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The Amiga, Circa 2010 — Dead and Loving It
Orion Blastar writes "While many Amiga users have moved on to Linux, Mac OS X, and even, gasp shock, Microsoft Windows, some of us don't want to give up so easily. There are two open source projects that are keeping the Amiga legacy alive even if Amiga Inc. seems to be deader than a doornail and not really doing much but selling old Classic Amiga games for new platforms. Like WINE, there was a project to run AmigaOS 3.1 software for Linux and other platforms, but it evolved instead into an open source operating system named Amiga Research OS, or AROS. AROS is best run inside an emulator, and while it is not a modern OS like Linux, it can be downloaded and run inside of Linux (and the downloads section has more). While it is not ready for prime time yet, it is a promising OS that is being ported to many platforms and uses the user friendly Amiga GUI we Amiga users grew up with." Read on for more.
"OK — maybe AROS is not modern enough for you, and you like Linux instead. Then you might like Anubis OS, as it is a hybrid of AROS and Linux. Much like when Apple took NextStep (based on *BSD Unix and the MACH kernel) and the classic Mac OS to make Mac OS X, this project wants to take Linux and AROS and do the same thing.
For those who want the classic Amiga, there is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, which needs kickstart ROMs and boot disk images to work. You can buy them from Amiga Forever; the emulator comes with all the files you need plus other goodies.
For the classic Amiga 68K series, it is recreated via the Minimig, which uses SD cards instead of floppy disks; a must for retro computer hobbyists. AmigaOS 4.1 exists for PowerPC based SAM 440EP systems like the SAM 440Ep systems and parts sold here. (I am not associated with Amiga Kit or Amiga Inc. or any Amiga company. I am just an Amiga user since 1985 and very much into retro computing.)"
For those who want the classic Amiga, there is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, which needs kickstart ROMs and boot disk images to work. You can buy them from Amiga Forever; the emulator comes with all the files you need plus other goodies.
For the classic Amiga 68K series, it is recreated via the Minimig, which uses SD cards instead of floppy disks; a must for retro computer hobbyists. AmigaOS 4.1 exists for PowerPC based SAM 440EP systems like the SAM 440Ep systems and parts sold here. (I am not associated with Amiga Kit or Amiga Inc. or any Amiga company. I am just an Amiga user since 1985 and very much into retro computing.)"
..Year of the Amiga Desktop
. .
The 1960's: "I was at Woodstock!"
The 1980's: "I had an Amiga!"
There are a number of reasons why the Amiga could run so well using a 50MHz processor or slower.
1) The OS used a flat memory model. The entire address space of the 680x0 looked the same to all processes. So there was no slowdown doing page table translations on a per process basis.
2) Every process could read and write to every other process's memory. One process could pass a memory pointer to a second process, which would then have direct read-write access to every data structure the first one had. No having to pass huge amounts of data using semaphores or pipes.
3) The GUI was very primitive. The BOOPSI widget subsystem was about as bare to the metal as you could get. Even extensions such as ClassAct/ReAction were very minimalistic. That made it very fast.
Of course, that all comes with a price.
1) The flat open memory model meant that any sort of malicious software could eavesdrop on any other memory location without bother. Stealing passwords or silently copying data from your word processor? No problem!
2) That same memory model meant that any program could go outside of its bounds and trash any other program in memory, including the kernel. That's why Amigas tended to crash more often than even Windows 95 boxes.
3) Memory fragmentation was horrible because the OS had no form of garbage collection. You couldn't move allocation blocks around in memory because there was no form of abstraction, either using Win32 style handles or virtual memory pages.
4) No memory tracking / garbage collection. If a process closed without freeing memory, it was gone forever. After a while, you'd run out of memory and would have to reboot.
5) Every modern widget toolkit around today, including Qt, GTK+ and Cocoa, generally make BOOPSI look absolutely prehistoric. Try doing any sort of raster or Unicode based apps under AmigaOS. You'd probably have to write your own BOOPSI extensions to get what you want.
6) You would have hit the 4GB limit of the 68020/030/040 much faster had the platform remained around unaltered. That's because every process would share that space. With OSes like OS X, BSD and Windows, each process gets its own 4GB (~3GB after kernel reservations) to play around in.
Yeah. Even your mobile phone has an OS with better memory management and UI functionality than your Amiga 4000.
Fullscreen windows. Why slide them up and down when you can switch with Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab. Also check out Virtual desktops, you might like them.
It's difficult to compare with modern operating systems, but the sliding windows were really clever. Each screen could be a completely different resolution with a different colour map and screen format. If you Alt-Tab between full-screen applications of different resolutions, you can still only see one at a time. With the Amiga, you could see all of them at once. For example, if you're playing a full-screen game today and alt-tab to the desktop, the game will typically switch back into a window and the screen will switch to the desktop resolution. The Amiga method would let you simply drag the full-screen game screen to reveal the higher-resolution desktop behind it, without forcing the game to swap back to a window. Even virtual desktops aren't as clever or flexible as that.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress