I personally went from Amiga OS up until 2000 or so, to BeOS and Linux and later Haiku.
Haiku is a great OS for former Amiga OS fans - itās fast and responsive, and fun! I think I prefer public screens to fixed workspaces, but I much prefer the memory protection and pervasive multi threading of Haiku.
Iāve often wondered after R1 is out, if some Amiga OS features might make it into Haiku, like public screens. Might tempt some ex Amigans over. Maybe even feasible to have a global menu bar, given all menus use the same classes with BMenuBar?
Oh, and a decent UAE derivative/port would be another way to hook them in Thereās an old e-uae for BeOS that still works, but FS-UAE or the one AROS uses (Janus?) with a proper Haiku UI would be nice.
All I can say isā¦ patches welcome!
I still have an Amiga around, and indeed public screens are a nice thing we could get some ideas from. We would probably blend it a bit with our workspaces, still.
The global menu bar could work, but it would probably leave an empty space in the window, especially for apps not using the layout system yet. And it may not be wanted by everyone.
Sure, Iāll have a look at how public screens could be implemented. As thatās really a post R1 thing though, for now I think Iāll work on getting an up to date UAE derivative working.
I wish AROS and Haiku could merge. Haiku has all the multithreaded features that AROS lacks and AROS can run hosted on top to get the software library running.
I am not sure if this is possible. Trying to get Janus UAE to map 68k function calls to the x86 calling convention with endian swapping is hard enough. Trying to do the same thing with BeOS software might be tricky.
The hosted version of AROS may have lower dependencies than a full-blown merge? The integration may not be as high, but it could get some more software running.
Also, more in the hack category, I had to compile Amiga software on Haiku and to do this, I wrote some wrapper headers to convert Amiga/BCPL calls into something Haiku could handle. The result is https://github.com/pulkomandy/guideml (the āincā folder in particular). This only covers command-line and internals stuff and is just what I needed, but could be expanded - possibly reusing code from AROS.
Iām not sure what can get out of that. Could we get AROS binaries running? Or would it need a recompile?
AROS hosted runs as a user application that calls equivalent functions in the host OS. Applications for AROS are binary compatible within the same CPU architecture and ABI version. ABI v0 was experimental and only supported x86. The next-most common version is 68000 ABI v1 since it runs most AmigaOS 3 software.
The configuration I would be most interested in would be a 64 bit host Haiku running hosted backward compatibility OS versions for BeOS and AROS compatibility.
The two biggest problems with the idea are license compatibility and time constraint.
Running AROS hosted could he interesting - ABI 0 for running existing programs though (like those distributed by Icaros).
Hosted uses the hosts syscalls, so I guess Haiku should work with its POSIX support? I seem to remember OS X can run AROS hosted.
AEROS is an AROS hosted on Linux distro, where you can run Linux applications āfrom withinā by some shell commands. The Haiku equivalent of this could be interesting also.
Iāve submitted a pull request for a recipe to Haiku Ports for the last (0.8.29-WIP4) version of e-uae, which Iāve got compiled with full JIT, Picasso96 support with SDL graphics and audio under Haiku (nightly). Hopefully it will be added to the Haiku Ports repository once the pull request has been accepted
Iāve got it working very well with the Amiga Forever supplied hard drive directories and a hand crafted .uaerc file.
Itās e-uae, which is actually fairly old, but this is at least the latest version compiled specifically for Haiku with JIT & Picasso96 support - previously all that was available was an older version for BeOS that I donāt think had Picasso96.
An up to date port of FS-UAE would be even better, but so far I am stuck on the requirement for libx11_x86, which I donāt think is building at the moment.
From time to time I imagine a parallel world where the Commodore has never failed, the Twin Towers have never been attacked, etc. etc.
In this parallel 2021 I have a Commodore Amiga Neuromancer
FS-UAE is in HaikuDepot via HaikuPorts already, both the launcher and emulator work fine - OpenGL is only really used for the fancy effects and works fine with software rendering. The main advantage over E-UAE is the GUI/launcher and the built in UI (via F12).
@lelldorin E-UAE is also in the depot already if you want to use thatā¦
The hosted AROS version for Linux got lucky that there were no namespace collisions. (Once I thought about making a hosted AROS for MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.x for binary compatibility but there were namspace collisions galore!) That might be the biggest problem though.
