AROS 68k and other new platforms

An important new chapter has been opened in AROS's history with the development of a stand-alone AROS port for the original Amiga computers. This should also be of great interest to people using WinUAE to run old Amiga applications. Such is the level of compatibility, the AROS ROM image can even boot original Workbench disks as old as V1.3. This development will hopefully also lead to improved integration of original Amiga software into AROS on x86 platforms and elsewhere.

AROS's platform support has continued to diversify in other directions too. A Linux-hosted ARM port has emerged, and new hosted ports for Mac OS X support three different CPU architectures. And AROS may soon become even more portable with the recent development of new iOS and Android ports.

Graphics

On the PC-compatible/x86 front, a lot has been happening too, particularly in the area of graphics. The Intel GMA graphics driver has been extended to support a wider variety of chipsets, and also now works with laptop LCD displays as well as external monitors. The Nouveau and Gallium based driver for nVidia graphics cards has been improved too: as well as increasing its speed and hardware support, it has also become the first driver with hardware-accelerated alpha-blending operations.

A notable graphics feature from our Amiga heritage has also been introduced to AROS: most native graphics drivers now support screen dragging and scrolling. These include our drivers for nVidia and Intel GMA chipsets, as well as the generic VESA driver.

Apart from the graphics drivers, AROS also received some additional graphics libraries: egl.library and openvg.library. The first provides portable GL initialisation and window management interfaces, while the second is a vector graphics library accelerated using Gallium. Our port of the SDL library has become more polished too, with improvements to features such as SDL-to-GL integration, leading to a more enjoyable gaming experience.

Wireless networking

Two significant milestones in network support for laptops have been reached. Firstly, a modern and secure wireless networking stack has been added to AROS. The first driver to use this infrastructure supports many popular cards with Atheros chipsets. Secondly, support has been added for a wide variety of mobile broadband USB devices.

Other improvements

Debugging support and error reporting have been improved. Misuse and mismanagement of memory and other resources by applications is now more easily detected, and error reports now include stack traces showing where the error occurred.

A lot of fine tuning and ease-of-use improvements have been made to various components. The FAT filesystem handler has received a number of important bug fixes. Native graphics drivers are now typically activated automatically for detected graphics cards, and the AC97 and HDAudio sound drivers usually need no manual configuration before use. And at last, AROS is no longer stuck with one unchangeable mouse pointer: the standard pointer to use can be chosen in a new pointer preferences program, and applications can change the pointer to suit different situations. The AROS shell has become more sophisticated, and now has a scrollable output history, as well as support for more modes and some bug fixes. AROS's handling of GUI themes has also become significantly faster. Finally, another piece of the backwards-compatibility jigsaw has been filled following the transformation of Regina into a much more complete ARexx clone.

Wider developments

AROS now has a third distribution available in addition to the regularly updated Icaros Desktop and AROS Broadway. The new AspireOS distribution is aimed mainly at the Acer Aspire One 110 and 150 netbooks, but may also be interesting to users of other PCs looking for a lightweight distribution.

Many applications and games have been added to AROS's software selection in recent months. Some application highlights include AmiFig, Protrekkr and Open Universe. 3D games such as Cube, AssaultCube and Super Tux Kart (with a popular kitty car!) put AROS's 3D graphics enhancements to good use, while many 2D games such as Giana's Return and Mega Mario have also arrived. We have added a number of emulators too to allow even more retro gaming fun to be had.

Latest updates

Many things happened since the latest status update.

Michal Schulz developed the GMA950 hidd, so AROS can now use 2D native functions of the latest GPUs from Intel. This will be really handy for people using Stephen Jones' iMica systems and netbooks like the Acer Aspire One A150.

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz has gone really far with his Gallium3D port to AROS: he has now integrated 2D and 3D accelerated functions in a single driver called Nuveau, which supports 2D acceleration for almost all GeForce GPUs starting from the ancient GeForce 2 cards until the recent GTX 200 series. 3D functions, however, are available only to GeForce FX (5x00), cards and upwards. Some models and GPUs might not be supported yet. Users of Nvidia cards may now regularily use this driver, instead of the old Nvidia one. This will also help Krzysztof fixing it, as it is still work-in-progress. Please refer to this AROS-EXEC topic to help him spotting and fixing bug (and please remember he's not directly responsible for driver quality: he's just adapting and porting to AROS what has been done by Nuveau/Gallium team).

Pavel Fedin is reworking our graphics subsystem, cleaning it up and making it behave like the original Amiga one: the day we won't need anymore to enter driver names in GRUB boot lines is approaching. Some drivers can now be mounted moving them in the Monitors directory (like on AmigaOS), while others not yet. But he's still working on it. Pavel is also fixing linux framebuffer driver and his Win32-hosted version of AROS, which can now move screens like classic Amigas.

Neil Cafferkey has vastly improved our support to FAT partitions, and also made AROS installable on USB pendrives (and bootable from them). This means that regular nightly builds, but also Icaros Destop version 1.2.2 can now be installed on netbooks and other USB-bootable systems using a memory stick instead of a DVD. Paolo Besser has written a complete how-to in PDF format, and placed it on the Icaros website.

Pascal Papara has brought us a brand new distribution called Broadway, which is targeted to attract also people never involved with Amiga computers, and include a stripped down version of the incoming AMC, the first media-center environment based on AmigaOS-like systems. Broadway is not complete yet, but a nice preview version can be downloaded from its website.

Steve "ClusterUK" Jones has announced a new silent version of his iMica line of computers. This Atom-based system will be as performing as the old one, but it will also run completely fanless. We also have to thank Steve for his funding efforts: after paying Davy Wentzler for his useful AHI HDAudio drivers, he also financed the port of the Catweasel MKIV controller drivers and the development of Michal's GMA driver.

Good news for ACube's SAM440EP users too: since April 14th, AROS nightlies are available also for this nice PPC platform, which is still actively mantained. Michal Shulz has also recently brought a EFIKA version of AROS too.

Nick "Kalamatee" Andrews has slightly improved Wanderer and some long- running bugs have been fixed. AROS won't nest directories recursively anymore, when a drawer is placed into its own window by mistake, and AROS desktop can now be populated using the leave out/put away options, which are now finally enabled. He is also working on icon and list view: files can now be listed by details and sorted as you prefer.

There are also many small and big enhancements ongoing "under the hood" and coming from third party software developers, but they are simply too much to be mentioned here. We apologize with them, but we'd also like to say a big "thank you!" to anyone helping us in any way, porting applications, creating new ones, writing documentation and/or just evangelizing AROS inside and outside the Amiga community.

Latest updates

It's been a long time since the latest status update, however many things happened in the meanwhile.

First of all, Chris "platon42" Hodges has opened the sources of his Poseidon USB stack under the terms of the APL, and ported it to AROS: after some weeks of tweaking, adapting and bugfixing, AROS can now handle USB 1.1 and 2.0 controllers. Any USB device should be correctly detected by the operating system, while mice, keyboards and other input devices should be correctly handled as well. Most USB pendrives and storage devices work, while others don't yet, due to some fat.handler issues we're investigating about. Other devices will be supported in future, when someone will write the necessary drivers.

Thanks to Poseidon, AROS can now boot from USB CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives. This allows installing AROS on a wide range of notebooks and netbooks like the Acer Aspire One A150. This netbook is now a fair good hardware platform for AROS: Steve Jones and Davy Wenzler wrote a HD Audio driver for the iMica computer which covers also this one and a wide range of Intel-compatible mainboards, and the Icaros Desktop distribution introduced a way to get correct 1024x600 resolution on the GMA9x0 video chip.

Przemyslaw "Qus" Szczygielski's TCPPrefs utility has been fixed and added to the AROS prefs utilities: pokeing with script and configuration text files is not required anymore to connect to the Internet. Matthias Rustler has ported Scout to AROS, so closing offending windows and crashed applications should be easier than before. Kernel stability has improved a lot thanks to many fixes from Neil Cafferkey and Pavel Fedin.

Neil Cafferkey vastly improved our ata.device, which now supports many SATA controllers. Any SATA enabled computer which can be turned to work as 'IDE' in the BIOS settings, however, should work with AROS.

Stanislaw Szymczyk continued to update OWB, fixing bugs and problems, and adding new features like bookmarks, application menu, splash screen, the ability to open HTML files and so on, and he's now heading to release version 1.0 of his modern, CSS and JavaScript enabled web browser. OWB is a quite flexible tool, since allows AROS to run most web-enabled applications.

Yannick "Yannickescu" Erb has ported to AROS some interesting games like Open Tyrian, Super Methane Brothers and SDL Ball, and wrote ZuneARC, a standard and customizable Zune frontend for command-line archivers already available for AROS. You can find these and other interesting stuff on his website. Some nice games have been ported also by AROS_EXEC.org user Fishy_fis. Don't miss his DOSBox port to AROS!

Simone "samo" Bevilacqua ported his Amiga game BOH to AROS, and it behaves nicely! BOH is the first commercial game available for the new Amiga platforms.

Krzysztof "Deadwood" Smiechowicz ported version 7.5 of MESA to AROS, and is adding hardware 3D acceleration capabilities to AROS with his ongoing port of Gallium3D. For now, he has just released an alpha demo of this technology running on GeForce FX, 6 and 7 series video cards. A nice video showing the GLExcess demo running on AROS is here.

Paolo Besser has released version 1.2 of the Icaros Desktop distribution. The new version includes the ability to run old Amiga games straight from their ADF files, thanks to some new AmiBridge scripts and a old version of E-UAE. In the meanwhile, Oliver Bunner has improved Janus-UAE integration, allowing AROS to run AmigaOS 3.x applications inside AROS windows. To do both things, however, users must provide a working installation of AmigaOS 3.x and original kickstart, maybe using Cloanto's Amiga Forever.

Behind the scene Staf Verhaegen is still working on a new standardized ABI for AROS. Hopefully the moon and the sun will be right one day this year and the ABI can see the light of day.

Latest updates

Since the last update before Christmas, AROS has gained a lot of improvements, both in system components and applications: AROS is getting really close to being suitable for daily usage.

Oliver Brunner recently released version 0.3 of Janus-UAE, the AROS-specific version of UAE required by phase 1 of the UAE Integration Bounty. Now AROS can open AmigaOS applications in their own AROS screen or window. Oliver is currently working on integrating menus.

But the most important news is that AROS has finally got its own modern web browser! Thanks to the hard work of Stanislaw Sszymczyk, OWB is available for AROS, delivering full CSS and Javascript compatibility, tabbed browsing and a download manager. OWB is at version 0.9.3 Beta, and in order to run correctly requires recent versions of muimaster.library, arosc.library and codesets.library. OWB can be downloaded at its own page at sand-labs. Stanislaw has also finished work on allowing the compilation of multiple versions of AROS using a single copy of the source tree.

Pavel "Sonic" Fedin is still working on the Windows Hosted version of AROS and, in the course of this work, is also trying to solve several problems in the way AROS talks to the hardware, in order to abstract it; this led to his modifying components that require an abstraction layer in order to work in hosted AROS versions, such as file systems and hardware; this includes a packet handling method for SFS. Also, Pavel, together with Jens Langner, is trying to cross-compile the most up-to-date versions of the mcc.BetterString and mcc.TextEditor MUI classes so that they will be taken straight from the mainstream source instead of being included in the AROS source tree.

Matthias "Mazze" Rustler has released an alpha version of the Ignition spreadsheet application. At the moment data cannot be saved but it is still a good occasion to have a look at this application, underestimated on AmigaOS but quite powerful and well realised. There are just a couple of major glitches: the applicaiton is only partially translated from German; in order to be used in English the file ignition_english.prefs has to be renamed to ignition.prefs.

Nik "Kalamatee" Andrews is improving Wanderer: in recent months his work delivered better stability, he added a status bar to windows, and he experimented with a directory tree in the left-hand side of windows. In the future, besides the introduction of the much awaited list view, he plans to make Wanderer more modular, so that various components can be added or subtracted at will and implemented also with third-party modules.

The well known VmwAROS distribution has changed name to Icaros Desktop; version 1.1 (updated recently to 1.1.1) delivers updated system files and better stability. Almost all applications were recompiled in order to use the most recent muimaster.library build - finally getting rid of the old switchmuimaster application. As usual, Icaros is available as both a Live DVD and a virtual environment (VE). The VE version has been installed on top of Windows XP on a netbook, running at a reasonable speed with full audio and wireless networking support. More info here.

Michal Schulz still continues to work on his Efika port and, in parallel, on the USB mass storage bounty. In December AROS was able to mount USB sticks and boot from an external CD-ROM drive. Progress on the Efika port brought a more robust kernel, a detailed debug report and a feature quite similar to Grim Reaper on AmigaOS 4 that prevents the machine from freezing in case of a crash.

Neil Cafferkey has been working on improving the compatibility of the ATA driver, so that it works with a greater variety of PCs and drives. These changes were not ready in time for Icaros 1.1.1, but they will probably be included in the next release.

Some changes also occured in the way AROS boots: it is now possible to install 32-bit and 64-bit versions of AROS side-by-side on the same computer. As a result of this, all bootable AROS partitions are required to have a file called AROS.boot containing the architecture type of the AROS system files on that partition. If you want to upgrade the kernel on a system installed prior to March 20, you need to manually copy this file to the root of your system partition, or create it yourself (e.g. run the command "Echo pc-i386 TO DH0:AROS.boot" for a 32-bit system).

And, last but not least, the coming of Steve "ClusterUK" Jones: a Siamese System developer in the past, he now comes back to Amigaland proposing his AROS box for sale. The iMica is an Intel Atom-based small desktop system with Icaros Desktop pre-installed. iMica currently offers one of the best AROS experiences on real hardware, due to the inclusion of a Creative Labs SoundBlaster card with EMU10k chipset that is supported by AROS, and an RTL8168 Network card, supported by Kalamatee's new driver.

Latest updates

Stanislaw Szymczyk has made AROS self-compilable. This means you can now compile AROS (or its parts) on AROS itself, without the need of any external tool. An almost complete development chain is already available on our nightly builds, while some of the needed tools are available through The Archives. You may read more about this straight from Cogville.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz is making many useful things for AROS. He just ported MPlayer, so we can now watch our favorite movie files in many compression formats, including AVI, MPEG, MOV, DIVX, XVID and many others. MPlayer is a good music player, too.

Paolo Besser has released version 1.0 of his VmwAROS distribution, both as a bootable and installable Live-DVD, and as a pre-configured virtual machine for VMware, introducing many new features. VmwAROS is tailored both to end users and developers, since it includes games, applications, network clients and a complete AROS development chain. Former Amiga users might be interested in AmiBridge, a scripting tool which allows launching AmigaOS applications in UAE straight from AROS.

Michal Schulz has found an issue which prevented AROS from correctly booting on VirtualBOX, and he introduced a workaround. Tomasz Wiszkowski has corrected a really annoying bug in our ata.device, and now we can use CDs and DVDs flawlessly again. But all AROS developers are spotting bugs and trying to fix them. You are welcome to help us using the bug tracker when you find one.

Soon (or late) on an AROS box near you...

We generally don't talk about pending projects on this page. We prefer to announce here only the concrete results we have already reached. It's Christmas, however, so maybe an exception would be nice. Here are some projects AROS developers are working on.

Michal Schulz is working on the mass storage bounty, whose goal is "producing a DOS device that we can mount to use a filesystem on a USB stick". Michal has already got some interesting results, which he talks about in his personal blog. Michal Schulz is also still porting AROS to the Efika PPC platform.

Stanislaw Szymczyk is working on the port an open source browser to AROS bounty. He started with Netsurf, but he turned to OWB. He recently posted a very initial, but promising screenshot on AROS-EXEC.

Krzysztof Smiechowicz, Staf Verhaegen, Markus Weiss and others are working on the AROS ABI v1. You can see some progress in its documentation here.

Matthias Rustler is porting Ignition to AROS, a spreadsheet application recently re-released under the terms of the GPL license. He has already made some interesting progress. This screenshot looks great.