New improved intuition.library version from the Kickstart 3.1

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I've had issues with BB3 and BB4

What version was this, some old beta version I suspect?

that I can't really explain

You could try. I do take bug reports seriously, however "can't really explain" is not enough info.

(BTW just to clarify for readers, Cosmos intuition.library is not part of BB3/4, at least for now.)

sources for intuition are around.

Do you have a download link? Or I can "just ask" H&P or someone and I will be sent official AmigaOS source code?! I doubt this... :-(

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however all this is void talk, since there is no chance in hell any sources were going open one way or the other.

Perhaps we should start a bounty to open source OS3.9? That has happened with various Amiga applications but curiously not with the operating system itself.

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OS3.9 contains various components from various companies (ie: Haage&Partner iirc). I guess you'd better off starting with OS3.x if you would like to open source something.

Well, it would be H&P that the bounty would be directed to, of course. AFAIK they are the only ones who actually have the OS3.9 source code. Hyperion certainly don't, and I doubt Amino has it either.

And seeing it's still been sold by Cloanto I'm afraid you'll have a hard time convincing anyone to open source it.

Well, the OS Cloanto provide is actually OS3.1 with a few bits of OS3.5+3.9 thrown in, it isn't the proper OS3.9, there is a page at their site admitting this. I don't think their permission would be required in any event, they don't hold the rights to OS3.9 source code.

Releasing for free OS1.x (binaries only, except say/narrator stuff) could be possible though, and would be a good start.

I agree, but that's an entirely different issue and wouldn't solve this problem.

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aros modules improve on the genuine fuctionality while as i observe the developers care very much for backwards compatibility

AROS is no solution, it is still missing functionality that was in OS3.5 15 years ago...

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You can try to work on the original sources and avoid a fragmentation by talking to Hyperion.

Not sure how that would help as it is well known that they don't have the source code.

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Where did you get this nonsense from? Of course they do.

I got it from Ben Hermans' mouth. You can read the interview here: https://web.archive.org/web/20041020081420/http://www.swaug.org.uk/int010402.html

The relevant part is:

"SWAUG: Has Haage&Partner given you access to OS3.9 source code to be used in OS 4.0?
BH: No."

Obviously they have OS4.1 source code, which is what I assume you are referring to. However, that is not going to be very useful for people who are targetting Classic Amigas, even if they were willing to share it which I very much doubt. They've also shown no inclination to release the OS3.1 sources which they also hold. AFAICT there is no legal impediment to it but IANAL.

What exactly is missing? And again if you talk about 68k you can (almost) replace everything with original 68k libraries.

Last time I checked, it was/is missing the entire official AmigaOS GUI (ie. ReAction), as well as some less important components. I suppose those files can be copied over from OS3.9. But in that case, why not just use the proper OS3.9 instead rather than some mishmash of AROS+OS3.9?

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reaction isnt particularly necessary, the only software i can recall testing on aros, that needed its classes was aweb. aros contains few appropriate rewrites of those classes and the rest you can obtain from the internet, afair from the class act download page to be precise.

If you're aiming to do a proper job of replacing an OS, it is indeed necessary to support all the standard functionality of what you are replacing. This should surely be the first priority, before wasting time doing non-standard AROS-only extensions and crapplets such as a new editor when there is already a perfectly functional editor in OS3.9, not to mention dozens available on Aminet. I don't think it's appropriate to make these kinds of value judgements on the necessity of various components which are already official parts of the OS and hence are depended on by third-party applications. The fact is, ReAction is part of the OS, is used by various components of the OS and third-party applications. (Not just AWeb either.) Certainly more necessary than an unofficial one that was never part of the OS and which isn't used by OS components.

BTW ClassAct files are generally earlier versions than the corresponding ReAction files, and are missing functionality that is offered by the ReAction files. So just downloading them from Aminet is not necessarily enough.

now, aros doesnt provide everything, for instance proper installer tool is missing in c:, but you can just download the commodore version from aminet and put it there.

In that case, why not just use the official version of *everything*, no need for AROS at all then.

Even where its still buggy, slow or incomplete, it comes with the sources and can be fixed and improved.

Development tends to be random, presumably it is more interesting for the devs to expand the system in non-standard ways and ignore the missing functionality. Even 15 years later...

with the genuine amiga you had to get and install even mui separately, in contrary to where you have zune with basic set of libs.

Well, of course. MUI has never been part of AmigaOS. AmigaOS already has a GUI system and it isn't MUI. So I'm not sure why you would put MUI into AROS instead of the official GUI system.

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first of all there might be replacements on aminet without proper sources, which is my assumption, secondly aros aims officially at full source compatibility with os 3.1 for starters, whats happens beyond is just what the devs have fun to do, which is perfectly legitimate with me. whoever is not satisfied with the approach may contribute themselves, this is not a guarantee on non open approach.

Why pick an arbitrary obsolete version like V3.1 and not, for example, V1.1? Seems pretty random. I don't see what's so special about OS3.1.

has not made any difference so far when trying to run any reaction app on aros. care to name me one that doesnt work that way?

Report+ and MCE, for example, require BB1 versions of some ReAction components as they use some of the newer functionality.

aros is for convenience to have the complete system out of the box, but not the whole aminet.

OS3.1 never included MUI anyway so I don't see the reasoning behind having it in AROS. If it's missing Installer then it's hardly a "complete system out of the box", even for an OS3.1 clone.

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>Hack&Patch were doing 3.5/9 on the cheap, scamming contributors left and right.

Allegedly. It's odd that no one was ever able to provide any proof of this; if they had had a case they would have been able to sue H&P and get lots of money from them.

>Doing those few actually new tools in 3.5/9 based on just plain GadTools+BOOPSI was no option.

Why not, if they were just doing it on the cheap?

>So they had to find a 2nd class GUI system that could be aquirred at next to 0 cost, and hell did ClassAct fill that bill.

I've never seen any evidence that it was acquired "at next to 0 cost". Do you have a source for this claim?

>The reality even today is that it is 100% possible (and not even hard) to setup a useable Amiga without ever touching ClassAct/ReAction. Try the same without useing MUI (yes even on OS4)...

I don't use any MUI programs, I keep it installed just for trying out new programs but have never found a MUI-based one worth keeping...I can't see how you could possibly have a usable Amiga without ReAction, considering that important OS components require it. At least for OS3.5/3.9.

@olsen:

Yes, I agree that OS3.1 is a big improvement over OS1.1, I don't think anyone is disputing that.

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>OS 3.5 introduced GlowIcons (which I already had in NewIcons format)

NewIcons is just an unofficial "hack and patch" based on tooltypes, whereas GlowIcons is a proper upgrade to the icon system, the two are not at all equivalent.

>3.1 is the last official C= release, and the last combined ROM+disk release.

Actually 3.1 was released by Village Tronic, not Commodore. Not that there is anything sacred about Commodore. I don't see the relevance of whether the ROM upgrade is performed in firmware or software.

>The more recent releases have no big API updates anyway

Yes they do, obviously you haven't read the autodocs.

>Most of what is included in 3.5 or 3.9 can be added from aminet

That's incorrect.

>OS 3.5/3.9 had almost no improvements (scsi.device with large hd support was only major improvement there) but just 3rd party software you can download from Aminet for free.

Maybe if you had actually bought and used the product, or even bothered to read the changelog and/or autodocs, you would know this to be wrong.

>I am only a little nerved because people seem to search for any reason not to do anything or invest time (even testing would be something).

Open source status isn't really a reason for an ordinary user to want to use something. They will make that assessment based on other factors such as as features, speed, etc. which AROS lacks.

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@psxphill:

>>Not that there is anything sacred about Commodore.

>In terms of Provenance there is.

I suppose you think that an Amiga Technologies (Escom) A1200 is not a real Amiga then? Or that eg. a ZX Spectrum +3 isn't a real Spectrum, etc. because Amstrad had bought Sinclair. With that Ship of Theseus analogy, that was about whether it was still the real thing after every single component in it had been changed. OS3.9 is a big upgrade with lots of new features, but of course not every single byte in it is different from OS3.1.

>If it's not in ROM then it's taking up RAM.

I should point out that OS3.1 and even earlier versions used SetPatch to patch the ROM.

@wawrzon:

>im not so much advocating to attract regular customers to aros 68k at this point, but people who care, and are able to contribute in some way.

You seem to be suggesting that there are no regular users left in the community, only programmers. But I think the majority of Amiga users are still non-programmers. Maybe we should have a poll about this.

>finally informed statement about the matter from someone who knows not only aros but os4, mos and genuine amiga from application programming standpoint.

I've programmed for all these systems, so I believe I qualify...granted that for OS4/AROS there are other users that help with testing etc. Several of my programs are available for AROS x86. The rest would also be available, except for the fact that AROS is missing ReAction. How is software supposed to get ported to AROS when AROS lacks basic functionality that is part of the OS (not even undocumented functionality!) that the application absolutely depends upon? (In the interests of fairness, I should point out that both MOS and OS4 are missing some OS3.9 functionality too, but AROS is missing the most though.)

@BSzili:

>I don't understand why people are so fixated on the fact that AROS strives for 3.1 compatibility. This doesn't mean that they won't implement anything beyond V40.

Well, we've been waiting 15 years already...maybe if we wait another 15 it will have complete V45 support...? *Then* there might be a reason to switch to AROS...

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>Why would you suppose that? Once you have reverted the floppy disk motherboard hack then it's mostly equivalent to a commodore A1200.

Well, if you revert enough of OS3.5/3.9 you can turn it back to OS3.1. After all, 3.1 is even included on the CD, so it's just a matter of replacing files. I'm really trying to understand your reasoning but it doesn't seem consistent. It seems to be that if OS3.5/3.9 was almost the same as OS3.1 it would be OK (like an Escom A1200 compared to Commodore A1200) but since it is a significant upgrade, it's not OK? What about Amiga Walker, would that have been a real Amiga if released?

>The AmigaOne isn't an Amiga though.

Well, I'm certainly no OS4 fanboy, and it's tangential to the issues at hand, but IMHO an AmigaOne is a real Amiga, it's just not a "Classic Amiga". Which is why we have the term. It's a bit like saying that a PPC Mac or Intel Mac isn't actually a Mac, only a 68K Mac is a real Mac. I suspect that if anyone went to a Mac forum and claimed such a thing there would be howls of derision.

>the only parts that rely on Reaction in OS3.9 are the preference programs - is the API of OS3.9 open enough to allow third party prefs programs to be written?

There are other parts: some that spring immediately to mind are AWeb and various items on the Workbench menus (eg. "Execute command...", "Information...", etc.). As to preferences files, they are mostly just IFF files and are mostly documented, eg. Report+ can interpret most of these files.

>After they died there haven't been anyone who has been universally agreed upon to hold all the rights to the fallen empire. If someone had stepped in and taken command then I would have agreed.

Escom bought everything important. IIRC they bought everything except some trademarks and patents.

>True(partially), but then again the 3.5/3.9 releases didn't really update the ROM parts much so not so much of a upgrade to the ROM contents?

Quite significant upgrades to the ROM-based components actually.

>The Amiga being what it is is also more vulnerable the more of the code that lives in ram instead of rom, but I'm not suggesting to limit updates because of that.

That's an interesting point, ROM is indeed not susceptible to being overwritten with garbage. However if a program is writing garbage to arbitrary addresses you will likely have problems regardless of whether Kickstart is in RAM or ROM...because most of the time statistically such accesses will be hitting RAM.

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AWeb does NOT need Reaction, it needs Classact and both Classact and AWeb work perfectly on Aros 68k. But you seem not to react on the comments of others

I don't? Read through this thread again and you will see that I have responded to the comments of various people. Without resorting to ad hominem attacks as you are doing now. I've made this point before, but again: yes you can add extra bits to AROS to get a semi-usable system. That doesn't make it a usable system. Someone could get a bare CPU and add various bits to it to make it a usable system, that doesn't make it a usable system in its own right. You have to download extra bits to make it equivalent to something that already works fine out of the box. What good is that?

Also with AROS x86 you can't even do that; if a piece of software is not available in an AROS x86 version you can't use it at all. Unless they finally have working 68K emulation, which they didn't last time I checked. And like I and others have said before, there's no reason for any 68K user to bother with AROS: it's slow, missing features and ugly. Really, it has next to nothing to recommend it except for copyright issues, which seemed to be the main reason Toni Wilen was bothering with it, because it could be distributed freely with WinUAE, not because it was actually better. The same applies to various BIOS replacements that are included with various emulators. For best compatibility you use an authentic BIOS which, by definition, is 100% byte-for-byte identical. Substitute BIOSes are included for legal reasons only, generally the first thing one does is get an authentic ROM dump.

What is wrong/bad about the original Icon format?

The main one is that they aren't palette independent. So users have to keep the default colours; if the user changes their palette all their old-style icons will look awful. And if the developer used a non-standard palette to begin with, you have to match your palette to theirs. Not everyone runs MagicWB. MagicWB doesn't even define more than 8 colours IIRC. The original icon format was designed for OS1.x which didn't support deep screens. Even if you assume that neither the developer nor the user has modified the colours from the default, you still can't guarantee what palette is in use. Eg. 1.x has a different default palette as compared to 2.x.