Amiga Research Operating System

Amiga Research Operating System (AROS) is an open source implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 APIs. Designed to be portable and flexible, ports are currently available for x86 and PowerPC based PCs in native and hosted flavours, with other architectures in development.

Current status

The project, started in 1997, has over the years become an almost "feature complete" implementation of AmigaOS - with currently (as of March 2006) only a few lacking areas of functionality. This was achieved by the efforts of a small team of developers.

It can currently be installed on most IBM PC compatibles, and features native graphics drivers for video cards such as the GeForce range made by NVIDIA.

While the OS is still lacking in applications, a few have been ported, including E-UAE, an emulation program that allows 68k-native AmigaOS applications to run in the same way a majority must be run on AmigaOS 4.0. A few AROS-specific applications have also been written. AROS has TCP/IP networking support, and the AMosaic web browser is available, among other Internet-related applications.

Most important applications available

Name	Description	Status
BWBasic	Old 1992 BASIC language interpreter.	Full Port
C Compilers	GCC, TCC, LCC	Full Ports
False	False can be classified as an exotic language, so it will most likely not be used for serious development, although it can be lots of fun.	Full Port
Free Pascal	Free Pascal (aka FPK Pascal) is a 32 and 64 bit professional Pascal compiler.	Full Port
GAS Assembler	Gas (actually, as), the GNU assembler, is the default GCC back-end.	Full Port
LUA	Lua is a powerful light-weight programming language designed for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a general-purpose, stand-alone language.	Full Port
NASM Assembler	NASM is an 80x86 assembler designed for portability and modularity.	Full Port
Python	Python is a scripting language which has become quite popular, because of it's nice design and features.	Full Port
Regina REXX	Regina is a portable ANSI compliant REXX interpreter. The goal for the AROS port is to be compatible with the ARexx interpreter for the classic AmigaOS.	Full Port

External links

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