Aros

AROS is an recursive acronym for the AROS Research Operating System, an AmigaOS (TM) API compatible, with certain improvements, that is portable and freely available. It is developed as a collaborative project, with the source code being available under an open source license.

AROS is not tied to any company policy or computer hardware. No financial or legal circumstances will have any negative effect on the progress of AROS. It has a secure future. Moreover AROS effort helps the Amiga community in general. Projects such as AfA-OS which improves the Classic Amiga OS and the free kickstart which is useful in improving UAE emulator and others.

As more Amiga 68k hardware and accelerators become scarce and expensive some thought was made to preserve the Amiga spirit. One approach out of many is AROS which can run on 68k, PowerPC, Intel x86 and compatibles, a select ARM SOCs. Where anyone can use an alternative to most mainstream Operating Systems (OS), for nostalgic reasons, educationally as an alternative to Linux, to experience new ideas or just be different.

Ways to program


 * Open - Aros target level with C, C++, Pascal, LUA and others. Goal of portable coding
 * Closed - CPU architecture means specific assembler mnemonics becomes machine code - closely coupled to hardware and not portable

Most old 68k applications and games work out of the box on Aros68k and related Amiga based m68k hardware, so it has a lot to do with the original "Amiga". It implements the same APIs, it has the same directories. You can code a program in M68K assembler which will actually run on BOTH AmigaOS 3.x and AROS for M68K. But it will run on AmigaOS 3.x and AROS M68K ONLY (this means: on classic Amiga models, clones and ports of ).

Obviously, if you wish your code to work on ANY OTHER platform, you have to either code the application in a compatible assembler for THAT platform or use a higher level language. The advantage of C and other interpreted or compiled high-level languages is that you can write your source code once, and then compile it for any target platform.

Being able to share the same source code and compile it on many platform targets is the aim of AROS.

User - The manual on using AROS

 * Introduction
 * Frequently Asked Questions
 * Sound and MIDI manual
 * Getting software - applications, games, ...
 * DOS manual
 * AmigaOS support / Amiga68k emulation
 * AROS USB support

Platforms - Platform specific parts both for user and developer

 * 68k support
 * 68k installing
 * x86 support
 * x86_64 support
 * x86 installing
 * Windows Mingw and MacOSX support
 * Linux and FreeBSD support
 * ARM Raspberry Pi support
 * ARM support
 * Android support
 * PPC support
 * PPC installing

Building AROS, and using its APIs

 * General overview and introduction
 * Kernel Basics
 * Porting software from other platforms
 * Memory Management
 * Nightly Config
 * Self-hosted Compile
 * LLVM
 * ABI v1
 * Build-System used to compile AROS
 * Games Programming Basics WIP

Zune (GUI toolkit)

 * Primer/Manual
 * Standard classes: built-in, or supplied with AROS
 * Custom classes: expanding Zune
 * Zune example code

AHI audio hardware independent API

 * AHI Manual

Libraries

 * CGFX
 * DOS
 * Exec
 * Expansion
 * Graphics
 * IFFParse
 * Icon
 * Intuition
 * Layers
 * RexxSysLib
 * Utility


 * AROS public license