The virtual AmigaOS runtime (a.k.a. Wine for Amiga:)
118 points
1 day ago
| 5 comments
| github.com
| HN
Narishma
20 hours ago
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Wine for Amiga is as confusing as Windows Subsystem for Linux. I thought it would be a port of Wine for the Amiga but it's instead something to run Amiga software on PC.
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ahartmetz
14 hours ago
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It also makes even less sense than the Wine name. "Wine is not an emulator" - but it is! It's an API emulator, not an instruction set emulator. "Wine for Amiga" is an emulator in both senses.
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petterroea
11 hours ago
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My favorite piece of trivia is that main.c of the wine loader actually calls itself "emulator initialisation code" :D

https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/loader/main....

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easyThrowaway
11 hours ago
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IIRC Amiga Forever by Cloanto already did something similar?
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mras0
9 hours ago
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Amiga Forever is a distribution of software (Amiga ROMs and OS disks) and a full system emulator: CPU, custom chips (graphics/sound/..) etc. It allows you to emulate various Amiga systems completely.

vAmos is just CPU and an embedded ROM/OS replacement that does just enough to run (some) AmigaOS command line programs. The primary use case is for cross-development (running Amiga compilers/tools, testing simple stuff, etc.) without having to boot a full system emulator for each command and better integration with e.g. host-side Makefiles.

With the vAmos=WINE analogy, Amiga Forever=VirtualBox/VMWare.

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layer8
8 hours ago
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Being preceded by “virtual AmigaOS runtime”, I somehow had no trouble understanding it.
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doener
9 hours ago
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The official name of this software is vamos - virtual Amiga OS.
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metadope
6 hours ago
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Si habla español: Let's go!
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Wowfunhappy
11 hours ago
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I guess a better description would be “Wine for Amiga software”.
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dizzy9
23 hours ago
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Unfortunately, both "amiga" and "vamos" are common Spanish words, making it difficult to search.

So far it runs command-line Amiga programs only, but there's an open merge request to add GUI support.

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skywal_l
17 hours ago
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There is fundamental difference between Windows and AmigaOS is that you usually want to run Linux+wine on a the same hardware you would run Windows. That's why wine is not an emulator. Whereas, in the case of vamos, the AmigaOS hardware is not a PC.

They explicitly states that in the link: "It will run typical console binaries that do not rely on user interface [...] This approach will not run any applications or games using direct hardware register access - for this use case a machine emulator like FS-UAE is the tool you will need..."

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vidarh
16 hours ago
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There's a lot of Amiga software that doesn't rely on direct hardware access.

Couple that with AROS providing implementations of all the important parts of AmigaOS, it'd be possible create something that supported the GUI as well. It's a decade+ since I did any work on the AROS source, so I don't remember how much work it might be to retarget the window rendering to open and update actual windows of the OS it runs on, instead of compositing to a window representing the full screen.

The caveat is that a lot of AmigaOS apps open their own "screens" (virtual desktops) and expect to be able to open windows on them, in which case you might end up with a bunch of full-screen sized windows anyway. Then you might as well run full AROS.

For that reason I think the limitation of this is probably fine: Use this for command line programs you want to run in your regular terminal, and just spin up AROS or FS-UAE to run programs with a gui. I can spawn AROS with a custom StartupSequence to "boot" right into FrexxEd (an editor co-written by the guy behind Curl) and have it spin up the entire OS and the editor faster than a typical Emacs session...

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amiga386
14 hours ago
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The comparison with WINE is quite apt, though. Although it is using a 68000 emulator, unlike WINE which is purely native code, it is taking the same approach to implementing AmigaOS as WINE took to implementing Windows: it offers the normal API entrypoints, and as soon as programs call into them, it takes over and does things natively.

VAMOS writes as few 68000 instructions into the emulator's memory as possible; as soon as the program calls an AmigaOS API, the emulator traps it and handles the implementation in Python.

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tejtm
21 hours ago
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just checked and AmiNet is still up!

https://www.aminet.net/

maybe start your searching there

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kwanbix
1 day ago
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Wine for Amiga sounds like I can run Wine on my Amiga. Is to run Amiga software on a PC instead.
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paulmooreparks
19 hours ago
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AINU - Ainu Is Not UAE?

Just spitballing.

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actionfromafar
17 hours ago
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Just realized that the Amiga line lasted 19 years, from 1985 to 1994.

UAE was released in 1995, so it's over 30 years old.

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iberator
15 hours ago
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Sir your math is wrong. :)
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actionfromafar
13 hours ago
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Wouldn't be the first time :)
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tejtm
7 hours ago
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just carry the one back
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bitwize
18 hours ago
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Giving your open source project the name of an indigenous people is fraught with complications, as the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) is now discovering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

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zozbot234
17 hours ago
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Come on, Apache Software Foundation is clearly named after an attack helicopter, and AINU after one of countless immortal spirits in the Middle Earth universe who helped create the world with her beautiful music.
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dsr_
9 hours ago
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The attack helicopter is named after...

Hint: other helicopters were named Kiowa, Cheyenne, Blackhawk, Sioux, Mojave, Iroquois.

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sedawkgrep
22 hours ago
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Literally the first line in the description:

> vamos is a tool that allows to run AmigaOS m68k CLI binaries directly on your Mac or PC.

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billpg
17 hours ago
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Could this be a the basis of an independent implementation of AmigaOS? At the moment, (I think) you still need a licensed copy of Commodore's OS to run an emulator.
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mghackerlady
12 hours ago
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There's the free AROS for that, and the less talked about but arguably cooler nonfree MorphOS. If you have an old PPC mac try a trial of MorphOS on it, it's a very interesting little system
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amiga386
15 hours ago
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It's about a million miles away from that. It's a 68000 CPU emulator, with no Amiga hardware, and just enough OS structures sprinkled into memory, such that quite a few Amiga CLI utilities work.

What you're looking for is a ROM with a full implementation of AmigaOS, that can manage real Amiga hardware: that is only possible with the official ROMs or projects like AROS

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actionfromafar
17 hours ago
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There is an open source version, named AROS, which you can use.
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anthk
17 hours ago
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You can use the ArOS roms for m68k and Aros m68k itself, but you need to set a highend setup.
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fithisux
19 hours ago
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It should be paired with a cross-compiler.
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mras0
9 hours ago
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There already exist cross-compilers (e.g. http://sun.hasenbraten.de/vbcc/ and various amiga-gcc versions). vAmos is more for the case where you want to use an Amiga-native compiler (say SAS/C http://pjhutchison.org/tutorial/sas_c.html) but work on Linux/Windows.
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