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Operating System Specific Discussions => AROS Research Operating System => Topic started by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 10:50:35 AM

Title: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 10:50:35 AM

Is there anyone interested in making Aros 68K discs for Amiga's?

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: wawrzon on May 25, 2011, 10:55:14 AM

????
do you mean the softkick floppies, as used currently to test aros 68k on amiga? in this case: adf image is included in 68k distribution in distfiles directory. i think everybody will be able to decompress it to a floppy with adf2disk.

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 10:58:06 AM

Sorry, I need to get up to speed on Aros 68K.
If I wanted to use Aros 68K on an A500 sometime in the future, could someone make and possibly sell 880K discs?

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: bloodline on May 25, 2011, 11:13:20 AM

I'd be happy to send out floppies... But I actually don't have any floppy disks anymore... Nowhere local sells them either...

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 11:14:58 AM

I have seen them on Amazon in packs of 100.
I need a fdd emulator.

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: wawrzon on May 25, 2011, 11:16:35 AM

too early to talk about such measures.

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 11:21:17 AM

That is quite okay.

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: trekiej on May 25, 2011, 08:29:06 PM

I saw someone looking for KS discs for an A1000.
Will Aros work with an un-expanded A1000 some time in the future?

Title: Re: Aros 68K Floppy Disc Service
Post by: Ezrec on July 02, 2011, 06:30:54 AM

Quote from: trekiej;640235

I saw someone looking for KS discs for an A1000.
Will Aros work with an un-expanded A1000 some time in the future?

The simple answer is 'No, not likely. But not impossible.'

The current AROS ROM eats up most of a 1M ROM image, but it's packed with goodies (ata driver, FAT/RDB/GUID partition support, cdrom (ISO9660 and HFS) handler, 68040/68060 math libraries, resident shell commands, icon.library, etc).

To 'trim the fat' to a small, 256K (yes, you heard me right, that's all the 'WROM' space you get on a A1000) ROM image would be a major undertaking, one that I'm not ready for right now.

Compression is right out for the unexpanded A1000, since you'd eat up all your working RAM with the uncompressed ROM.

So, a number of features would have to go, and you'd probably need to:

* Remove all dependencies on oop.library
  - graphics.library driver plugins
  - input.library driver plugins
  - etc.
* A custom graphics.library that only supports OCS features
* An assembler version of Workbench
* An input.library that only supports the Amiga keyboard and mouse
* Remove all ROM resources the A1000 doesn't need (CDROM support, ata.device, etc)
* etc. etc.
 
It can be done, but it's VERY low on my priority list at the moment. I'll be doing good to support 512K ROMs (it's on my Christmas wish-I-had-time list)

(Of course, if someone wants to step up and commit to the hard slog of fitting a minimal AROS into a 256K ROM, I would be more than happy to give them pointers to the places where the most attention is needed.)