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109-593: The Magic User Interface was written for AmigaOS and gained popularity amongst both programmers and users. It has been ported to PowerPC processors and adopted as the default GUI toolkit of the MorphOS operating system. The MUI application programmer interface has been cloned by the Zune toolkit used in the AROS Research Operating System . Creating GUI applications on Amiga was difficult for

218-513: A Motorola 68040 or 68060 CPU in order to maintain backwards compatibility, as very few apps at the time could run natively on the PPC chips. However, the new machines never materialized, and Commodore subsequently declared bankruptcy. Over a decade later, AmigaOS 4 would be released, which would put the platform permanently on the architecture. OS4 is compatible with those first-generation accelerators, as well as several custom motherboards created for

327-557: A magic number . The native Amiga windowing system is called Intuition , which handles input from the keyboard and mouse and rendering of screens, windows and widgets . Prior to AmigaOS 2.0, there was no standardized look and feel , application developers had to write their own non-standard widgets. Commodore added the GadTools library and BOOPSI in AmigaOS 2.0, both of which provided standardized widgets. Commodore also published

436-558: A superscalar implementation. Versions of the design exist in both 32-bit and 64-bit implementations. Starting with the basic POWER specification, the PowerPC added: Some instructions present in the POWER instruction set were deemed too complex and were removed in the PowerPC architecture. Some removed instructions could be emulated by the operating system if necessary. The removed instructions are: Most PowerPC chips switch endianness via

545-544: A "snapshot" of icons and windows so the icons will remain on the desktop at coordinates chosen by user and windows will open at the desired size. PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing , sometimes abbreviated as PPC ) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple – IBM – Motorola alliance, known as AIM . PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has been named Power ISA since 2006, while

654-455: A MUI application. Some notable applications that use MUI as a widget toolkit include: Currently there are two main widget toolkits in the Amiga world, which are competing with each other. The most widely used is MUI (adopted into AROS , MorphOS and in most Amiga programs), the other one is ReAction which was adopted in AmigaOS 3.5. There is in development a GTK MUI wrapper and it will allow

763-483: A big contribution it makes to the elegant design of system software. The Amiga has an excellent multitasking system, and I think it will have twice the product life of the Macintosh because of it. Exec is the multi-tasking kernel of AmigaOS. Exec provides functionality for multi-tasking, memory allocation, interrupt handling and handling of dynamic shared libraries . It acts as a scheduler for tasks running on

872-504: A bit in the MSR ( machine state register ), with a second bit provided to allow the OS to run with a different endianness. Accesses to the " inverted page table " (a hash table that functions as a TLB with off-chip storage) are always done in big-endian mode. The processor starts in big-endian mode. In little-endian mode, the three lowest-order bits of the effective address are exclusive-ORed with

981-404: A blank disk by use of the install command. Some games and demos on floppy disk used custom bootblocks, which allowed them to take over the boot sequence and manage the Amiga's hardware without AmigaOS. The bootblock became an obvious target for virus writers. Some games or demos that used a custom bootblock would not work if infected with a bootblock virus, as the code of the virus replaced

1090-448: A floppy, the system reads the first two sectors of the disk (the bootblock ), and executes any boot instructions stored there. Normally this code passes control back to the OS (invoking AmigaDOS and the GUI) and using the disk as the system boot volume. Any such disk, regardless of the other contents of the disk, was referred to as a "boot disk" or "bootable disk". A bootblock could be added to

1199-481: A handler has been written, a possibility that has been exploited by programs like CrossDOS and by a few "alternative" file systems to the standard OFS and FFS . These file systems allow one to add new features like journaling or file privileges , which are not found in the standard operating system. Handlers typically expose a device name to the DOS , which can be used to access the peripheral (if any) associated with

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1308-549: A high level of compatibility with it; the architectures have remained close enough that the same programs and operating systems will run on both if some care is taken in preparation; newer chips in the Power series use the Power ISA . The history of RISC began with IBM's 801 research project, on which John Cocke was the lead developer, where he developed the concepts of RISC in 1975–78. 801-based microprocessors were used in

1417-469: A high-performance digital flight control computer, powered by a quadraplex PowerPC-based processor setup on a HAL Tejas Mark 1A in 2024. Operating systems that work on the PowerPC architecture are generally divided into those that are oriented toward the general-purpose PowerPC systems, and those oriented toward the embedded PowerPC systems. Companies that have licensed the 64-bit POWER or 32-bit PowerPC from IBM include: PowerPC processors were used in

1526-411: A new incarnation of the Amiga platform. IBM also had a full line of PowerPC based desktops built and ready to ship; unfortunately, the operating system that IBM had intended to run on these desktops— Microsoft Windows NT —was not complete by early 1993, when the machines were ready for marketing. Accordingly, and further because IBM had developed animosity toward Microsoft, IBM decided to port OS/2 to

1635-425: A new port of OS/2 (with Intel emulation for application compatibility), pending a successful launch of the PowerPC 620. Throughout the mid-1990s, PowerPC processors achieved benchmark test scores that matched or exceeded those of the fastest x86 CPUs. Ultimately, demand for the new architecture on the desktop never truly materialized. Windows, OS/2, and Sun customers, faced with the lack of application software for

1744-623: A number of IBM embedded products, eventually becoming the 16-register IBM ROMP processor used in the IBM RT PC . The RT PC was a rapid design implementing the RISC architecture. Between the years of 1982 and 1984, IBM started a project to build the fastest microprocessor on the market; this new 32-bit architecture became referred to as the America Project throughout its development cycle, which lasted for approximately 5–6 years. The result

1853-417: A property of the motherboard. An OS that operates in little-endian mode on a big-endian motherboard must both swap bytes and undo the exclusive-OR when accessing little-endian chips. AltiVec operations, despite being 128-bit, are treated as if they were 64-bit. This allows for compatibility with little-endian motherboards that were designed prior to AltiVec. An interesting side effect of this implementation

1962-533: A second source for the microprocessors. This three-way collaboration between Apple, IBM, and Motorola became known as the AIM alliance . In 1991, the PowerPC was just one facet of a larger alliance among these three companies. At the time, most of the personal computer industry was shipping systems based on the Intel 80386 and 80486 chips, which have a complex instruction set computer (CISC) architecture, and development of

2071-420: A separate physical organization. Standard assigns that are generally present in an AmigaOS system include: AmigaOS 4 introduced new system for allocating RAM and defragmenting it "on the fly" during system inactivities. It is based on slab allocation method and there is also present a memory pager that arbitrates paging memory and allows the swapping of large portions of physical RAM on mass storage devices as

2180-471: A sort of virtual memory . Co-operative paging was finally implemented in AmigaOS 4.1 . Since the introduction of AmigaOS in 1985 there have been four major versions and several minor revisions. Up until release 3.1 of the Amiga's operating system, Commodore used Workbench to refer to the entire Amiga operating system. As a consequence Workbench was commonly used to refer to both the operating system and

2289-726: A standard RAM disk but can maintain its contents on soft restart. It is commonly called the RAD disk after its default device name, and it can be used as a boot disk (with boot sector). Previously, a recoverable RAM disk, commonly called the ASDG RRD or VD0 , was introduced in 1987; at first, it was locked to ASDG expansion memory products. Later, the ASDG RRD was added to the Fred Fish series of freeware, shareware, and public domain software (disks 58 and 241 ). The AmigaOS has support for

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2398-412: A three bit value selected by the length of the operand. This is enough to appear fully little-endian to normal software. An operating system will see a warped view of the world when it accesses external chips such as video and network hardware. Fixing this warped view requires that the motherboard perform an unconditional 64-bit byte swap on all data entering or leaving the processor. Endianness thus becomes

2507-406: A user-selected audio device, standardized functionality for audio recording and efficient software mixing routines for combining multiple sound channels, thus overcoming the four-channel hardware limit of the original Amiga chipset. AHI can be installed separately on AmigaOS v2.0 and later. AmigaOS itself did not support MIDI until version 3.1, when Roger Dannenberg's camd.library was adapted as

2616-416: A very long time, mainly because the programmer got only a minuscule amount of support from the operating system. Beginning with Kickstart 2.0, the gadtools.library was a step in the right direction, however, even using this library to generate complex and flexible interfaces remained difficult and still required a great deal of patience. The largest problem in existing tools for the creation of user interfaces

2725-629: Is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000 , in 1985. Early versions of AmigaOS required the Motorola 68000 series of 16-bit and 32-bit microprocessors. Later versions, after Commodore's demise, were developed by Haage & Partner (AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9) and then Hyperion Entertainment (AmigaOS 4.0-4.1). A PowerPC microprocessor

2834-498: Is a negative offset to the library base pointer. That way, every library function can be patched or hooked at run-time, even if the library is stored in ROM. The core library of AmigaOS is the exec.library ( Exec ), which provides an interface to functions of the Amiga's microkernel . Device drivers are also libraries, but they implement a standardized interface. Applications do not usually call devices directly as libraries, but use

2943-467: Is also integrated into the system, though it also is entirely window-based. The CLI and Workbench components share the same privileges. Notably, AmigaOS lacks any built-in memory protection . AmigaOS is formed from two parts, namely, a firmware component called Kickstart and a software portion usually referred to as Workbench . Up until AmigaOS 3.1, matching versions of Kickstart and Workbench were typically released together. However, since AmigaOS 3.5,

3052-829: Is another area where embedded PowerPC processors are found in large numbers. MSIL took the QUICC engine from the MC68302 and made the PowerQUICC MPC860. This was a very famous processor used in many Cisco edge routers in the late 1990s. Variants of the PowerQUICC include the MPC850, and the MPC823/MPC823e. All variants include a separate RISC microengine called the CPM that offloads communications processing tasks from

3161-459: Is fragmented between Amiga Inc. , Cloanto, and Hyperion Entertainment . The copyrights for works created up to 1993 are owned by Cloanto. In 2001, Amiga Inc. contracted AmigaOS 4 development to Hyperion Entertainment, and in 2009 they granted Hyperion an exclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to AmigaOS 3.1 in order to develop and market AmigaOS 4 and subsequent versions. MorphOS and AROS Research Operating System are modern implementations of

3270-465: Is not enough space on screen to display window with full contents. This makes it very easy to build UI which adapts well to tiny and large displays as well. There are over 50 built-in MUI classes today and various third-party MUI classes. This example code creates a small MUI application with the text "Hello World!" displayed on it. It is also possible to embed other BOOPSI based GUI toolkit objects inside

3379-535: Is now handled by Power.org where IBM, Freescale, and AMCC are members. PowerPC, Cell and POWER processors are now jointly marketed as the Power Architecture . Power.org released a unified ISA, combining POWER and PowerPC ISAs into the new Power ISA v.2.03 specification and a new reference platform for servers called PAPR (Power Architecture Platform Reference). Many PowerPC designs are named and labeled by their apparent technology generation. That began with

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3488-412: Is required for the most recent release, AmigaOS 4 . AmigaOS is a single-user operating system based on a preemptive multitasking kernel , called Exec . It includes an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS , a windowing system API called Intuition , and a desktop environment and file manager called Workbench . The Amiga intellectual property

3597-556: Is that a program can store a 64-bit value (the longest operand format) to memory while in one endian mode, switch modes, and read back the same 64-bit value without seeing a change of byte order. This will not be the case if the motherboard is switched at the same time. Mercury Systems and Matrox ran the PowerPC in little-endian mode. This was done so that PowerPC devices serving as co-processors on PCI boards could share data structures with host computers based on x86 . Both PCI and x86 are little-endian. OS/2 and Windows NT for PowerPC ran

3706-542: Is the POWER instruction set architecture , introduced with the RISC System/6000 in early 1990. The original POWER microprocessor , one of the first superscalar RISC implementations, is a high performance, multi-chip design. IBM soon realized that a single-chip microprocessor was needed in order to scale its RS/6000 line from lower-end to high-end machines. Work began on a one-chip POWER microprocessor, designated

3815-573: Is the PowerPC ( performance computing ) specification. The differences between the earlier POWER instruction set and that of PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02. Since 1991, IBM had a long-standing desire for a unifying operating system that would simultaneously host all existing operating systems as personalities upon one microkernel. From 1991 to 1995, the company designed and aggressively evangelized what would become Workplace OS , primarily targeting PowerPC. When

3924-539: Is the native graphical file manager and desktop environment of AmigaOS. Though the term Workbench was originally used to refer to the entire operating system, with the release of AmigaOS 3.1 the operating system was renamed AmigaOS and subsequently Workbench refers to the desktop manager only. As the name suggests, the metaphor of a workbench is used, rather than that of a desktop; directories are depicted as drawers , executable files are tools , data files are projects and GUI widgets are gadgets . In many other aspects

4033-597: Is the use of multiple screens shown on the same display. Each screen may have a different video resolution or color depth. AmigaOS 2.0 added support for public screens , allowing applications to open windows on other applications' screens. Prior to AmigaOS 2.0, only the Workbench screen was shared. A widget in the top-right corner of every screen allows screens to be cycled through. Screens can be overlaid by dragging each up or down by their title bars. AmigaOS 4 introduced screens that are draggable in any direction. Workbench

4142-571: The AltiVec extensions in Motorola's 74xx series) was added. IBM's RS64 processors are a family of chips implementing the "Amazon" variant of the PowerPC architecture. These processors are used in the RS/6000 and IBM AS/400 computer families; the Amazon architecture includes proprietary extensions used by AS/400. The POWER4 and later POWER processors implement the Amazon architecture and replaced

4251-506: The Amiga User Interface Style Guide , which explained how applications should be laid out for consistency. Stefan Stuntz created a popular third-party widget library, based on BOOPSI, called Magic User Interface , or MUI. MorphOS uses MUI as its official toolkit, while AROS uses a MUI clone called Zune . AmigaOS 3.5 added another widget set, ReAction , also based on BOOPSI. An unusual feature of AmigaOS

4360-518: The Pentium processor was well underway. The PowerPC chip was one of several joint ventures involving the three alliance members, in their efforts to counter the growing Microsoft-Intel dominance of personal computing. For Motorola, POWER looked like an unbelievable deal. It allowed the company to sell a widely tested and powerful RISC CPU for little design cash on its own part. It also maintained ties with an important customer, Apple, and seemed to offer

4469-559: The Python language is included with the operating system. John C. Dvorak stated in 1996: The AmigaOS "remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT . The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. Even today,

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4578-642: The Rexx language, called ARexx (short for "Amiga Rexx"), and is a script language which allows for full OS scripting, similar to AppleScript ; intra-application scripting, similar to VBA in Microsoft Office ; as well as inter-program communication. Having a single scripting language for any application on the operating system is beneficial to users, instead of having to learn a new language for each application. Programs can listen on an "ARexx port" for string messages. These messages can then be interpreted by

4687-458: The disk operating system portion of the AmigaOS. This includes file systems , file and directory manipulation, the command-line interface , file redirection, console windows, and so on. Its interfaces offer facilities such as command redirection , piping , scripting with structured programming primitives, and a system of global and local variables . In AmigaOS 1.x, the AmigaDOS portion

4796-501: The exec.library I/O functions to indirectly access them. Like libraries, devices are either files on disk (with the " .device " extension), or stored in the Kickstart ROM. The higher-level part of device and resource management is controlled by handlers , which are not libraries, but tasks , and communicate by passing messages. One type of handler is a filesystem handler. The AmigaOS can make use of any filesystem for which

4905-479: The narrator.device' s phonemes, Francesco Devitt developed an unofficial version with multilingual speech synthesis. This made use of an enhanced version of the translator.library which could translate a number of languages into phonemes, given a set of rules for each language. The AmigaOS has a dynamically sized RAM disk , which resizes itself automatically to accommodate its contents. Starting with AmigaOS 2.x, operating system configuration files were loaded into

5014-493: The native Amiga graphics chipset , via graphics.library , which provides an API for geometric primitives , raster graphic operations and handling of sprites. As this API could be bypassed, some developers chose to avoid OS functionality for rendering and directly program the underlying hardware for gains in efficiency. Third-party graphics cards were initially supported via proprietary unofficial solutions. A later solution where AmigaOS could directly support any graphics system,

5123-533: The phonemes used in American English , translator.library , which translates English text to American English phonemes using a set of rules, and a high-level SPEAK: handler, which allows command-line users to redirect text output to speech. A utility called Say was included with the OS, which allowed text-to-speech synthesis with some control of voice and speech parameters. A demo was also included with AmigaBASIC programming examples. Speech synthesis

5232-561: The "G3", which was an internal project name inside AIM for the development of what would become the PowerPC 750 family . Apple popularized the term "G3" when they introduced Power Mac G3 and PowerBook G3 at an event at 10 November 1997. Motorola and Apple liked the moniker and used the term "G4" for the 7400 family introduced in 1998 and the Power Mac G4 in 1999. At the time the G4

5341-429: The 2nd generation "pure" PowerPC designs. Apple continued work on a new line of Macintosh computers based on the chip, and eventually released them as the 601-based Power Macintosh on March 14, 1994. Accelerator cards based on the first-generation PowerPC chips were created for the Amiga in anticipation for a move to a possible new Amiga platform designed around the PowerPC. The accelerator cards also included either

5450-461: The 8xx and designed in Israel by MSIL (Motorola Silicon Israel Limited). The 601 core is single issue, meaning it can only issue one instruction in a clock cycle. To this they add various bits of custom hardware, to allow for I/O on the one chip. In 2004, the next-generation four-digit 55xx devices were launched for the automotive market. These use the newer e200 series of PowerPC cores. Networking

5559-401: The Amiga chipset and some core OS components. It will then examine connected boot devices and attempt to boot from the one with the highest boot priority. If no boot device is present a screen will be displayed asking the user to insert a boot disk, typically a floppy disk. At start-up Kickstart attempts to boot from a bootable device (typically, a floppy disk or hard disk drive). In the case of

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5668-477: The Amiga clone Draco from the German firm Macrosystem. Modern PCI bus TV expansion cards and their capture interfaces are supported through tv.library by Elbox Computer and tvcard.library by Guido Mersmann. Following modern trends in evolution of graphical interfaces, AmigaOS 4.1 uses the 3D hardware-accelerated Porter-Duff image composition engine. Prior to version 3.5, AmigaOS only officially supported

5777-459: The Amiga is well known for its ability to easily genlock with video, it has no built-in video capture interface. The Amiga supported a vast number of third-party interfaces for video capture from American and European manufacturers. There were internal and external hardware solutions, called frame-grabbers, for capturing individual or sequences of video frames, including: Newtronic Videon, Newtek DigiView, Graffiti external 24-bit framebuffer ,

5886-427: The Amiga's native sound chip , via audio.device . This facilitates playback of sound samples on four DMA -driven 8-bit PCM sound channels. The only supported hardware sample format is signed linear 8-bit two's complement . Support for third-party audio cards was vendor-dependent, until the creation and adoption of AHI as a de facto standard. AHI offers improved functionality, such as seamless audio playback from

5995-456: The Amiga's operating system, such as Exec , Intuition , the core of AmigaDOS and functionality to initialize Autoconfig -compliant expansion hardware. Later versions of the Kickstart contained drivers for IDE and SCSI controllers, PC card ports and other built-in hardware. Upon start-up or reset the Kickstart performs a number of diagnostic and system checks and then initializes

6104-493: The Apple and IBM PowerPC desktops). Apple, which also lacked a PowerPC based OS, took a different route. Utilizing the portability platform yielded by the secret Star Trek project , the company ported the essential pieces of their Mac OS operating system to the PowerPC architecture, and further wrote a 68k emulator that could run 68k based applications and the parts of the OS that had not been rewritten. The second generation

6213-496: The BCPL utilities and interfaces. ARP also provided one of the first standardized file requesters for the Amiga, and introduced the use of more friendly UNIX-style wildcard ( globbing ) functions in command-line parameters. Other innovations were an improvement in the range of date formats accepted by commands and the facility to make a command resident, so that it only needs to be loaded into memory once and remains in memory to reduce

6322-647: The Digilab, the Videocruncher, Firecracker 24, Vidi Amiga 12, Vidi Amiga 24-bit and 24RT (Real Time), Newtek Video Toaster , GVP Impact Vision IV24, MacroSystem VLab Motion and VLab PAR, DPS PAR (Personal Animation Recorder), VHI (Video Hardware Interface) by IOSPIRIT GmbH, DVE-10, etc. Some solutions were hardware plug-ins for Amiga graphics cards like the Merlin XCalibur module, or the DV module built for

6431-501: The Mac OS could not fit in 8 KB and thus slowed the computer drastically. The 603e solved this problem by having a 16 KB L1 cache , which allowed the emulator to run efficiently. In 1993, developers at IBM's Essex Junction, Burlington, Vermont facility started to work on a version of the PowerPC that would support the Intel x86 instruction set directly on the CPU. While this

6540-401: The OS is only about 1 MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code — there's nothing like it. I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of

6649-587: The PowerPC in the form of Workplace OS. This new software platform spent three years (1992 to 1995) in development and was canceled with the December 1995 developer release, because of the disappointing launch of the PowerPC 620. For this reason, the IBM PowerPC desktops did not ship, although the reference design (codenamed Sandalbow) based on the PowerPC 601 CPU was released as an RS/6000 model ( Byte ' s April 1994 issue included an extensive article about

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6758-433: The PowerPC, almost universally ignored the chip. IBM's Workplace OS platform (and thus, OS/2 for PowerPC) was summarily canceled upon its first developers' release in December 1995 due to the simultaneous buggy launch of the PowerPC 620. The PowerPC versions of Solaris and Windows were discontinued after only a brief period on the market. Only on the Macintosh, due to Apple's persistence, did the PowerPC gain traction. To Apple,

6867-468: The RAM disk on boot, greatly speeding operating system usage. Other files could be copied to the RAM disk like any standard device for quick modification and retrieval. Also beginning in AmigaOS 2.x, the RAM disk supported file-change notification, which was mostly used to monitor configuration files for changes. Starting with AmigaOS 1.3, there is also a fixed-capacity recoverable RAM disk, which functions as

6976-511: The RS64 chips in the RS/6000 and AS/400 families. IBM developed a separate product line called the "4xx" line focused on the embedded market. These designs included the 401, 403, 405, 440, and 460. In 2004, IBM sold their 4xx product line to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC). AMCC continues to develop new high performance products, partly based on IBM's technology, along with technology that

7085-500: The RSC ( RISC Single Chip ). In early 1991, IBM realized its design could potentially become a high-volume microprocessor used across the industry. Apple had already realized the limitations and risks of its dependency upon a single CPU vendor at a time when Motorola was falling behind on delivering the 68040 CPU. Furthermore, Apple had conducted its own research and made an experimental quad-core CPU design called Aquarius, which convinced

7194-531: The Somerset Design Center. The building is named after the site in Arthurian legend where warring forces put aside their swords, and members of the three teams that staff the building say the spirit that inspired the name has been a key factor in the project's success thus far. Part of the culture here is not to have an IBM or Motorola or Apple culture, but to have our own. Toward the close of

7303-424: The alliance between IBM and Motorola, both companies had development efforts underway internally. The PowerQUICC line was the result of this work inside Motorola. The 4xx series of embedded processors was underway inside IBM. The IBM embedded processor business grew to nearly US$ 100 million in revenue and attracted hundreds of customers. The development of the PowerPC is centered at an Austin, Texas, facility called

7412-642: The central processor and has functions for DMA . The follow-on chip from this family, the MPC8260, has a 603e-based core and a different CPM. Honda also uses PowerPC processors for its ASIMO robot. In 2003, BAE Systems Platform Solutions delivered the Vehicle-Management Computer for the F-35 fighter jet. This platform consists of dual PowerPCs made by Freescale in a triple redundant setup. Aeronautical Development Establishment tested

7521-507: The code needed to boot standard Amiga hardware and many of the core components of AmigaOS. The function of Kickstart is comparable to the BIOS plus the main operating system kernel in IBM PC compatibles . However, Kickstart provides more functionality available at boot time than would typically be expected on PC, for example, the full windowing environment. Kickstart contains many core parts of

7630-524: The company's technology leadership that the future of computing was in the RISC methodology. IBM approached Apple with the goal of collaborating on the development of a family of single-chip microprocessors based on the POWER architecture. Soon after, Apple, being one of Motorola's largest customers of desktop-class microprocessors, asked Motorola to join the discussions due to their long relationship, Motorola having had more extensive experience with manufacturing high-volume microprocessors than IBM, and to form

7739-457: The cost of loading in subsequent uses. In AmigaOS 4.0 , the DOS abandoned the BCPL legacy completely and, starting from AmigaOS 4.1 , it has been rewritten with full 64-bit support. File extensions are often used in AmigaOS, but they are not mandatory and they are not handled specially by the DOS, being instead just a conventional part of the file names. Executable programs are recognized using

7848-540: The decade, manufacturing issues began plaguing the AIM alliance in much the same way they did Motorola, which consistently pushed back deployments of new processors for Apple and other vendors: first from Motorola in the 1990s with the PowerPC 7xx and 74xx processors, and IBM with the 64-bit PowerPC 970 processor in 2003. In 2004, Motorola exited the chip manufacturing business by spinning off its semiconductor business as an independent company called Freescale Semiconductor . Around

7957-456: The disk with name "Work" in drive DF0: , one could write " DF0:Foo/Bar " or " Work:Foo/Bar ". However, these are not completely equivalent, since when the latter form is used, the system knows that the wanted volume is "Work" and not just any volume in DF0: . Therefore, whenever a requested file on "Work" is being accessed without volume "Work" being present in any drive, it will say something to

8066-406: The effect of: Please insert volume Work in any drive . Programs often need to access files without knowing their physical location (either the drive or the volume): they only know the "logical path" of the file, i.e. whether the file is a library, a documentation file, a translation of the program's messages, and so on. This is solved in AmigaOS by the use of assigns . An assign follows, again,

8175-507: The embedded market. It was later and slower than promised, and IBM used their own POWER3 design instead, offering no 64-bit "small" version until the late-2002 introduction of the PowerPC 970 . The 970 is a 64-bit processor derived from the POWER4 server processor. To create it, the POWER4 core was modified to be backward-compatible with 32-bit PowerPC processors, and a vector unit (similar to

8284-512: The file manager component. For end users Workbench was often synonymous with AmigaOS. From version 3.5 the OS was renamed "AmigaOS" and pre-3.5 versions were also retroactively referred to as "AmigaOS" (rather than Workbench). Subsequently, "Workbench" refers to the native graphical file manager only. From its inception, Workbench offered a highly customizable interface. The user could change the aspect of program icons replacing it with newer ones with different color combinations. Users could also take

8393-481: The first PowerPC products reached the market, they were met with enthusiasm. In addition to Apple, both IBM and the Motorola Computer Group offered systems built around the processors. Microsoft released Windows NT 3.51 for the architecture, which was used in Motorola's PowerPC servers, and Sun Microsystems offered a version of its Solaris OS. IBM ported its AIX Unix . Workplace OS featured

8502-496: The first release after Commodore's demise, only the software component has been updated and the role of Kickstart has been diminished somewhat. Firmware updates may still be applied by patching at system boot. That was until 2018 when Hyperion Entertainment (license holder to AmigaOS 3.1) released AmigaOS 3.1.4 with an updated Kickstart ROM to go with it. Kickstart is the bootstrap firmware, usually stored in ROM . Kickstart contains

8611-462: The handler. As an example of these concepts is the SPEAK: handler which could have text redirected to spoken speech, through the speech synthesis system. Device names are case insensitive (uppercase by convention) strings followed by a colon . After the colon a specifier can be added, which gives the handler additional information about what is being accessed and how . In the case of filesystem,

8720-414: The interface resembles Mac OS , with the main desktop showing icons of inserted disks and hard drive partitions, and a single menu bar at the top of every screen. Unlike the Macintosh mouse available at the time, the standard Amiga mouse has two buttons – the right mouse button operates the pull-down menus, with a "release to select" mechanism. Until the release of version 3, AmigaOS only natively supported

8829-406: The old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture –based processors. Originally intended for personal computers , the architecture is well known for being used by Apple's desktop and laptop lines from 1994 until 2006, and in several videogame consoles including Microsoft's Xbox 360 , Sony's PlayStation 3 , and Nintendo's GameCube , Wii , and Wii U . PowerPC

8938-407: The original AmigaOS that are compatible with it. AmigaOS is a single-user operating system based on a preemptive multitasking kernel , called Exec . AmigaOS provides an abstraction of the Amiga's hardware, a disk operating system called AmigaDOS, a windowing system API called Intuition and a desktop file manager called Workbench . A command-line interface (CLI), called AmigaShell,

9047-662: The original. The first such virus was the SCA virus . Anti-virus attempts included custom bootblocks. These amended bootblock advertised the presence of the virus checker while checking the system for tell-tale signs of memory-resident viruses and then passed control back to the system. Unfortunately these could not be used on disks that already relied on a custom bootblock, but did alert users to potential trouble. Several of them also replicated themselves across other disks, becoming little more than viruses in their own right. The Macintosh should have had multitasking. I can't stress enough what

9156-761: The performance limitations of the chip for future personal computer hardware specifically related to heat generation and energy usage, as well as the inability of IBM to move the 970 processor to the 3 GHz range. The IBM-Freescale alliance was replaced by an open standards body called Power.org. Power.org operates under the governance of the IEEE with IBM continuing to use and evolve the PowerPC processor on game consoles and Freescale Semiconductor focusing solely on embedded devices. IBM continues to develop PowerPC microprocessor cores for use in their application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) offerings. Many high volume applications embed PowerPC cores. The PowerPC specification

9265-422: The performance of the PowerPC was a bright spot in the face of increased competition from Windows 95 and Windows NT-based PCs. With the cancellation of Workplace OS, the general PowerPC platform (especially AIM's Common Hardware Reference Platform ) was instead seen as a hardware-only compromise to run many operating systems one at a time upon a single unifying vendor-neutral hardware platform. In parallel with

9374-501: The porting of various GTK based software. There is also modern interfaces based on XML, Feelin . MUI extended Workbench 's four-colour palette with four additional colours, allowing smoother gradients with less noticeable dithering . The MagicWB companion to MUI made use of this extended palette to provide more attractive icons to replace the dated Workbench defaults. MUI 4 added support for alpha blending and support for user defined widget shapes. AmigaOS AmigaOS

9483-447: The possibility of adding IBM too, which might buy smaller versions from Motorola instead of making its own. At this point Motorola already had its own RISC design in the form of the 88000 , which was doing poorly in the market. Motorola was doing well with its 68000 family and the majority of the funding was focused on this. The 88000 effort was somewhat starved for resources. The 88000 was already in production, however; Data General

9592-556: The processor in little-endian mode while Solaris, AIX and Linux ran in big endian. Some of IBM's embedded PowerPC chips use a per-page endianness bit. None of the previous applies to them. The first implementation of the architecture was the PowerPC 601 , released in 1992, based on the RSC, implementing a hybrid of the POWER1 and PowerPC instructions. This allowed the chip to be used by IBM in their existing POWER1-based platforms, although it also meant some slight pain when switching to

9701-453: The program in a similar fashion to a user pushing buttons. For example, an ARexx script run in an e-mail program could save the currently displayed email, invoke an external program which could extract and process information, and then invoke a viewer program. This allows applications to control other applications by sending data back and forth directly with memory handles, instead of saving files to disk and then reloading them. Since AmigaOS 4,

9810-412: The rumors, the switching process took only 5 cycles, or the amount of time needed for the processor to empty its instruction pipeline. Microsoft also aided the processor's demise by refusing to support the PowerPC mode. The first 64-bit implementation is the PowerPC 620 , but it appears to have seen little use because Apple didn't want to buy it and because, with its large die area, it was too costly for

9919-546: The same syntax as a device name; however, it already points to a directory inside the filesystem. The place an assign points to can be changed at any time by the user (this behavior is similar to, but nevertheless distinct from, the subst command in MS-DOS , for example). Assigns were also convenient because one logical assign could point to more than one different physical location at the same time, thereby allowing an assign ′s contents to expand logically, while still maintaining

10028-579: The same time, IBM exited the 32-bit embedded processor market by selling its line of PowerPC products to Applied Micro Circuits Corporation (AMCC) and focusing on 64-bit chip designs, while maintaining its commitment of PowerPC CPUs toward game console makers such as Nintendo 's GameCube , Wii and Wii U , Sony 's PlayStation 3 and Microsoft 's Xbox 360 , of which the latter two both use 64-bit processors. In 2005, Apple announced they would no longer use PowerPC processors in their Apple Macintosh computers, favoring Intel -produced processors instead, citing

10137-455: The specifier usually consists of a path to a file in the filesystem; for other handlers, specifiers usually set characteristics of the desired input/output channel (for the SER: serial port driver, for example, the specifier will contain bit rate , start and stop bits , etc.). Filesystems expose drive names as their device names. For example, DF0: by default refers to the first floppy drive in

10246-528: The standard MIDI API. Commodore's version of camd.library also included a built-in driver for the serial port. The later open source version of camd.library by Kjetil Matheussen did not provide a built-in driver for the serial port, but provided an external driver instead. AmigaOS was one of the first operating systems to feature speech synthesis with software developed by SoftVoice, Inc., which allowed text-to-speech conversion of American English . This had three main components: narrator.device , which modulates

10355-433: The system, providing pre-emptive multitasking with prioritized round-robin scheduling . Exec also provides access to other libraries and high-level inter-process communication via message passing . Other comparable microkernels have had performance problems because of the need to copy messages between address spaces. Since the Amiga has only one address space, Exec message passing is quite efficient. AmigaDOS provides

10464-430: The system. On many systems DH0: is used to refer to the first hard drive. Filesystems also expose volume names , following the same syntax as device names: these identify the specific medium in the file system-managed drive. If DF0: contains a disk named "Workbench", then Workbench: will be a volume name that can be used to access files in DF0: . If one wanted to access a file named "Bar" located in directory "Foo" of

10573-477: The thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant — albeit cultlike — community, not unlike that which you have with Linux, the Unix clone." AmigaOS provides a modular set of system functions through dynamically loaded shared libraries , either stored as a file on disk with a " .library " filename extension, or stored in the Kickstart firmware. All library functions are accessed via an indirect jump table , which

10682-423: Was "pure" and includes the "low end" PowerPC 603 and "high end" PowerPC 604 . The 603 is notable due to its very low cost and power consumption. This was a deliberate design goal on Motorola's part, who used the 603 project to build the basic core for all future generations of PPC chips. Apple tried to use the 603 in a new laptop design but was unable due to the small 8  KB level 1 cache. The 68000 emulator in

10791-501: Was also used for the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars and a variety of satellites. It has since become a niche architecture for personal computers, particularly with AmigaOS 4 implementations, but remains popular for embedded systems . PowerPC was the cornerstone of AIM's PReP and Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) initiatives in the 1990s. It is largely based on the earlier IBM POWER architecture , and retains

10900-472: Was based on TRIPOS , which is written in BCPL . Interfacing with it from other languages proved a difficult and error-prone task, and the port of TRIPOS was not very efficient. From AmigaOS 2.x onwards, AmigaDOS was rewritten in C and Assembler , retaining 1.x BCPL program compatibility, and it incorporated parts of the third-party AmigaDOS Resource Project , which had already written replacements for many of

11009-560: Was developed within AMCC. These products focus on a variety of applications including networking, wireless, storage, printing/imaging and industrial automation. Numerically, the PowerPC is mostly found in controllers in cars. For the automotive market, Freescale Semiconductor initially offered many variations called the MPC5xx family such as the MPC555, built on a variation of the 601 core called

11118-416: Was just one of several concurrent power architecture projects that IBM was working on, this chip began to be known inside IBM and by the media as the PowerPC 615 . Profitability concerns and rumors of performance issues in the switching between the x86 and native PowerPC instruction sets resulted in the project being canceled in 1995 after only a limited number of chips were produced for in-house testing. Aside

11227-619: Was launched at a time when there was little support for 3D graphics libraries to enhance desktop GUIs and computer rendering capabilities. However, the Amiga became one of the first widespread 3D development platforms. VideoScape 3D was one of the earliest 3D rendering and animation systems, and Silver/ TurboSilver was one of the first ray-tracing 3D programs. Then Amiga boasted many influential applications in 3D software, such as Imagine , maxon's Cinema 4D , Realsoft 3D , VistaPro , Aladdin 4D and NewTek's Lightwave (used to render movies and television shows like Babylon 5 ). Likewise, while

11336-407: Was launched, Motorola categorized all their PowerPC models (former, current and future) according to what generation they adhered to, even renaming the older 603e core "G2". Motorola had a G5 project that never came to fruition, and Apple later used the name when the 970 family launched in 2003, though it was designed and built by IBM. The PowerPC is designed along RISC principles and allows for

11445-499: Was occasionally used in third-party programs, particularly educational software. For example, the word processors Prowrite and Excellence! could read out documents using the synthesizer. These speech synthesis components remained largely unchanged in later OS releases and Commodore eventually removed speech synthesis support from AmigaOS 2.1 onward because of licensing restrictions. Despite the American English limitation of

11554-925: Was released as shareware . Starting from MUI 3.9 an unrestricted version is integrated with MorphOS, but a shareware key is still required to activate all user configuration options in AmigaOS. UI development is done at source-code level without the aid of GUI builders. In MUI application the programmer only defines logical structure of the GUI and the layout is determined at run time depending on user configuration. Unlike on other GUI toolkits developer does not determine exact coordinates for UI objects but only their relative placement to each other using object groups. In traditional Intuition -based UI coding programmer had to calculate placement of gadgets relative to font and border sizes. By default all UI elements are resizable and change their size to match window size. It can also automatically switch into smaller font or hide UI elements if there

11663-455: Was shipping 88000 machines and Apple already had 88000 prototype machines running. The 88000 had also achieved a number of embedded design wins in telecom applications. If the new POWER one-chip version could be made bus-compatible at a hardware level with the 88000, that would allow both Apple and Motorola to bring machines to market far faster since they would not have to redesign their board architecture. The result of these various requirements

11772-849: Was termed retargetable graphics (RTG). With AmigaOS 3.5, some RTG systems were bundled with the OS, allowing the use of common hardware cards other than the native Amiga chipsets. The main RTG systems are CyberGraphX , Picasso 96 and EGS . Some vector graphic libraries, like Cairo and Anti-Grain Geometry , are also available. Modern systems can use cross-platform SDL (simple DirectMedia Layer) engine for games and other multimedia programs. The Amiga did not have any inbuilt 3D graphics capability, and so had no standard 3D graphics API . Later, graphics card manufacturers and third-party developers provided their own standards, which included MiniGL , Warp3D , Storm Mesa ( agl.library ) and CyberGL. The Amiga

11881-415: Was the inflexible output. Most of the programs were still using built-in fonts and window sizes, thus making the use of new high resolution graphics hardware adapters nearly unbearable. Even the preference programs on the Workbench were still only using the default fixed-width font. In 1992 Stefan Stuntz started developing a new object-oriented GUI toolkit for Amiga. Main goals for new GUI toolkit were: MUI

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