First Aros 68k Kickstart boot screen!

[Piru]

Could use a different splash screen, though; I never did care much for the KS2-3 one anyway.

Well, don't worry that isn't AROS spash screen, but KS 3.0.

As you might remember this current FrankenROM is actually KS 3.0 with some modules replaced with AROS ones ("This is just the AROS Exec, with everything else from AmigaOS KickStart 3.0."). "strap" module (which produces the "please insert disk in the drive" animation) is obviously still KS 3.0 one. Once strap will be replaced the KS 3.0 spash animation will be gone.

This is the very first step on a long road. It gets far more interesting once you start replacing more KS ROM parts. It gets a bit messy once you run into the gazillion compatibility issues in AROS replacement modules. However, now that you can easily switch between the original modules and the AROS ones it will be trivial to use bisect method to track bugs.

[Piru]

The topic is a bit misleading. The kickstart boot screen is produced by Commodore graphics.library, utility.library, timer.device, ciaa and ciab resources, trackdisk.device, carddisk.device, card.resource and various other components which really are not AROS yet.

I think it's time to get excited once AROS does all of that.

[Piru]

Any idea how long it took MorphOS to get from such level to the level where it completely overtook Commodore's OS ?

Well personally I think we overtook Commodore's AmigaOS quite early on, even though we still depended on some rarely used KS ROM parts for quite some time.

I was there doing the actual work but I've long forgotten when it was the point we could drop the KS ROM altogether. It probably was around MorphOS 0.8 or 0.9 (late 2001, early 2002) or so. So it took several years.

However, AROS case is slightly different: they already have most of the modules and they just need to bugfix and adjust them. It could be just couple of months if everthing plays out well. However, if there are major gaps to fill it can take well over a year in my estimation. Also, it depends much on how buggy version you'll consider acceptable. If you don't mind things being glitchy and some modules missing altogether then it should be possible in couple of months.

[Piru]

Though I question the need to have the disk animation and Amiga checkmark exactly as they were, as it seems those images could suffer from copyright issues.

Again, the reason you see it because this is not AROS. It's original Commodore KS ROM.

The only part AROS is the exec. That's a tiny fraction of the KS ROM.

Are there plans to have some new imagery to replace them once things progress and there is less and less and then none of Amiga Inc's code in there?

They're not images as such, but rather instructions on how to draw the vector gfx involved. Anything else would have taken way too much ROM storage.

It will get replaced as soon as the strap module is replaced.

[Piru]

(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.)

Well, you have a very tight space constraint. It can be asked if AROS KS ROM even fits 512KB as it is now. Images are definitely out, so anything you do must be mathematically generated.

I don't think that AROS even implements the "please insert disk" animation of any sort as of now. So you have free hands on this one. As long as your effects fits into say 7KB it should be fine. Some free hints: You really want to look into vector graphics and perhaps procedural generation.

[Piru]

I suspect there is none, so maybe you could take a stab at generating some
I'd be interested just to see how it works. You would have to disassemble sections of KS and comment the code, for starters. Would be interesting if you could re-factor it into a callable subroutine that could be run anytime you wanted to see the 'hand'.

Well I've actually done it once. I even wrote my own gfx replacement using the routines. Unfortunately I have no idea where I might have the source code...

[Piru]

@piru off topic, but what was the development platform for MOS back in the old days (2000ish)?

A4000 with CyberStorm PPC and A1200 with Blizzard PPC running MorphOS. Very early on the userland was mostly AmigaOS with 68k apps. Also, not all kickstart modules were PPC native replacements yet, so some 68k modules from the kickstart ROM were used.

[Piru]

Using gcc on AmigaOS?

IIRC we had a cross compiler for 68k that produced binaries ppc-morphos target. But very early on we had everything running natively under MorphOS (native ixemul, native GG). Some very early things used SAS/C though.

Or did you guys use any Mac/PC machines for large builds?

We didn't. Or if we did I didn't pay much attention at that time

[Piru]

"As for the licence, the modified MPL was chosen so that comercial projects like MOS could use the source code without having to publish their private code. Which is a good thing as it allowed the MOS guys to use and fix te AROS code without giving away their, trade secrets."

Yeah, that sounds very open source to me.

There are different grades of open source. GPL may be suitable for some projects while it isn't for some others. MorphOS team was happy to collaborate with AROS team on several components, donating the changes back to AROS tree, as specified by the license.