First Aros 68k Kickstart boot screen!

[commodorejohn]

AROS still hasn't been polished enough to br released as a 1.0 package. If ported to a 68K its likely to be slower and buggier than what you currently use.

The other points people have made being well covered, I'd just like to know why you would wait until a 1.0 release (typically a major milestone in open-source projects, and long past the point of basic usability) before providing support for the nominal target platform?

And slower, maybe, but buggier? If anything, the Amiga is likely to be less buggy, as there's a more intuitive architecture (both CPU and hardware) and less extreme variations in setup than on an x86 or even PPC machine.

You think gcc cannot compile efficient m68k binaries?

GCC can't compile efficient anything binaries; what it can do is compile consistently usable binaries on all platforms

Anyway, spiffariffic! I'm not an AROS partisan, but anything that gets 68k Amigas further away from the giant rights tangle-up is okay by me Could use a different splash screen, though; I never did care much for the KS2-3 one anyway.

[commodorejohn]

No more silly boing balls please - I very much perfer the one and only true Amiga logo - the checkmark - which btw is free for anyone to use, since none of the Amiga copyright/IP holders cared about it.

I'm with this. I like the checkmark logo, but something a little more elegant than the KS2-3 version would be good; it looks a bit too much like a mid-90s "I'm just learning Turbo Pascal!" shareware thing. Maybe something sort of like the old Windows 95 BOOT.SYS with some color-cycling? (Not with the clouds, obviously, but a largish checkmark against a simple abstract backdrop?)

'Course, if we do want a sexy animal, I'd be happy to assist

(P.S. yeah, I know that's still the old Kickstart doing the splash-screen gruntwork; I'm just tossing out ideas for when it does get to the point that a replacement is in order. Heck, if someone would point me to some documentation on how that section works, I might take a stab at a new screen myself.)

[commodorejohn]

Oh definitely vector/procedural type graphics; no question there. Would this be okay to make Amiga-specific, or would they be looking for something cross-platform? (i.e., is it safe to go stuffing registers, or should it rely on graphics.library?) What is the code structure like? Is it a function that gets called periodically, or what?

[commodorejohn]

Hmm. Well, I'm just going to play around with designs and graphics.library coding; if you ever find the information on integrating it into Kickstart, drop me a line

[commodorejohn]

Well, if it's going to be compatible with normal 68k Amiga software, it's got to at least contain the reimplemented Kickstart libraries. Like the old Macs with the Toolbox ROM, that's a significant portion of the OS (kernel and a number of driver, graphics, and windowing libraries.) I don't know enough about AROS or about the plans for this to say what portion of AROS that is, though.

[commodorejohn]

Plus if you have fast ram, most people want the ROM there anyway for faster access.

True enough, and those of us who want to boot floppy-based games can always use a ROM switcher.

Why don't they just distribute with  a real license (GNU / General Public License)?

Maybe they don't want to get involved with GNU organizational politics?

[commodorejohn]

GPL is like a parasite. It infiltrates every part of a system while keeping it alive. It seems to work for some software, but only where there is no possible business model & the programmers are prepared to do the work for free.

Hi, Steve Ballmer. Didn't know you posted here. Red Hat and SUSE might want to have some words with you about this statement, though.