Okay, it has several things going for it..
1) It's FREE to download
2) It's FREE to download
3) I am not getting charged for things it doesn't have
4) Did I mention it's free??
5) See the logo by my name, it runs great on that CPU and faster than Windows or an Intel Mac (and seems to crash less)
6) Wait did I say it's free to download ;-)
When are the Amiga folk here gonna part with their software from the 1980s?? If I bought an Amiga today it still can't directly run most classic software without UAE because they don't have the custom chips... Run UAE and anything runs decently.. That's true of current "Amiga" hardware too, same problem..
No memory protection I generally don't need it, AROS stuff doesn't crash like the 68K amiga did in general..
Oh this is my favorite one, it doesn't support symetric multiprocessing, well let's see if I run it HOSTED from Windows or LINUX with QEMU or Virtual PC or heaven for bid the 64 bit implementation of Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 (a free download right now at microsoft.com), I can assign either CPU to the virtual machine and it's still speedy, and it's like having TWO Amy's in front of me (but much more current and faster)..
I have a 64-bit processor (actually I have a few of them ;-) and I still love aros, it is floppy bootable, it just runs. Yeah the software is skimpy but complaining it doesn't have a good web browser is LAUGHABLE because I can't find one on the platform anyway (but I digress typing this entry in 64-bit IE 7)..
Office suite? Word Processor before printer drivers I suppose :-) Anyway, on x86 hardware you can boot any OS and run free Open office even from a live CD.. Or heaven forbid Office 2007 in free beta right now. Gotta love that..
68K emulation is a waste of time when everything runs from within UAE anyway and it's not that much of a pain to set up or use once you have floppys moved to disk image. I had to do it but I don't even use a FLOPPY anymore so it doesn't matter..
I have a great number of Amiga library programs that work great inside of AROS and any machine running UAE.. I would rather put my old machine away than let it die in use..
The reality of this is x86 hardware is cheap. You can have a fully functional aros box and monitor for a couple hundred dollars right now. I guarantee it's faster than your old machine and when you move your old floppies over to images they work so much faster stored on a hard drive or memory stick...
I think you should reconsider how much fun you'd have with old and new software especially running it on ultra cool cheap hardware with sound and graphics processing that you can't touch with your old hardware..
So much of the software library from the public domain has already been ported to AROS that it just doesn't make sense to say you are gonna have to sit and recompile especially from the end user perspective.
-Don
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iamaboringperson wrote:
*It doesn't use memory protection.
*It doesn't take advantage of SMP.
*It isn't multi-user.
*It doesn't go 64-bit eventually
It would also be nice if it had a half-decent web-browser and office suite.
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You can add to that list:
*It does not integrate 68k/full Kickstart emulation.
Using original programs within UAE just does not cut it for me.
I'd like to run my old programs without having to track down the source code, rewriting portions of that code and crossing my fingers as it recompiles in hopes that it will work under AROS.
This is the main reason why I have stayed away from it (no offense, I've used AROS and think it's great, but if it can't run legacy software in its original binary form, then its inability to exploit the Amiga's vast software library really makes it unattractive to me).
I'm in the "wait n see" stage right now concerning AROS.
