Why not AmigaOS4 for x86 Platforms?

[Karlos]

dammy wrote:
by Karlos on 2005/1/26 17:59:19

f it had gone x86, then great, I would have saved money too.

Then what do you call AROS, chop liver?

Dammy
TeamAROS

I have downloaded AROS periodically and taken it for a spin on the old PC. And I have to confess, it's about as much fun as one can have with x86 :-)

However, and don't take it personally but for me, AROS is not AmigaOS. It is source compatible and I do intend to code on it at some point but I prefer to wait until it has matured further. Also, I want to see where the OS is going as opposed to just where it has been. In this regard, I feel AROS and AmigaOS will diverge considerably. So, which route to follow? For me, that depends on which of the two is presently the most compatible.

It's probably not a good quantifiable reason, but one of the reasons I feel more of a connection with OS4 is that it already runs on my classic PPC, which has several bootable versions of AmigaOS. It runs the old 3.x applications (well the 680x0 ones), even the hardware banging ones, without UAE , as well as the newer OS4 native ones. I appreciate that the A1 does not have this level of compatibility, but it will always be more compatible with existing software than AROS (that is, until, AROS develops some kind of internal 680x0 emulation).

[Karlos]

@Bloodline

When that fateful day arrives, I will be forced to reconsider my options. However, it is quite likely that I will have already bought a more powerful PPC system by then, the migration from classic to A1 will be even less painful than it is now.

An interesting future project, in many ways a variation of one of my existing ones would be a Unified Amiga Layer, a nice standard library, classes etc that make the future diversification of the platforms easier to deal with from a developer perspective.

[Karlos]

This leads me to the question just HOW compatible is OS/4 with old Amiga software..

On my system, for instance, I can fire up DPaint AGA under OS4. It just runs as if it were on OS3. Except for the the fact that that things tend to be a lot snappier.

I know what you are saying about emulation, but I prefer emulation to be non-intrusive. OS4 and MOS are excellent in this respect in that they transparently run 680x0 stuff, they don't need to do a MacOSX style "load the previous OS" in order to do it and they certianly don't need to use a full blown UAE style emulation. You just run an application, and aside from the often highly conspicuous speed increases you really don't know it's not running on a real 680x0.

Now, the A1 hardware naturally has no AGA/ECS/OCS compatibility, so hardware banging stuff just won't work or won't work as expected (to say the least), but that would be true of an existing amiga "clone" like the Draco. That doesn't make it an unusable system.

What OS4 does for me, is to allow me to run my existing applications and those that are new and OS4 specific. As more and more of these appear, so I will gradually migrate away from needing / wanting any OS3.x/AGA compatibility, by which time some A1 style system will be far more attractive to me than it might be now (not that it isn't already, save for my finances :lol:)

[Karlos]

PS @Previous poster, does OS 4 (a release version?) really run on your classic PPC Amiga (with accelerator)?? Me thinks for most people out there this is a no, and OS4 on acclerated classic Amiga hardware isn't supported..

Yes it really runs and runs well. Why is that such a surprise?

Check my pictures in the gallery, there's a shot from mid last  year sometime.

edit

PNG grab of me mucking about with p96 and some 680x0 stuff here (500K image)

Note that the grabbing process seemed to catch the emulated 68020 based voxelspace demo partway through (not to mention killing it's speed a bit), but typically it was getting 30fps; fullscreen it hit refresh rate. Which is far faster than my real 040 can manage running the same executable (windowed, about 12fps maximum under the same conditions).

[Karlos]

@Bloodline

I absolutely guarentee you would not say that if you ever had to use it ;-)

-edit-

Also, one of the reasons that OS4/MOS get the performance they do is *because* they don't rely on emulating everything as  the OS code remains native. That way all those old 3.x applications get the benefit of newer/faster OS routines, datatypes etc. etc.

[Karlos]

:lol: I suppose there is that :-D