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Author Topic: Would you purchase AmigaOS if it supported ARM or x86?  (Read 21424 times)

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Offline Romanujan

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Re: Would you purchase AmigaOS if it supported ARM or x86?
« on: January 11, 2017, 10:09:03 AM »
Quote from: Rob;819510
It would have to be x86 for me.  I don't understand all the fuss about ARM.  If you going to change architecture at this point you might as well go for the most powerful.

With AmigaOS API, if you change the architecture from M68k (big endian) to PPC (also big endian), you can provide a CPU emulator to run system-friendly legacy applications - just like AmigaOS4 or MorphOS did.

If you change the architecture to x86 (little endian), you can't - you can only emulate the whole legacy machine (UAE), like AROS does.

The OS for ARM CPU can be either big or little edian, depending on the compiler toolchain; CPU supports both endianness. This is what makes ARM particularly interesting.
 

Offline Romanujan

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Re: Would you purchase AmigaOS if it supported ARM or x86?
« Reply #1 on: January 11, 2017, 06:19:50 PM »
Quote from: nicholas;819523
Or they can do it like Amithlon did it.

Which is basically a stripped-down Linux running a stripped-down UAE...
 

Offline Romanujan

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Re: Would you purchase AmigaOS if it supported ARM or x86?
« Reply #2 on: January 11, 2017, 08:43:54 PM »
https://amithlonblog.wordpress.com/amithlonfaq/

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It is “just” an emulator. It boots up (from a CD, although other  boot methods are possible), then starts an m68k emulator task, sets up  the hardware for it, loads the rom images into memory, and then pretty  much hands control over to the emulated 68k, which just runs like it  would in any “real” Amiga
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So what we do for gfx card access is to use the linux framebuffer  devices. That lets us use just about any gfx card to some degree, and a  number of directly supported cards in very nice ways. That’s only  possible because some nice people already wrote really good drivers for  the linux kernel, and all we have to do is to make some calls to those  drivers.
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The same goes for IDE/SCSI access. The linux kernel is full of drivers for an incredible range of IDE/SCSI controllers.
Authors took UAE, got rid of the Amiga chipset emulation to gain speed, provided "drivers" to some Linux kernel APIs, and bundled this with AmigaOS 3.9... the only innovation there was API (and, as far as I know, a customized GCC) to integrate x86 and m68k code, but not much of such code was eventually written.