How Icaros Desktop Brings the Amiga Experience To x86 PCs 202
angry tapir writes "Icaros Desktop is an effort to build a modern Amiga-compatible operating system to standard x86 hardware. It's a distribution built atop AROS, which is an open source effort to create a system compatible at the API level with the AmigaOS 3.x series. I recently had a chat to the creator of Icaros, Paolo Besser, about the creation of the OS and why Amiga continues to inspire people today."
Deadest horse (Score:5, Funny)
Evar!
68k games (Score:4, Interesting)
Can I seamlessly run Amiga games written for the 68000 on it? This would require emulation, but it's been done before.
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The biggest problem with games is the copper. Emulators tend to be "best effort", which is often faster than you need, but not locked to cycles. This might work fine for the blitter running as a separate emulation process, but the copper wears a different fur. A "standard" emulator won't do it - you need a special m68k+copper emulator. that can do things in step no matter what the execution speed is.
This is likely a good part of the reason why some games and demos just won't work with UAE and other effor
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Take it from someone who used to program Copper every day in the early 90's: It's not exactly a miraculous superchip that is hard to emulate. Games are usually pretty easy, the Amiga demos are harder to emulate 100% thanks to various copper effects.
Sure, Amiga architecture was way different from PC, but these days PCs are so powerful they can emulate 68000+Blitter+Copper easily. I'm pretty sure UAE has this covered pretty damn well by now.
Re:68k games (Score:4, Informative)
Take it from someone who used to program Copper every day in the early 90's: It's not exactly a miraculous superchip that is hard to emulate.
No, the copper isn't, but what the copper triggers, when is somewhat harder.
You don't have a lock to scanline in an emulator. For the display effects, you need to emulate every scanline separately and generate a complete image as it would have looked at the end. No biggie when you have fast enough hardware.
However - and here lies the devil - the copper isn't just used for display effects but can also control a bunch of other hardware registers. (Including audio, where waiting until the end before presenting results won't do what you want - a simple example being creating a 100 or 120 Hz tone by doing two equally spaced copper moves per frame. And the CPU.)
And you can even modify the copper list while it is running, triggered from either the CPU or the copper through a copper-scheduled blit, or both. Then it becomes a small headache to get things done in the right order at the right time.
Getting some of it right is trivial. Getting all of it right is not.
Why not use a Linux distribution? (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder why they wouldn't use a Linux distribution for this project.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I recall from the Amiga back then (a friend had one), and what I have seen here so far, this "Amiga Experience" is all about the GUI, not so much about the underlying tech. Which is no matter what totally different than on the original Amiga for the simple fact that we have so different hardware nowadays. Hard drives, more memory, USB, optical drives, WiFi, you name it. It wasn't there back then, and is standard now.
Already there are themes to make Gnome or KDE look and behave exactly like OS-X, or Mac Classic, or Windows XP or whatever. They can be themed so thoroughly, using different window managers probably even more possibilities, that I'd say this is the way to go.
Take a Linux distro, e.g. Ubuntu, as base, and build your own customisation on it. There are plenty of derivative distros that do it just like that. Ubuntu being a derivative itself. And presto you have the Amiga Experience, with all it's quirks, with all the underlying goodness of modern hardware support etc.
Or am I really missing something here?
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Because they don't want to use Linux? And, yes, it is also about the kernel, filesystem, etc. according to the Amiga snobs.
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AROS team didn't want to use Linux (although the AROS Developers use Linux to develope AROS), but Commodore USA is using Mint called CommodoreOS Vision (currently in Beta) for their new Commodore Amigas: http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_OS_Vision.aspx [commodoreusa.net]
Re:Why not use a Linux distribution? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, according to the cult of the Amiga, you can't replicate the fluidity and responsiveness of Amiga with Linux. Amiga was about the hardware and software. The hardware was quirky, cool, and cutting edge. To use an Amiga in its day was like a trip to the future. Plus it didn't have any memory protection, so a single goof in a program would kill the entire system sadly you can't do that with just a gui in linux. At least not without creating your gui in the kernel.
Re:Why not use a Linux distribution? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah. What we need is a Linux kernel module that traps userland segmentation faults and throws a kernel panic. XD
I love all my Amigas; I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins. I carried the Boing Ball flag into harm's way too many times to count. But the true Amiga experience, as depicted by connoisseurs, requires abandonment of such niceties as memory protection and process isolation.
The hardcore nostalgics forget that the Amiga didn't have memory protection first because the hardware wasn't routinely available, and more importantly because the seamless memory map allowed all of RAM to be a huge playground for the CPU and custom co-processors to accomplish amazing things at less than 8 Mhz. Also, the kernel was blazing fast because there was no meaningful context transition from userland to kernel; everything was memory-pointer based, and all memory was directly mapped and non-virtual.
Therefore, it was also fragile. But that was an acceptable cost for blazing speed and jaw-dropping media performance at a time that MS-DOS machines were single-tasking, playing beeps and boops through a 2" speaker in the system case. and displaying EGA-level graphics.
So, let's not wax too nostalgic. True nostalgists wouldn't want this any more than an intelligent car collector will settle for a kit car body, even if it's on a more powerful and capable chassis than the original 1950s Ferrari (for instance).
Amiga enthusiasts who are curious or interested in one evolutionary path of the old OS might want to see this.
Other than that, I can't imagine this being a very popular product.
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I fought on the epic frontlines of the Amiga versus Atari BBS flamewars before most of you were an ache in your daddys' groins.
Most perhaps, but not all. Some of us here on slashdot actually wrote the BBS software that the flamewars went on.
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Wayne Bell? ;)
~S
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I love all my Amigas
I'd imagine your Amigos are jealous.
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Well said! I was with you in those trenches of Amiga fanboihood in the late 80s, preaching Amiga religion to anybody who would listen and hating on those who wouldn't. Let's face it, it was the only "modern" consumer OS at the time, with proper preemptive multitasking and coprocessing subsystems and a proper driver system for external hardware and message queues. Plus it had a very powerful UNIX style CLI with advanced scripting beyond anything outside of UNIX, a power user's wet dream. And you could open a
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Couldn't agree more with what you said. The Amiga was a breeding ground for technologies and programmers. For its day it had it all. Altough I was more of a "Hardware reference" guy, I still remember my first copperbars, spinning cube or a screen full of bobs in glorious 50fps like it was yesterday. But it was a short trip, the OS or hardware never evolved much inside Commodore. A lot of what made it great was third party. And when Commodore went bust the tech was already outdated, and really no way to fix
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And the legacy lives on in some respects... When i interview someone, if they started out on the amiga they are in 99% of cases much better at the job than someone who started out on windows... I put this down to a system that encouraged you to learn about it, vs a system that discourages you and makes you fearful of breaking things (dont look at this dir, it contains system files and you might break something!).
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And gamers, don't forget gamers! Because in the 80s the Amiga wasn't just an awesome development platform but also by far the best gaming platform. No telling how many of today's avid gaming Gen-Xers started on the Amiga. For me it was the other way around though--I got to the Amiga because of the games and flash and it dragged me tooth and nails into the programming world, making my future career all but inevitable. I will confess that before getting the Amiga I was actually seriously in love with the Atar
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At the time, dos, macos, early versions of windows, atari tos etc also didn't have memory protection...AmigaOS was still a better os on similar spec hardware.
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Also, if you had finished the whole summary you'd notice how they want API compatibility with AmigaOS which you don't get from Linux or by changing the GUI.
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Ironically, Linux is the perfect example of "API compatibility". It shares that with Unix. You could even make libamiga not dependent with x86 so it would run on things like Sparc, and PPC, and Raspberry PI.
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Linux is the perfect example of API compatibility with AmigaOS? Huh?
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They want it most lkely so software developers doesn't need to rewrite any code written against the APIs. It makes it more likely you ony need to recompile not rewrite.
Re:Why not use a Linux distribution? (Score:4, Informative)
That's exactly what they did. Icarus Desktop is a distribution of AROS, in a prepackaged VM image to make it easy to use. AROS is similar to WINE, in that it can run programs within a hosting OS. It also has native ports, but those progress slowly on the hardware support side.
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Amiga was about the tech (to some) (Score:4, Interesting)
Everyone had a different idea of what the "Amiga Experience" was, because the machine was so striking in so many different ways.
I don't remember talking to many people who thought Intuition and Workbench (the GUI) were all that special (right-button fixed-position menus, and "screens" being the only "cool" Amiga-exclusive GUI features that I can think of off the top of my head), but OTOH in the mid-1980s there weren't that many GUI competitors, so I guess it's not far-fetched that at least some people thought that was special.
To some people, it was just the games. The Amiga had its day in the sun where it was, for a brief period, the game machine. When that day ended, those people moved on.
To me, it was all about the tech. And even within the tech, there were at least two camps and lots of people with a mix of membership in both. The custom chips were excellent -- by mid/late 1980s standards (by 1996 I had installed a graphics card and by 2000 the case was truly stuffed to the gills with replacements for nearly everything on the mobo, every Z3 slot filled and some cards with other weirdo connectors which connected to other sub-cards!).
Exec was excellent (if you ignored the issue of memory protection) and simple, and I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities. (But it doesn't matter as much, these days.)
Even AmigaDOS (!) (when's the last time you heard that part of the system praised?) had some very nice things about it, or easily added onto it. Linux finally got equivalent ramdisk tech with 2.4 but I still don't see a pipe device as awesome and convenient as APIPE. ;-) Linux finally got diverse filesystems (on of my favorite things about it) and has pulled ahead by a huge margin (I'll admit that; Linux is now the world leader in this regard) but Amiga people were plugging in, and playing with, and benchmarking different ones, years before anyone ever heard of Hans Reiser. When x86 people were working around fdisk partitioning, Amiga people had RDB -- equivalent tech is just now hitting becoming widely deployed with GPT. Some of its features seem very dubious by today's standards (I can't explain to anyone in 2012 why they would want "assigns" and not sound like a moron) but compared to AmigaDOS' comtemporaries .. oh, those people knew why someone would want a feature like that, and envied the Amiga even if they had to do it in secret.
The Amiga was plenty loved for its tech. Maybe by different people for different reasons, but the techlove was there, and I think critical to Amiga lingering after Commodore's death, for as long as it did.
One thing, though. For all the Amiga tech we don't have today, we still get by. Some of it got improved on (FFS seems so quaint now), some of it got the need for it bypassed by either new paradigms or brute force (you don't need copper lists, or to tell APIPE how much memory to use for its queue, or decent partitioning system when you have LVM), some of it is now seen as a bad idea (e.g. reading the the code which implements a filesystem, from the inserted media), and whatever we all still lack today, is mitigated by the other advantages of being the mainstream (e.g. Core i5 for $200 instead of a Cyberstorm 060 for $1000). The tech was damn fine, but it's still 1980s tech that we're talking about. It still impressed in the 1990s, but mainly because the 1990s were a semi-dark age.
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What was special about the amiga gui, was the way it was extremely responsive and fully multitasking, competing systems of the time usually couldn't multitask very well if at all, and were generally very sluggish even on considerably faster hardware.
This is also why the amiga stuck around for quite a while, although the hardware was getting dated the user experience took longer to seem slower than the underlying hardware would have suggested.
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I still sometimes wish on Linux I could "nice" processes with absolute priorities
You can, you just need to use the realtime priorities instead. However, you need privileges to do so because it is trivial to crash Linux that way. Just like it was trivial to crash AmigaOS that way, of course.
FFS let the Amiga rest in please (Score:5, Insightful)
It was a superb machine (arguably the best personal computer) in the 80s and early 90s, but its now 2012 and things have moved on. Why are people still intent on trying to resurrect it like some festering computer zombie? Its making a mockery of the Amiga name and of the time and effort the original designers put into its HARDWARE - because it was the hardware rather than the OS which really made it what it was.
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IBM peeled off some Amiga developers to work on the Workplace Shell for OS/2 2.x and later. That OS also had some enthusiasts (and still has a few).
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Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good? Is there anything about it that is better than what we have today?
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I use Amiga OS almost every day. Technically, Linux have almost every capability that Amiga OS have.
I write "almost" because the Amiga OS is more or less a true "microkernel", so you could replace most everything in the system live. Normally you don't do this though, and it's pretty insignificant.
What it excelled at during the days was that it had true multitasking with a fast message passing functionality, and it took something like 5-10 years until other desktop operating systems had that (windows, maco
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Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good?
It had extremely efficient and lightweight pre-emptive multitasking, such that multiple programs could run simultaneously and respond to the user very quickly even on very modest hardware (e.g. 7MHz 68000 CPU, 512KB RAM).
The downside of that was that there was no memory protection -- all programs ran in the same memory space. While that made efficient data sharing trivial (any program could just get a pointer to any system data it needed to access, and read it), it also made things very insecure -- one bug
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The downside of that was that there was no memory protection
Replacing a non-protected OS with a protected version while retaining app compatibility is impossible. That's why Apple had to ditch the original Mac code base and replace it with OSX.
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DataTypes survive in a limited context; audio and video codecs do much the same thing.
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>>>Not being familiar with the Amiga OS at all, could you explain what made it so good? Is there anything about it that is better than what we have today?
It had the same power as Windows98 or MacOs 10.0, but back in 1985. It had preemptive tasking, near-photographic level images/videos, and near-CD quality sound. So in other words in 1985 it was over a decade ahead in technology (and now it's about a decade behind). There's really no reason to use AmigaOS today, except to experiment with a diffe
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it was about that time that Carmack made it clear that Doom would never be ported to the Amiga due to hardware concerns
Apparently, Carmack was wrong. It won't run on an Amiga 500, but the A500 was 6 years old at that point. The Amiga 1200 was current at the time Doom was released. And you can obviously run Doom on it now.
What Carmack really meant was that it wasn't worth the effort to port Doom to the Amiga hardware.
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The Amiga 1200 was current at the time Doom was released. And you can obviously run Doom on it now.
Running Doom on a stock Amiga 1200 would be a painful experience. If it's upgraded with a 030 CPU and 4MB memory is another matter, but there wasn't many of those. You could also run Doom on an upgraded Amiga 500, as there were 030 upgrade cards for them too.
But I strongly doubt a stock A1200 would be anything but epically slow on Doom. First you need to run it straight from a floppy drive, as most owners didn't have a hard drive. Then you'd have to squeeze the game into half the memory, and that memory
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As far as CPU goes, any 020 is likely too slow (unless there's lots and lots of room for optimization in the Doom engine). A 16MHz 030 is better, but is
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However, by that time Commodore was bankrupt.
If you're going to get Doom on the Amiga I think you need to go back as far as 1986. C= was in financial difficulties back then, and the Amiga was yet to become a runaway success, and therefore they didn't inve
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It was slow even with an 030, it was just about playable on a 68040, and the only amiga to come with a 68040 by default was the A4000... Also the default 68040 card in the A4000 was quite slow, the one i played it on was significantly faster than a stock A4000.
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I find it interesting that fans released an Amiga port based on DOOM's source code. It seems to run well too.
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The first Doom-based game to use true 'flat' 13h mode was Hexen.
Still inspires? It doesn't. (Score:4, Informative)
>> why Amiga continues to inspire people today
Um...not really. I owned two Amiga machines and worked on two different Video Toaster rigs. Fun at the time, but I'm very, very happy that the Amiga's best features (graphics, sound and text-to-speech) went mainstream. I haven't plugged in any of my old systems in more than five years.
Let it rest - RIP.
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Why the animosity? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why the animosity to Amiga enthusiasts? Im willing to bet that a significant portion of Linux users on Slashdot were once Amiga users and for various reasons moved on - maybe like myself - a reluctant windows user in the late 90's before discovering Linux and dumping windows for good eventually! Initially Linux - for me reminded in many ways of Amiga OS which is why it was so easy for me to fall in love with it.
Although Linux will for the moment remain my primary OS I've been keeping an eye on AROS. Over the years and as of late the system is becoming really polished with different distro's including one for 68k that can be run on classic hardware - as well as a port currently underway for the Raspberry PI. So you will see that this is not just about running AmigaOS on x86 but creating an OS that eventually will run across different processor architectures. There is also a very interesting Aros / Linux hybrid which opens up the world of linux applications to use inside AROS ... Aeros / Broadway X [aros-broadway.de] .
How quickly we forget that Linus Torvalds was scratching an itch to build a minix clone for x86 which has led to the incredibly widespread and varied use we see today. So to AROS which started albiet more recently than Torvalds effort which has similar but humble beginnings.
AROS and the work that has been done are enabling things like replacement , royalty free Kickstart's that can be used with emulation software - free of the chains of licensing. Its open source nature will ensure that the operating system can be free and modified by all.
I for one applaud the efforts that have gone into the project particularly since they have so few active developers. (Anyone interested should probably dig in)
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> Why the animosity to Amiga enthusiasts?
There's plenty of people here that will screech and point at anyone they think isn't part of the herd.
I suspect that's not the old 68K users acting like pod people here.
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>> "Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious....I'm not kidding. We'd bring in the Amiga into every discussion. How it was the best computer in the world. How you suck for having a PC or Mac. How Bill Gates sucks because he won't support our wonderful computer system. "
Very true. I was an Atari ST guy. Man, you guys pissed me off so much. And what REALLY sucked was I knew deep down the Amiga was the better machine. I carried a stupid torch for Atari that looking back was completely u
ex-Amiga fan (Score:2)
I used to be a die hard Amiga fan and I still dip into the scene every now and again to see what's going on.
They seem to have a fairly decent browser in the form of a Firefox port called Timberwolf, but it's quite sad to see the amount of effort they have to through just to watch a video on YouTube.
Likewise, USB support is still quite lacking (I'm not even sure they have USB2 support yet), and most of the software is just ports of Linux software (Blender etc.)
It's interesting to see what's going on, but it'
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I'm running USB2 in my 4000D with OS3.9. With this, I have a multi-card reader, 10/100 Ethernet adapter, and wireless keyboard and mouse. It can also handle USB wireless adapters and I connect USB flash drives and hard drives frequently. Not bad for a dead system. And, yes, it's a hobby and it's fun. I can't explain it any more than anyone can explain why it's fun to tinker with old cars, planes, stamps, etc.
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I posted this above, but you seem like another in-the-loop Amiga fan to ask, so I am reposting below:
For the collector / new to Amiga market, what would you recommend? I want to get a complete Amiga system, for gaming exclusively, but I always get tripped up in the model numbers (500, 1200, 3000, etc). Just something new to toy around with for a few months and add to my collection of gaming equipment. I had a Commodore 64 since it was released in the "C" format, and still have all of my equipment and soft
AROS on Raspberry Pi (Score:2)
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Woohoo! (Score:2)
I seem to recall the last time (Score:4, Funny)
something was named Icarus, it went down in flames.
Like sailing the Atlantic in the Santa Maria (Score:2)
The good old timey feeling of the late Renaissance
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Well in 20 years, we'll have x86 denial syndrome instead (of Amiga Denial Syndrome that is).
I deny that
Re:First Post (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Post (Score:4, Informative)
They were referring to AmigaOS not x86.
Did you feel a little breeze in your hair? Yeah, that was the comment going over your head. He intentionally switched them up for effect.
Re:First Post (Score:5, Funny)
It's a bird! It's a plane! No, just the joke you didn't get.
Re:First Post (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not sure why people get so butthurt over what other people do with their free time.
Amen! This is an incredibly common reflex, found in all walks of life, and in relation to almost any area of human behaviour imaginable.
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Amiga's moved-on anyway. OS 3 is obsolete, replaced by OS 4.0 and 4.1. Running version 3 today would be like running a Mac with OS9.
Re:Good luck. (Score:5, Interesting)
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No. You see, even the most snobby of snobs is well aware that the only viable CPU architectures right now are ix86 and ARM. 68K is dead outside of the low power (in every sense) embedded world; and PowerPC is a WTF.
Ten years ago, like I said, you might have found a hold out, clinging perhaps to PowerPC as a possible 68k successor, but today? Nope. The CPU wars are over.
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Nope, look at my post below from an Amiga thread from 3 months ago for 3 seperate people in the first 2 pages decrying AmigaOS on x86 and how PPC hardware makes it 'special'.
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Re:Good luck. (Score:4, Interesting)
Incidentally, by some accounts Commodore were working with HP to transition to the PA-RISC processor and had no plans to use PPC... Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.
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Re:Good luck. (Score:4, Insightful)
Had they not folded, they most likely would have moved to HPPA, later moved to IA64 and would probably be in the process of moving again.
The few remaining polar bears are very thankful that IA64 didn't gain momentum...
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Just take a gander at this thread from 3 mnths ago. [amiga.org]
BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.
Custom hardware is good choise, there woun't be any benefits to go x86/x64
Custom hardware makes Amiga special and force people who has it to use it. (Yes I know there is linux distro for ppc)
OS4 needs to remain PPC.
No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.
It's be just another offshoot hobby OS that could once make a meager earning on the PPC side that is now on commodity HW where there's a plethora of free OS'es for every niche market. Another OS I'd have to run an emulation layer on to run legacy software. Why should I run OS4 x86 vs. AROS, vs. UAE/Amikit/Amithlon?
and those are just select quotes from the first 2 pages. The snobs still exist.
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Only the second person mentioned PPC. The first guy was just saying you should have to have 'custom hardware' because otherwise AmigaOS is no longer 'special'.
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You mean other than the 3rd quote explicitly stating AmingaOS4 has no reason to go on commodity hardware and the first one saying there are no benefits to x86/x64? You seem to be trying to reinterpret their clear statements to try to claim they are saying the opposite of heir own words.
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Those quote are hilarious...
BeOs didn't succeed with x86. Some developers said that those who has originally used BeOs started to use window/Linux and stopped to support original BeOs apps because everythig was easier with Windows/Linux.
Nor did it succeed on PPC.
No valid reason for OS4 to go to commodity hardware. The market isn't there - niche OS's are free/open source on commodity hardware, Hyperion would have no business model.
There is no market for a niche OS targeting hobbyists. Niche OS are free or open source and run on widely available hardware because that's the only way any of them has a hope of attracting a user base. Lots of people have old/spare hardware they would play with a new OS on, but very few would buy expensive hardware just to try an expensive os.
That's how myself and many others first experienced linux. In fact, my first experience of both linux and netbsd