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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: vic20owner on October 19, 2005, 02:47:05 PM
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I've always been somewhat unimpressed by emulators... mainly because I have to run them on top of windows. I have always dreamed of and often considered writing myself, an emulator which rides on top of a very small OS and takes control of the system making the emulation look and feel as if it really IS th os.
To my delight it looks like cloanto has actually done this with AmigaForever booting on top of a tiny knoppix.
Does the emulator feel like the *only* operating on the system, or does it behave like an emulator running on linux? What I mean by this is, does it take full control or can you switch back to knoppix or view the emulator option menus, etc.
I'd actually prefer it take full control.
vic20owner
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Amithlon done that years ago.
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But that product is dead for legal reasons correct? Also, I tried amithlon and AmigaOSXL and they were fairly unstable at the time.
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Does the emulator feel like the *only* operating on the system, or does it behave like an emulator running on linux? What I mean by this is, does it take full control or can you switch back to knoppix or view the emulator option menus, etc.
You almost only see the progress display, so it looks as if AmigaOS is loaded at once. There are only a few seconds before the X server is started where you see some text output from Linux.
However, the emulator is read-only. Unless you are familiar with Knoppix and Linux you have to work with the setup as it is on the CD. You can browse the web with AWeb and paint some pictures with PPaint, but you cannot save anything. And you cannot change the UAE config. There is very few memory configured for AmigaOS.
Bye,
Thomas
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@ vic20owner,
Too bad the relationship between QNX and Amiga Inc. went bad. I think they were headed in the direction you speak about with their emulator on top of QNX. I don't own Amithlon or AmigaXL, so I can't say how well they work, but I was impressed with the QNX demo that came compressed on a single floppy disk with the whole OS and a browser included. If QNX had continued perfecting their implementation of running Amiga OS on top of their tiny kernal OS, I think it might be something I would prefer so I could have at least one PC that did not have to run Windows on it. It would be perfect for the A1000 that I want to convert to a stealth modern computer running just Amiga OS to fool most people into thinking that it came that way back in 1985. :-D
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If you're prepared to spend a little time customising a Linux environment, I believe you could get close enough to the appearance of a real Amiga.
My Amiga Forever 2005 arrived yesterday (thanks AmigaKit!) and I've not had any luck with the self-booting environment on my Athlon64-based machine... It hangs on detecting SCSI devices, and if I boot Knoppix with the "noscsi" option, the emulated Amiga environment loads, Workbench appears, then the entire machine appears to freeze - no keyboard or mouse movement...
I'll try it on my other PC later. Anyway, the self-boot option isn't 100% critical for me - I usually run WinUAE anyway.
- Ali
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Update: tried this on my other PC, it also hangs once started (but does get past the SCSI checking part).
I've found the culprit though... I share the same keyboard, mouse and monitor via a Belkin USB KVM and it's this that is not being detected by Knoppix. Odd really, since it works fine under Ubuntu and Fedora Core...
- Ali