Classic AmigaOS On Modern Hardware - A Critical Analysis

[TeamBlackFox]

OS4 is just far better on the NG platforms, even my lowly 440ep runs OS4 just stunning where as my old PPC A1200 never ran it acceptably in my own books.

I'll probably go for an '040 or '060 then.

Honestly, my favorite accelerator for the A3000D is the Warp Engine  68040 @ 40MHz.  It is not the fastest accelerator you can get, but it is  rock solid, has an excellent SCSI controller and fits well into the  A3000D with small modifications to provide better airflow through the  hard drive and floppy drive shelf.

I can't recommend 68060 accelerators that I have no experience with in  the A3000D, but other members may give you some good recommendations.   The 68060 is supposed to run cooler and may be a better choice in the  A3000D's small case (small for an Amiga with Zorro slots).

I think your money would be better spent to get an accelerator without  the PPC and use the saved money to buy a good RTG video card, like the  PicassoIV, or Cybervision64.  The A3000D is a very popular Amiga model,  and I hope that you have hours of fun playing around with it.  I suggest  that you NOT try to expand it into something it can't do well.  Stick  with AmigaOS2.1 through AmigaOS3.9 and software for the OCS & ECS  chipsets and you should enjoy it for what it is, and what it was  designed to be.

The only reason I mentioned MorphOS, was because you intended to buy a  PPC accelerator for your A3000D, and MorphOS will run almost all of the  PPC Amiga software much better than any PPC accelerator could ever do  it.  Unless you are really interested in NG Amiga inspired systems and  software, don't bother buying any hardware to run it.  The NG systems  are certainly not for everyone, as they are best suited to only the hard  core users who are dedicated to supporting the future of NG systems.   The Amiga NG platforms are not ready for the general computing public,  and might never be ready for them.  AROS & MorphOS have one  advantage that they can both be "test driven" for free, if you happen to  have any of the supported hardware to run them.  From your signature, I  see that you have a PPC G5 that might be supported some time in the  future by MorphOS, and possibly AROS PPC as well, though I don't know if  anyone is working on AROS PPC any more.

I hope you enjoy your Amiga A3000D.  Did you choose that model because a  version of it at one time in the distant past came from Commodore with  Unix installed on it?    

I had a 3000UX a few years back that was stolen by someone who a family member let into my house. I know who did it, and I'm 99.99% sure he took it to the scrapyard. He still won't admit he stole it. In hindsight though, I never used it, and Amiga UNIX is atrociously broken - so glad to have moved to BSD and IRIX. I'd much rather enjoy AmigaOS on it and use it for certain things ( If you read my signature I have a lot of systems and in my home network they all have a role they're specialized for )

As far as expandability for it goes, I have yet to decide other than a CPU upgrade. I was only looking at PowerPC cards because they seemed interesting but I didn't realize they're that slow ( I'm used to MIPS and SPARC which generally have slow clocks but high performance output )

I'm getting rid of the G5 soon due to its high power consumption, that I never want to touch OS X again, the atrocious prices for upgrades, the lack of overall expandability and the fact I can't find a good video card that won't burn out ( Had an X1900 in it till last night when it bit the dust, now a GeForce 6600 and the return of an unaccelerated X11 ). At this time I have no interest in AmigaOS beyond the legacy releases 3.9 and AROSM68k. AROS is a cool project, but I have no use for it, except I may, and this is a maybe, see if it can be hosted on DragonFly BSD ( Probably not as the Linux kernel is a piece of nonstandard junk and tends to break dependencies for other platforms ).

[TeamBlackFox]

@TeamBlackFox:

You seem to want AmigaOS to be just like UNIX. This would not be an improvement. UNIX is a late 60s/early 70s design filled with a lot of cruft and very user-unfriendly, I don't see what it would offer that AmigaOS does not. I've tried various UNIXes and they have been universally awful.

Not at all.

My favourite UNIX variant is SGI's IRIX which is very Amiga-like on the frontend - same market, different ends of the market though ( SGIs were 10k USD and up )

I just prefer the setup of UNIX and its philosophy ( Everything is a file, device nodes and commandline tools ) But I like AmigaOS for graphical stuff.

Ideally a UNIX variant like IRIX or DragonFly BSD with a Wayland compositor in the vein of Ambient, Zune or Workbench would be very ideal along with graphical tools for those who prefer GUIs ( I'm perfectly fine with console configurations but I know others arent )

Both these variants of UNIX differ from other UNIX in a few key areas:

IRIX is very optimized for graphical usage and therefore supports console and graphics usage equally. DragonFly BSD is still under heavy development and until it reaches the 5 or 6 release mark it will still not be ready for desktop use ( It works great for servers )

Both are designed to fix what others broke and did wrong.

Unfortunately IRIX has been frozen since 2006, but tha

[TeamBlackFox]

Really? Sounds awful.

Not at all! For instance under UNIX we have a concept called mountpoints.

Lets say I have two drives:
Drive A is an SSD that is very fast, but very small
Drive B is a SCSI disk that is slower, but many times as big.

So I want to install all my OS files to Drive A. Well under Windows and AmigaOS, no issue.

Next I make Drive B into two slices- Slice 1 for personal data and Slice 2 for programs. I want them mounted transparently so that programs install automatically under Slice 2 and programs save my data to Slice 1.

Well under FreeBSD for example I'd do this:

I'd set up mountpoints so that da0 ( Drive A's device node/file ) is mounted at / and da1s1 ( Drive B, Slice 1's node/file ) mounts at /home, the userdata directory. Then since most all programs under the BSDs install in /usr/local/bin I'd mount da1s2 at that mountpoint.
 
As a result I have a transparent, unified filesystem that goes where I want it to go. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but as to my understanding AmigaOS doesn't have this concept. Now some may say just change the install target, but what if you've a pesky program that WANTS to be installed to a certain location?

Note: This is merely an example. I'd never mount separate disks like this with consumer drives unless I had a RAID array configured, since I mostly use industrial drives, its not an issue though.

In addition under UNIX interprocess and device communication is handled via pseudofilesystems:

All device nodes/files are under /dev

Process information is under /proc or sometimes /sys

Under some process supervision schemes there is /run which has data used by the process table supervisor.

The main benefits to the UNIX method are that most data is transferred in raw text rather than binary, facilitating tools like tcpdump ( A packet capture program ) to be human readable immediately, which would be impossible if part of the binary stream was corrupted. I'm not saying binary - binary communication is bad, but in a lot of places like logs and raw dumps human readability is very nice.

[TeamBlackFox]

On Amiga operating sytems we have the opposite - anything can be mounted at the top of hte filesystem for easy access via assigns.

rather than burrowing down into a path for everything, any directory can be addressed at the top level of the filesystem by creating an assign.

We also have softlinks (speaking form a MorphOS standpoint) which essentially operate the same as mountpoints, so wrt dos paths anything can be trasparently addressed from anywhere.

Eh I don't consider it burrowing at all. Plus symbolic links are horribly inflexible. I prefer everything to be under a unified filesystem, but I guess I'm the one over here drinking green tea while everyone else is drinking black tea or something like that.

[TeamBlackFox]

I see. I'm not into that setup because anything remotely resembling old DOS-type OSes with drive lettering or otherwise aggravates me. That is why on AmigaOS I only use the GUI and never the console for anything. On UNIX its the exact opposite - I use the console more often and the GUI is just a window manager/basic settings system overlayed, most of my control remains in the terminals.

[TeamBlackFox]

To TeamBlackFox:

Your example is about normal file access. Where's the 'everything is a file' thing in that? If that's what it means, then it's not true. Everything is a file implies EVERYTHING, and that's why it sounds awful.

Well all devices on your busses be they PCI/SCSI/ATAPI or what have you are accessed as files ( Specifically called device nodes ), /proc or /sys uses files like /proc/cpuinfo to communicate info about the hardware, directories are a file with a special bit set on them indicating they're a directory, interprocess communication is handled by socket files, pipe files and other things.

How many more examples do I have to list? The "Everything is a file" is a good thing not a bad. Unless you like accessing devices with raw binary streams and having to rely on the assumption that no part of the data stream is corrupted so your binary parser can parse the data... I don't know what you're getting at here - what the hell makes this a bad thing?

[TeamBlackFox]

I wrote that it sounds bad

It just seems odd to me that you'd make things that essentially aren't files, files. Inter-process communication is one such thing: Why not just send a message? Why have this work through a file system?

Perhaps it's time for me to use google

Sorry I took that the wrong way I suppose (=.=). Message passing is not traditionally the way UNIX does things, both methods have their benefits and drawbacks. This is why DragonFly BSD is a good thing - because they're adding things such as message passing. Its an interesting BSD/AmigaOS hybrid in some manners.