@cdimauro
That is exactly what I meant with "no clue". That was the case end of 2019 and from this time the post of Gunnar. Kal left all related to vampire if I remember right December 2019. Yes he got a board. The same is true for MSchulz. He got a board and indeed contributed some time but then also left. He has his own project now (a kind of Amithlon on ARM based on Aros 68k). Then Aros was forked, the dev contributing now are involved because they are interested in Aros 68k on Vampire, nothing else.
OK. Thanks for the clarification. I didn't know those details, which weren't publicly available (at least to me, looking at the usual sites which I frequent).
Kal on the other hand has different views so, in my view, forking was best solution. The forked branch does not affect the main branch, even if something is removed there.
As I've said, if you remove the HIDD to get something similar to the original Amiga o.s. then it's a bad thing, because you're wasting resources.
And regarding future, of course anything 68k related cannot become mainstream again but in amiga terms the 68k market is multiple of all NG related platforms together regarding sales and number of users. How many active Aros (X86) users are there currently should be known to you.
It looks like that the AROS "market share" is bigger than the 68K one, according to the numbers (and only his numbers) that nikos reported...
BTW I personal do not see the real potential for another exotic OS out there. It is difficult today to really attract new users that not know amiga. The biggest potential are current amiga interested people and people knowing amiga from the past. And 68k is what people know, the biggest software base is there, the most compiler and development environments and so on.
Which can run under an emulator, if needed.
"Not necessarily. There's a reason why a pillar of AROS is source-level compatibility (binary-compatibility is only about 68K)."
I do not understand how this helps... you still need people who adapt software to 64bit and recompile them,
If you follow the guidelines you don't need explicit support for 64-bit software (as well as for the endianess): it should be enough to recompile.
However some bug can be left in the code, and it can eventually be easily fixed.
SMP-support alone makes no software faster, you need software that uses it. And you need OS-support that makes it possible for software to use it.
On AROS there's already o.s. support for SMP, and even allowing single applications to run concurrently (e.g.: not requiring explicit SMP support. Just launch them, and let the system assign them to one of the available core / hardware threads) it's already a vast improvement compared to the single-process-for-all-threads Amiga o.s. model, especially nowadays where even cheap phones have several cores.
Certainly 68k as architecture in the real world is dead but we talk here about a micro market. It would be stupid to compare to one of the big platforms. The platforms we can compare with are exotic platforms (in most cases retro related too). In this niche world 68k as amiga platform is not "dead" (at least it depends how you define dead here). A market is living when it is growing in both number of users and products. This is the case for the amiga 68k market currently.
The Amiga 68K "market" is made by the same people which are splitting their interests on one or more of the available "post-Commodore" platforms: AROS, MorphOS, OS4, FS/WinUAE, Minimig/Mist/Vampire/FPGA*.
The only ones from those which are used as a normal platform aren't the 68K ones, because they have not enough processing power, and their are mostly used to run videogames, where compatibility is the biggest needed feature, and WinUAE wins hands down.
Talking about applications, which is the second use case, the non-68K platforms are the most widespread (because you need more resources / performances).
So, the Amiga 68K market is mostly a retrogaming platform: insert the "disk" and play. And it has no future other than that.
68K is dead because it's a legacy platform, and the fact that there's a "FrankenstIEn" (cit.) being actively developed doesn't mean that it's back alive, or will have any chance in the future to increase the market share of the whole Amiga nano-niche.
Even because it's ultra-expensive for what you get, whereas a MiniPC costing a few bucks can give better results in terms of both compatibility (you can configure WinUAE as you want, contrary to all hardware solutions) and performance. There's no point on getting an FPGA/hardware-devices other than people which psychologically needs to "touch the physical hardware" (SIGH!).
A whdload-luncher?
Something like that... it should be possible to start a game by simple double clicking without even care that it is whdload and you are on X86. In best case without even needing to launch a program for it. The barriers between X86 and 68k should become as invisible as possible. Also resource sharing is important. There should be no basic difference if you use a 68k application or a X86 application. I know that this is propably not easy to do. I just wrote what I assume would be accepted by more people.
There always will be differences because you cannot fully integrated 68K and native apps. This can only happen on big-endian & 32-bit systems, like OS4 and MorphOS are doing.
However sharing some resources (filesystem, clipboard, networking, etc.) and intercepting and launching 68K apps or WHDLoad games in a transparent way should be enough.
The best in my opinion is realizing a "virtualizer", like VAMOS, and allowing to run 68K apps transparently on any host o.s., but this requires time as well.
