That's hugely overestimated. Most of OS4 is written in C. If basically one man can port AROS to ARM in a course of one or two years in his spare time I'd like to think Hyperion could do a x86 port much faster.
No, if you want to maintain backwards compatibility.
Sure, plain x86 port would be much faster (and less expensive) - but it will be as useable as AROS for PowerPC (or ARM).
Joined: 4-Jan-2010 Posts: 580
From: London, UK (ex-pat; originally from Norway)
@WolfToTheMoon
Quote:
That's hugely overestimated. Most of OS4 is written in C. If basically one man can port AROS to ARM in a course of one or two years in his spare time I'd like to think Hyperion could do a x86 port much faster.
How many would be interested in OS4 with no backwards compatibility (apart from UAE) with M68k or PPC apps? Effectively starting from scratch in terms of applications.
Consider how many people seems to be regularly using x86 AROS... Granted, OS4 on PPC is more mature than x86 AROS, but nevertheless application availability is a big enough problem for OS4 on PPC. A port without JIT support for both m68k and probably PPC too would likely be DOA.
That drives the cost up a lot.
Then there's additional features. A straight port would leave potential new users totally underwhelmed, and alienate the portion of existing users that wants to stay PPC.
You're also ignoring the issue of moving to a platform with different endianness. Having compiled a few old Amiga programs for AROS I can tell you it is likely to bite you in a lot of unexpected ways.
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