Giving your open source project the name of an indigenous people is fraught with complications, as the ASF (Apache Software Foundation) is now discovering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_people

Just realized that the Amiga line lasted 19 years, from 1985 to 1994.

UAE was released in 1995, so it's over 30 years old.

There's a lot of Amiga software that doesn't rely on direct hardware access.

Couple that with AROS providing implementations of all the important parts of AmigaOS, it'd be possible create something that supported the GUI as well. It's a decade+ since I did any work on the AROS source, so I don't remember how much work it might be to retarget the window rendering to open and update actual windows of the OS it runs on, instead of compositing to a window representing the full screen.

The caveat is that a lot of AmigaOS apps open their own "screens" (virtual desktops) and expect to be able to open windows on them, in which case you might end up with a bunch of full-screen sized windows anyway. Then you might as well run full AROS.

For that reason I think the limitation of this is probably fine: Use this for command line programs you want to run in your regular terminal, and just spin up AROS or FS-UAE to run programs with a gui. I can spawn AROS with a custom StartupSequence to "boot" right into FrexxEd (an editor co-written by the guy behind Curl) and have it spin up the entire OS and the editor faster than a typical Emacs session...

The comparison with WINE is quite apt, though. Although it is using a 68000 emulator, unlike WINE which is purely native code, it is taking the same approach to implementing AmigaOS as WINE took to implementing Windows: it offers the normal API entrypoints, and as soon as programs call into them, it takes over and does things natively.

VAMOS writes as few 68000 instructions into the emulator's memory as possible; as soon as the program calls an AmigaOS API, the emulator traps it and handles the implementation in Python.

My favorite piece of trivia is that main.c of the wine loader actually calls itself "emulator initialisation code" :D

https://github.com/wine-mirror/wine/blob/master/loader/main....

Amiga Forever is a distribution of software (Amiga ROMs and OS disks) and a full system emulator: CPU, custom chips (graphics/sound/..) etc. It allows you to emulate various Amiga systems completely.

vAmos is just CPU and an embedded ROM/OS replacement that does just enough to run (some) AmigaOS command line programs. The primary use case is for cross-development (running Amiga compilers/tools, testing simple stuff, etc.) without having to boot a full system emulator for each command and better integration with e.g. host-side Makefiles.

With the vAmos=WINE analogy, Amiga Forever=VirtualBox/VMWare.

Si habla español: Let's go!