And that of course is a completely different challenge but one that does appear to have a captive market with more capable hardware behind it.

In my opinion AROS is our best bet. It's Amiga OS 3.1 API compatible and open source. It's also available for different CPU's.

We have some options as far as operating systems for use with our
new accelerator cards.

1. Plain OS (3.1/3.5/3.9)
2. Heavily patched OS (Classic WB, etc.)
3. Hybrid OS (Amiga OS 3.x + AROS 68k binaries)
4. Completely new OS (AROS 68k, Linux 68k?)

I currently run Amiga OS 3.5 in WinUAE and I will use that, or
a hybrid version on my Vampire 500 V2+ card. The problem with a
new OS such as AROS 68k it's not really Amiga OS, but it's similar.

(WinUAE can be used for experimentation to see what combination works best.)
(When you find a good setup for yourself, copy it to CF and use in with Vampire.)

Let's go with "systems" as the Vampire is clearly more than an accelerator and will take on greater stature with the introduction of the standalone. ;)

It may constitute heresy, but given the potential volume there should be an opportunity for Hyperion as well.

Do we know how much of 4.x is PPC-specific? Is it compiled for PPC or developed in ASM?

Just asking out of technical curiosity - I'm not suggesting it's workable.

It's an option but effectively more of the same with upside potential.

Supporting legacy will be simple enough but we really need to move forward.

not yet again..

Do we know how much of 4.x is PPC-specific? Is it compiled for PPC or developed in ASM?

its certainly mostly written in c with some asm ppc inlines, as usual, but why even bother, if it isnt open, and not going to be ported to 68k?

Even the Apollo Team favors AROS!
 

Would be nice to have AROS as official Vampire OS in the foreseeble future. Having an OS that is not at it's development death opens up the possibility of developing it accordingly to Vampy's specs.

im not sure if it needs to be official os, i have the feeling it might put some folks away. but it might serve as an extended alternative.

i dont have a vampire myself but i think it should be bootable on one as of today. except if there is some problem sith the ide driver, as there is on my a4000. one way or the other aros68k wont become a worthy alternative to the genuine os without some input from the amiga coders scene.

good thing is that amiga gcc 6.2.0 is in active development, as aros uses 6.3.0 even if not yet as default, so maybe some amiga specific extensions may be implemented in aros toolchain for amiga-m68k target.

still, as i said, we need skilled volunteers for this to happen.

in fact, i know of the opposite: the usb stack  developed for amiga (68k) (and morphos) being now a part of aros source.

Hypothetical conversation point.

It may be improbable but it's always good to be informed.

I left the OS4 bandwagon years ago and don't even think of looking back.  With all the progress the rest of the Apollo Team has made you can just as well forget working with the PPC crowd at all.

this is a knowledge forum. i think there are better suited forums for small talk, say wmigaworld.net as example. otherwise important content will be burried here under a pile of "conversations".

It may be improbable but it's always good to be informed.

so you have been informed. i think we need a sticky banner "os4 wont be ported to apollo core" in order to prevent this subject beinbg brought up any other day by someone else.

I wouldn't put my faith in a commercial company like Hyperion deciding to move forward on a 68k compatible version of Amiga OS 4. That doesn't seem very likely to happen. They gave up on 68k and decided to focus on PPC instead. But we have some good software options available as far as Amiga 68k operating systems. The old saying is true here as well - "Build it and they will come!". Newer software will be developed when enough Apollo based systems are in the hands of end users.

Since you aren't concerned with the technical aspects of alternative Amiga 68k operating systems perhaps I should ask you to stay with the main topic? Do you use WinUAE or UAE? Do you own or do you intend to purchase a Vampire accelerator card? If so how would you compare or contrast the two? That's all you need to be concerned with.

but what do you need them for, if you anyway need to prepare everything yourself in advance in order to attract them?

to my knowledge, os4 has no perticularly interesting new functionality in comparison to genuine amiga os (3.x). at least none i can thinbk of, that is not present on aros. on the contrary, aros has technical edge over os4 in so many areas, its hard even to decise what to mention. additionally os4 is much more resource hungry, just to mention memory footprint, exceeding that of aros by ten times.

beyond that os4 has almost no native software, except maybe some simple system tools. almost everything is sdl ports. okay, they have qt4, and also a number of qt ports none seems to use.

on aros build system you have a "build with configure" script, which instead of porting lets you build an aros program from a gnu source, with or without a diff, which not alyways is necessary.