I'm New Here and to Amiga - Please Help...

[motorollin]

Hi Tommy, always good to hear people showing interest in the Amiga platform. AmigaOS is a very flexible operating system and is also very stable, as is MacOS 9. You may find that the Amiga is a bit more active now that MacOS 9 is being abandoned in favour of OSX. I don't know for sure as I don't use OS9.

Sorry to hear about your father, and your financial problems. If you can borrow an Amiga to try out, then great, but in the mean time why not think about using an emulator? This will allow you to try out the operating system first without committing to buying any hardware.

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moto

[motorollin]

FYI - ArosMAX has already been released.

http://www.aros-max.co.uk/

--EDIT
Oh I notice you're on the Aros dev team, so I guess you already know that  :-)

[motorollin]

Oh ok. Think I'll have to get an x86 emulator up and running on my iBook again  :-)

--
moto

[motorollin]

You are right about AmigaOS being less bloated than OSX. It can be as simple or as complex as you want.

As for the variations of the OS, here is a quick rundown:

AmigaOS 3.x
Runs on "classic" Amigas (most likely what you will be interested in).
Runs the majority of Amiga applications and games.
Will only run on older Amiga hardware or an emulator

AmigaOS 4
Can only be run on an AmigaOne board (very expensive). Will run some 3.x applications, but not games.

MorphOS
Similar idea to OS4 - it's designed as an updated Amiga OS. MorphOS only runs on the PegasOS boards, and I don't think it runs classic software unless you use an emulator.

AROS
An Amiga-like operating system that will run on any PC. Will not run any Amiga software unless you use an emulator.

--
moto

[motorollin]

Thanks for clearing that up. Presumably 68k code would need to be recompiled to get it to run on AROS on x86???

--EDIT
Oh yes, just read that part :roll:

--
moto