In Capt. Dummy speak, please.

[bloodline]

The UAE approach will run AROS* in UAE, so no Amiga ROMS's will be needed.

The 68k programs will run on the workbench, and have access to all the same drives as the x86 programs. as a user you will not really know that UAE is running.

This approach as the advantage that Hardware banging apps and games will work fine (they will get thir own intuition screen), and even Multitask with the x86 programs!
Also if a 68k programs crashes it wount take down the whole OS.
This method is also platform independant.

The BIG disadvantage, is that 68k libraries cannot be used by 68k programs and vice versa.


*This will be a standard 68k build of AROS, except that most operating system calls will passed directly to the Host (in tis case x86) version of AROS.


-Edit- THere will be an announcment about PNG icons in due course :-D

[bloodline]

I have been trying to think of a good way of visualising this...

The way you can think about it is this is like this:

You can imagine that AROS running on the PC is one computer, and AROS running in UAE is another computer. They run separatly.

Now imagine that these two computers are networked using a magic network cable, or you can even think of the UAE as an "Amiga-on-a-PCI-card".

The "UAE Computer" has full access to the devices on the AROS-PC and gets it's input/output directly from the AROS-PC, this is easy to do since they are both running the same operating system.

So when your normal 68k Amiga program opens a window on workbench, it calls the intuition.library from AROS running in UAE... but that intuition.library will itself call the intuition.library running on the AROS-PC... so the window will open on the AROS-PC's workbench.

A normal AROS program will do this:
Program--->Intuition.library--->Display on your PC monitor

An Amiga 68k program will do this:
68kProgram--->68kIntuition.library--->x86Intuition.library--->Display on your PC monitor

the 68k version of the intuition.library will need to be responsible for handling and byte order issues.

Since UAE emulates a full Amiga, you can run hardware hitting apps with out any problems (I remember most audio apps would hit Paula directly rather than use the audio.device), also you can run those gaems that take over the computer, like most A500 games did. These games can run in a window on the workbench or on their own intuition screen (depending upon user preference).

An obviously, if the UAE-Computer crashes, it can be rebooted without affecting the AROS-PC :-)

[bloodline]

DFergATL wrote:
Don't know if you are following this thread anymore but I did have an other question.  We all know that the Amiga 68k did not have memory protection.  My question is this.  In the way that AROS is going to handle running Amiga software via UAE does each programing running in UAE get its own memory space or do they share?  Basicly I am curious to find out, If I am running 2 Amiga programs under UAE on AROS and one crases does it take the other Amiga program down with it?

Yup, the only pretection is between the x86 and 68k side. If one 68k goes down, they all go down :-D But the x86 programs will be running along happily, none the wiser to the 68k crash :-)

-Edit- though, it would be possible if the user so desired, to run each 68k task in it's own instance of UAE thus protecting the 68k programs from each other, though this would be quite memory hungry.