David's Computer Blog

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