AmigaOS 3.2 and beyond

[amigo1]

Congrats to all involved! ))

Can't wait for the CD.

What I would still like to see in the future, are unified Shortcuts.

I kind of accepted the answer a while back when a developer answered to my same suggestion with a phrase along the lines of "we have to stick with the choices which had been made before us" but when I see the number of changes and the new features which have been added to OS 3.2, this is not a valid excuse.

Shortcuts can surely be changed as many things can in the system.
And to have the same keyboard shortcuts for the same function as in AmigaOS 4 does only seem logical to me. E.g. Look at the ASL requester.

And my suggestion goes even further, but I'm sure people will not like it, although there is reasoning behind it.
IMHO the keyboard shortcuts should be the same, regardless of the language setting.

[gdonner]

Originally Posted by Jope

The kickad module and the bonus code would have to be updated to support 040/060. More ROM space could be gained by deleting wb.lib from before the bootstrap modules in the ROM.

I'm not sure if the source code for the hacked 2nd exec in the bootstrap ROM still exists, but at least a relocation table for it could be manually created in order to be able to build the new ROM.

My educated guess here is that it might be feasible to have an 030/040/060 aware kickad module but the various CPUs would need matching bonuses, so your superkick file would have to be tied to a certain CPU.

Interesting! Would be great if this were indeed doable--no more obstacle(s) in the way of faster CPUs. I'd imagine all it takes is someone eager enough to try.

[Michael]

Originally Posted by amigo1

Congrats to all involved! ))

IMHO the keyboard shortcuts should be the same, regardless of the language setting.

Sadly, in current form this is impossible. Personally I would like to have two shortcuts for one function, one in default english and the other in native language, or have them switch depending on the currently active keymap layout, but this is complex to implement in current framework without braking things.

More to this, in some languages you may get shortcuts to some functions that are not available in english, but loose some shortcuts for other common functions, possibly because the shortcut was taken for something more important.

[hth313]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

I checked and there is plenty of room still (in excess of 20 KiBytes). The bonus code will fit and do its magic. Work is underway to make building the A3000-specific ROM file you would find on a regular SuperKickstart disk part of the production process.

That is great news to me, thank you for taking a look at this, and also for the desire to keep it working in the future!

[hth313]

Originally Posted by Steril707

It's hard or maybe even futile to debate this if the folklore surrounding the Amiga's inception is unimportant to you.

Me personally, I loved reading about all those quirky things that made the Amiga the Amiga back in the day.

That said, off course I am not happy about my system crashing.

But if it does crash, it makes me smile reading that "Guru Meditation at " text, remembering that little story about RJ Mical and Dave Needle sitting down on their weirdo Meditation Board to calm down after a crash and then realizing the machine I am working on was created by really amazing people, who loved what they were doing and had fun coming up with these little quirks.

For me these little things (Mac OS still has that shitty lo fi sample from back in the day on startup for instance) give character and life to something that otherwise strives to be a streamlined to the hilt experience.

That's all...

I will second this, of course it was not funny to crash the machine, but at least that little message brought some additional emotion to it. That could be annoyance that they were not so serious, but most often I could tell my Amiga friends that this and that caused a Guru, rather than a crash. Everyone knew what it was. It enriched my life every so little.

That said, it is not of significant importance, but given that the term was so special and sometimes brings a smile, knowing the origin of it, makes it a lot better than the blue screen of death (Windows) or "the bomb" (Mac). Has anyone ever heard any positive feelings about those latter two, I have not.

[malko]

Yes, BSOD is just an horrible name.
maybe they used it as a joke : "try to pronounce it 10 times quickly while eating chips"

[Predseda]

Also a lot of references to Guru, anywhere. Including Lemon:

https://www.lemonamiga.com/nonsense

[kamelito]

Originally Posted by gulliver

We are talking about this already.
Be patient, lots of things need to align.

Things are not so easy as they might seem.

Not sure if it's a 3.2 bug but in this video he's installing Picasso 96 and a driver for the Vampire and you can see that texts in the installer exceed the size of the gadget.
Start at 22'30"

[ Show youtube player ]

[mnemo]

Originally Posted by Olaf Barthel

I checked and there is plenty of room still (in excess of 20 KiBytes). The bonus code will fit and do its magic. Work is underway to make building the A3000-specific ROM file you would find on a regular SuperKickstart disk part of the production process.

That's good news (everyone). Would you already know if this could be acquired as an update download after already getting the CD-ROM?

OTOH, adding the existing bonus code to the 3.2 roms is a piece of cake.

As for the source code, this should be easy to reverse-engineer, right?

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by kamelito

Not sure if it's a 3.2 bug but in this video he's installing Picasso 96 and a driver for the Vampire and you can see that texts in the installer exceed the size of the gadget.
Start at 22'30"

[ Show youtube player ]

Thank you.

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by mnemo

That's good news (everyone). Would you already know if this could be acquired as an update download after already getting the CD-ROM?

OTOH, adding the existing bonus code to the 3.2 roms is a piece of cake.

As for the source code, this should be easy to reverse-engineer, right?

Please don't get ahead of yourself.

We spent the afternoon working on it. We were fortunate enough that a tester was there with that particular hardware willing to lend us a hand, and that the entire team was supporting this small "off-road" adventure in one way or the other.

Still, it seems there are other side-effects to look into.
Patience is the name of the game or so they say.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by Steril707

It's hard or maybe even futile to debate this if the folklore surrounding the Amiga's inception is unimportant to you.

Like everybody else, I have a peculiar personal perspective on this matter. Growing up with the software development environment in 1988/1989 made it terribly easy to crash the operating system and that has to a certain degree coloured my view of the Guru meditation/Software failure.

The "hacker nature" of the message and the fact (then not known to me, and probably hard to grasp for many other people like me) that this was a debugging aid with an interactive debugger kernel waiting to be woken up made it supremely cool and helpful. But if you didn't know its graces it was just one more station on the quest to solve a problem, and not one to be immediately helpful. Yes, there was a certain degree of frustration involved which could be traced back to a lack of ability and understanding: Amiga programming in 'C' was about as punishing as these things get. This was truly a School of Hard Knocks

But this is not about my biases. The request to bring back the Guru meditation has come so many times it's important to understand why. There is certainly more to the Amiga than what can be understood in terms of dry facts

Me personally, I loved reading about all those quirky things that made the Amiga the Amiga back in the day.

That said, off course I am not happy about my system crashing.

But if it does crash, it makes me smile reading that "Guru Meditation at " text, remembering that little story about RJ Mical and Dave Needle sitting down on their weirdo Meditation Board to calm down after a crash and then realizing the machine I am working on was created by really amazing people, who loved what they were doing and had fun coming up with these little quirks.

For me these little things (Mac OS still has that shitty lo fi sample from back in the day on startup for instance) give character and life to something that otherwise strives to be a streamlined to the hilt experience.

That's all...

Thank you! I can understand and relate to this notion, and also how important it is to you. Not only to you, as I expect.

What made the Amiga special has been central to the work we all did on AmigaOS 3.1.4/3.1.4.1 and 3.2. Its quirks and the humanity of those who made the Amiga what it is always shine through. There ought to be a place for the Guru meditation in it today, among what we already have.

[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by hth313

I will second this, of course it was not funny to crash the machine, but at least that little message brought some additional emotion to it. That could be annoyance that they were not so serious, but most often I could tell my Amiga friends that this and that caused a Guru, rather than a crash. Everyone knew what it was. It enriched my life every so little.

Thank you, I learned as much today: the humour behind the message, knowing what it means in context and the technical purpose behind it (debugging aid) is very powerful. But it was not necessarily an accessible tech at the time and would have deserved better.

That said, it is not of significant importance, but given that the term was so special and sometimes brings a smile, knowing the origin of it, makes it a lot better than the blue screen of death (Windows) or "the bomb" (Mac). Has anyone ever heard any positive feelings about those latter two, I have not.

Making you smile also counteracts the frustration that comes with seeing the system crash, doesn'it?

[Laupert]

I don't mind supporting the retailers but the waiting is killing me I have a new Amiga to set up and Amigastore haven't even shipped my copy yet. For 3.3, consider including a digital download when buying a physical copy

[daxb]

I think this should satisfy everyone who is missing the guru. Just a small collection from Aminet (search for more):

http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/NoMem
http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/PinkAlert
http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/HelloGuru10
http://aminet.net/package/game/gag/Guru

[Jope]

Originally Posted by gdonner

Interesting! Would be great if this were indeed doable--no more obstacle(s) in the way of faster CPUs. I'd imagine all it takes is someone eager enough to try.

http://aminet.net/package/util/misc/softboot331 Someone sort of did as a standalone piece of software. The comments in the source contain some further insights

When using softboot, the bonuses don't quite work the same way in terms of wb_1.3/wb_2.x partition bootpri/visibility as they do with superkick ROMs.

[Romanujan]

Since the developers want to get the feedback - here is mine


Distribution:

1. Why there is no digital download? I paid for my copy a week ago, and the parcel still hasn't been dispatched (so this feedback is based on the change log and videos on YouTube only). It's XXI century now, we typically purchase software digitally, and it is available to us few minutes after the payment, some of us do not even have the CD drive any more - I know this is a retro OS, but full distribution limited to physical CD is not a retro experience I'm missing. And please consider the environment - I'm serious.


Bigger features - I understand these might would require a lot of work, but these are the ones I'm missing:

2. Full bitmap theming of window gadgets, window title bar, screen menu - to make VisualPrefs and MagicMenu obsolete. If I understand correctly, at least some of the features are currently being worked on.
3. TrueType font support, to get rid of the 20 years old patch (TTFLib).
4. As far as I can see from the change log, there is some support for per-user file permissions, at least in some network-related code. Would it be possible to provide them in a way compatible with multiuser.library? It was a standard long time ago, and at least Directory Opus 4 can use this API.
5. Would it be possible to add a single document mode to TextEdit? I'm not a fan of the MDI.


Smaller features:

6. Would it be possible to add one more mode for TAB completion - display a file requester, like the KingCON does? IMHO KingCON has the best file name completion, ever!
7. MCP has a nice feature - tool aliasing, would it be possible to implement it? It is very useful for making old icons working properly, for example to redirect AmigaGuide -> MultiView, C:Installer -> SYS:Utilities/Installer, Ed -> TextEdit, etc.
8. Another nice MCP feature I like is a pointer blanker - mouse pointer disappears after some period of inactivity, and reappears as soon as the user moves a mouse.
9. Since the Workbench title is now customizable - would it be possible to add a clock on the workbench bar, located next to the screen cycle gadget (not as a part of the Workbench title)?
10. Would it be possible to move the system directories (ENV:, T:, CLIPS:, etc.) to a separate RAM disk, independed from the regular one? I find it irritating that they clutter my temporary space, I always create a second RAM disk for such purpose using AmberRAM.
11. Would it be possible/feasible to integrate UnixDirs3 patch? I find it very convenient.
12. There is a mess in a font selection dialog - some names start with upper case, some with lower case. Would it be possible to clean this up, and start all the font names from upper case, including Topaz? If I understand correctly, font matching is done in a case-insensitive way nevertheless.


[edit] Don't get me wrong, I do not demand the team will implement these - this is just a feedback, a dream-list I would say.

What would be nice memory optimisation. OS 3.3 (if ever), will out of the box need to support a stock Amiga, so you will have to code for low-spec machines (and assume fast-ram is not on board) but: most amiga's in use these days have MB's of fast. So give OS3.3 some configurable switch to use fast ram for almost everything.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Syntrax

What would be nice memory optimisation. OS 3.3 (if ever), will out of the box need to support a stock Amiga, so you will have to code for low-spec machines (and assume fast-ram is not on board) but: most amiga's in use these days have MB's of fast. So give OS3.3 some configurable switch to use fast ram for almost everything.

I am not sure if it is worth. If you have unexpanded Amiga, you can easily live with older OS I think.

If I would compare it to a PC, new Windows always forced its users to upgrade their hardware to benefit from the new OS.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by Syntrax

What would be nice memory optimisation. OS 3.3 (if ever), will out of the box need to support a stock Amiga, so you will have to code for low-spec machines (and assume fast-ram is not on board) but: most amiga's in use these days have MB's of fast. So give OS3.3 some configurable switch to use fast ram for almost everything.

The OS does not assume fast RAM is or is not on board, it allocates RAM intelligently according to what is available. Chip memory will not be used where fast RAM is suitable and available.