Amiga OS4 on old (PPC) Macs

[BooBoo1200]

Yep thats a good idea - I wonder if its possible to make a dedicated FFS partion under Mac OS/E-UAE like with with WinUae then copy over the Os4 files -Maybe Im going in totaly the wrong direction here? I may have to wait until someone in the know gets a Mac? I dont know if I can wait that long :-P

[Fats]

Hans_ wrote:

Maybe you should tell some of the more vocal AROS advocates to STFU then. The impression that I got was that AROS developers have no interest in OS4 compatibility at all, see it as inferior, blah blah blah.

AROS devs are a bunch of totally different people with (almost) the only common interest an amiga compatible OS. You should not take the rants of one of them as a general AROS statement.

greets,
Staf.

[whabang]

Zac67 wrote:
Does anyone know, how much OS4 for classic and OS4 for A1 actually differ?

Personally, I have no idea, but I doubt they differ very much.

My bet is that the HAL and the bootloader is different, and that the rest is handled by drivers. After all, that's the reason for having HAL and drivers in the first place, and I doubt that Hyperion had resources for a complete rewrite anyway.

As for the piracy bit: If someone manages to get an implementation of OS4 Classic running on a PPC Mac, then i _will_ buy a copy of it. Period.
That is not piracy, no matter how you put it, and it will support the platform.

[dammy]

Maybe you should tell some of the more vocal AROS advocates to STFU then. The impression that I got was that AROS developers have no interest in OS4 compatibility at all, see it as inferior, blah blah blah.

My, what a lovely attitude. :roll:  There is a bounty for a AROS PPC MOS wrapper/emulator, I see no reason why there can not be one for OS4.  In the past month, I've seen AROS (think it was Zune) being brought into line with OS4 version.  

Dammy
TeamAROS

[persia]

Any possibility of running Amiga OS 4 on an HFS file system?

[rkauer]

whabang wrote:
--ZIP--

As for the piracy bit: If someone manages to get an implementation of OS4 Classic running on a PPC Mac, then i _will_ buy a copy of it. Period.
That is not piracy, no matter how you put it, and it will support the platform.

 Agree with this point!

 The way you use the software you bought is irrelevant, but you must have purchase it (since you don't reverse engineer it!)! ;-)

[HenryCase]

Fats wrote:
I myself am a core AROS developer and I do plan in the future to make two PPC versions of AROS possible. One binary compatible with MorhOS and one compatible with OS4. First I want to finish the i386 ABI though.

That's great news (about your future plans). Thanks Fats. :-D

ABI = Application Binary Interface, right? It sounds pretty important, but I don't really understand how it will be used by AROS. Can you explain the benefits of a good i386 ABI implementation to us?

[beakster2]

Yo,

I've been playing around with PearPC.  I haven't got very far but this is what I have discovered:

If you try and get PearPC to boot the AmigaMini.iso it says [IO/PROM] can't open boot file.  If you change the prom_bootmethod to select it shows the ISO has 3 partitions.  1 is Raw, 2 is Apple Partition Table and 3 is HFS.

I eventually gave up on trying to get PearPC to boot the ISO directly.  Without the commands you need to issue through the Open Firmware interface it doesn't work.

I then extracted the ISO to a directory so I could then manually specify the boot file.  Here are the lines I used in my PearPC.cfg:
prom_bootmethod = "force"
prom_loadfile = "iso\l\slb"
prom_env_bootpath = "iso"

This resulted in PearPC spitting out the following to the terminal:
[CPU/CPU] execution started at 00200078
[IO/PROM] unknown interpret size 175
interpret: " /chosen" find-package drop " memory" rot get-package-property drop
decode-int nip nip ihandle>phandle " reg" rot get-package-property drop decode-i
nt drop decode-int nip nip

I then tried booting the other file in the "l" directory, slb_v2_mm.  This gave the following screen output:

But it spat out:
JITC Warning: program exception: 00080000 00000000
in what appeared to be an endless loop.

That is as far as I've got with it.  I think I'm out of ideas on how to take it any further.  I might post something on the PearPC forum and see if they have any suggestions.

Cheers

[lovrenco]

Nice try,

I think now, when "moana loader" and copy of AOS4 for A1 is available as torrent, it will not take long for someone to run it through emulator (PearPC). After all, if Mac OsX can run, why couldn't this OS.

But we can treat this as AIncs way of thinking. Underneath weak "slave platform" and on top AA2....

If "big players" doesn't want to end like this, they should act fast. New hardware is solution.... (or can I say - hardware exists, but license don't)...

[Crumb]

After all, if Mac OsX can run, why couldn't this OS.

You would require AmigaOS4 drivers for video, audio, network, hard disk... not imposible but it requires a lot of skill...

[beakster2]

lovrenco wrote:
After all, if Mac OsX can run, why couldn't this OS.

The thing is Mac OS X actually has really good built in hardware support.  There have been lots of different Macs over the years using lots of different video chipsets and stuff.

The Moana loader seems to have been written specifically for the 1.5GHz Mac Mini only.  Without the source code for Moana I don't think its any use on any other machine.

But I agree, with the PPC processor emulated, and a few implementations of OpenFirmware/OpenBIOS out there, surely the hard work has been done and tailoring these to emulate an AmigaOne should be simple if you know how.

If we were emulating Macs and PCs on our Amigas 15 years+ ago, why should this be much different.

[lovrenco]

Look at this topic on Pearpc.net

http://www.pearpc.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=5536&sid=d1aa4ab24d13bc60db35b51361a488e4


What do you think about it?

[persia]

Would perhaps the solution be to write an HFS file system for OS 4?

[Zac67]

No. If OS4 is able to access the harddrive and understand the partition info, FFS will be fine.

[DoogUK]

I have a powerpc powermac 5500/275....one of the rare ones that looks and is a tv too.. :-D .

it has the powerpc 603ev chip @275mhz......how cool would that be to run os4 on!

[Trev]

Would perhaps the solution be to write an HFS file system for OS 4?

No, you'd want an FFS package for Open Firmware. A read-only implementation would suffice. Although, an HFS handler for OS4 would be nice, too. Anyone know the current state of MaxDOS?