Ben Hermans still staunchly against x86

[SamuraiCrow]

As stated at AmiWest 2010, they still have no interest in x86.

As a platform, I'd rather be stuck on the FPGAs than to have to support all the hardware that exists for x86 commodity PCs.  The best option, however, is still "all of the above" if you can get drivers for it.

A large portion of the advances of AROS are from the Gallium drivers for NVidia graphics cards.  The Radeon drivers all require LLVM and will follow when I get LLVM ported to AROS.  (I've already taken the bounty.)

I think LLVM will make a much more palatable target than any one processor architecture will by itself, especially since almost all AROS software is written in C.

The AmigaOS 4.x may take a similar turn since the XMOS toolchain is based on LLVM also.  Hyperion has also deprecated PPC Assembly language on OS 4 in favor of C and C++.  It's just a matter of time until everybody makes the switch to LLVM and Clang.  (Clang has a much more liberal license than GCC, after all.)

[SamuraiCrow]

I'm not sure how supporting every x86 device is considered a problem when we've been scrounging up PCI Voodoo3's and 5v ATI cards on ebay for years and thought it was just grand.

If we had support for just one or two current pieces of hardware we'd be ecstatic.

If you've been following the AROS scene, we have drivers for high-end NVidia cards (PCIe interfaced), one high-end sound card, a few mid-range network adapters, and some other high-end peripherals.  The table is set already but we can't sit down at the meal for lack of something to eat!  We need software!

LLVM will at least make it possible to compile software for every supported architecture including PPC and AMD64.  The SAM440ep already has PPC AROS for it so if anybody wanted to migrate to AROS, they could.  Now do you see what I mean by "all of the above"?

[SamuraiCrow]

Is Amiga inc still really in business and if so, what do they do?

The last I heard, they had sold the Amiga name to CommodoreUSA, a company with even LESS business sense than the old A Inc.

[SamuraiCrow]

I dunno, does AROS PPC run legacy 68K (and some legacy PPC) executables?

Not without EUAE.  In fact they are trying to fix a serious bug that prevents Sam440 series computers from running Efika software and the other way around as well.  You can run EUAE on either of them but it won't run any faster than the OS 4 or MorphOS versions of EUAE.

At least EUAE and JUAE support x86 JIT though.