Which OS Would Be The Best Amiga Way Forward...

[bloodline]

Hmm... not sure why you think that no-one still uses all these old apps anymore, I do, every day...

I very rarely play games on the Amiga and use it on daily basis for everything I need computing wise gfx, DTP, audio etc...

So I'm not sure if what your saying is that AROS can't handle such basic things as all these old apps or are simply saying that they would be better re-written or re-compiled to run under AROS. In which case I'm back to doubting if AROS in it's 68K form would indeed be the best way forward...:confused:

Issues are getting confussed here.

AROS 68k will run your 68K apps just fine. The main thread now is that Emumiga will only ever run a subset of 68k apps within the AROS x86 environment... But that isn't really a problem as we already have a transparent UAE for running 68k Apps in AROS on other CPUs.

Emumiga is an experiment, an interesting idea that keeps people like me, who are fascinated by weird experimental concepts, interested in the platform.

[Forcie]

So I'm not sure if what your saying is that AROS can't handle such basic things as all these old apps or are simply saying that they would be better re-written or re-compiled to run under AROS. In which case I'm back to doubting if AROS in it's 68K form would indeed be the best way forward...:confused:

Read up on this some more. UAE and Emumiga are both solutions for running 68k software on a foreign CPU. Like AROS running on x86 PC:s.

AROS-68k, on the other hand, runs 68k software natively, since it runs the software on the 68k CPU. Just in the same way all other Amiga software is run in for example OS3.1.

Little things that seem obvious to some can get lost in the discussions.

[Franko]

@ Bloodline

Thanks for clearing that up, that other post left me wondering (again) if AROS 68k would not be able to run a lot of stuff and then what would be the point of it, I'll take your word for it though over anyone else's...cheers...

[Franko]

Read up on this some more. UAE and Emumiga are both solutions for running 68k software on a foreign CPU. Like AROS running on x86 PC:s.

AROS-68k, on the other hand, runs 68k software natively, since it runs the software on the 68k CPU. Just in the same way all other Amiga software is run in for example OS3.1.

Little things that seem obvious to some can get lost in the discussions.

Cheers Forcie, Bloodline has already answered that question for me...

It would be a wee bit more helpful though to us AROS dummies if folk when talking about the technical side would bear in mind that not all of us who are interested in AROS are technical experts on this subject...

[vidarh]

Hmm... not sure why you think that no-one still uses all these old apps anymore, I do, every day...

Bloodline has already addressed UAE + AROS m68k being able to run "everything". But let me just address the point above:

No, I don't think no-one uses *most* of these apps anymore. Sure, there are plenty that *are* being used, and those would be great to support.

But I'm willing to bet that even you are not using 30000 m68k applications on a regular basis.

If nothing else because a huge amount of them are redundant (multiple versions, multiple tools that does the exact same thing) or have been obsoleted by newer m68k apps, or not even apps, or have hardly been downloaded.

E.g. in the util/app category, to pick one at random, there are archives that have only been downloaded 2-3 times since they were uploaded in '95/'96. Given that a lot of the time people will download files just to check things out, and the number of users that have fallen off since the 90's, we can safely assume that a fairly substantial number of applications with downloads even in the hundreds are not being used by *anyone* anymore.

On top of that, in that category alone, a bunch of the archives are catalog files, and there are umpteen different generic app icons that does almost exactly the same, and a bunch of different versions of the same apps.

This is pretty much par for Aminet. In other categories you'll also find tons of icons, graphics, documents etc. mixed in with the applications.

So for starters the actual number of unique applications is far lower than 30k, and of those the actual number of applications with unique functionality is far lower than that again, and only a subset of  those are still being used by anyone simply because there are so many that overlaps and so few users left.

Even then, there's no point in Emumiga handling them if none of the people using those applications have any interest at all in running Amiga on a non-m68k platform, as on m68k they'd be able to run them straight on AROS m68k or AmigaOS..

That's why I think that the actual number of applications there'd be any point at all for Emumiga to support (as opposed to UAE which has as a goal to be a faithful emulation, or AROS m68k, which should work as documented, both which should aim to be able to run far more) is somewhere well below 5000.

[Franko]

@ Vidarth

I'm not disagreeing with you over just how many "real" apps there are on AmiNet, as to be honest it's been many years since I downloaded anything from there...

Everything I run on a daily basis on my Amiga's are years old and do the jobs required of them and if I can't find something to do a job I simply write my own in 68K Assembly...

My main interest in AROS is that it will finally put an end to all the BS over the "legality" of obtaining Kickstart images. I don't have need to be able to run modern day apps that folk use on PC's or Mac's or have versions of them ported to the Amiga, for me everything that I need for computing has already been written for the Amiga a long time ago... :

It's like the NatAmi, I want to buy one but I'm not looking for it to be some new miracle all singing all dancing machine that will allow me to run the type of things folk use on PC's and Mac's. I see the NatAmi as a way of having new hardware that does all that the Amiga has always done but instead of relying on eBay and the likes to find old hardware at crazy prices, I would be able to purchase a brand new NatAmi instead...

[Templario]

Amiga OS4 for PPC systems and AROS for x86.

[bloodline]

@ Bloodline

Thanks for clearing that up, that other post left me wondering (again) if AROS 68k would not be able to run a lot of stuff and then what would be the point of it, I'll take your word for it though over anyone else's...cheers...

Please don't just take my word for it! Try it out Seeing my old 68k apps (some written nearly 20 years ago) running in AROS on my A1200 is a very oddly emotional expeience

Probably because I've dreamed of a 68k version of AROS ever since I first ran it on a Pentium II back at university, 12 years ago!

[bloodline]

There are probably 5 or 6 old 68k apps that I would like to run in AROS x86... Given that is a very small set, I might be possible to get Emumiga to a level where they could run via that... If not then, Transparent UAE it is

[Rodomoc]

Bloodline...How is your Aros68K-A1200 experience? Looks like it is OK. In my own Aros68K-UAE poking around, it seems to me that this is the way to go as opposed to a massively patched 3.x original. Would you tend to agree? Question...Aros kickstart' files are softloaded at boot somehow?
 
I am debating on installing this in my A3000. I am assuming that all of the expansion hardware I have wouldn't be an issue and that I would still be able to run RTG video via cybergraphx4. The problem I have in the A3000 is memory. only a 2/16MB config. Maybe it is time to jump onboard the 256MB ZorRam thing. Which would mean I have issues with # of cards installed. I think dumping the X-Surf/Subway USB combo in favor of Deneb/USB/USB Network would do the trick. I need to learn more about this USB network thingy I see people using...
 
So Aros68K very interesting and certainly could solve once and for all the 68K OS availability and politics and do so with improved functionality.
 
Cheers.

[Franko]

Please don't just take my word for it! Try it out Seeing my old 68k apps (some written nearly 20 years ago) running in AROS on my A1200 is a very oddly emotional expeience

Probably because I've dreamed of a 68k version of AROS ever since I first ran it on a Pentium II back at university, 12 years ago!

Erm... how do I do that... I thought AROS 68k wasn't ready yet and only the developers had it... :confused:

[wawrzon]

@rodomoc, franko:
i have posted a short instruction how to boot aros on real amiga numerous times also in this thread. have patience read through or search for it. aros68k is currently booting again.
a3000/030 with 16mb ram should be enough to get it running, will be quite slow though. no rtg support as yet, and i dont have an ocs/ecs machine to test.

[Forcie]

Erm... how do I do that... I thought AROS 68k wasn't ready yet and only the developers had it... :confused:

AROS gets compiled during nights and new versions are released to the public for every supported platform every day on www.aros.org. Since 68k is a supported platform, this means that there is a new version for that every day, too.

Follow Wawas instructions if you want to try it on real hardware, although the planar gfx support is not very good yet, so it wont be as fun as emulating with the uaegfx chunky modes for now.

[itix]

As for handling the hooks, again, why do you think this is even a problem? It is no different from handling any other part of the system - you need to trap any attempted read/writes from/to the "host" and translate appropriately. Tedious, sure, but not much more.

If you think it can be done in filesystem context, ok. I was thinking it would be too slow and thought about implementing ExAll() emulation in Emumiga. My mistake.

But more importantly, since the number of possible applications is small and finite, if there are any particularly troublesome applications you can add workarounds for that specific application.

This is a shortcut for rewriting a subset of applications - it doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to work for the m68k applications a reasonable number of people still care about and where it's not easier to port an existing alternative application instead. For the rest there's UAE.

There arent that many applications indeed. But dont assume people wont try all kind of exotic applications.

I think a lot of those of you that think this is so hard are massively overestimating the scope of this.

I think you just dont know Amiga software very well. If AmigaOS design was kept easy and simple like it was in Kickstart 1.3 it could even work. In release 2.0 Commodore developers really screwed it up.

We don't need Emumiga to be able to run every legal m68k Amiga app - the only reason to do that would be just to say you can -, just ones already in existence. We don't need Emumiga to even be able to run all of the ones in existence, only the ones that people want to be able to run regularly on AROS with tight integration.

So Emumiga will be tailored for each application? My wish list would be very short: Blacks Editor because it is still the best text editor for Amiga. AmiNetRadio and dynAMIte could be nice to have, too. I can not remember any other useful 68k applications/games anymore.

There's no doubt Emumiga will be a lot of work, but even if you have to add manual workarounds for a lot of the applications in the "interesting" set, it'd still be feasible.

When working on OS4Emu I added manual workaround for every known hook in MUI (this because ABI is different in MorphOS). If you love that kind of stuff, nice. I can compile list of MUI hooks if it is any help with Emumiga development.

It's fairly simple to automatically create thunks to handle this. I've written enough compilers with custom object systems to have done far nastier things than that.

Hmm? Do you realize how often OO application are going to have context switch between 68k and AROS native code? You can not even figure out when 68k code is calling native AROS code because it is nothing but jsr() to a pointer. Nothing is going to tell you 68k code is trying to call AROS BOOPSI dispatcher code. This is not only Zune/MUI related issue but concerns all BOOPSI driven applications and classes.

This problem is related to 68k hook implementation. BOOPSI dispatcher is an extension of struct Hook -- if there is any chance that 68k code could call your BOOPSI dispatcher or hook function you are in trouble.

Just ask how many problems the OS4 dev team had with their MMU driven context switch code. It never worked properly and they went to trap based implementation. Since AROS can not use traps I dont see how this could be handled at all.

But back to data endianess problem. How do you can really know what kind of data structure there is behind Object pointer? Depending on object type its data structure extension is different. Are you going to detect data structure format based on its pointer + allocated space for object?

(Obviously naive endianess swap in 68k emulation code can not work because data could be written to the disk for example.)

Since the m68k side is emulated, you can easily lazily mutate data first when it's actually needed on the m68k side. Will it be slower than "just" emulating everything in UAE? Maybe, but frankly it doesn't matter with the performance of modern x86 hardware.

Anything that executes 68k code faster than real 060 is already enough and 020 level of performance is still acceptable. It could be an issue in the operating system code i.e. when executing layer hooks where multitasking is suspended.

[haywirepc]

Bloodline, I first booted aros from a floppy ages ago. I was so excited at the time to see it run on x86/vga. (even if it did almost nothing then) Aros for 68k is odd to me, but I suppose its like coming home in a sense. I think I'd be very excited to see aros running on my 1200.
 
Steven

[bloodline]

Bloodline...How is your Aros68K-A1200 experience? Looks like it is OK. In my own Aros68K-UAE poking around, it seems to me that this is the way to go as opposed to a massively patched 3.x original. Would you tend to agree? Question...Aros kickstart' files are softloaded at boot somehow?
 

:lol: AROS 68k on an A1200 is currently slow, painful and bloody good fun

There is a nightly build ADF on the AROS website, write it to a real Amiga disk... Boot your Amiga with the disk, it will softkick the AROS ROM... The fun is then throwing all your Amiga software at it and seeing what crashes and what produces weird results

I am debating on installing this in my A3000. I am assuming that all of the expansion hardware I have wouldn't be an issue and that I would still be able to run RTG video via cybergraphx4. The problem I have in the A3000 is memory. only a 2/16MB config. Maybe it is time to jump onboard the 256MB ZorRam thing. Which would mean I have issues with # of cards installed. I think dumping the X-Surf/Subway USB combo in favor of Deneb/USB/USB Network would do the trick. I need to learn more about this USB network thingy I see people using...
 
So Aros68K very interesting and certainly could solve once and for all the 68K OS availability and politics and do so with improved functionality.
 
Cheers.

Try the nightly build, have a play, you're not going to break anything and te devs welcome all feedback!