28 May 2018, 02:02 | #1 |
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What's the deal with NG Amiga OS's?
OK, right up front, for the love of god, please don't let this degrade into a thread about technicalities over hardware. Even though I used to love fiddling with hardware, have tried to get into FPGA's and have built my own GBA, at the moment the hardware arguments over technicalities and instruction sets etc. bore me to tears (apologies to those that love that stuff - I still read and for the most part understand it, I just can't feel it right now).
Over the last few weeks I've played a bunch with Aros and Morphos. I've built Aros from scratch and hope to take it further and I've tried the latest 3.10 version of Morphos and was really rather impressed*. Two things puzzle me however.
I'm kind of struggling on what makes these Next Gen and / or the desired way forward?? Beyond the "I quite like this" I'm a bit stuck what I should be getting so excited about once I've got each up and running and skinned / themed them to my liking? But I am in limbo a bit at the moment and sort of looking for a new hobby. Like I say, I'm kind of tired of the hardware side. I have a tonne of stuff here. Various computers and a LOT of arcade hardware, not to mention that my eyesight isn't what it was and I have to resort to huge magnifying glasses in order to solder. I very much feel the urge to get into a hobby that get's creative with what's around me rather than amassing more. But I don't have a specific software project in mind. My job kind of sucks the life out of me with having bright ideas on that front. *Impressed I may be, but I'm STILL reluctant to shell out the asking price for the license when it is locked to hardware that is known to be a bit rubbish (ATI Radeon with 32MB of video RAM), especially now it is no secret that the Morphos team are moving towards targeting x86 at some point and presumably then my money would be spent on already obsolete hardware. |
28 May 2018, 05:56 | #2 | ||
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AROS is not compatible at API level with AOS 3.1- funtions form os exist but they are not tested and do ditterent things than original AOS 3.1. Amiga NG is compatible, functions form os exists, they are tested and do what they are do on 3.x; Plus You can use 68k library in ppc code. Quote:
On ppc only program code is emulated, os is not emulated and system calls run full speed on ppc. On mac mini 68k software run faster than on my i7. If someone have old pc, old mac mini will be cheaper than upgrade to for ex i7 to and give better results. |
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28 May 2018, 07:47 | #3 | |
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The 68k emulation (at least in the case of OS4 and MOS) is built into the system, so you can simply run a 68k binary as you would a native one. The process is quite transparent. You only need to run an actual emulator program (UAE) if you also need to access the chipset (again something that is missing from the new systems on a hardware level, so it has to be emulated). This would be most games, as most of them don't use the system libraries for accessing the hardware (for obvious performance reasons). |
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28 May 2018, 08:59 | #4 |
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It seems anything that runs on something other than 680x0 is referred to as "NG".
However it's rather meaningless because AROS, for example, is supposed to be one of these "NG" operating systems, yet nearly two decades later they haven't even implemented OS3.9 levels of functionality, let alone OS4.0/4.1. It would be like if I wrote a clone of Windows 95 and called it the "Next Generation Windows OS". MorphOS is not much better in this regard either. |
28 May 2018, 10:14 | #5 | ||||||
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When it comes to emulation, MorphOS and OS4 have an inline 68K emulator that works very well to run system-friendly 68K software while using the NG API. This is much faster than emulating the entire machine, and means much better integration - 68K programs don't look or feel any different to PPC programs, and aren't isolated from the system, which allows things like seamless ARexx usage and drag'n'drop between 68K and PPC applications. Think Rosetta on OSX Leopard. It's a very, very different experience to running a virtual machine. Quote:
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Perhaps you could help out with the AROS project, or porting open-source frameworks and applications to any of the NG systems. Quote:
Anyway, the bottom line is that you should choose a hobby that makes you happy. If you genuinely don't see any appeal to the whole NG area, even after spending some time with them, then that's fine. Stick with classic, which is still well catered for in both hardware and software terms. |
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28 May 2018, 10:35 | #6 | |
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http://aros.sourceforge.net/document...rs/roadmap.php |
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28 May 2018, 11:49 | #7 |
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OK, that's interesting indeed. So I think it may be time to register MorphOS (if that's what you're referring to?) to get rid of the time limit and dig a bit deeper into this then.
I have a great 68060/100Mhz system with PII++ card but the monitor and screens are always still a pain. The Mac Mini goes so much easier with a modern LCD. @Daedalus - a great response with a lot of detail, thanks. I'm going to re-read it in a bit but I think I mostly get the gist of it. In particular I think I now understand what the different NG's do and don't do in regard to the APIs and if I understood then if I took something (or created something) that was 100% compatible with the OS API calls from (say) 3.1 then it should either just build or not require too much in the way of changing to get to build on any of the NG's? Just to go back to the Mac mini and MorphOS again, I think my biggest issue is that I have an A1200 and a GBA if I want to purely play games so while the Mini is a great machine I have a tendency to steer towards things that the other two machines can't do and then I start to hit the limits of that 32MB of video ram. MorphOS feels to me like it could do with some better hardware than the Mini but then we hit the expensive hardware problem again. I'm very likely to jump on an A1222 assuming they see the light of day. I do like OS4.1 (and did buy a copy), I just don't like running it emulated. |
28 May 2018, 12:49 | #8 |
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I think one problem is the term "Next/New Generation".
All three are either vintage and/or outdated themselves from a todays perspective or never reached a "production level" status, like AROS. Trying to stay more or less compatible to the original API and trying to offer a experience that is very close to that of the classic Amiga is both: goal and burden at the same time. that's why the other thread (the boring API, ISA and so one discussion) tried to rise the question what a modern system might look like and if that would be still Amigaoid. Probably not, as everybody has his/her very own definition what makes an Amiga and what features are essential and what not.... From the mentioned trio AOS4, MOS and AROS, i think the last one has the biggest potential, as it can run native (and hosted) on modern hardware and different architectures ... Sadly it is missing developers and general interest and the overall experience can be quite frustrating - for users and developers alike A couple of years ago there was a big AROS bug-fixing and code-cleanup effort, that improved usability greatly and was a success ... but sadly not a lasting thing. I hope this can be repeated for ABIv1 in not so far future. |
28 May 2018, 13:28 | #9 |
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I've not done much with any of these yet as you've seen, but something from my experience with MOS this weekend that would benefit Aros greatly is the development setup. They have a nice IDE now called Flow Studio and I can't stress enough how good it felt to just install the latest SDK, bring up that IDE start a new project and 2 minutes later there is a fully working Hello World complete with Makefile and debugger support. I didn't do anything much apart from a few mouse clicks and type the lines of code.
That has to be a win surely? |
28 May 2018, 14:06 | #10 |
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At least definitive guide how to setup a working development environment for AROS would be great. Along with overall better documentation and tutorials.
And than there is the whole ABIv0 vs. ABIv1 disaster. Many things are fixed/improved in ABIv1 but back porting has a very low priority ... most devs are on v1 anyways ... so v0 (were most or all distros are) is somewhat left out in the rain. So just go on AROS-people: make the jump! set v0 as "deprecated" and move everything to v1 - experimental stuff can go in a new v2. But there seems to be nobody who could even make such a decision .... |
28 May 2018, 14:13 | #11 | |
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28 May 2018, 14:27 | #12 |
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Thats a fair point. And I have to say, another reason for not registering this G4 mini yet. I'm tempted to go off and see if I can pick up a G5 tower. There's a company locally doing a refurbished one with a warranty but it's bit overpriced (not much, but it's certainly nearly double the 100€ mark). I could always end up modding the case and using it for my Hackintosh
I have to say, I'm more and more impressed by MOS now. I've just brought it downstairs and connected it to my main monitor which is a 2560x1080 ultra-wide. So I have MOS running 'picture-by-picture' next to my main laptop and using synergy as the mouse / keyboard client so only one keyboard / mouse. That's pretty slick I have to say. |
28 May 2018, 15:27 | #13 |
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You can pick up a G5 2.7ghz monster for about £70 if you search around. That's what I did. It's a cheap way to experiment with MOS.
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28 May 2018, 17:26 | #14 |
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Are the G5 towers very noisy? Looks like there's a lot of fans in there!
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28 May 2018, 17:33 | #15 |
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Not especially. It's quieter when running OSX as the fan throttling works correctly. Under MOS it's a little louder as I don't think the OS quite knows what to do with the fans with only one CPU working. It's not loud, but it's not anywhere close to silent.
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28 May 2018, 17:35 | #16 |
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OK, that makes sense. I thought the G4 mini was quite quiet until I shut it down :P
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28 May 2018, 17:46 | #17 | ||
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29 May 2018, 12:10 | #18 | ||
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For the moment I think I'll stick with the Mini and just keep my eye out. Key is to get into doing something with it first I think. Quote:
I tried 3.9 last year and having working wireless was a major improvement (I may have tried a version in between too?). This time I themed it to make it more Amiga-like (don't shoot me!) but ultimately didn't do anything with it. 3.10 seems to be a lot more polished. I don't think I've had any problems with it at all and like I say, Flow Studio is very nice icing on the cake so this time I'm going to try and stick with it. |
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29 May 2018, 12:18 | #19 | |
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But it would fail. It looks like it was down to the combination of binutils and GCC version. Ultimately 'system' build with gcc 6.3.0 and the default binutils. It wasn't until after I thought to look in the official build logs to see what their configure setup was. For some reason if I try to compile with the binutils they are using, it fails to build. I guess there's something wrong on my end. And the default GCC (4.x) is fundamentally broken with the version of texinfo that installs on Ubuntu. Then there's contrib. Damned if I can get that to build. It fails in one of the supporting port packages. Both on i386 and x64. Don't know why yet because it doesn't on the build server. Would be so much easier if someone could just supply pre-built cross compilers. The good news is that what did build of contrib works better than last time I tried it. No crashes this time except in the 'Galaxy' demo. |
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29 May 2018, 14:36 | #20 | ||
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That's the people OS4, MorphOS and AROS were targetting. But these projects came too late, delivered too little or got stuck in bullshit legal battles - the target audience simply vanished in the meantime and the niche one of these system could have maybe occupied is gone. Quote:
OS4 is dead, AROS was never really alive and MorphOS is making some impressive progress (there are lots of hints they're working on a x86/x64 port), but software development for it died down years ago as well. |
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