Aos 3 -> aos 4

[SamuraiCrow]

@HotRod

2 words:  Developer tools.  If you develop for something other than C/C++ you're kind of stuck if you ever try to move up to PPC.  I tried to make an AmosPro equivalent for OS 4 and MOS but it proved to be too difficult.  It's easier to develop a new computer out of an FPGA to run OS 3 and AmosPro than it is to make a new AmosPro to run on OS 4.

Have you ever tried to convert a Copper list from classic Amiga to a system that doesn't have a Copper?  It requires fragment shaders and as of version 4.1.x shaders are still not supported by AmigaOS 4.  Maybe after the Gallium drivers get written for OS 4 there will be shader support and a Copper equivalent that can be used to run old software.

[SamuraiCrow]

If you are a die hard amiga fan but want... I don't know what... too expensive, I don't believe in that as a reason. I can do anything in AOS 4 that I could do in AOS 3, only better so why not? And regarding speed it's faster than any classic machine too anyway.

Let's see you try to bang the hardware and expect it to work.  What?  There is no custom hardware there to bang?  Too bad.  You can't do that on OS 4.  Maybe the Gallium drivers will allow that but AROS already lets you do that for free on nVidia GeForce graphics cards.

[SamuraiCrow]

Maybe at some point when I've nabbed a cheap PPC Mac I'll give MorphOS a try, instead.

Been there, done that.  It's ok but nothing to write home about.  It's a small, fast OS that's stuck on PPC.  If you're in the market for a Mac, don't settle for a bad one if you can afford to buy one that's over 1 GHz.  I have a 500 MHz PowerMac G4 and still don't have the money to buy a Radeon card nor a compatible network adapter.  I'll be impressed if they ever get shader support for the Radeon graphics cards.

[SamuraiCrow]

One thing here is that you can get rid of the hacks and they will be implemented to the system in a clean way. Also you can now drag windows outside the screen, change the side from any direction and other little things that are nice to have. Screendraging are back and so on, and that is just 4.0. I know that there's a hack for draging windows outside the screenborders for 3.x but AFAICR I never had much luck getting it to work. There are tons of other improvements than those that you listed.

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IExec->AllocVec(bufsize);vs.

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AllocVec(bufsize);and that is getting rid of the hacks in a clean way?

I realize that having the interfaces load into different registers based on what other libraries they call is faster but couldn't they have just used a custom calling convention for library calls?  Sheesh!

[SamuraiCrow]

Something like Blitzen for copper?

Blitzen covers only the blitter functionality, IIRC.  For the Copper emulation, you'd need shader support which may someday come from Gallium3D drivers.  It's not there yet, drHirudo.

[SamuraiCrow]

@HotRod

Why is this thread going on for pages and pages.  I thought I gave some good answers.  Maybe you're asking the wrong questions.

[SamuraiCrow]

Summary:  MOS is better than AOS 4 but neither runs on a classic Amiga in stock configuration, so the point is rather moot.