AmiBrowser brings 21st century web to 20th century Amigas The new native 68K AmigaOS web browser leans on the machines' underlying emulation system to offer modern facilities on a retro OS. Amibrowser [PDF] from Amigakit tackles one of the requirements to use a 20th century retrocomputer in the world today: a modern browser. Thanks to the raw speed of modern emulation, it's possible …
> a shell runing on top of Linux underpinnings
No, not at all.
A full Amiga-compatible OS that can run most original Amiga software, including games _direct from floppy_, but implemented using a FOSS OS on a FOSS emulator on top of a FOSS OS.
Pretty clever way of doing it IMHO.
These are niche products for a niche market. They will not sell many. Therefore they need to make decent profit on each unit. That means keeping the costs down.
Compare with PiStorm:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/12/pistorm_accelerated_amiga_pi/
(I meant to link to that... oops.)
This puts a RasPi inside your real Amiga and the Pi emulates the Miggy's CPU.
No it is not "real". But it's much realer than an emulator.
If you want real Motorola silicon, you can have that.
Here's a modern such accelerator -- TerribleFire:
https://www.retropassion.co.uk/product/tf1260-terriblefire-a1200-accelerator-with-lc060-50mhz-cpu/
£300 to you guv.
Not quick enough? No bother. How about an FPGA replacement? About 4-6x faster still than a TF.
https://amigastore.eu/en/856-vampire-1200-v2.html
A little under €600.
You want a fast Amiga on silicon, you can have it, but it will cost you a lot.
These devices assume you own the OS and the ROMs already.
If someone wanted to built new computers around that sort of kit they'd need to pay Cloanto or Hyperion for the OS as well, and that won't come cheap.
Result, a new Amiga that is much faster than a real one, but costs £1000 a unit or something.
This way, you get something that looks like an Amiga and feels like an Amiga and runs Amiga software from Amiga media...
And costs £200.
And they make money on that.
It's not only a better way from a business POV -- given how entangled the ownership of the IP is, it's the *only* way.
You can have a MiSTress 1200 for €150 which also requires you to bring your own case... and your own DE10 too but at least it's FPGA and cheaper than a Vampire.
Also, AmigaKit doesn't have a great reputation and is the sole supplier of the A1200NG.
"Nah. If I want an alternative OS to play with Haiku looks to have more of a future. It's usable as a daily driver on standard hardware."
That's running on emulation too! And proprietary emulation at that.
You do know that Intel and AMD chips are not x86 now and have not been for a while. They run their own microcode and emulate the x86 instruction set on the fly.
So let's not get too picky about emulating a CPU from nearly 40 years ago, especially since you are self-declared as not the target market.
> emulate the x86 instruction set on the fly.
That's not really how it actually works.
What you describe is a more accurate description of a Transmeta Crusoe.
Instructions are decoded into micro-operations, which are executed out of order and reassembled, but it's still an x86 chip executing x86 code. It can't run anything else. Nothing else can generate "raw micro-ops" and feed them into the CPU; there's no mechanism for that.
Isn't this just a minor issue of semantics?
A modern "x86" is still an x86, but that's by definition since, as you say, it runs- and only runs- x86 software, because the conversion layer is fixed.
But it's still taking x86 instructions and converting them into non-x86 micro-ops in the CPU's internal native format, even if that internal format or conversion process is inaccessible to the end user.
While I'm thinking about it, and out of curiosity, Crusoe apparently did the conversion process in software, giving it intentional flexibility, whereas I'm not sure whether the "fixed" x86 conversion in modern CPUs is entirely based around fixed-function hardware or still partially software-driven?
Also, I'm also not sure whether the internal architecture and instruction format was chosen to make that conversion from x86 instructions easier and better-matched?
I assume they could have completely reimplented and replaced the internal architecture and instruction set several times anyway- so long as it's externally x86-compatible, it shouldn't matter.
Interesting way of doing it, I wonder how compatible it is with older games that hit the hardware directly rather than going through Amiga OS though?
I tried out Aros ROMs on WinUAE a few years ago and compatibility wasn't as fantastic, but since I own a real Amiga which had been upgraded to 3.1 ROMs I can legally use the 3.0 ROM i took out on the emulator and just stick them in a drawer. Plus I think I have an copy of Amiga forever CD knocking around somewhere which might have come on one of the later post Amiga Format / CU Amiga magazines cover CDs? I should really go through them and make them into ISO files before they start to die of bit rot.
> I wonder how compatible it is with older games that hit the hardware directly rather than going through Amiga OS though?
Disclaimer: I am very much not a gamer. I do own an Amiga, but I only experimented with AmigaOS. I've never run a game on the thing.
Given my thus _very_ limited practical understanding of the Miggy and its games...
AIUI most Amiga games booted from floppy. They didn't load from hard disk, and indeed, to install them onto a hard disk and run them from Workbench, you needed a special tool called WHDLoad.
https://whdload.de/
If you boot a game from floppy disk -- or more likely a disk image -- then it's the real game loading into the emulator and AROS is not much involved. The emulator might have to do some sleight-of-hand to tell the game it has an AGA chipset and redirect the output to HDMI, upscaled, but that sort of thing is I believe not very hard to do these days.
I think -- but do not know -- that games compatibility will be very good to excellent.
That's what most people really want, after all, not to be able to run Wordworth and Pagestream at 1920*1080.
Many Amiga games did run natively from the hard disk but it usually depended on the kind of game, the developer, the game's original platform if converted and number of floppies. RPGs, adventures, simulations, wargames and strategy games had a good chance of running from the hard disk but more action-based games such as shoot-'em-ups, platformers, beat-'em-ups and arcade racers were less likely.
Hard disk installable games usually came with either custom install programs or scripts that ran through the Amiga's own installer application.
Arcade-style Amiga games often hit the hardware directly without going through the Amiga's operating system and had their own file system and format, so the the files can't be viewed in Workbench and appear as NDOS (non DOS) disks. WHDLoad came later and solved this problem by using disk images and accessing the custom files through the disk image file as well as providing a common system.
Therefore you could have installed The Secret of Monkey Island 2 (11 floppies), Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis (11 floppies), Formula One Grand Prix, Civilization, Colonization and Ultima VI: The False Prophet on your Amiga's hard disk using their own installers although they were also brought into the WHDLoad system as well for extra features such as the quit-to-Workbench key.
Used to be we needed a z80 CP/M card, a SunPCi x86 card, or similar hardware contraptions for our machines to run erstwhile incompatibles ... but with today's CPU perf and hypervisor extensions, even a $25 quad 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 (eg. Allwinner H618 set in Orange Pi Zero3) can do it in software instead. Wow!
The Chromium-oriented HTML-5 Amibrowser's acrobatics are quite impressive in this, as it does the splits over a good chunk of the software layer cake, with its GUI (one leg) running within the AmiBench Desktop, on top of System Release V46 that emulates AmigaOS on a virtual 68EC020, and (the other leg) the actual Youtube video-playing, with sound, plus the likes of Blink and V8 (or similar) running through ARM code libraries executed by the underlying Linux host ... (iiuc)
That's just about as exciting as actual French Cancan (to geeks at least!)! ;)
> hardware contraptions for our machines
All very true.
I did run full software-emulations of PCs on high-end PowerMacs in the mid 1990s and it did work. About as well as !PCemu on my Archimedes 310 nearly a decade earlier: you could use it but it wasn't great.
But nowadays, even a low-end Arm is several thousands of times faster. The problems become not performance, but latency and I/O response times.
Man, now I'm tempted to try and get a copy of 'MechForce' running, which was THE game for me on my Amiga 1000 or 2500 back when I had them. I loved that game, which was freeware and let you design your own Mechs and then fight them on a hex grid battlefield. If I had free time and ability to focus, I'd try to recreate it natively. There looks to be an alpha implementation in Java, which means I won't be able to help... https://sourceforge.net/projects/mechfight/
Ah... memories!
It just seems wrong on all sorts of levels, especially the "that app calls down to the Chromium Embedded Framework running on Linux" bit. Seems like something HR Giger would have dreamt up. Also the compatibility of the A600GS, the A1200GS' sibling, isn't that great. You have to bring your own ROMs if you want a higher degree of compatibility and even then it's not assured.
I'm sure many people want to go out and buy a new Amiga, but this doesn't seem to be it.
The Amiga was quite innovative in the 80s and 90s with its clever proprietary software/hardware single-user message-parsing architecture, but this proprietary nature later became its Achilles heel, thus increasing irrelevance. Even a Wine-like architecture, like this, may reveal these issues to some extent.
One snag I can see happening is that web pages have become so damned bloated by fat-client JS and media, that a bridged browser may not work well for a mere 1.5GHz 4GB Orange Pi Zero 3. Some security exploits only require JS, but will this split-browser block them?
Rather than using such a limited, and possibly hard to get Orange Pi Zero 3, as a host. It'd make more sense to use the 2.5GHz Raspberry Pi 5 with up to 16GB of RAM, which includes PCIe and an RTC with backup battery socket, and has numerous relevant HATs and side/under boards on Amazon. I bought a compact fan-heatsink case, with an NVMe socket/mount under the Pi, for only £16, with easy access to the 40 pin header.
It would probably be possible to run the Amiga 680x0 VM and delegator hooks in a docker or podman container, using a compose launch, with internal IP networking used to delegate expensive tasks or hardware access to the host and possibly other containers.
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