10 Jul
1997
10 Jul
'97
6:07 a.m.
It was thus said that the Great William Donzelli once stated:
The thing that dooms new developement of the Amiga line is the fact that
the M68K line of processors is just about out of steam. Sure, a blazingly
fast Amiga with a 68060 would be nice, but Motorola is trying to kill off
the line gracefully, so the PowerPC and Coldfire chips can prosper.
But that doesn't mean that the OS can't be ported to other chips.
The operating system is (more or less) divided along three main
components: Exec (more or less the kernel), DOS (the file system) and
Intuition (the GUI). Exec isn't that big, and in one evening I had about
half of it written in C (there were still some issues like memory management
and task switching that obviously will be CPU dependant, but as it stands,
the API is fairly neutral in that reguard). DOS was actually a port of
Tri-POS (from England) and if I recall, was ported to Exec in about three
weeks. Intuition might be the more difficult part, as it does rely upon the
graphics subsystem, but from what I hear, some of the later versions (before
Commodore went belly-up) had managed to get more abstraction.
The other funny thing about the OS is that Exec was (obviously) written in
68K assembly, DOS in BCPL and Intuition in C.
I don't see why it can't be ported.
-spc (Nice system)
Aren't the A1200 a little too 'old' technology for the new machines
market where everyone must have a fast MMX Px with faster math copro
for Quake? Unless they're selling them as NCs or Nintendo killers.
The Amiga OS on a modern CPU should literally scream. My own 7.1Mhz Amiga
500 seems snappy compared to the doggish NT box I use at work, and suffers
from fewer crashes.