#: 19330 S1/General Interest
15-Nov-93 19:02:05
Sb: #19329-#OS9 for the Amiga A500
Fm: Steve Wegert 76703,4255
To: Philip Lee 70630,2542 (X)
I pulled this down from the CoCo List in September. It has some interesting
comments on OS9 for the Amiga.
Steve
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Hi All, I received the following summary from Digby Tarvin, the person who
ported OS9 to the Amiga.
---- Summary follows --
Firstly, let me quickly review the products available from Microware. The
initial 6809 product, which was available as level I or II (the latter
supporting an expanded memory model) has been discontinued. Its successor,
OS-9/68000, is available as either "Industrial" or "Professional". Industrial
OS-9 is Kernel and serial I/O only, and is intended for imbedded systems.
Professional is intended as a multi user development system including
everything in industrial, plus file system and tape support, a full range of
utilities and the Microware C compiler. An earlier "Personal" OS-9 package
intended for hobyists has unfortunately been discontinued.
A variation on the above packages is required for use with 68020 or better
processors. This version is called OS-9/68020 and comes with a different kernel
and enhanced C compiler to allow access to the more powerful instruction set.
The correct kernel must be used for the host CPU, but there is no difference
for application software. The OS-9/68020 versions cost about 50\% more than
their 68000 counterparts.
Finally, Microware have released a kernel which has been re-coded in C, called
OS-9000. The main effect this has is to allow non Motorolla systems to be
supported. It does, however, require a more powerfull CPU. For example a
minimum 68020 for Motorolla or 386 for Intel platforms.
The Microware product that we have licenced is Professional OS-9\/68000 Version
2\.4. We are attempting to keep the price at US\$600.00 in line with Microwares
price for the equivalent Atari product. Unfortunately, even though this is
quite a bit below the the recommended retail price, it is expensive for hobyist
use.
An OS-9/68020 version of our port has been tested on an A3000, but we are
waiting for some definite interest before comitting the money for a licence.
Consequently, I cannot quote an exact price at this stage. We have not licensed
the OS-9000 product yet as it could only be used on a small subset of Amiga
machines (those with 68020 or better processors), and the 68000 product is
still better supported (new products are usually available for OS-9/68000
before OS-9000). It is also quite a bit more expensive, so it will probably
wait till there is some evidence of demand.
We use the system in house on A1000, A2000 and A3000. It has also been used at
Microware on A500s.
It is a bit difficult to summarise the technical details in a couple of pages,
but I would be happy to answer any specific questions you may have about the
implementation or support for specific disk controllers and other hardware.
As a very brief outline, the system takes over the Amiga completely so it
retains its realtime qualities and performs like a very standard OS-9
environment. It requires no rom replacement or other hardware modification, so
switching between OS-9 and Amigados (or any other operating system) requires
only a re-boot. The Amiga display is supported as a colour text terminal with
customizable emulation and font module support. It also supports multiple
virtual screens much like that provided by Amiga Unix.
Several graphical environments are available for OS-9, including Rave, X11,
gwindows and MGR. However these are not currently supported for the Amiga
display.
We are looking at these but the main problem is the substantial price increase
that would result and of course deciding on the most appropriate choice. Rave
would allow CDI application compatibility which may be of interest to hobbyists
and developers, X11 of course provides increased UNIX workstation
compatibility, and gwindows/MGR a Mac style operating environment. A company in
Switzerland have volunteered to undertake a port of MGR which I will be very
interested to see.
To summarise some answers to some common questions:
Operating System Vers: Professional OS-9/68000 V2.4
Booting: Can boot from any floppy or hard disk
OS9 Kickstart may be used on A1000 to gain
an extra 256K of write-protectable ram.
Supported by AmigaDOS
Terminals: VT100 emulation on amiga display
Full support for amiga serial port
Driver for ASGD serial card available
Commodore A2232 driver under development
Disks: Internal floppy drive supported
Primary format is amiga standard encoding
OS-9 Universal format supported for
compatibility
Driver for A2090 HD available
Driver for A2091/A3000/A590 HD available soon
(new SCSI driver technology will support SCSI tape
disk etc)
Amiga Utilities: AmigaDOS file system access utility
Convert amiga font files to OS9 font modules
SSM: SSM may be used when hardware supports it.
Price: US$600.00
We are currenty updating our licence to include the new Microware 'Ultra C'
Ansi C compiler technology. This will add about US$150.00 to the price of a
license. The compiler if purchased separately from Microware will be priced at
US$1,300. This would seem like a good buy for professional users, but does
increase the entry cost for hobyists. I would be interested in any thoughts you
may have on this.
Thank you again for your enquiry. I hope this information is of some
assistance.
Digby Tarvin Tesseract Pty Ltd 53 George St. REDFERN. NSW. 2016 Australia
FAX: +61 2 698 8881
digbyt@extro.ucc.su.oz.au
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