Amiga os 3.1 vs amiga os 3.5

[AmiDude]

OS 3.9 is terrible slow and looking ugly if you don't have a 040/060 CPU + GFX card.
It just don't look good on an ECS machine with 16 colors, or even if you have AGA with
030/50Mhz it's too slow and it's very annoying.
OS 3.9 was running good on my A3000/040/40Mhz + CyberVision64, but I like the
classic look of OS 3.1. So I'm back from 3.9 to 3.1.

[rockape]

Hi,

see http://www.gregdonner.org/os39faq/whatsnew.html

and check it out yourself.

This FAQ lists all the fixes etc over 3/3.1

You may find it's suitable for you, I did.

I run 3.9 on a A1200/BlizzardmkII/SCSI system with 32 Meg fast RAM and its nice.

Regards, Michael

aka rockape

[jj]

OS 3.5 only contains some Aminet stuff you can get for free anyway. OS 3.5 and 3.9 were never real OS upgrades and run slower than 3.1.

 
What rubbish.  not sure about 3.5, buit 3.9 fixed a lot of bugs.
 
Its just a neater package than installing 3rd party hacks and software yourself

[itix]

What rubbish.  not sure about 3.5, buit 3.9 fixed a lot of bugs.
 
Its just a neater package than installing 3rd party hacks and software yourself

Why waste money when you can have everything for free and 3.1 runs better? 3.9 isnt even up to date but you have to download boing backs and updates from Aminet if you wish to use latest versions.

[golem]

I run OS3.9 on my Blizzard 030 with 128 colours DblPAL(no gfx card). It looks nice and is responsive enough for my needs. I wouldn't go back to 3.1. Theres just too much nice stuff in 3.9

[Varthall]

Why waste money when you can have everything for free and 3.1 runs better? 3.9 isnt even up to date but you have to download boing backs and updates from Aminet if you wish to use latest versions.

OS 3.5/9 support hard drives >8GB (new scsi.device) and have ATAPI support for CD ROMs, for which AFAIK there's no free alternative on Aminet.

Varthall

[Tempest]

OS 3.5/9 support hard drives >8GB (new scsi.device) and have ATAPI support for CD ROMs, for which AFAIK there's no free alternative on Aminet.

Varthall

Look at NSDPatch, worked well on my a3000t to use >8GB harddrives. I think NSDPatch is also used in OS 3.9.

And there is also AmiCDFS which is free.

[Zero]

I always go back to OS 3.1,

I guess it's the speed thing and my Amiga always runs best on OS 3.1
At the moment I have downsized my hard drive as well so space is a small factor as well.

Having said that 3.9 seems to have issues with my accelerator card.

But even on other setups I have had in the past I always end back on OS 3.1

[tone007]

3.9 is great if only for the fact it supports JPG workbench backgrounds out of the box.

..of course there's other nice stuff, built in archive handling app, AmiDock, GenesisTCP stack, MP3 player, click and go CD drive configuration...  If you don't want to spend hours getting a barebones 3.1 system usable, 3.9 is the way to go.  I only go with 3.1 when I'm stuck with low memory.

[dannyp1]

Once you've used AmiDock (in OS 3.9) it's hard imagining wanting to be without it.

[cha05e90]

Why waste money when you can have everything for free and 3.1 runs better? 3.9 isnt even up to date but you have to download boing backs and updates from Aminet if you wish to use latest versions.

I used OS3.1, 3.5 and 3.9. Sure 3.5 was a half way but after installing 3.9 (with both boing bags) I never looked back again. And no, OS3.9 is not slower than a heavy patched OS3.1 system (considering mostly the same functionality). But to be truthfull, I talk about minimum 030 and a graphics card (starting with a PicassoII) here. I don't have much experiences with vanilla Amigas...I only sometimes downgraded by disabling the startup-sequence to run some funny games or very rare apps, that would't start in a full 3.9 enviroment. If you really have to, you can always use startup scripts like mentioned before in this thread by Tempest.

[mr_a500]

If you're using OCS/ECS and don't have a graphics card, stay with WB 3.1.

Here are the problems in 3.5/3.9:

1. The new picture.datatype is super slow and will stupidly remap and dither images that are already mapped for your current palette. There is no option for "do not dither/remap".

2. Any palette requester is now in 256/256/256 - which makes selecting palettes in OCS/ECS painfully tedious. I don't know why it didn't automatically switch to 16/16/16 when in OCS/ECS modes. Also, the Palette Prefs still only allows you to change 8 colours (!) and there is still no colour locking. (!!)

3. The icon editor is super slow buggy garbage and Fkey doesn't work properly.

4. Reaction GUI is slow and ugly. ASL requesters are also super slow.

5. You must insert the CD-ROM to install updates (stupid copy protection) and "boingbag 2" ROM update is buggy and crashes.

I'm sure there are other annoyances I've forgotten. I consider 3.9 to be one of my worst Amiga purchases.

There is only one useful thing I've found in 3.9 - the new scsi.device for >4Gb - but even this is annoying because it causes a double boot. I extracted it and use it in WB 3.1 - and only when I need to access >4Gb.