This solution lets developers compile their Amiga API-based applications as Linux binaries. Once the features are implemented, tested and optimized using the runtime on Linux or Windows, developers re-compile their applications for their Amiga-like system of choice and perform final quality checking.
Applications created with AxRuntime can be distributed to Linux or Windows communities, giving developers a much broader user base and a possibility to invite developers from outside general Amiga community to contribute to the application.
↫ AxRuntime website
I had never considered this as an option, but with AmigaOS 3.x basically being frozen in time, it’s a relatively easy target for an effort such as this. It won’t surprise you to learnt hat AxRuntime is using code from AROS, which itself is fully compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. This should technically mean that any AmigaOS application that runs on AROS should be able to be made to run using this runtime, which is great news for Amiga developers.
Why? Well, the cold, harsh truth is that the number of Amiga users is probably still dwindling as the sands of time cause people to, well, die, and the influx of new users, who also happen to possess the skillset to develop AmigaOS software, must be a very, very slow trickle, at best. This runtime will allow AmigaOS developer to package their software to run on Linux and Windows machines, getting a lot more eyes on the software in the process. Amiga devices are not exactly cheap or easy to come by, so this is a great alternative.
Unfortunate it doesn’t support the standard AmigaOS GUI introduced a quarter of a century ago, so modern Amiga software won’t run on this.
What “standard GUI” would that be?
MUI is supported (in AROS Terms it is called ZUNE, but it is API compatible to MUI).
MUI is widely used on the 3.x branch as well as on MorphOS and AROS – on the last two it is even the official GUI standard.
ReAction obviously, MUI has never been the standard GUI toolkit for the Amiga.
What good is a “standard” that does not support all relevant platforms?
Since there is no ReAktion for AROS or MorphOS. And it is closed source and proprietary.
MUI/ZUNE on the other hand is supported on all Amiga-like platforms:
AROS, AOS 3.x (68k), AOS4.x (PPC), MorphOS.
Many more programs are using MUI/ZUNE instead of ReAction.
ReAction works on AROS and MorphOS. If some inferior clones are lacking it that is the fault of those clones, of course. Eg. if I decided to write a Windows clone but it was missing support for the GUI, I would not claim it was a complete or adequate reimplementation, nor would I blame Microsoft.
I could not afford an Amiga when they were new and never got into “the scene” afterwards. So, I have no idea to assess how exciting this is.
That said, if you are an Amiga fan and really want to write software using Amiga-sphere APIs, this at least let’s you distribute your software to a much, much larger audience. That certainly seems like a good thing.
I wish this approach was a bit more common. What would have been great is if some of the alternative platforms of yesteryear had created APIs for other platforms to allow their apps to run elsewhere. OS/2 touted itself as a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows. Some people say that prevented OS/2 apps from being created. What if IBM had allowed you to write Presentation Manager apps for Windows so that the story could be that they were a better platform for OS/2 apps than Windows was. Maybe at least some folks would have targeted OS/2 first with Windows as the fallback. It certainly would have been possible to continue targeting the platform longer. NeXTstep already ran on x86. Imagine if Apple had allowed Cocao apps ( really OpenStep ) to run on Windows. That would have been a pretty nice dev platform back in the day even if Windows was the primary platform you were targeting. A lot more applications would have been ported to Mac though I bet. Big name Mac-first Mac apps of the day ( like the Adobe stuff ) ended up porting to Windows anyway. Perhaps if Cocao had been cross-platform, the Mac versions would have stayed as the flagship.
I wish there would be a Wine and Cider but for Amiga and AmigaOS 1.x-3.x stuff. But also including specific hardware emulation, using translation layers and very advanced ahead of time recompilation from 68k and PowerPC to native and Vulkan as much as possible.
How would you call that project?
I would call it fresa, Pana or similar
Well – the Wine/Cider approach is exactly what AxRuntime does … if you want 68k hardware emulation as well, than you should compile it for 68k-linux …
But I guess the use cases for such a solution are rare, so nobody will bother.
Hi All,
I’m the maintainer of AxRuntime.
First of all, Thom thank you for featuring AxRuntime on osnews.com – I really appreciate it.
On the topic of the APIs, AxRuntime provides all the standard AmigaOS 3.1 APIs (like Intuition, DOS, Exec, ASL, etc) and most popular extensions which have been introduced in Amiga-land (MUI, GadTools, CyberGraphics, BSDSocket, etc). For a developer, there is plenty to choose from.
Additionally, when developing your software for AxRuntime you can mix and match APIs available on Amiga with APIs available in *nix world – that is you could develop software that uses MUI as GUI toolkit, but native *nix libraries to provide additional features that AxRuntime is not providing. For example, AxRuntime does not provide standard C library – programs re-compiled for AxRuntime use C library of it’s *nix host.
If you are a developer interested in trying it out, just contact me.
From user perspective it is also interesting to note that AxRuntime can now also run native AROS 64-bit applications apart from applications re-compiled for AxRuntime. They are executed as first-class citizens, with same UI interactions as AxRuntime programs. I’m often using OWB (native AROS web-browser) started via AxRuntime under Linux to browse Amiga-related sites. In future it is also planned for AxRuntime to allow running “legacy” AROS 32-bit binaries, which can be found in distributions like Icaros Desktop.
If there are any additional questions about AxRuntime, just let me know!
When you say ArOS 64-bit, You mean x86_64 or PowerPC64 (ppc64eb) ? Coz our new hw is very close to finish, its Power8 PowerISA v 2.07 e6500 c0re compatible, it supports both endianess / byteOrdering, AltiVecTor Unit / VelocityEngine available only in endianBig. <(")
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2022/12/prototypes-produced-lets-go-on-hardware-tests/
I mean the x86_64
This is really cool. I’m not in the Amiga scene, but I really hope that at least one of the Amiga systems can “make it” and survive as a semi-competitive modern system (think Haiku or Illumos – never the target of any developer but they got the most essential apps ported), just in the case of Amiga with a big catalogue of retro games and so on.
This would probably have to be AROS as it’s the only one that’s open source and can run on widely available hardware (x86).