25 years ago, I had some Amigas, even did some assembly coding for it. But now I'm back to being a newbie.

I installed MorphOS on a spare Mac Mini, and am amazed how fast it is!

Anyway I have two questions about MorphOS:

1) How "Amiga compatible" is it? I have almost the entire Fred Fish collection of public domain software; will that software work on MorphOS?

Assuming the answer is "yes", here is the next question:

2) I have the ten AMOS Professional programming language (IDE and compiler) "diskettes" that I used to use. Actually, they are not physically on a diskette, they are files in .ADF format for Amiga emulators. The installer expects the disks to be in the floppy drive (after installing one, it tells you to insert the next disk, etc.).

Any ideas how I can get this software installed? I thank you in advance for any insights, pointers, advice, etc.!

As long as the software was written Sysmtem compatbiel, it will work.

Most games will not, as they try to access nonexisting hardware. Beside that you should be able to use most of the software.

You can mount ADFs using the tool fileimagectrl,which will solve these installation issues, as you can add up to 15 ADFs at once.

I tried quiet some software from the AmigaOS 1.x days myself and was surprised that a fair ammount does actually work, though often with some glitches.
But for theisvery old stuff UAE (Amiga emulator) is probably better suited than MorphOS itself. An UAE version for MorphOS is available, too.
For AMOS I guess UAE is also the better target, I guess it rides the Amiga custom chips directly which - apparently - are not present in a Mac mini.

Best resource for old software is still the Aminet (for new software it is of course also a great source).

Getting floppies to a non floppy system - there are a few ways, if the disks are not filled with individually created or modified data, google may help you to find the content of the disk copied to an .adf file already. If you really need the actual data from a particular floppy I guess you need either someone with an old Amiga doing the copy job for you (given he/she has some "modern gear" like a CDR or DVD-R drive or network card or an usb card or at leat a pcmcia/sd card adaptor). There's also some software for pcs to read Amiga floppies. http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118 may help in this regard.

Quote:

When you write "nonexisting hardware", do you mean the custom chips that are in the original Amigas?

The original author of AMOS donated the programs to the public domain. He also donated the source code, I believe. I wonder what effort would be required to recompile this software for MorphOS?

I don't know if you are familiar with AMOS, but it is a rapid deployment programming language, like BASIC on steroids. It is an interpreted language, but the compiler created stand-alone executables. I think it would be a great boon to the MorphOS community to have a programming language for the common user.

Quote:

Thanks for the tip! I happen to own the Amiga Forever 2006 Premium Edition, I'll take a look. They gave it to me for allowing something I wrote to be used on the CDs. Funny thing is, I can't remember what it was that I wrote, whether it was a magazine article or a program I released. Nor can I find any trace of it on the CD, although I haven't looked very hard.

There is also Hollywood. It's made to be simple as well.

http://hollywood-mal.com

Quote:

I recall it was written in the 68k machine language so it is no go.

Quote:

Yes, it is in 68k assembly code. It is actually not that difficult to translate 68k assembly code into PPC assembly code, I've done it.

At the start of my business in 1989, I used Amigas exclusively. I had one mission-critical program (written in AMOS) with some embedded 68k assembly code. When Commodore went belly-up, I ported the program to a Mac, rewrote the program in REALBasic and converted the 68k assembly code routines I wrote into PPC. It wasn't difficult, it was only a couple of hundred lines.

Of course AMOS is written with thousands of lines of assembly code, so a program would have to be written that reads in the 68k assembly code, line-by-line, and write out PPC assembly code*. Of course, it would not be the most efficient code, since the PPC has a far broader instruction set; many individual instructions taking the place of several 68k instructions. But this speed capabilities of a 1.42 GHz PPC vs. a 7 MHz 68000 more than compensates.

*I could actually do such a program, if anyone is interested. I hope I still have the reference books I used.

It's possible to get Amos programs running on MorphOS, but they will likely always have a few illegal memory accesses AND you need to use separate "RTG-compatible" graphics functionality.
Been there, done that.

Not worth it, in my opinion. Just learn C & OpenGL

> a program would have to be written that reads in the 68k assembly code,
> line-by-line, and write out PPC assembly code*.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=9193&forum=9