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Comment by vhodges | Hacker News Reader

Given the legal turmoil it's been adopted/forked for use on the Vampire series of Amiga accelerators/clones.

See also: reactos (Windows2k) and haiku-os (BeOS)

To be clear, the legal turmoil in question is over the current ownership of the original Amiga brand and IP, not AROS itself. AROS is published under a license that is not OSI approved but is actually a fork of the MPL with the word "Netscape" changed.

I wondered if the parent comment was actually talking about the Vampire folks distributing an AmigaOS image with programs/games pre-loaded, without having the rights to do so?

The ApolloOS distribution of AROS that Apollo ship still has plenty of proprietary software on it. In the Discord they’ve discussed that the problem they had with CoffinOS/Amiga Coffin was the rights to Amiga OS.

Ah, sorry for not being clearer. Yes this is what I was talking about.

One big difference is AROS only aims for essentially source compatibility with Amiga, while both ReactOS and Haiku aim for binary compatibility[0].

I've only toyed around a little bit with AROS back when I was a teen, but my impression is it's something a bit different than just a clone of any Amiga OS. It's sort of Amiga-like, but does things differently, and targets very different hardware. Which I think is pretty cool :)

[0] I believe Haiku intends to drop binary compat with BeOS at some point, maybe they already have? It's why Haiku still uses (used?) a version of GCC from 2003, for binary compat

I think the M68k version does aim for binary compatibility where practical, but outside of M68k it doesn't really make much sense as AmigaOS4 on PPC deviates quite significantly from older AmigaOS, and for the other architectures there of course isn't any AmigaOS software.

Huh, this is further along and more ambitious than I remembered! https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Aros/Platforms/68k_support

Looks like it's pretty far along. Shame that old Amiga hardware is more and more unavailable nowadays, looks like this would be fun to hack on.

If I were to get an m68k-ish machine to play with today, it'd almost certainly be a Vampire V4 Standalone. It's of course not acceptable to those who insists on classic hardware, but it feels like a close-enough evolution with sufficiently fun improvements.

There are a bunch of hardware clones (usually need genuine custom chips). I think there are a500 and 1200 replacement mother boards (and cases!). There is a replacement a1000 motherboard (just announced) and a Mini-ITX Amiga MB.

There are of course a bunch of FPGA options including the Vampire v4sa which I would pick up, but is a bit on the costly side (~800CAD)

There are two builds of Haiku right now, one using the legacy compiler for binary compatibility and a new one that updates the compiler at the cost of binary compatibility.

MS-DOS was programmed using CP/M API calls for the DOS Interrupts. AROS uses AmigaOS 3.1 API calls for the DOS Interrupts.

Anyone interested in this legal turmoil should visit https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

I wonder if anything would have been different if the Amiga IP was opened to the public. Perhaps nothing...

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