Aros 68k vs aos on legacy hardware

[alex]

I hope I'm not covering old ground here but I'm very interested in people's opinion on aros 68k running on native hardware of various configurations.

I have a a3000 with cybervision, 68060, and various zorro cards that I honestly could live without other than the networking card which I don't remember which brand I kept in it at the moment.

I also have an a1200 with an 030 card.

I would love to gather intel on your experiences and suggestions based on my configs.

Thanks in advance

[alex]

i wouldnt call 030 a satysfying option for aros68k currently. even with 060 the user experience is sluggish, but about usable.

the situation is such: 68k applications run in most cases with usual speed. what is slow may be user interaction due to zune (mui clone) not being optimized enough. such is also alas the performance of wanderer (workbench replacement) which is built upon zune and contains several bugs (especially listing files in detailed mode) and oddities, that make it not as usable.
also loading binaries is noticeably slower than on original aos. generally the system is still more crashy and not tested enough due to apparent general lack of interest alas.

there are several contributions to aros that already run under aros68k, mostly games and demos, and most noticeably the aros owb web browser. unfortunatelly the executable alone is about 40mb big and loads very slowly especially parsing ttf fonts (about 2 minutes if you dont feed it with too much fonts). it is usable on simple pages but complex css loaded sitest load pretty slowly.

you can use whatever zorro rtg card you can find p96 driver for i think. i used picasso4 and cybervision64. but you will have to add the appropriate *.card and *.chip drivers to bootstrap command in the startup-sequence to have them available. then simply choos the desired rtg resolution in screenmode prefs.

you can also use an network card to connect to the net. having a router the setting should be pretty straightforward. get the appropriate 68k device copied into your devs/networks and choose it under network prefs. your card should run under arostcp stack with default automatic settings. note that imho arostcp is slow in comparison to miamidx i have used under aros68k on my a4k previously.

to tell the truth, aros 68k may be a lot of fun testing and trying to contribute to development but is not yet a real alternative to an end user, except maybe on winuae. if you seriously want to give it a shot, i can guide you through and likely answer many questions. setting up a system is not complicated at all. its just downloading a nightly (or a distro) to a hd you should be able to boot from it as it is, whatever hardware you got. no messing with appropriate cpu libs, aros setpatch will take care of it for you.

you may also head to aros-exec.org for further assistance.

Warzon, I might have to take you up on your offer at some point.  The prospect of running AROS on native hardware may be to enticing to pass up.  Considering we will most likely never see an AmigaOS 68k update ever again and I'm currently trying to determine the best native system to run AROS x86, it would be nice to move all my Amiga-like experiences in the same direction.