Advantages of 3.1 ROMs and OS 3.5/3.9

[DrDekker]

I'm interested in upgrading my A1200 to 3.1 ROMs and OS3.5 or 3.9, and was wondering if anyone could enlighten me as to what the main advantages are over 3.0 ROMs and WB 3.0?

Also, what hardware spec will be required to run such an upgrade?  At the moment my A1200 has an M-Tech 1230 accelerator (at 28MHz), with 8Mb RAM and SCSI interface.  Would this be sufficient?

Many thanks in advance.

Dekker

[tonyvdb]

What I can tell you is that its definatly worth while to upgrade to 3.1 roms.
First of all its not nearly as slow as 3.0 was and has a better interface. Coupled with OS3.9 you will love the "new" look that it gives you. OS3.5 is not worth it unless you can find it cheep. I'm using it and it works fine for me but if you dont have it already go for the 3.9. It will also suport your accelerator better then what you are using now and alow you to use larger hard drives (over 4 gig)

[Piru]

@tonyvdb

What I can tell you is that its definatly worth while to upgrade to 3.1 roms. First of all its not nearly as slow as 3.0 was and has a better interface.

Say what?
Could you detail what is faster in 3.1 compared to 3.0, and what interface changes it has?

alow you to use larger hard drives (over 4 gig)

This is well possible with AmigaOS 3.0 (idefix, scsi.device 43.x, p5/dce accelerator with scsi...).

[tonyvdb]

Its been awhile but when I upgraded to 3.1 from 3.0 I noticed faster boot times and the Boot menu was better layed out with more options.
As far as looks the windows had nicer looking drag bars and the colour options were nicer. Plus if I remeber right they fixed som bugs that were in 3.0.
OS3.9 dose away with all the patchwork needed for using larger drives atached to the amigas drive inerface (not accelerator)

[Piru]

Its been awhile but when I upgraded to 3.1 from 3.0 I noticed faster boot times

Actually KS 3.1 has longer boot delay when scanning for IDE devices. Other than that it's exactly as fast as 3.0. Couple of gfx operations are faster in 3.1, though, but only marginally, and only for apps using the OS anyway.

and the Boot menu was better layed out with more options.

That's quite funny, considering the boot menus are identical.

As far as looks the windows had nicer looking drag bars

The drag bars are identical.

and the colour options were nicer.

There are some changes in wb pattern prefs iirc, but that's just software. They work the same on KS 3.0 and KS 3.1.


IMHO the only real reason to get 3.1 over 3.0 is to be able to use WB 3.9, and even that is just artificial limit. WB 3.5/3.9 could have easily allowed booting from KS 3.0 (with expense of using more system memory than booting from 3.1).

[jmbattle]

Well, I recall that the 'Execute Command' and 'Icon Information' user interfaces are font sensitive under KS3.1, whereas they will use the default Topaz/8 under KS3.0.

However, as far as actual interface rendering/drawing speed is concerned, I believe they are identical.

Cheers,
James
x

[Piru]

@jmbattle

Well, I recall that the 'Execute Command' and 'Icon Information' user interfaces are font sensitive under KS3.1, whereas they will use the default Topaz/8 under KS3.0.

Not quite, this is Workbench 3.1 vs Workbench 3.0. They're font sensitive with KS 3.0 and WB 3.1 aswell.

[EDIT]
Update: I was wrong there, indeed this is font sensitive with KS 3.1 only.
[/EDIT]

Anyway, here are pretty informative pages of AmigaOS 3.0 and 3.1:
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_31.html

Even the WB 3.1 review was made on system with KS 3.0... ;-)

[DrDekker]

Thanks for the responses guys.

Does OS 3.5 also support >4Gb HD's or is it only OS 3.9?

Also, what is the largest size of partition that can be used?

At the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS as this is twice as big as the original HD.  However, I've got a relatively new 2.5" Toshiba 60Gb HD that I'll use if I decide to upgrade.  Any ideas how long it would take to format?

Cheers.

Dekker

[amigagr]

yes 3.5 support >4gb too.


@Piru: if you where happy with any workbench from 3.0 to 3.9 you probably didn't jump (finaly) to morphos, or not?
(it's not a question for fight, just curiosity)

[tonyvdb]

At the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS

The only drawback with using a CF card is that they are not as reliable as a good hard drive you may want to have a backup of it.

what is the largest size of partition that can be used?

Its not recomended to go above 2 gig per partition in OS3.5 or 3.9.

[amigagr]

Its not recomended to go above 2 gig per partition in OS3.5 or 3.9.

it's nor recomended a bootable partition more than 2gb. i have a 12gb partition and some 6gb on a 27gb hd and all working fine.(with sfs) :-)

[Piru]

what is the largest size of partition that can be used?

Barring the filesystem limits, 2TB.

For pfs3 the limit is about 96GB, not sure about SFS or FFS 44.x/45.x.

[nadoom]

at the minute I'm messing about with a 512Mb Kingston CF card to hold the OS

I have bizzare problems when i used my CF card as my boot device, in particular with blizkick, when i swapped the CF card with my 10 gb hard drive i had no problems. It could indicate some incompatabilities with the amiga..

[mr_a500]

Piru wrote:
Not quite, this is Workbench 3.1 vs Workbench 3.0. They're font sensitive with KS 3.0 and WB 3.1 aswell.

No, you're wrong about that one. I run WB 3.1 with 3.0 ROMs and "Execute Command" and "Icon Information" use Topaz. When I run WB 3.1 with 3.1 ROM, they use the System font.

Besides WB 3.9 (and programs written using the annoying Reaction GUI), there are only two programs I know of that have problems with the 3.0 ROM (vs. 3.1): The Matrix screensaver (the required WriteChunkyPixels is only in 3.1) and graphics corruption using the latest SystemPatch quicklayers.library. (so I just use the older quicklayers.library and run AFA-OS before running The Matrix)

I use scsi.device 43.35 to access partitions >4Gb with Workbench 3.1 and 3.0 ROMs. Also, there is a program to convert WB 3.9 colouricons for use in WB 3.1.

The only 3.9 advantage I can think of (Amigas without graphics cards) is the 3.9 BB2 HDtoolbox when installing new drives. This is the only version of HDtoolbox that actually reads the correct information from large harddrives.

[Piru]

@amije

if you where happy with any workbench from 3.0 to 3.9 you probably didn't jump (finaly) to morphos, or not?

AmigaOS versions I've used:
AmigaOS 1.3 (KS 1.3, WB 1.3.3)
AmigaOS 2.1 (KS 2.04, WB 2.1)
AmigaOS 3.0 (KS 3.0, WB 3.0)
AmigaOS 3.1 (KS 3.1, WB 3.1)
AmigaOS 3.5 (KS 3.1, WB 3.5)

Out of these only AmigaOS 3.5 was bit of a disappointment (mainly because it didn't deliver what was promised, and because it was hideously buggy).

Regarding the MorphOS bit: I've been developing MorphOS since about end of 1999 (iirc, it's a bit hazy either end of 99 or early 2000). The transition to full MorphOS system was gradual, basically it started with combination of OS 3.5 and MorphOS on the BPPC. Eventually I used less and less AmigaOS components until finally there were none (this process was quite necessary as MorphOS lacked many components initially). The final switch to pure MorphOS only occured when I switched to peg1 development system.

Today I don't have any AmigaOS installation in use. I still have my AmigaOS 3.5 box somewhere stored though. ;-)

Anyway, my argument was that KS 3.0 and KS 3.1 aren't really that different, and that if you're not going to use WB 3.5/3.9 it doesn't really matter much whether you have KS 3.0 or KS 3.1.