Submitted by Sure, we have AmigaOS and MorphOS, but those cost money and require special hardware. For those of us more interested in running an Amiga-like operating system on regular, x86 hardware, there’s AROS. Two AROS distributions, Icaros Desktop and AspireOS both saw new releases recently.
Icaros Desktop 1.4 comes with several improvements over the previous version, many of them courtesy of AROS. Most importantly, there’s the first parts of a printing system. Currently, printer.device only support PostScript printers, and only a few programs are ready to use it. Still, it’s an interesting start, and more is sure to come in this area.
Wanderer has also been improved considerably, and general system stability has seen a boost as well. OWB has been ported from MorphOS to AROS, and obviously, Icaros profits from this as well – it ships this new port by default. OWB supports HTML5 (including video) and uses the WebKit rendering engine.
It will come as no surprise that AspireOS 1.7 also ships with the new OWB port and the printing system. It also comes with a PlayStation emulator (the first PlayStation). AspireOS is a more basic AROS distribution, with less bells and whistles than Icaros Desktop.
So, there’s really no excuse not to try out the world of AROS if you want to. Get cracking! I mean, you’re already tired of the Windows 8 consumer preview, right (I’m not, actually)?
Despite what the article says AROS port of Odyssey doen not support playing HTML5 video (yet).
But does it run Cannon Fodder?
Yes. It runs Cannon Fodder. Either with an ADF image of it, or with the original disk if you have a Catweasel MKIV PCI controller on your PC.
Well, what more do you need?
I have the original disks, but the game is also on an Amiga 1200 I bought with an internal CF drive full of games. Not sure how that work i.e. if that runs from an ADF image.
I just can’t over the fact that a recreation of an ancient OS will probably be able to display HTML5 (not even a finished standard) before it can print
….and that is even what people are now expecting
See it this way : to display HTML5, you just need to port some of the dozens of open-source web browser rendering engines out there, put a simple frontend around it, and you’re done. It won’t be pretty, but it should do the job well enough to advertise “HTML5 compatibility”. Prerequisites do not go much beyond having GUI ready.
To print, now, you need a lot more infrastructure work : not only GUI, but also a printer driver model, printer drivers themselves, code that allows application code to talk to printers, GUI that makes it easy to do, all that knowing that as with any infrastructure work, the silliest mistake will follow you across the OS versions to come due to the need to maintain driver and UX compatibility (whereas with a web browser, you can just ditch the old rendering and replace it with another one and users won’t even notice).
The two tasks have a similar “wow, this OS is grown-up now” factor, but printing is an order of magnitude more complex to implement. It is as such logical that it comes second, unless it is a priority to developers.
Edited 2012-03-13 07:49 UTC
It can print.
From the summary: Most importantly, there’s the first parts of a printing system. Currently, printer.device only support PostScript printers, and only a few programs are ready to use it.
If you would like to summarize that by “It can print” then you have lost all sense of reality (although you are not technically wrong)
Yes, and it’s specified almost everywhere (on the Icaros website I openly talk about initial printer support, ps printers support, ps file printing support, nothing more, nothing less: you just need to read). If I summarize with “it can print” I am technically right: it can print. Something, with just a couple of applications, with selected printers. Or to a ps file anyway. But it CAN print and it can do that in the real world, not in fantasyland. Proper extension of printing system is expected in the next months.
paolone,
It wouldn’t have hurt to qualify the statement. If someone said an OS supports video acceleration in general terms, but it turns out only to support one type of GPU, that might be a bit misleading even though I understand the logic both ways. But now that it is clarified everything is good in the world!
Why are you asking this to me? I didn’t write the news. =)
On the Icaros website, however, it should be clearly specified that hardware acceleration is good for most GeForce GPUs and Intel GMA ones. It’s stated also on the ReadMe and on the manual… Well, anyway I am happy it’s now been made clear.
AmigaOS and its influences were never ancient. It kept on developing despite numerous hardships.
Kudos to AmigaOS and Icaros!
“Ancient” basically just denotes time… AROS is, to be sure, by far the most sane of those (directly) AmigaOS-influenced efforts, but that influence is fairly ancient, as far as timeline of home computing goes.
And yeah, about that “kept on developing” …still no memory protection (hence also, sort of, no proper multitasking, just the not-quite-one that depends on well-behaving apps, where any program can essentially take over).
A decade more till it comes? Two decades? Will by then all of ~Amiga application development be just porting OSS stuff from the ~PC?
Does the VMWare video driver support sane resolutions yet? Last time I tried AROS, running it in qemu or kvm with -vga vmware resulted in it using 2560×1600 as the minimum resolution. This was somewhat problematic on a laptop.
That’s because you haven’t properly configured video settings for your virtual machine. There’s a option in VMware to specify max resolution of the screen: there you can put whatever resolution you need. For instance, I myself use 1366×768 this way, and VMware stopped opening AROS aT 2560×1600.
Yes, it runs Cannon fodder just as well as Windows does. (in emulataion) So i guess the answer you were really seeking is… No.
I just gave a tricky answer to a silly question: since Cannon Fodder runs on completely different hardware than the target one used by Icaros, well, emulation is necessary. The difference, however, is that Icaros is completely auto-sufficient and doesn’t need any original Amiga KickStart ROM, since the AROS replacement one does it by itself. And, well, to run Cannon Fodder you just need to click twice on its ADF file icon. The rest is self-explanatory (and reported on the Icaros Manual if further informations are needed).