Advantages of 3.1 ROMs and OS 3.5/3.9

[Piru]

@tonyvdb

What I can tell you is that its definatly worth while to upgrade to 3.1 roms. First of all its not nearly as slow as 3.0 was and has a better interface.

Say what?
Could you detail what is faster in 3.1 compared to 3.0, and what interface changes it has?

alow you to use larger hard drives (over 4 gig)

This is well possible with AmigaOS 3.0 (idefix, scsi.device 43.x, p5/dce accelerator with scsi...).

[Piru]

Its been awhile but when I upgraded to 3.1 from 3.0 I noticed faster boot times

Actually KS 3.1 has longer boot delay when scanning for IDE devices. Other than that it's exactly as fast as 3.0. Couple of gfx operations are faster in 3.1, though, but only marginally, and only for apps using the OS anyway.

and the Boot menu was better layed out with more options.

That's quite funny, considering the boot menus are identical.

As far as looks the windows had nicer looking drag bars

The drag bars are identical.

and the colour options were nicer.

There are some changes in wb pattern prefs iirc, but that's just software. They work the same on KS 3.0 and KS 3.1.


IMHO the only real reason to get 3.1 over 3.0 is to be able to use WB 3.9, and even that is just artificial limit. WB 3.5/3.9 could have easily allowed booting from KS 3.0 (with expense of using more system memory than booting from 3.1).

[Piru]

@jmbattle

Well, I recall that the 'Execute Command' and 'Icon Information' user interfaces are font sensitive under KS3.1, whereas they will use the default Topaz/8 under KS3.0.

Not quite, this is Workbench 3.1 vs Workbench 3.0. They're font sensitive with KS 3.0 and WB 3.1 aswell.

[EDIT]
Update: I was wrong there, indeed this is font sensitive with KS 3.1 only.
[/EDIT]

Anyway, here are pretty informative pages of AmigaOS 3.0 and 3.1:
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html

Even the WB 3.1 review was made on system with KS 3.0... ;-)

[Piru]

what is the largest size of partition that can be used?

Barring the filesystem limits, 2TB.

For pfs3 the limit is about 96GB, not sure about SFS or FFS 44.x/45.x.

[Piru]

@amije

if you where happy with any workbench from 3.0 to 3.9 you probably didn't jump (finaly) to morphos, or not?

AmigaOS versions I've used:
AmigaOS 1.3 (KS 1.3, WB 1.3.3)
AmigaOS 2.1 (KS 2.04, WB 2.1)
AmigaOS 3.0 (KS 3.0, WB 3.0)
AmigaOS 3.1 (KS 3.1, WB 3.1)
AmigaOS 3.5 (KS 3.1, WB 3.5)

Out of these only AmigaOS 3.5 was bit of a disappointment (mainly because it didn't deliver what was promised, and because it was hideously buggy).

Regarding the MorphOS bit: I've been developing MorphOS since about end of 1999 (iirc, it's a bit hazy either end of 99 or early 2000). The transition to full MorphOS system was gradual, basically it started with combination of OS 3.5 and MorphOS on the BPPC. Eventually I used less and less AmigaOS components until finally there were none (this process was quite necessary as MorphOS lacked many components initially). The final switch to pure MorphOS only occured when I switched to peg1 development system.

Today I don't have any AmigaOS installation in use. I still have my AmigaOS 3.5 box somewhere stored though. ;-)

Anyway, my argument was that KS 3.0 and KS 3.1 aren't really that different, and that if you're not going to use WB 3.5/3.9 it doesn't really matter much whether you have KS 3.0 or KS 3.1.

[Piru]