from those who use it, or have in the past, how is amiga OS4 ?
Whats cool and fun ?
Well, if you have experience with AmigaOS 3.x, here are some of the features that I love in AmigaOS 4 and reasons for not looking back at the classic Amigas:
AmigaOS 4 advantages
1. No boot partition size limit. No more 4GB partition Hard Disk limit crap. I know this was fixed with some patches in AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9, but if you needed to boot without Startup-Sequence, it can destroy your boot partition if it is bigger than 4GB. I know a friend who had 24 partitions in a 100GB hard drive. Painful to sort.
2. No more FastFileSystem crap. You can use SFS for boot partition on AmigaOS 4. AmigaOS 4.1 have the nice JXFilesystem. I never ever lost a file with JXFilesystem. I lost some files with the SFS, but I easily recovered them. With FastFileSystem, I lost lots of files during the years. Validation gives me headaches, because I don't know what file is truncated after it.
3. Virtual Memory. No more usage of simple and dangerous to the system MMU hacks. Virtual Memory is presented and built-in and I use it a lot, since my Amiga is only 256 MB RAM. But even if I had 10GB of RAM I still would write movies to RAM: and watch them from there and if I forget about them in the RAM. Having SWAP: is a nice feature.
4. No more need for third party software to connect to the Internet. With AmigaOS 3.1 you need something like Miami, which you can not register anymore. Good luck with the limited demo for 30 minutes. NetConnect was not working good with me on my Amiga 4000.
5. ASL requester with the possibility to sort with a single click. I open many files very often. With big directories, the old ASL was a pain for finding files. Now with a single click I sort by Name, Size, Date. Selecting files now is much easier and fun.
6. No more need for second monitor if you are with graphics card and want to play old games or something goes wrong at bootup. The RTG system is built-in, you don't need to search for patches for specific graphics card.
7. GrimReaper - if a program is not stripped, the Grim tells a lot about the reasons for the message to appear. This is very handy for developers. On AmigaOS 3.9 I used MMULib/MuTools and MuForce (Enforcer alike program), but the GRIM is much much better.
8. Very good SDK. I used a lot VBCC on AmigaOS 3.9. I still use it on AmigaOS 4, now compiling for AmigaOS 3 and 4. But the AmigaOS 4.x have many more libraries included, which were pain to install with AmigaOS 3.9.
9. AmigaInput - now I can play games with wide variety of joysticks. I can configure the buttons to my liking, I can set the threshold for the analog paddles. In AmigaOS 3.9, the support for Joysticks with several buttons is limited.
10. No more need to put commodities and programs in WBStartup and manage AmigaOS startup with hacks like WBStartup/Enabled and WBStartup/Disabled or similar. The new startup modules management is very nice.
11. Notification system. Not much talked about and discussed feature of AmigaOS 4, but I like when tunes names popup when listening to online radio. It can have many other uses like notification for downloaded files, new e-mail etc...
12. SObjects - shared objects. Some programs use them. Additional plus of AmigaOS 4.
13. AmiUpdate. No more need for manual search for updates. Many programs are already in AmiUpdate.
14. System RollBack - part of AmiUpdate, where you can roll back to old system.
15. AHI is a standart. No more need to mix the Paula out and the audio card out if you want to use a single audio output.
The list can go on and on. But I will leave it to other AmigaOS 4 users to add more features they love of AmigaOS 4 over AmigaOS 3.
Hope this helps. If you are familiar with AmigaOS, you will love AmigaOS 4.
Regards
