Integrated Emulation

[XDelusion]

So what became of the UAE integration bounty that was due last month?

[Crumb]

Nothing

[Piru]

disappointment

[mongo]

Is anyone surprised?

[XDelusion]

Grrrrrr!

Well AROS almost had a place on my HD.

[Crumb]

I have created a thread to see what coders and users would think about this:

http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=2931&forum=7&post_id=23643#forumpost23643

I think that an m68k emulator would make AROS-PPC much more popular between Amiga users and it would make Sam440 much more interesting for customers as a wide range of sotware would work: full MUI compatibility thanks to MUI3.8, web browsers, paint programs like Art Effect or PPaint, 3D apps like lightwave or Real3D, ... the list would be very long.

It would attract developers too as they could use it for everyday computing, just like AmigaOS4 or MorphOS.

[weirdami]

If R stand for replacement, then doesn't OS4.1 (or even M*rphos  :roll: ) accomplish what AROS hasn't in it's currently 300 year old effort? Or, is AROS supposed to be like Linux in that it's a kind of GNU type alternative to a commercial thing?

[Crumb]

@weirdami

AROS is an open source reimplementation of AmigaOS. Its license is much more permisive than GPL and allows projects like OS4 or MOS to integrate AROS code inside without worrying about legal problems. Both AmigaOS and MorphOS already use AROS code. E.g. colorwheel.gadget was taken from AROS.

AROS can run natively just like AmigaOS/MorphOS or in a "hosted" way. The hosted way allows you to run AROS on top of Unix, in a similar way as MacOSX and its classic compatibility. It's better than emulation because it acts as a compatibility layer: when AROS runs hosted programs run natively too, there's no emulation.

AROS runs natively on x86-64bit, x86, PPC and older 680x0 alpha versions on Amiga Classic and Palm Pilot (but don't expect much from the old alpha 680x0 versions as AROS was far too primitive). It also runs hosted on Linux, *BSD and others. E.g. it can run on a Mac PPC running Linux, a PSX3 running Linux, a Pegasos2/A1 running Linux... and of course, any machine running Linux.

There are coders working on running AROS natively on Efika and hosted on MacOSX and Windows.

There's also an EUAE port for AROS and it runs very fast on x86. Unfortunately EUAE doesn't include a JIT for PPC so on PPC machines it's too slow.

The most popular solution in the next generation AmigaOSes (AmigaOS4 and MorphOS) has been developing an integrated emulator that allows the user to use transparently devices, handlers, filesystems, datatypes, libraries and binaries from AmigaOS3.x. That has allowed users of these next gen computers use regularly their new machines and take adavantage of the speed. Despiting the fact that the 680x0 binary runs emulated, the rest of the system and libraries is native PPC so when the 680x0 binary calls any function from a library (e.g. graphics.library WritePixelArray() function) it calls the native PPC functions so speed is very fast. This is noticeable on MUI programs.

I think that Sam440 will be more successful with a 680x0 emulator. This will also make easier running AmigaOS4 and MorphOS binaries as public structures will have to be 2-byte aligned like on OS4/MOS/OS3.

If you are interested or know any coder capable of performing the task don't hesitate to post in this thread or AROS-Exec to see if it would be viable to create a bounty.

[Fats]

Crumb wrote:

AROS is an open source reimplementation of AmigaOS. Its license is much more permisive than GPL and allows projects like OS4 or MOS to integrate AROS code inside without worrying about legal problems. Both AmigaOS and MorphOS already use AROS code. E.g. colorwheel.gadget was taken from AROS.

The AROS license is not a BSD type license; it's actually based on the Mozilla Public License. You need to give source code back when you use AROS code.

greets,
Staf.

[Crumb]

@Fats

I know it. But the big difference with GPL is that if you use a GPL library you have to convert your binary into GPL but if you use an APL (AROS) library you just have to give back the sources of the library if you have performed modifications to it.

I guess you'll spot the difference. GPL is a viral license. LGPL is OK for shared libraries. AROS Public License is OK for shared libraries.