They should make a Windows like Amiga OS so it runs on a PC

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Channel-Z

There already is an AmigaOS that runs on older PC hardware, it's called Amithlon.

https://amithlon.snkbitten.com/
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...0ZIXogjp8Hf7f7

More or less does what JIT is doing now though

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by swoslover

Wonder if AI will ever be in a position to replace human coders and we can just type "AI code Amiga 68k browser" or make Firefox work with Amiga 1200s ??

Lets hope not Lets really, really, hope not

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by minator

I moved to the Mac after that, it became a lot more interesting once they moved to a Unix base. There is the Apple tax to pay, but every time I use Windows I'm reminded why I pay it.

Funnily enough, I went the other way (to some extent - I use Windows at home for regular productivity and audio production and Linux for development)...

It may just be me, but I've always found MacOS's GUI design arse-backwards in several fundamental aspects (for example, they still cleave hard to making the Trash icon double up as the eject function for removable media - I wish I'd experienced the hallucinogens they got hold of when they came up with that one). Yes, Darwin allows us to use the likes of bash and zsh, but I'm compelled to use a MacBook for work and I still retreat inside Terminal as much as I can lest the GUI drive me to throw the damn thing out of the window.

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

The Amiga essence for me has always been the feeling that I have the computer's full attention.

Agreed, and I'll get back to that...

no random half-a-second of disk activity followed by a grudging and jerky rendering.

For better or worse, the march of technology regarding the cost of RAM and the advent of SSDs has made that issue increasingly moot.

If one program's busy you can flip to another one without fear of triggering a swap-storm and locking up the user-interface for a couple of minutes.

See above, and if we're honest we're talking about programs several orders of magnitude more complex than we were using in the classic Amiga days.

For me, as you say, the responsiveness of classic Workbench/AmigaDOS was decades ahead of the competition back in the day, and with the advent of 2.x and 3.x that was combined with an unparalleled degree of integration between the GUI and CLI (the main shortcoming of 1.x being the need for .info files to execute programs from the GUI). Create a file in an Amiga CLI shell and it was (to all intents and purposes) seamlessly and instantly visible in the GUI if you needed to access it that way - nothing else came close.

Additionally, AmigaOS felt like it was designed to be integrated in that manner from the ground up - as opposed to feeling like a GUI kludged onto a very limited CLI-based OS held together with logical gaffer tape (every version of Windows from 1.x to Me) or a GUI explicitly designed to keep even power users at arms' length from the underlying workings (every System/MacOS up until 9 - they initially tried to do the same with the first few releases of OS X).

I'll always remember feeling a bit smug visiting other geeky schoolfriends who had STs and PC compatibles back in the day and demonstrating - even on my humble expanded A500 - the ability to simultaneously run ProTracker, DPaint and AMOS Pro and flip between all of them using [Left-Amiga] + N/M - similarly the big selling point of Windows '95 for power users being pre-emptive multitasking, and pointing out we'd had that since Workbench '85 (Classic MacOS never had it).

For these reasons and many more, the Amiga will forever be the platform I first fell in love with, and even for several years after the demise of CBM it could still do many things in a more integrated and user-friendly manner than much of the competition.

That said, the march of time and technology (and we're talking 30 years since CBM collapsed) has continued, and for better or worse (even by default) modern OS interfaces have caught up and surpassed our beloved 'Miggy. Over the last few years I've got myself involved in helping out with a few projects that had had me using an emulated A1200 setup for graphical, sound and coding tasks and there have been more than a few times where shell features I've become accustomed to out-of-the-box in Bash, Zsh and even (sorry) Windows command and PowerShell were frustratingly absent in AmigaOS 3.1. Don't get me wrong, those features can be added with third-party add-ons and we're talking about an OS that was last actively updated in the mid-1990s; but it did make me question the degree to which I might have been sporting the metaphorical rose-tinted specs.

As such, while I know I will likely never experience the sense of connection and control with modern machines that I did with my Amigas, I've reluctantly accepted the tradeoff that I can do a heck of a lot more these days.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

A computer like the Amiga.

However this thread is about running an 'Amiga-like' OS on a PC - ie. a computer that is not like the Amiga.

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

The Amiga essence for me has always been the feeling that I have the computer's full attention.

You click, the computer gives immediate visual feedback...

Yes. Strange that systems a thousand times more powerful than a cheap 30 year old home computer don't seem to be able to do this.

I don't know how much of that would survive the addition of virtual memory - probably none of it if "modern" software was ported across from other platforms.

An 'Amiga-like' OS won't have virtual memory. It will tell you how much memory you have free. If an app can't get enough memory it will tell you. This won't be a problem because a modern PC has so much memory that you shouldn't run out.

it's not just the OS that would need to be Amiga-like, but also the software running under it.

Yes. Which means it should have emulation built in so we can run existing Amiga programs on it. However many Amiga apps have source code that can be recompiled to suit, provided the OS is sufficiently compatible.

I think it would need an almost monastic discipline from developers to resist the patterns of bloat that are normal on other platforms and retain the minimalist approach. The system-resource equivalent of a vow of poverty!

Don't worry, the OS will take care of this. In order to be more 'Amiga-like' it will limit the resources available to apps.

The faster the machine, the less CPU time each task will be given. So apps won't run faster on a more powerful machine, but running more in parallel won't slow it down. The number of signal bits will be limited just like they are in Amiga OS, so an app can't just spawn a hundred tasks to get around this throttling. Apps which consistently hog CPU time will change the mouse pointer into a pig, and 'oink-oink' sounds will be played while they run.

Code complexity will be limited by the maximum number of reloc entries (65535 per hunk, just like AmigaDOS). If an app tries to allocate too much memory at once it will be refused due to 'fragmentation'. If the total memory allocated by an app exceeds 120MB the next 8MB will be put in 'SlowRAM' which is forced to 3.5MB/s read/write speed. A hard limit of 128MB max will be enforced, because no Amiga had more than that so it should enough be for anyone!

Some other things this 'Amiga-like' OS should have:-

- You should be able to close down the computer by just turning it off at the wall, with no danger of corruption provided you wait for at least 2 seconds after any explicit disk writes.

- The OS should write to disk as little as possible. It should be able to run with full functionality from a write-protected drive. Using a floppy disk should not slow the machine down or impinge on multitasking. A RAM disk should be standard, but not required.

- The OS should be ROMable and not require a hard disk. You should be able to boot off a floppy and get a fully functional GUI from a single 'Workbench' disk, or run games etc. without the GUI getting in the way. Floppy detection should be automatic. The disk drive should 'click' when there is no disk in it.

- OS components should be modular and able to be replaced by the user without drama. Things like network stacks should be optional addons that are run separately when you want them.

- No hidden files or registries that store configuration info. No caching icons, combining drivers into a 'blob', or other cheats to make it run faster (that sometimes fail and make it much slower).

- The OS should run on any PC using generic drivers that give developers the ability to 'bang the hardware' (not necessarily the actual hardware, but an emulation of it like PCs did with VGA, Sound Blaster etc.).

- The GUI should be designed to look good on a 640x256 4 color screen, even on a TV in composite mode. Apps should be able to open custom screens in other resolutions that can be pulled down over each other.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by TuRRIcaNEd

I've become accustomed to out-of-the-box in Bash, Zsh and even (sorry) Windows command and PowerShell were frustratingly absent in AmigaOS 3.1. Don't get me wrong, those features can be added with third-party add-ons and we're talking about an OS that was last actively updated in the mid-1990s; but it did make me question the degree to which I might have been sporting the metaphorical rose-tinted specs.

You have it backwards. Commands lines are an anachronism that should have disappeared decades ago. The fact that we had to use the CLI to get some things done on the Amiga was a fail.

[TuRRIcaNEd]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You have it backwards. Commands lines are an anachronism that should have disappeared decades ago. The fact that we had to use the CLI to get some things done on the Amiga was a fail.

With all due respect sir, hard disagree. If a user really knows their CLI shell inside-out there are still plenty of ways in which use of a CLI can be more efficient.

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by spannernick

They should make a Windows like Amiga OS so it runs on any PC so like Amiga OS 4.2 but its Intel/AMD based so it moves it away of PPC and into mainstream OSes like Microsoft Windows or Linux so its a main OS, Amiga is to emulated now, it need a mainstream version so you can install it on any PC,
like how Apple moved OSX to use Intel CPUs so why you can run it on a PC now.

Amiga OS is to stuck in the past still and 30 years behind, it need to stop using PPC now.

More people would then use it and cheaper to buy, no need to have dedicated hardware.

We had that with amithlon. Kinda wish amithlon took off and PPC never did. I don't expect it to beat windows in terms of market share, but it'd be nice to see mid-ranged PCs sold w/ amithlon.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

However this thread is about running an 'Amiga-like' OS on a PC - ie. a computer that is not like the Amiga.

You asked what 'Amiga-like' means, so I answered.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Yes. Strange that systems a thousand times more powerful than a cheap 30 year old home computer don't seem to be able to do this.

My less than two year old peecee does this just fine and is cheaper than an Amiga was (inflation adjusted price).

[jdog320]

Originally Posted by saimon69

More or less does what JIT is doing now though

I've read somewhere that the JIT used in UAE came from amithlon. I wonder how true is this though?

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

An 'Amiga-like' OS won't have virtual memory. It will tell you how much memory you have free. If an app can't get enough memory it will tell you. This won't be a problem because a modern PC has so much memory that you shouldn't run out.

It might have virtual memory, but as an option that can easily be disabled.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- You should be able to close down the computer by just turning it off at the wall, with no danger of corruption provided you wait for at least 2 seconds after any explicit disk writes.

IMO there should be no wait at all.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- The OS should write to disk as little as possible. It should be able to run with full functionality from a write-protected drive. Using a floppy disk should not slow the machine down or impinge on multitasking. A RAM disk should be standard, but not required.

And power users at least should be able to tell what a disk access is when they see one (instead of wondering what the heck their machine is doing).

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- The OS should be ROMable and not require a hard disk. You should be able to boot off a floppy and get a fully functional GUI from a single 'Workbench' disk, or run games etc. without the GUI getting in the way. Floppy detection should be automatic.

Why requiring a floppy to boot ? One should be able to boot without any bootable media at all.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The disk drive should 'click' when there is no disk in it.

Errh, no.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- No hidden files or registries that store configuration info. No caching icons, combining drivers into a 'blob', or other cheats to make it run faster (that sometimes fail and make it much slower).

And no disguised fast startup that just reloads the whole machine's state... including the ram disk's contents !

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- The OS should run on any PC using generic drivers that give developers the ability to 'bang the hardware' (not necessarily the actual hardware, but an emulation of it like PCs did with VGA, Sound Blaster etc.).

Isn't this what we already have with emulation ?

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

- The GUI should be designed to look good on a 640x256 4 color screen, even on a TV in composite mode.

I'm afraid such a GUI would be ugly on any modern or semi-modern resolution...
But draw one that looks right in all cases (provided the differences are handled by the OS and not by the app), and i'll gladly implement it !

Originally Posted by Thorham

My less than two year old peecee does this just fine and is cheaper than an Amiga was (inflation adjusted price).

Not sure this is right when taking life duration into account. My A1200 lasted 21 years ; my first laptop only 7.