[wawa]

Originally Posted by grelbfarlk

Sorry that I called the x86 a fork.

nothing to be sorry about its just a misconception that needs to be corrected. calling it a fork suggests, that work is done on different branches separately, and whats done on one target doesnt affect the other. thats only partly right. most code is common, however there are necessary architecture and platform specific individual parts as well.

I see on Aminet i386-aros is sorted separately from AmigaOS-m68k applications, I took that to mean that AROS-x86 compiled binaries would not run on AROS-m68k. If that's not the case and any AROS compatible binary will run without recompilation under any other architecture then that's great.

correct. aros doesnt provide fat binaries. aros binaries run only on a corresponding platform, in this case x86 or 68k, and need recompilation to run on another. howeveri would underscore it being recompilation, rather than port, since very few changes to the source might be necessary, if any, to achieve this.

If AROS-m68k applications run just fine on AmigaOS 3.x then that's great too, I only know of AFA-OS, which I assume isn't binary compatible.

aros68k applications run on amiga (os) as long as they are available in hunk rather than elf format (which they usually are) and are not linged against some aros exclusive library (such as arosc or posixc.library). the other way around it is expected that an amiga application for the range of 1.x to 3.x kickstarts should run on aros. there are exceptions and not everything is already properly implemented, but thats the general rule. you will be even able to replace single libraries classes or other os elements between these both.

so, yes, you can say aros 68k and amiga are binary compatible.

But my point is if people really like AROS then why mess about with running it on an M68k Amiga anyway, why not run it on the platform where people don't need to argue about a few or dozens of MBs here or there.

the reason is the same as to use amiga hardware today at all. no matter what os. with aros you have opportunity to use it in potentially more ergonomic way, while keeping the same pool of applications and without the necessity of emulation. certainly you are free to choose anothe aros platform. it is a matter of your own sentiment and preference.

Saying if you want to run whatever AROS-i386 application on your 040 Amiga, compile with make target-m68k, that's not practical for most users, they aren't going to mess about with that. That's vastly overestimating the amount of effort casual users are going to but towards their hobby OS. Many people don't have a problem with it.

you dont necessarily need to compile things yourself. aros has contributions and ports that either are being constantly recompiled or kept ready to be recompiled for a particular platform once there is interest.

also aros software is usually available as source. given that, it might be made available for aros68k amiga target pretty fast, faster than it would be possible to properly port them to amiga. this is the potential benefit, besides the whole bunch of infrastructures aros provides and amiga could possibly take advantage of,