Amiga OS 3.9 Vs 3.1.4 on Accelerated A500
 

Hi

Its been a while since I've done much outside of WB 1.3 and WHDLoad on 3.1

My A500 has 1mb Chip ram full ECS ACA500+ and an ACA1121-lc Accelerator adding a MC68ec020 overclocked to 40.67mhz and 8mb available fast ram.

Also have the x-surf 500 pretty much for accessing a nas and web browsing pretty much to the extent of downloading from aminet.

Now im looking to do a little more tinkering and customising and am looking to upgrade from os 3.1. I have os3.9 and 3.1.4 roms ready to go on the aca500+

Two big factors at looking to upgrade are borderless icons and long file names. apart from WHDLoad the main thing im trying to achieve as much as possible is to make my a500 my daily desktop (basic office productivity, emails (plain text is fine), and some basic web browsing (amient and maybe the odd other amiga website)

pretty much want to make the amiga as nice looking and functional as possible with what's available to me.

Which os would you recommend? Thanks

OS3.1.4 is rather incomplete compared to OS3.9. Of particular importance are the ReAction classes which are missing from OS3.1.4. So OS3.9 is the better option if you want to be able to run all applications.

Of course OS3.2 is better than either though ;-)

So I’ve given both a go I prefer the os3.9 experience but the performance just doesn’t cut it on my hardware.

3.1.4.1 is really good once a few key enhancements are added, just a little lacking out of the box but no worse than 3.1 probably the best option for 1mb chip ram.

I think I’ll have to get 3.2 and see how it compares now.

I used to run 3.9 on an a1200 with a B1230MKIV (so a 68030) and it was fine but I would hesitate to run it on anything less.
I have not bothered for some time now however as 3.2 has effectively surpassed it all.
Unless the cost of purchasing 3.2 is the issue, I would move on from 3.1.4, as 3.2 (whilst still a little bare bones in parts) is definately the way forwards.

Yeah ended up getting 3.2 and I’m not looking to go back. 3.9 ran ok but it needs a lot of work to get the ram use down and personally I really dislike the new icons style. 3.2 feels like a nice blend of 3.9 and 3.1.4.

Though I have stolen the icon editor from 3.9 as I have a 3.2 1.3 and a shared work portion I can do old style icons and new glow icons in the one .info and have the drawers and everything look nice in both workbench.