Guest post by The AROS distribution Icaros Desktop has made its next step towards compatibility with legacy Amiga workbench applications, including an entire AROS enviroment compiled for the classic Amiga platform, which is almost binary compatible with the original Amiga OS 3.1 (and its extensions). When the user needs an old program, he or she only has to fire up the AROS M68K environment and run the application. The Amiga virtual machine can optionally be set to run at startup like a system service.
Icaros’ approach to M68K software is quite different from the competing ones chosen by AmigaOS and MorphOS: while they use a JIT layer to recompile M68K opcode “on the fly” and let it call PPC libraries directly, Icaros uses the Janus-UAE emulator’s abilities to run an entire AROS session compiled for the Motorola 68000 architecture, making old applications work in a custom, virtualized Amiga computer, which can share parts of the host filesystem and clipboard to exchange data.
This approach limits access to memory areas and prevents the ability to pass pointers from an application to another to share the same data, typical for the Amiga platform. However, it improves system stability.
Janus-UAE is a special version of UAE which allows integrating guest windows in the host desktop screen, while host and guest systems can now share decorations, language, keyboard layout and other settings. There are still many issues to fix but purists, if they need a more integrated environment, can still integrate Amiga Forever on their Icaros computer like they did before.
The new version 1.4.5 of the distribution also includes many bug fixes and new applications. There are three gems: Cinnamon Writer word processor, still young but truly Amiga-inspired, the classic Turrican remake “Hurrican”, which makes use of AROS’ Gallium 3D implementation, and the spreadsheet program Ignition, working under the M68K environment. People who liked creating games with AMOS on their old Amiga 500 will be happy to see both AMOS Pro and X-AMOS bundled with the distribution.
That’s AWESOME! I loved working with AMOS back in the early-to-mid 90’s. Francoise Lionet was/is a genius – he and his crew made a wonderfully accessible and powerful programming language for the Amiga. I spent many, many, many hours designing games in AMOS. Fun stuff!
That’s nice but I have a question: Other than nostalgia what is the point?
I mean I can understand why you’d want Amiga back in the day, with its specialized chips it was a multimedia monster in an age where a 30 FPS 320×240 video on anybody else was frankly impossible.
But why now? what does Amiga offer that the others don’t? You don’t have the killer specialized hardware anymore since everyone uses the same bog standard stuff, it frankly can’t hold a candle to a modern Windows, OSX, or Linux when it comes to multitasking, so other than nostalgia what is the appeal?
Not trying to troll, and if anybody was waiting for this please do enjoy it, i’m just trying to understand what the appeal is here. I mean I get maybe firing up a VM once in a while just to relive memories, but what is the point of completely rebuilding a long dead OS like this?
Of course nostalgia is part of it… The Amiga was probably the most widespread and popular computing platform to ever suffer total commercial failure (thanks to Commodore’s mismanagement), so obviously there are a lot of people who don’t want to let it go. (The inclusion of software like AMOS Pro and Hurrican says something about this too.)
But, more than that… It’s an alternative. Rational or not, some of us are attracted to the different, the offbeat. We don’t think it should be the destiny of every OS to someday grow up and become a Unix or Linux spinoff. That applies not only to AROS and Icaros Desktop, but also Haiku, Syllable, etc.
Also, it’s small. Linux (at least in the mainstream distros) has followed the path of Windows and Mac OS X, and bloated out into a multi-gigabyte monster. It’s really too much of a good thing. I feel like if an OS can’t fit on a CD-R, it tells me something has gone way, way off track.
Hate to rain on your parade. I am an enthusiastic Icaros user and a longtime Linux user. But, the Icaros 1.4.5 iso is 2.5GBs in size. That will hardly fit on a CD-R.
Well, it’s an 800 MB download…. I guess they must have a lot of compression going on there!
I have to really wonder what’s taking up all that space. This is supposed to be a near-clone of Amiga OS, right? I remember when Amiga OS came on six 880K floppy disks (not counting the Kickstart ROM!). I know AROS has got a lot of additional stuff: dev kit (it was available separately for Amiga OS), a TCP/IP stack, email, web browser… not to mention AMOS Pro, Hurrican and various other apps… and drivers… but still. How did it get this big?
Yes. That’s 7zip magic: about 1/3rd of the real size.
Easy. Download the distribution, mount the ISO somewhere, and use one of those apps that evaluate directory sizes.
Did the original 6x880k disks include a spreadsheet, a word processor, a couple of text editors, a data base, three different music trackers, a music composer, a multi-track audio editor, twenty games, emulators for about every old computer and gaming systems, a dozen of programming languages, tons of development tools and libraries, two internet browsers, many chat and mail clients, three full PDF manuals, an audio/video media player, a CD/DVD burning application, DirectoryOpus, and dozens of artistry stuff like pointers and wallpapers? I don’t remember…
Edited 2012-07-23 08:46 UTC
No, AROS is NOT a near clone of OS 3.1. The Amiga OS 3.1 API has been ported to AROS in an effort to make porting old Amiga 68K hardware-friendly programs to AROS x86 easier. AROS goes way beyond OS 3.1 in its hardware 3D support and for the support of other modern pieces of hardware. Hardware friendly apps from OS 3.1 can pretty much be recompiled as-is or with minimal changes and then run on AROS.
Sure it is, can be easily described like that. Just like Linux is a Unix clone, the underlying tech doesn’t need to be exactly the same. But the characteristics (including limitations) were carried over fairly closely.
(which I actually like to a degree, for example with how AROS feels most like classic Amiga OS to me also WRT to GUI; other OS efforts seem to fancy out their GUI for no good reason, sometimes even seemingly without much of a direction)
Icaros Desktop Live! is more than a operating system, it’s a distribution. A full desktop environment. The OS itself is some MBs big and may fit on a 3.5″ CD-R, while Icaros’ Light version, which is “the OS + mandatory programs” (like a browser, a media player, the janus emulator and a little more), barely fits into a 700 MB CD.
You’ll get no arguments from me, paolone. You’re doing a fantastic job on Icaros. It just keeps getting better and better, with more features each time it’s released. Being able to run original Amiga 68K apps on current x86 hardware is something I’d never have believed possible. But, it is!
Putting the blame on Commodore misses the reality of the situation (well, not uncommon in later ~Amiga movements…) – look at this graph http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ (and the next 6), there was nothing C= could do against such onslaught (except maybe adopting large part of Amiga tech for the PC, as an add-on card for gfx & audio; but that would be heresy to many Amigans)
The Amiga architecture, what gave it its strengths in the heyday, also severely limited its progress – the tightly integrated hardware made the improvement process more expensive (and it wasn’t spread among many companies), slower. Plus, with software mostly targeting the configuration that everybody had, hardly anybody saw reason to upgrade – Amiga never really managed to move beyond the A500 generation of hardware, it remained the baseline for most of its users till the end.
Complicating things was how this very console-like dynamics didn’t have a matching economic model (like with Atari 2600, video game crash of 1983 – curiously, C= largely brought this one, seems they didn’t really realize what they did in 83). The hardware prices were expected to go down, profits were falling, and meanwhile C= wasn’t able to extract money from dev houses – because they didn’t have control over them as a gatekeeper, what for example Nintendo did back then. So yeah, with how Amiga was, there perhaps was a way to keep it afloat – but you probably wouldn’t like it (copied games collections were so much nicer…), and it would need to be done at the very beginning anyway: by early 90s, the cat was long out of the bag.
PC started off worse, but could be more readily expanded, and it swamped everything else with its economies of scale – it just turned out to be a more optimal model of doing things, a more sensible approach (look at present “Amigas” – they are just PCs really, only with weird CPU for no good reason)
It tells me something has really gone way, way off track when it’s OK if an OS can’t reliably recover from misbehaving applications. Or has no security model to speak of (yes, various ~Amiga operating systems are virtually immune due to being maybe few thousand active users; still, it was more the qualities of design).
And, meanwhile, most of the present useful software are ports from the PC operating systems… (which can be also very small, if you care about it and don’t include many goodies which aren’t strictly part of the OS)
Just like MorphOS, the point is that you can have an Amiga-like system on modern hardware. AROS includes 3D hardware acceleration via GAllium 3D with all the eye-candy we’ve come to expect from late generation nVidia hardware as well as all the other niceties that we’ve come to enjoy from low-cost, modern hardware. As I said in an earlier post, that’s the whole point of AROS. AROS wasn’t designed to re-live the glory days of 68K Amigas. If you want to do that, go and buy a classic 68K Amiga system or use one of the UAE variants under Windows or Linux. But until AROS gets broader software support, especially office apps, then 68K emulation will just have to be a stop-gap until that support improves. We need native x86 AROS native versions of Ignition (spreadsheet), and a few other tools before AROS is ready for everyday use.
Edited 2012-07-23 02:45 UTC
For me the whole point of the Amiga was its hardware.
What we were able to do with clever 68000 Assembly coding coupled with the Paula, Denise and Agnus chipsets.
No emulator is going repeat this type of experience. For those of us that used to do this, the operating system was just a mean to get to the hardware.
Nowadays time is better spend doing clever tricks with GPGPU/Shader and audio DSP programming.
On the other hand, we really need more operating system models besides the Windows/UNIX duality that we get on the desktop.
It doesn’t really use very thoroughly the niceties of inexpensive hardware, the most crucial modern example of those being the MMU unit of the CPU… (for “modern” = “already standard two+ decades ago”; nvm multicore).
It very much relives the old days (also some not very glorious parts).
AmigaOS made some real magic when hardware resources were scarce. At the times of first Pentium and Athlon processors I often asked myself how a low-footprint OS like AmigaOS would have performed on such CPUs, since it performed so well on a <10 MHz processor. I embraced the AROS project short after its birth because I felt it could give me an answer. And that’s my motivation.
I perfectly know the world has changed so much in the meanwhile. We’ve now multi core processors, multi CPU motherboards, hybrid architectures like APUs and all the power a GPU can give, not only with graphics. So now my new curiosity is about how Amiga can deal with all this, and once again AROS can give me the answers (although current stable branch supports just 1 CPU and has no OpenCL support yet, multicore stuff is in the works).
Moreover, I grew up with the Amiga in the first 90s and loved its OS: there are many little habits I couldn’t simply find in “mainstream OSes”, so if I can have a way to continue with them, performing about the same tasks I can do with other alternatives, why shouldn’t I?
There’s a “problem” (not really, just from an elegance point of view) when that means bringing over things which made it nice back then, which very much made sense, but just don’t fit modern times…
I’m guessing that proper memory protection will come right around the time of ditching silicon for something else, in chips.
Overall, the answer to “how would have performed” is perhaps that it really doesn’t, that is sort of outside context – it’s not any more an Amiga (a limited but very tightly coupled hardware and software; with some sacrifices in that elegance and purist correctness in the latter, for the sake of efficiency)
And most other OS can be also quite small, when not looking at the size of whole distribution ( http://www.osnews.com/permalink?527819 ).
Edited 2012-07-28 00:03 UTC
Remember, AROS started in what was basically still mid-90s, when the memory was fresh. And then they managed to keep tinkering with it – good for them, I’d say (considering how many ~hobby OS died along the way).
But at least AROS seems the least crazy out of all ~Amiga projects, it mostly realizes its place – while some other camps sometimes seemed to behave and express like they’re just those few steps away from taking back the world.
And 30 FPS 320×240 video? I don’t think that was possible on pretty much anything-consumer (and was brought largely by PCs, later) – CDXL had considerably lower resolution and framerate, plus very limited colour palette.
unless you meant animation, but that’s a bit distinct (and, within different gfx styles, some other machines could do it too)
I’ve been using the latest version of Icaros Desktop for the past couple of days now. The new coherency mode that allows you to run 68K apps just like they’re native AROS apps was a bit touchy getting it configured properly. But once it’s set up properly it works great. It’s awesome to see a native 68K application such as Ignition open up on its own window in the same manner as a native AROS app.
If things keep improving at the current pace I think Icaros Desktop will be ready for everyday use in a few months. It just needs more native apps and broader hardware support. A fully functional AROS port port of Ignition and a Flash player would go a long way in making Icaros useful for everyday tasks.
>integrating Amiga Forever from Cloanto into Icaros installations has been the only way to get a perfect compatibility with older AmigaOS applications
You don’t need Amiga Forever nor AROS for this.
AROS is still missing large chunks of functionality. Eg. the standard GUI since 1999 is ReAction, this is not supported at all by AROS, neither are OS3.5/3.9 API calls.
WinUAE+OS3.9 still provides the best compatibility. I’m not sure why anyone would want to run AROS instead.
Because of the ‘win’ bit of winUAE?
Most of the Amiga users I know are happy Windows users.
Maybe it helps that at least in the demoscene no one cares about open source.
Edited 2012-07-21 20:10 UTC
Mmm… I don’t think so. Mac always was the 2nd platform of Amiga users. The use of PowerPC isn’t casual.
Personally, I prefer AROS to WinUAE any day. I can run Icaros under VMware Fusion without paying any Windows license.
Only for Amiga users with deep pockets that did not play games or program.
In Europe the Mac was bloody expensive. Usually costing twice as much as the PCs.
Plus I never saw a Mac at a Demoscene party, nor in one of the demomags I used to read.
The first time I saw a Mac live, it was a Macintosh LC in my first university year back in 1994, as there were a few models available for the students.
On the IT department only a few teachers had them, the students were using PCs with UNIX, Linux and MS-DOS/Windows 3.x/Windows 95.
Edited 2012-07-22 07:38 UTC
In most places where Amiga was really big, Macs hardly existed in the past, largely still hardly exist now.
And yeah, the use of PPC wasn’t casual – it was an irrational hatred of everything-Wintel, clouding judgement and blocking most sensible paths. “Of course PPC is better, Apple uses them” ended up funny with Apple Intel transition.
Meanwhile, Amithlon was, in its time, by far the fastest Amiga ever… (it probably still would be, if able to run on most recent hardware; and IIRC it even offered smooth migration path, with x86 apps & libs able to seamlessly run along 68k ones) …but of course it had to be killed, some marginal companies wouldn’t be able to ride on & exploit the nostalgia.
WinUAE offshots for *nix don’t require Windows…
Somehow the UAE version with “Win” is the one furthest along …and a source of its similarly mature forks for other platforms; probably why “WinUAE” not “UAE” is a fairly common description.
But let me guess, you also avoid AROS at all due to x86 part (or Amithlon in the past – the fastest Amiga back then, probably still if it was kept alive, and offering a smooth migration – IIRC, x86 apps and libs could run along the 68k ones; yeah, there were legal issues, but likewise with OS4).
Hell… why do you call present Amiga computers “Amiga”? They are basically PCs, just with uncommon CPUs for no good reason. And most of present software making them semi-useful are ports of PC stuff.
Somehow you’ve comploetely missed the entire point of AROS. AROS was never intended to be another way to emulate Amiga 68K software. AROS is a reimplementatin of Amiga OS 3.1 on modern hardware with new extensions that allow AROS users to have all the things they’d expect from a modern system, such as 3D hardware acceleration using Gallium3D.. The article was just stating that if you want to emulate Amiga 68K software under AROS, it’s now seamless. Stop trolling.
Are you serious about Reaction? Has there been any 68k programs that actually require Reaction except the ones that are bundled with AmigaOS3.9 (and 3.5?)?
I have been running AmigaOS3.1 on my A1200 lately and don’t think I stumbled on a single program that requires Reaction.
Obviously you haven’t looked at Aminet if you think there is no ReAction software available…
Standard, de facto GUI for Amiga OSes has ever been MUI. The ReAction path has been followed and endorsed by Hyperion, but most applications – even “NG” ones – use MUI and can be supported by AROS’ Zune MUI clone.
double post without quotes
Edited 2012-07-23 22:22 UTC
Good point, MUI has been king since the 90s. Does this count for OS 4.x apps as well though? I was under the impression MUI was now a MorphOS/AROS(Zune) thing and that OS 4 didn^A't get support?
Might be totally off the mark though, as I only keep an eye on AROS of the NG platforms nowadays.
OS4 does have a native port of MUI which is distributed with it, but it’s not the “standard” toolkit. You’ll find that most OS4-only programs are Reaction-based, whereas programs which are ported from other Amiga-ish platforms tend to use MUI. Also, if you’re writing some software for OS4 or any of the platforms and want to port it to the others, your best bet is to start with MUI as it’s common across AROS, Morphos, OS4 and classic.
Yes, this does count for OS 4.x too. People, who want to write software that will run on OS 4.x only, will probably use ReAction; people who try to make their applications “cross-compatible” between (and available on) all Amiga “heirs” will prefer MUI. Efforts are in progress to bring AROS’ Zune to the same features level of MUI 3.8, in order to enhance this side of compatibility as well.
Well, not really. I write ReAction based software, and it works fine on OS3.9, OS4 and MorphOS. The only platform that it won’t run on is AROS. Suggesting I completely rewrite the GUI just for AROS wouldn’t make much sense under those circumstances, it would be better just to add ReAction support to AROS.
I loved my Amiga back in the day and Aros is a nice homage to Amiga. But, anyone who wishes to try it out I wish them the best of luck. The driver situation is horrible. Not that this is their fault, per say. But there are very few drivers for anything even remotely out on the market. Finding compatible pieces of hardware takes great care, and lots of ebay. I wish anyone wishing to build an Aros box the best of luck.
I think you’re being overly critical of the hardware support. Sure it’s narrow in scope, but so is Apple’s hardware support or any other alternative non-*nix OS for that matter. Right now I have Icaros Desktop running on a Dell D800 laptop and everything is fully supported. Sure, I had to buy a different wireless card but that only cost me a whopping $6 USD.
Well, you can always improve it by writing some missing drivers. Quite annoying answer, I know, but absolutely legitimate with a open source project. Anyway, I don’t think that finding an AGP or PCI Express GeForce card (from 5xxx-era to Fermi), any SATA board able to run the controller in IDE emulation mode, a SB 128 or Live! card and a RTL8029/8139/8169 card would be so difficult, at least no more than buying a wi-fi card supported by our Atheros5000.device. You don’t even need eBay since many people around you may have the needed components laying somewhere in a unused PC. Situation with notebooks may be thougher, however any 2nd hand netbook from the first Atom platform era should be fine. My Acer Aspire One A150 has practically re-born when I installed Icaros over it. I can browse the web in less time than Windows XP needed to boot up the system, not counting loading Firefox.