I'm New Here and to Amiga - Please Help...

[motorollin]

You are right about AmigaOS being less bloated than OSX. It can be as simple or as complex as you want.

As for the variations of the OS, here is a quick rundown:

AmigaOS 3.x
Runs on "classic" Amigas (most likely what you will be interested in).
Runs the majority of Amiga applications and games.
Will only run on older Amiga hardware or an emulator

AmigaOS 4
Can only be run on an AmigaOne board (very expensive). Will run some 3.x applications, but not games.

MorphOS
Similar idea to OS4 - it's designed as an updated Amiga OS. MorphOS only runs on the PegasOS boards, and I don't think it runs classic software unless you use an emulator.

AROS
An Amiga-like operating system that will run on any PC. Will not run any Amiga software unless you use an emulator.

--
moto

[humppa]

Both AmigaOS 4 (final) and MorphOS will run most 3.x applications that do not directly access customs-chips/hardware, etc.
Since both OS are PPC native, yes, they do run built-in emulation layers (Petunia/JIT) to get classic Amiga apps running.

motorollin wrote: AROS
An Amiga-like operating system that will run on any PC. Will not run any Amiga software unless you use an emulator.

From the AROS homepage:

"AROS is a portable and free desktop operating system aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1, while improving on it in many areas."
"How compatible is AROS with AmigaOS?

Very compatible. We expect that AROS will run existing software on the Amiga without problems. On other hardware, the existing software must be recompiled. We will offer a preprocessor which you can use on your code which will change any code that might break with AROS and/or warn you about such code."

"What hardware architectures is AROS available for?

Currently AROS is available in a quite usable state as native and hosted (under Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD) for the i386 architecture (ie. IBM PC AT compatible clones) and hosted (Linux and NetBSD) for the m68k architecture (eg. the Amiga, Atari and Macintosh). There are ports under way at varying degrees of completeness to SUN SPARC (hosted under Solaris) and Palm compatible handhelds (native)."

[motorollin]

Thanks for clearing that up. Presumably 68k code would need to be recompiled to get it to run on AROS on x86???

--EDIT
Oh yes, just read that part :roll:

--
moto

[Tomas]

Currently AROS is available in a quite usable state as native and hosted (under Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD) for the i386 architecture (ie. IBM PC AT compatible clones) and hosted (Linux and NetBSD) for the m68k architecture (eg. the Amiga, Atari and Macintosh). There are ports under way at varying degrees of completeness to SUN SPARC (hosted under Solaris) and Palm compatible handhelds (native)."

I would not call it useable for the average user just yet, since it seem to lack most software. So far it seems to be only interesting to those people who would want develope software for it or for those who just want to see how the gui works. Atleast that seemed to be the case when i tried it out a few months ago.

I must say i find the system itself impressive, as it seems the share the responsiveness of the orginal amigaos. I look forward to the day when more software and drivers are avaliable.
I only have experience with the x86 port though..

I am sure this will change once some more software has been ported..  :-)

[dammy]

by motorollin on 2005/12/2 12:50:09

AROS
An Amiga-like operating system that will run on any PC. Will not run any Amiga software unless you use an emulator.

And the one thing that sets off AROS from the rest, it's a free OS.  Free download, and free to share with no expensive hardware to buy.

Dammy

[swift240]

Yes I downloaded AmiKit this afternoon, and I am now using it.
Its pretty good so far.
With Roms 3.1 and OS3.9. on a Athlon 2000+XP with 512 Meg DDR ram.

Give it a try if you have a system that can cope with it.

Its well worth it.

Mike.