Well it's here!
And it made it okay!
Well that's the good parts... it's been interesting so far, and I'm keeping a list of things that drive me nuts about it. I don't have it right next to me, but I'll go over it here in a second.
It's well made, looks great. There is no mistaking that it's an Amiga OS. And that's both good and bad.
I fired it up.. and a few minutes later it crashed. I tried some apps. They crashed. Everytime I tried to do something on the network, it crashed.
So I fired up Tunenet (streaming audio). Sound went out after 20 seconds. Rebooted, same thing happened. Annoyed, I went and searched the forums and while there was problems with the sound on some sound cards, this wasn't one.
I went to bed to work on it the next day.
The next day, I put on my Amiga hat and asked.. how would I fix this on my 4000T? I moved the card up one PCI slot. Everything started working without a problem. Sound started working, all good. I started feeling much better about my purchase.
The fact that it looks like the AmigaOS is both good and bad like I said before. So much of 4.1 is a collection of freeware and shareware kludges/utils/whatever that were made over the years for 3.9 that have moved to the 4.1 platform. It's good they included them, but bad that they had to.
The RunInUAE works flawlessly. I laughed as I double-clicked an ADF file and it took off loading the game, complete with disk drive sounds over the speakers.
Where the Amiga Dock was a nice to have on 3.9, it's a necessity on 4.1 . I have all my apps there, and there's a new thing called 'dockies' that allows a constantly updating icon to be on the dock. So I have a docky that shows my CPU usage, a docky that shows my RAM usage, etc. It's pretty neat.
The prefs have been overhauled, but everything is exactly where you remember them.
I set about to pretend this was my main machine so I will do the things that I would normally do. I fired up the included OWB browser, which is something you should use to download another browser (kinda like IE). I downloaded Odyssey which works pretty well, but's outdated. Gmail doesn't work. I can use FB, but it crashes. And when I say crash, just like always, there's no memory protection so it just sits there 'hung'. I can use FB in mobile mode and it works fine. I connected via telnet from my own page, and it worked long enough to post 3 or 4 messages on the board and then crashed. Not having a web browser that works properly in 2017 is unacceptable.
I installed WookieChat for my IRC program, which worked perfectly. I used the built in TuneNet for MP3s and radio stations.
Speaking of built in, I'm liking the update feature. Like Windows Update, there's an Amiga Update which updates your apps and third party apps which worked perfectly.
I created an account on the AmiStore and bought zTools. This worked well too.
So.. what drives me nuts? Here's some things:
- We went over the web browser issue. This needs to be fixed.. now.
- No WiFi. It's 2017. Again, another thing that should be fixed immediately.
- When I first fired it up, I hooked it up to my standard 23" LCD monitor. However, the maximum the Radeon 7700 driver would see by default is a 1280x1024 monitor. Who in 2017 has a 1280x1024 monitor as the main monitor for a $2k machine? Luckily I remembed how to edit a monitor file to add more modes but someone new would be lost.
- No memory protection.
- My whole PCI soundcard issue. I shouldn't have to move stuff around on the PCI bus until it works.
- A fun one.. don't leave
a DVD in the drive, the system won't boot. And it won't tell you why. It just sits there at the boot screen doing nothing.
Don't get me wrong thinking I'm saying this thing is junk, it's not. I'm having fun using it. I am just a bit astonished that the most basic of things haven't been corrected in the 17 years since 3.9 came out.
I'll update more later