AROS is an recursive acronym for the AROS Research Operating System, an AmigaOS (TM) API compatible OS, 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 ROM 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 Motorola 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 UAE).

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.

Contents

See also

• AROS on Wikipedia
• The AROS website
• aros-exec.org Primary AROS community website
• ArosWorld site