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

[wawrzon]

-aros for now.
@bloodline: you can softkick aros on real amiga already now.

see my post (#13) here:
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=57421

TheBilgeRat:
download the current nightly. in the distfiles folder you will find an adf archive of a boot floppy. using f.i diskimage device (http://aminet.net/disk/misc/diskimage.m68k-aos.zip)
you will be able to decompress it to a real floppy. also the best is to prepare aros boot partition on a hard disk (just coppy the content of nightly to it and mark the partition as bootable).

now, boot from the prepared floppy drive, which will extract the aros kickstart to ram and boot from there. you can recognize aros kickstart booting by dirty-ocker-yellow color on screen (lol). if you have a bootable aros harddisk partition attached to the system (preferably via internal ide or accelerator scsi) chances are that your system will boot to wanderer. be sure to have it a highest priority hd.
i have tested and can confirm a4k 030/040/060 as working, except for csppc. also many configs of a1200 work, in particular blizzard 1260. there is problem wit elbox fastata so far i see.

anyways further testers would be very welcome.

(i thought you would know)
sorry for spelling and typos. my bad.

[wawrzon]

@CSixx
sounds really like a valid reason to support os4. any other thoughts?

[wawrzon]

from the ng alternatives mos looks most polished of course.
os4 stands on the second place by the looks of it though it is in obviously many areas technically inferior to aros.
aros is still a wip construct, though there is apparently some exchange with mprphos and from all three (or four if 3.x counted in) it is the single open source solution and therefore it has most chances, not even because it runs on x68 too.

[wawrzon]

MorphOS is way ahead of any and all of the competition in the Amiga field. And MorphOS is the only one that has shown an ability to move Far Forward Fast (relatively speaking)! Not open source, so its development is entirely controlled by the development team. OTOH, open source isn't necessarily the best way forward; it could very well mean very slow and unstructured development in an anarchistic way with no goals. That's not good, if you want "the best way forward".

morphos even being closed source has gathered most talented amiga developers in its ranks, but how long does it last without fresh blood? no non-commercial but still closed source project like morphos can improve its dynamics, in my opinion, it can only sustain that as long as possible. this is why os4 and mos are doomed in a long therm, im afraid. its *not* what i wish, just to be clear! while aros does not get much attention compared to both others, not to speek of attracting "young blood" it gets quite a drive lately.

[wawrzon]

I voted Aros after reading what everyone was saying about it but when I wen to its source forge page, they barely mention using it on classic hardware.  Where can I find info about the AROS ROMs and "Amiga Classic" specific stuff?

ive posted a short instruction how to run an aros68k nightly on amiga earlier this thread. note that things get broken every once in a while which seems currently be the case.

[wawrzon]

i might be wrong but i think it represents the degree of frustration with os4 politics and progress. i expect mos users vote loyal to their os, also obviously no os3.x option is available. i think it explains a lot. for me aros wasnt relevant much before aros68k. today its completely different story.

[wawrzon]

I voted Pancakes.  My opinion is that no new Amiga OS will be the best way forward.  All have their place and followers but none of them will replace modern OSes.
You use a modern OS to do new stuff and use Amiga OS and Alternates to do "alternate" stuff.

right. this sums it up as well for me.
but still if one choose to mess with "amiga" not only for the sake of few old games, aros guarantees to be most fun about it. it is open to everybody. contrary to os4 and mos you are not being supplied (or not) with a product once in a while, you can literally watch it grow or contribute yourself, and be sure this contribution is not going to be sunk into some inaccessible closed source that might even completely disappear some day.

[wawrzon]

Actually that's all this machine has run so far. OS3.9 works great, and from what I've read, is even more supportive of the hardware than OS4.1 will be.

I've already purchased a Radeon card to replace the voodoo and I'll have to get a new sound card for OS4.

if you replace voodoo with radeon you will have to resign on warp3d on os3.9/68k side. there is no hardware accelerated w3d for radeon on 68k nor will there obviously be. the solution will be to leave both cards working in the machine, which i wasnt able to achieve up till now. or wait for some form of aros 68k support for classic pci, which might or might not happen.

[wawrzon]

@aros supporters:
now, that aros unquestionably leads the way (at least on this site) how about to factually support the development where possible? im talking about testing and contributing, whatever you can think of. would be great to have it somewhere along the way to where mos currently is.

[wawrzon]

@rodomoc, franko:
i have posted a short instruction how to boot aros on real amiga numerous times also in this thread. have patience read through or search for it. aros68k is currently booting again.
a3000/030 with 16mb ram should be enough to get it running, will be quite slow though. no rtg support as yet, and i dont have an ocs/ecs machine to test.

[wawrzon]

Bloodline, Thanks for the feedback. I think that I will attempt running Aros 68K from the ADF method you mention on my A3000 in native ECS video to see what happens. The machine does have 040 in it so maybe this will help it run Aros 68K better. I won't worry about any of the expansion hardware I have yet and if it freaks Aros 68K out somehow, I'll unplug the lot of it.

the current stage of aros 68k is trying to support maximum configurations. whoever is familiar with serial debugging could hook up (sub 25->9 pin adapter + null-modem cable + eventually serial->usb adapter between their amiga and a pc. using tera term on pc (adjusting the port and baudrate to 115200) you can catch the boot log and supply it to aros dev list. feedback welcome.

[wawrzon]

I dont have anything running AROS but I was wondering... How is the games compatability on AROS? Do old amiga 68k games run well on that platform? AGA Games? What about WHDLOAD? For most gamers that would be a deal breaker for the OS. I know that Morph and OS4.1 have specific games written for them but no real backwards compatability as I understand it to run old 68k amiga games. Maybe someone could clarify.

for instance i was able to run aros port of xinvaders3d, a game in concept similar to famous battlezone, on an a4k/aga. admittedly it looked like a slideshow. ive made a 68k port of this game some time ago dependant on a limited set of x11 libraries available there, and it worked quite well on chunky, never tried on planar though, dont even think it would work. conclusion is aros is surely bale to give you what os3.x gives since games do not make frequent system calls or maybe better. at this point limited to original amiga hardware ecs/ocs/aga it will rather disappoint.

[wawrzon]

Ok I went to the site and downloaded the following file :-

AROS-20110524-amiga-m68k-system.tar.bz2

Problem number 1:- As seems to be typical these days for things that folk have written or archived using a PC, the filename is TOO LONG for it to be recognised on a REAL Amiga...
...

right, its sometimes difficult to find a right tool on amiga. still i managed to download full svn repositories, so it should be possible to unarc a tar.gz or whatever it is on an amiga. lemme take look.

PS: Who is "Wawa" is he a hobbit that didn't make it into the films... :confused:

i go by nicks like "wawa" or "wawrzon" on a number of amiga sites, just for a clarification. i bet you will recognize me when met another place.

[wawrzon]

@Franko

Very odd, I can't find the boot 68k disk on the AROS website... here is my build:

http://www.cutiemish.com/bootdisk-amiga-m68k.adf

@bloodline, franko:
its contained in the "distfiles" directory of aros68k archive

[wawrzon]

@franko:
file name length is mainly a limitation of used file system on amiga. you can use pfs3
http://aminet.net/disk/misc/PFS3_53.lha
which has become open source and freeware these days.
install it on a partition, watch for the right dostype. then consult pfs3.guide and set the right filename lengt with pfs3directory../tools/setfnsize from the shell.
should be enough guidance for an old amigan. if you need a step-by step i will return to it.