Video: AROS 68K Booting

[vidarh]

You won't even have to do that since we can hope AROS+WinUAE bundles that will just work out of the box.

Given that Toni Willen is involved, and that he's made it *very* clear on the AROS dev mailing list that his primary motivation is to have something that works perfectly with WinUAE (including emulation of unexpanded smaller classics) this one is virtually certain. Just a matter of time.

[vidarh]

Comparing it to "real AmigaOS" performance at the current stage makes no sense at all.

The funny part is that long term it might be perfectly possibly to make AROS faster than AmigaOS. We can easily build versions with compiler optimizations targeting each individual m68k model, for example. We can draw on years and years of experience with different tradeoffs - such as knowing that on some machines using the CPU will often be far faster than using the blitter.

And as Cosmos has been demonstrating with his patched graphics.library, there's tons of parts of AmigaOS that are not perfectly optimized as is. AROS will let anyone optimize parts of it, starting from a far easier basis (make changes to the C first, fall back on inline asm if/when it makes a difference) and without any copyright issues.

AROS will take a while to reach parity in terms of performance. But long term, it really only depends on to what extent people cares.

[vidarh]

Is there a projected date (or even a guesstimate) for an actual release of AROS 68K,

Depends on what you'd consider an "actual release"

The deadline for the 2nd kickstart bounty that Toni is working on now is March 31st next year. Judging from his progress I'd say he'll easily beat that.

But that will "just" mean having it boot and run Wanderer (Workbench) and a few apps.

Getting it stable and to feature-parity with AmigaOS 3.1 and with roughly the same performance, and ability to fit it in a real Amiga (at least in a 1MB kickstart, or a stripped down kickstart requiring modules on disk) will probably take longer. I'd guesstimate another year to get it usable enough for people outside of AROS devs or UAE users who just want to boot mostly non-OS dependent games to want to use it much.

It could be more, but I don't think it'll be much less. The one thing that could really accelerate things is that once it gets "good enough" for more people to play with there's the chance it could really draw more people into working on AROS in general, but also get more current AROS devs involved in bug fixes/optimizations for the M68k version (I'm itching to get time to play with it in UAE)

don't wish to sound ungrateful or anything but I've begun to wonder recently why we are all still waiting around for things like AROS, the X1000, Natami or MiniMigAGA to actually appear.

Well, AROS is out there and reasonably usable, just not for classic Amigas yet. As I understand it the next version of Icaros (AROS distribution) is due out any day now.

Natami is showing great progress, so while it's still not out at least we know stuff is happening. Their "LX" board was pretty much brought up, and apparently their "MX" board which contains improvements and fixes they wanted to add after experience with the LX board is apparently right around the door (it was hinted very strongly the design is pretty much done)... Of course after the MX board design is done it'll still be at least a few months before machines are ready to buy (assuming they don't find any major flaws in the MX board design).

MinimigAGA aka FPGA Arcade is practically there - the first boards are ready and so far the tests apparently show them to be working fine. The next batch of 40(?) boards will be completed very quickly if the first 10 works fine. This one could be out in a couple of months if all goes well. This one is looking amazing - the FPGA Arcade cards don't just do MinimigAGA cores, but will do Atari ST, C64, Vic20 and a bunch of others too, and it's *tiny*.

X1000.. I guess we'll have to wait and see, seeing how quiet things are there.