Oli_hd wrote:
That would be a deam... however the Amiga AROS has been left for so long now I would bet a complete redesign from scratch would be needed to suit the newer source code.
Ahh if I could program this is what I would be working on.. but I cant so :-(
Don't feel bad. There are quite a few people here that can program that don't even want to touch it. Me included and I've written stuff like this for embedded systems.
Redesign? Well... I don't know about that. It has to match the original OS design rather than AROS. However, it never had to do a lot of things that the ROM does so I'm not sure how usefull it would be anyway.
The original kickstart tests hardware, sets up the cpu (identifies it, sets interrupts, etc), sets up memory and autoconfigs other hardware. It has to set up timing used for task switching and sets up the structures in RAM for the exec. Once it gets that far it says the exec is running and you are technically on the AmigaOS. However, then you need all the exec lib working on the 680x0 if you are going to do anything from the amiga OS to bootstrap the machine. Then there is that cool AROS logo someone wanted put up, etc.
I do belive that the graphics lib was also neaded somewhere early on so that you can display system alerts if there is a problem... and you have to write the alert code for the miggy.
Even if it is just enough code to bootstrap the rest of the kickstart from disk it still has to have some device driver for a floppy or hard drive. Unless you just lock out a fixed location on the drive for the rest of the kickstart to load from then you need a file system.
And on top of all that you have to make sure the code is ROMable, blah, blah, blah.
It's not that any of these jobs by themselves can't be handled. It's that it would be a full time job for several weeks to see any real results. Sure, you could hack together something using part of the original kickstart but then there would be copyright issues.
