David's Computer Blog

After trying AmigaOS 4.1 FE PPC Classic on a version of WinUAE from December 2016, I decided to try it on Amiga Forever Plus 2016. I was wondering if the experience would be any different. In my previous experiments with AmigaOS 4.1 FE PPC Classic, I had manually configured WinUAE based upon settings I had found on the Internet. With Amiga Forever 2016, however, the configurations were already preset. Amiga Forever 4K Desktop View from Developer Oddly enough, the Amiga Forever 2016 configuration works better. It runs faster and has fewer system crashes. I did a configuration comparison between the two, and both appear to have the same settings. At this point I'm unsure as to why Amiga Forever 2016 works better. I will continue to search for the differences, but all that I can determine, at this point, is that the developer of Amiga Forever 2016 has made additional enhancements to the emulation software. Amiga Forever 7, which is a newer version, is available at https://www....

In a previous post I mentioned having system crash issues with AmigaOS 4.1 FE. I seemed to have found one reason for the crashes. I read in a Forum entry and in an interview with Timothy De Groote about Z3 memory in OS 4.1. So I checked my WinUAE emulator settings and found Z3 memory set to zero. So I increased the Z3 memory to 512MB and rebooted. The system started working better. The web browsing experienced improved as the browser wasn't crashing as often. Although, unfortunately, it still crashes but less often now. I already had 2MB chip memory and 128 MB on the PPC card, so I'm not sure as to why adding Z3 memory helped. So I think that, at least in part, my AmigaOS 4.1 crashes and memory problems were related to a emulator configuration that caused an insufficient memory issue in AmigaOS 4.1 FE.

So I have been using AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Classic on WinUAE for a few months now. Here are some of my observations. Before I continue I must say again that this review is based on an emulated AmigaOS PPC Classic, so I do not know if my troubles discussed below are the result of emulation or of the OS. I enjoy working in OS4.1 but I tend to encounter problems that I had on my stock A1200 under OS 3.0: crashes. In OS4.1 I still experience frequent system crashes. The GrimReaper app does catch some programs before the program takes down the system, but it doesn't catch everything. I also seem to run out of memory often. This is particularly true with CodeBench, which is what I use to test-drive some C/C++ programming on OS4.1. Web browsing is a bit frustrating. I've tried OWB, Odyssey, IBrowse, and NetSurf. NetSurf seems to be the better browser for my tasks. One would think Amiga websites would work okay with AOS browsers, but that isn't the case. The ...

My Raspberry Pi 3 I received a Raspberry Pi 3 back in February for my birthday. Not too long after wondering if I could get an Amiga emulator for it, I discovered Amibian. After watching Dan Wood's YouTube video on it, I downloaded Amibian and set it up. So a special thanks to Dan and to the Amibian team. I already run AmigaOS 4.1 PPC Classic (as well as Classic OS 3.1) in FS-UAE on Linux and in WinUAE, so I copied existing HDF files over to Amibian and booted into a 3.1 environment on the Pi. I'm emulating an A1200 / 040 at the fastest possible MHz setting. I'm quite impressed and surprised by how well AOS performs on the Pi 3. It definitely runs better than my stock A1200. Amiga OS 3.1 running on Raspberry Pi 3