My dream would be to see a new, open source, operating system for the classic 68k Amiga, which would be backward compatible with at least AmigaOS 3.1 applications, but which goes beyond 3.1. This dream OS would have memory protection (and thus demand an MMU). It should also be easy to port this OS to other systems such as x86 or ppc. With a 68k emulation layer, it would then be possible to run Amiga 68k applications on intel in the same way as you can run ppc applications on an intel Mac.
Look at the Atari ST: First, they had TOS which was really bad. It did not even have true multitasking. Then, someone released a free TOS compatible OS kernel (called MiNT) with true multitasking. Atari later made MultiTOS, which was based on MiNT and had both multitasking and memory protection. I don't know if memory protection was already built into MiNT or if Atari added it to MultiTOS. MultiTOS was used for the Falcon computer. Today, the Atari community has FreeMiNT, the natural successor to MultiTOS, and XaAES as its graphical user interface. Both FreeMiNT and XaAES are open source.
As far as I know, not even OS4 has memory protection today. FreeMiNT has! It seems like the open source Atari ST community is larger than the Amiga community and they have better software. Isn't that strange, given how many Amigas that were sold and given the number of users we are today?
I wonder if FreeMiNT, being a 68k operating system, could be ported to the Amiga? Not that it would make me happy, I want to run Amiga applications, but it seems like FreeMiNT is actually just a Unix kernel. TOS compatibility must be added on somehow to FreeMiNT. In that case, would it be possible to add an AmigaOS layer to FreeMiNT?
Another, even better solution, might be to add AmigaOS compatibility to NetBSD?
