AROS
Since about 2005 I’m involved in developing for the AROS operating system.
The goal of AROS is creating an operating system which:
- Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1 where appropriate;
- Can be easily ported to different kinds of hardware architecture and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA;
- Is binary compatible on Amiga, and as source compatible as possible on other hardware;
- Can run as a stand-alone ‘native’ version, bootable directly from hard disk - or hosted, opening a window on an existing OS, to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time;
- Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.
What I’ve done so far
- Documentation: Autodocs for shared libraries and shell commands, Porting guide, German translation, some fixes here and there
- Lua 5.1 ported, extension libraries for Gadtools (siamiga) and Zune (zulu) added
- Snoopy, a simplified SnoopDos clone
- DepthMenu, a Commodity which shows open windows and screens in a popup menu
- Wanderer tools: WBstart (starter for sys:wbstartup), WBRename, WBNewDrawer
- iconx, a tool which lets you start dos scripts from Wanderer
- Zunified versions of Exchange and WiMP
- Ports of some SDL games and tools like antiword, id3ren
- Misc. improvements and bugfixes
Ideas
- Lua: shared extension libraries (currently siamiga and zulu are static); Lua functions as callback hooks (instead of message IDs); libraries for MUI classes like TextEditor, Toolbar; some wrappers for DOS functions
- A template driven code generator. Main features are ReadArg and Tooltype parsing and metamake file generating. Other possibilities are private MUI class creating and IFF file parsers. Update: Project ASDRAD has been started.
- Unification of the Preference editors; extending the related Zune classes with handling for default ReadArgs and Tooltypes, save with/without icon, export to file
- WBInfo: save current icon as default icon, disable/enable all tooltypes
- A game engine for board, card and dice games as Zune class. Similar as GTKBoard.
- A 2d game engine on top of the oop.library
- A tool which translates Glade XML files into a Zune GUI.
- A tool which creates Zune programs from a an input file (e.g. XML).