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I have heard/read enough people sing high praises of AmigaOS that I wonder how intimately it is tied to the hardware platform. In other words, would it make se

by krylon 5y ago

I have heard/read enough people sing high praises of AmigaOS that I wonder how intimately it is tied to the hardware platform. In other words, would it make sense to port it to the PC or maybe Raspberry Pi? It sounds like it would be fun to play with it, but I lack the hardware, and I am not sure I'm willing to sink money into it without having an idea of what I am getting into.

chriswarbo 5y ago
AmigaOS/Workbench relied pretty heavily on custom parts of the Amiga hardware, which is how it performed so well compared to other architectures with similar specs. That can be overcome with enough brute force; although emulators like FS-UAE can still struggle to keep realtime with some workloads. There are FPGA reimplementations of Amiga hardware, if you wanted something more 'realistic'.
- boomlinde 5y ago
  That's mostly been overcome by now. Retargetable graphics for example let you use a graphics card instead of the built-in chipset, and AHI is an abstraction layer for audio that's not at all tied to any particular hardware. The bigger issue is applications that bypass the hardware abstraction layer or throw away the OS entirely, typically games and quite a few productivity applications. I suggest looking at MorphOS and AROS
classichasclass 5y ago
Basically, you want AROS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
squarefoot 5y ago
You can experience something very close to it with AROS, which is free both as in speech/beer, can be used either native stand alone or hosted, that is, as process under other operating systems without requiring any installation. There's also an ARM port which runs native on the Raspberry PI or hosted under Android devices. https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/
agent327 5y ago
Yes and no. One problem is that it is kind of hard to describe: most features sound like something Linux sort-of has, and whenever you try to describe them people tend to disregard them as something that has been incorporated into Linux, and thus of little interest. What they can't know is just how much more convenient those things generally were on the Amiga, how much easier it all worked. You really have to experience that to know. The nr. one thing any new OS should learn from the Amiga is its motto: "simple things should be easy, complex things should be possible." Not "Simple things should be possible, complex things should be Dark Souls"! The next biggest thing would be the use of pervasive inter-process scripting. ARexx (I wouldn't choose it today but it worked) gave you amazing power to combine applications and automate various tasks - a bit like the Linux command line does, except it works everywhere. To illustrate, there was an ARexx script that combined a mail application with a chess playing game to create a chess-playing robot: you could mail it a board and it would make the next move, and mail it back. You could get two Amigas to play chess against each other, and thus avert nuclear annihilation. "Screens", we would now call them virtual desktops, were way better than virtual desktops because applications are aware of them, and can be configured to run on a specific screen. Thus you don't waste time setting up new virtual desktops, moving windows across, etc., it's all automatic. Assigns let you add globally valid short names for directories and devices. An assign can refer to multiple directories, and it can be deferred, meaning it is hidden until you refer to it. I really miss those on other OSes. Yes, you get links. No, they aren't the same. You don't have to create an assign in a location (they are always global), you don't need weird syntax for creating links, and you can delete them without fearing for your data. The OS is essentially a microkernel that uses message passing for asynchronous communication, and that uses dynamically loaded drivers for things like devices and file systems. For modern usage you would really have to add memory protection (it wasn't available on the hardware of the time), and resource tracking (it wasn't finished in time for the Amiga launch). And its culture was just different. The Amiga had so many small, simple productivity tools (it also lacked big, complex productivity tools, but that's another story). You had simple, yet powerful programming languages, music creation tools, drawing tools, etc. The tools of today are orders of magnitude better, but that power has come at the cost of considerable complexity. DPaint 2 can't hold a candle to the Gimp, but at least I knew how to draw lines with it. And is there even a single music creation tool for modern OSes that isn't either a sample arranger or a fullblown score editor? So it can certainly be done. The question is, will you end up with the same joyful platform and the same joyful culture? I sort of doubt that: without a captain on that particular ship, odds are it will quickly turn into a Linux reskin. The world already has enough of those, and even if that weren't to happen, part of its magic was in the applications it ran. Just ports of existing Linux tools wouldn't have that. So I'd love to see a proper AmigaOS port to modern PC hardware, and it would totally rock - but I just can't see it gain the same momentum it had back in the day.

by krylon 5y ago

chriswarbo 5y ago

AmigaOS/Workbench relied pretty heavily on custom parts of the Amiga hardware, which is how it performed so well compared to other architectures with similar specs. That can be overcome with enough brute force; although emulators like FS-UAE can still struggle to keep realtime with some workloads. There are FPGA reimplementations of Amiga hardware, if you wanted something more 'realistic'.

boomlinde 5y ago
That's mostly been overcome by now. Retargetable graphics for example let you use a graphics card instead of the built-in chipset, and AHI is an abstraction layer for audio that's not at all tied to any particular hardware. The bigger issue is applications that bypass the hardware abstraction layer or throw away the OS entirely, typically games and quite a few productivity applications. I suggest looking at MorphOS and AROS

classichasclass 5y ago

Basically, you want AROS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System

squarefoot 5y ago

You can experience something very close to it with AROS, which is free both as in speech/beer, can be used either native stand alone or hosted, that is, as process under other operating systems without requiring any installation. There's also an ARM port which runs native on the Raspberry PI or hosted under Android devices. https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/

agent327 5y ago

Yes and no. One problem is that it is kind of hard to describe: most features sound like something Linux sort-of has, and whenever you try to describe them people tend to disregard them as something that has been incorporated into Linux, and thus of little interest. What they can't know is just how much more convenient those things generally were on the Amiga, how much easier it all worked. You really have to experience that to know. The nr. one thing any new OS should learn from the Amiga is its motto: "simple things should be easy, complex things should be possible." Not "Simple things should be possible, complex things should be Dark Souls"! The next biggest thing would be the use of pervasive inter-process scripting. ARexx (I wouldn't choose it today but it worked) gave you amazing power to combine applications and automate various tasks - a bit like the Linux command line does, except it works everywhere. To illustrate, there was an ARexx script that combined a mail application with a chess playing game to create a chess-playing robot: you could mail it a board and it would make the next move, and mail it back. You could get two Amigas to play chess against each other, and thus avert nuclear annihilation. "Screens", we would now call them virtual desktops, were way better than virtual desktops because applications are aware of them, and can be configured to run on a specific screen. Thus you don't waste time setting up new virtual desktops, moving windows across, etc., it's all automatic. Assigns let you add globally valid short names for directories and devices. An assign can refer to multiple directories, and it can be deferred, meaning it is hidden until you refer to it. I really miss those on other OSes. Yes, you get links. No, they aren't the same. You don't have to create an assign in a location (they are always global), you don't need weird syntax for creating links, and you can delete them without fearing for your data. The OS is essentially a microkernel that uses message passing for asynchronous communication, and that uses dynamically loaded drivers for things like devices and file systems. For modern usage you would really have to add memory protection (it wasn't available on the hardware of the time), and resource tracking (it wasn't finished in time for the Amiga launch). And its culture was just different. The Amiga had so many small, simple productivity tools (it also lacked big, complex productivity tools, but that's another story). You had simple, yet powerful programming languages, music creation tools, drawing tools, etc. The tools of today are orders of magnitude better, but that power has come at the cost of considerable complexity. DPaint 2 can't hold a candle to the Gimp, but at least I knew how to draw lines with it. And is there even a single music creation tool for modern OSes that isn't either a sample arranger or a fullblown score editor? So it can certainly be done. The question is, will you end up with the same joyful platform and the same joyful culture? I sort of doubt that: without a captain on that particular ship, odds are it will quickly turn into a Linux reskin. The world already has enough of those, and even if that weren't to happen, part of its magic was in the applications it ran. Just ports of existing Linux tools wouldn't have that. So I'd love to see a proper AmigaOS port to modern PC hardware, and it would totally rock - but I just can't see it gain the same momentum it had back in the day.