades. The machine’s impact has been fondly remembered in series like this or in documentaries like 2017’s Viva Amiga. And you can even purchase new hardware that runs an updated AmigaOS, allowing a new generation to dig into the hardware and software while running a modern Web browser and interacting with the rest of the computing world at a comparable level.

Coincidentally, we tested that new Amiga—the Amiga X5000—and it brought back plenty of familiar feelings:

The X5000 is a strange beast. It’s like a window into an alternate universe where Commodore never went bankrupt and the Amiga platform never died. The fact that both the hardware and operating system were produced at all is a monument to the passion and dedication of the folks at A-EON and Hyperion Entertainment.

It is by no means the fastest PC ever made, but it is certainly the fastest Amiga ever produced. The operating system harkens back to the days when computing was more personal, less corporate, and a lot more fun…

It feels like an exotic car: expensive, beautifully engineered, and unique. If you bought one, you’d be one of a proud few, a collector and enthusiast. It practically begs for you to dig in and tinker with the internals—the system comes with an SDK, a C compiler, Python, and a huge amount of documentation for things like MUI, the innovative GUI library. On top of that, there is the mysterious XMOS chip, crying out for someone to create software that leverages its strengths. It feels like a developer’s machine.

Trevor Dickinson reports that over 50 percent of people who purchased an Amiga X5000 have never owned an Amiga before. Perhaps some of them will be inspired to create something entirely new and revolutionary, in the same spirit as the tiny band of heroes who joined together to found Hi-Toro in 1982.

Listing image: Jeremy Reimer

Jeremy Reimer Senior Niche Technology Historian

I'm a writer and web developer. I specialize in the obscure and beautiful, like the Amiga and newLISP.

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