Which OS Would Be The Best Amiga Way Forward...

[HenryCase]

Would there be a possibility of a virtual machine like Virtualbox running in AROS?  Might solve some of the issues of software.  A Crossover type system might be nice but it would be easier to just port open office than get something like that running.....

In a way this already exists. You can run both DOSBox and Bochs in AROS. This allows you to use MS-DOS, Windows and Linux software within AROS. Does that suffice?

http://www.dosbox.com/
http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

[HenryCase]

There's also the aresone to look into, if thats still around. Im not sure where and how that and the imica compares but I do know both projects donate back into aros.

iMica covers the low end, Ares One covers the high end, both of the people behind these projects (Steve and Pascal) contribute to AROS in various ways, including donations to AROS bounties.

[HenryCase]

Anyone claiming AROS will run on "any old PC you throw together" is completely insane.

Who claimed that? I haven't seen such a comment here, no one in the know about AROS would make such a comment. AROS is just like any other OS; you pick the hardware it works with. Looks to me like you're just trying to stir up an argument.

[HenryCase]

And so are you.

Trance and Petunia are just JIT translators. Both MorphOS and OS4 can run 68k apps just fine without Petunia or Trance respectively.

How? I understand the transparent API calls, but how do you run 68k apps without emulating a 68k CPU? Are you suggesting PPC CPUs can understand 68k opcodes without translation?

I haven't seen much progress from this project lately. The project has seen several refactoring/rewrite cycles already and so far hasn't actually run much 68k apps. Latest download release is from 1 year ago. I wouldn't go as far as to predict that the project is in trouble, but it certainly doesn't seem to be progressing well.

Last post from the Emumiga blog was on 15th May, i.e. 6 days ago.
http://emumiga.com/
Who cares if there have been some challenges along the way, as long as it's still being worked on then it will get there, there's no technical reason I know of that means it won't work.

[HenryCase]

Both have integrated interpretive 68k emulation.

So in other words, MorphOS and OS4 are just as dependant on emulation as AROS. The method of integration might be different, but the use of emulation is still there. Do wish you wouldn't try misleading people on this, Trance and Petunia might be just the names for the JIT interpreters but considering the context Forcie was clearly trying to get across that MorphOS and OS4 use emulation too, which is clearly true by your own admission.

That remains to be seen. There sure are challenges getting the described method to work correctly.

There are challenges in any development, especially when implementing something fairly new. Let's remind ourselves of what Emumiga sets out to accomplish:

Emumiga is a Motorola MC68000 emulator and a system interface proxy for AROS. Our goal is to run AmigaOS 3.x applications directly in AROS without emulating the Amiga chipset and without any 68000 Kickstart ROM.

http://emumiga.com/about/

Sounds similar to the transparent API calls that are used in OS4 and MorphOS to me. Are you saying that something that already exists on OS4 and MorphOS is impossible to implement in AROS, and if you are saying this why do you believe it?

[HenryCase]

But EmuAmiga has to deal with the endianess issue. Structures on the host (on x86 & co, anyway) are littleendian while the emulation side deals with bigendian structures.

Since all the amiga applications peek/poke in system structures, this adds quite some challenge compared to MorphOS/OS. EmuAmiga tries to resolve this in its way, but it's certainly not trivial at all, and it has to be seen if it can even work properly for real world applications (but just read what piru pasted from the author himself, it describes it much better).

What the author will be looking for is the most elegant way to solve the endianness issue. 68k apps already run on x86 in emulation, the only question is how little emulation is required. Even if the endianness issue is not solved then the author can at least achieve feature parity with MorphOS and OS4 on any big endian arch that AROS supports (PPC, ARM in big endian mode).

At this stage with Emumiga, we already have a coded proof of concept (Amiga clock). The developer is currently refining his development environment and coding approach (chose to switch to C++ for example). After the development environment is stable I imagine we'll see more work being done on researching the best emulation approach for Emumiga to take. Your questions will be answered then.

[HenryCase]

Nope. See my previous post.

Eh? If these issues are so insurmountable how does MorphOS get around them? Anything that MorphOS can do on big endian machines, AROS will be able to do on big endian machines, end of. The question is, how much can the isolated emulation be stripped away on little endian machines. Those questions are as yet unanswered, but even if some emulation overhead can be removed then the effort will still be worth it.

Amiga clock is trivial and isolated application. The only interface it has is a window. Real life applications are much more complex and interact with the host environment in various complex ways.

Of course it's trivial, it's just a simple program. I respect that more complex programs will present new challenges, but let's see what can be done. If new features are discovered they can always be copied by other Amiga platforms if the core developers choose to do so.

[HenryCase]

Last I heard AROS is not interested in full binary compatibility on big endian systems other than 68k. Even if such compatibility would be added you'd still need to add the CPU emulation and the required infrastructure.

AROS developers are free to work on whatever they want, provided they don't interfere with the goals of the project (at which point a fork is necessary). Seeing as the goals of AROS do not rule out developments like Emumiga then they are free to continue. I'm surprised I have to explain this to someone of your supposed intelligence.