New Beta for Icaros Desktop available

My personal favorite distro of AROS is Icaros Desktop, mostly because it was first, and updated with many features and has been consistently stable and came in a virtual machine format for easy testing.

Paolo Besser, creator of this distro has just annouced Easter-weekend preview of 2.3.0, but he’s limiting it to patreon supporters or dedicated beta testers. The announcement list here specifies why.  Apparently, it has to do with his pledge to no longer release buggy betas to the public.  I think he’s done a lot of work for the AROS / AmigaNG community so I applaud the move.

Link –> here<–

A quick way to get into AROS development

With AROS’s x86 (and also x64 multi-processor version), porting cpu-heavy apps or creating new ones may be more doable than other variants (no knock against 68060/vampire or PowerPC users, but even those are still not nearly as powerful as the Intel/AMD machines that AROS can run on).

But how to start developing?  Well, the distributor for IcarosDesktop (paolone), has put together a virtual machine image of an Ubuntu distro with the AROS development system already set up.

I’ve downloaded it and will try my hand at it soon.  Requires VM Workstation, VMPlayer or even VirtualBox to get started.

The first Amiga NextGen OS to support 64bit native architecture and multi-cores: AROS

Well, if there was a race to see which of the Amiga-flavors of OS would support both SMP (multiple processor cores) and 64bit architecture, along with the extra RAM afforded by 64bit addressing, it was won by AROS. Check out the video below:

Places to find Games for NextGen Amiga (and Amiga-like systems)

Well, for anyone looking to get into some games and aren’t necessarily looking to run the classic Amiga games, here are a few sources to check out:

AROS
AROS playground has several ports for AROS. Check them out –> here <–

MorphOS
A user named BSzili has done many ports of games for both AROS and MorphOS. –> Here

AmigaOS4.x
Someone name HunoPPC has been porting quite a number of games to the latest Amiga OS. Check out his site –> here here

And don’t forget to check the software archive locations I mentioned in an earlier post.

So, one became four… the fracturing of Amiga

When I left the Amiga-scene in 1998, there was only a single OS that we used: Classic 68k Amiga OS. Sure, proDad tried to make pOS. I remember the pre-release, but it seemed to be highly dependent upon the kickstart ROMs.

I kept an eye out on AROS, then later, I read that 3.5 and then 3.9 were coming out. I played with UAE from it’s first PC version even when it was really “Unusable”.

Well, now we have:

Classic Amiga OS (currently sitting at 3.9 with 2 official boing bag expansions and 2 unofficial ones)

AROS in many flavors (I prefer Icaros which is at 1.5.x) for many architectures, primarily x86 for super-speed

MorphOS (currently 3.4) for classic Amigas with PPC accelerators, bPlan’s Pegasos 1 and 2 and lots of ppc mac’s

Amiga OS4 (currently 4.1r6), supporting classic PPC accelerators, bPlans’s Peg 2, SAM 440/460 and A-Eon x1000

(It’s worth noting that various distro’s of AROS support ARM (raspberry Pi, classic AGA Amigas, and maybe a few other platforms, but I’m focusing on x86 as it appears to be most mature).

Classic Amiga OS does seem to not only have a life on original Classic Amigas, the the expansions that are available are limited. Besides some accelerators that top out at MIPS ratings that are a decade behind current PC/Mac hardware, a few amiga-specific hardware as well as PCI adapters, the future of classic Amiga can be found in either emulation or related technologies.

I’ve used WinUAE and it makes for amazingly fast Amiga systems, but it’s hard not to know it’s running on top of Windows. Back in the early 2000’s, there was a pathway to lead to migration to x86 hardware via Amithlon, but the litigious nature of Amiga-land let to that becoming derailed. I have an old laptop running Amithlon and it “feels” more like a real amiga than any emulation. I’ll make a post on that machine soon.

AROS is probably a great, long-term path for Amiga users, and will probably be the first to have multi-processor support, as well as the power to handle ports of high-end games and apps from other systems. However, it’s slow to advance. AROS has been in the works since the mid 90’s and is only recently feeling like a good, working system. Maybe I need to spend more time testing it.

MorphOS is a great alternative and, apart from AROS, is the most easy to get started with. Whereas AROS involves nearly any old PC hardware and a burned ISO, MorphOS can be run on cheap, used mac hardware, which can be found on ebay for less than $100 USD. It’s fully working for 30 minutes at a time, is very much structured like classic Amiga OS and supports newer tech like USB and even the fastest PPC Apple machines made, and also runs classic 68k software natively and can even run WarpOS games made for Amiga PPC accelerators. It also sports the most advanced webbrowser right now in the Amiga world.

Amiga OS4.x is limited to hard-to-find and expensive hardware and appears to be maturing slowly. However, they recently implemented over-the-internet live updates, have ports of QT, X11 servers, a new Amiga Java client, and many more software packages that make life a little easier. No downloadable demos of their OS though.

I think it was a mistake for Hyperion not to try to get wider distribution by supporting older apple hardware like MorphOS but I’m sure they have their reasons.

It’s hard to tell now which OS will come out on top or if we start seeing some merging or some dropping out. However, there are lots of available paths to take, depending on your needs and your means. Personally, I have a classic machine (a 1200 tower in progress), an amithlon laptop, a PowerBook G4 (MorphOS) and 2 AmigaOne machines (AmigaOS4.0 and 4.1). I hope to make an older tower into a dual-boot Amithlon/AROS machine and start whittling down my collection.

Which path did you follow?