AmigaOS 3.2.2 released for those feeling nostalgic

Original mid-1980s OS is still alive and kicking

A new update to AmigaOS 3, for the classic Motorola 68000-powered Amiga computers, has just been released: AmigaOS 3.2.2.

Commodore Inc released AmigaOS 3.1 a full three decades ago now, in 1993. Since then, there has been a long, embattled and confusing history of arguments, announcements, acquisitions, and sell-offs of the Amiga and Commodore brands, the intellectual property of the machines' designs, the operating system and its various successors.

At the end of the 1990s, a German company, Haage & Partner, released a couple of updated versions: first AmigaOS 3.5, which we mentioned at the time, and later AmigaOS 3.9. The original source code to the 680x0 version was sold off as Amiga Inc. planned to focus on its next-generation AmigaDE. Sadly, that eventually died off, as did the company that created the underlying OS.

About a quarter of a century later, signs of life started to appear from the old rootstock. With the demise of all the successor products and companies, the company which was working on AmigaOS 4, the PowerPC version, took renewed interest in the original version. The first green shoots appeared in the form of an update and bugfix. We presume that even at a tenner a pop, this update aroused interest from Amiga fans, who in the experience of the Reg FOSS desk are so passionate about their beloved platform as to make the Emacs-versus-Vi rivalry look positively amicable.

In May 2021 followed a whole new point release, AmigaOS version 3.2, which bundled a new GUI toolkit called ReAction and a new text editor to show it off. It also included direct support for .ADF disk files – common currency among those using Amiga emulation – integrated help and online documentation, multiple updates to various components, and a general spruce-up and facelift. Coming 28 years after the last point release, that seems fair enough.

In December 2021, Hyperion released version 3.2.1, which fixed various bugs and added some cosmetic enhancements, plus Rexx integration to the new Text Editor. (Yes, the Rexx programming language is still around as well. It's included in IBM's PC DOS 7 for instance.)

The new update applies to that release, although it adds some small cosmetic features too, such as an About box in the new Text Editor, chip revision info if you're lucky enough to have a 68060 processor, and support for older versions of Kickstart, which means 3.2.2 can now dual-boot with older versions.

As we detailed at the end of last year, there is still a lot of life in the world of 1980s 680x0 machines, and there are various upgrades available to revive an original Miggy. Some of these are quite inexpensive, so if you have an original Amiga 1200 in the attic, stick a CF card in it as a hard disk, and a PiStorm as a CPU upgrade, and give it a well-overdue upgrade. ®