Maybe someone would like to download Icaros Desktop and see what actually is. Here's the link to the project page. Thanks to all visitors, http://www.icarosdesktop.org

"Specifically, I'm thinking of the design and feature-richness of Apple's GUI toolkit. It was way ahead of every other mass market GUI design in the 1980s, even things like GEM (the GUI Atari used). ... in the short and medium term, the architecture was sheer wizardry which permitted Apple to cram a dramatically better GUI than Amiga into fewer resources. (just 64K ROM and 128K RAM in the original Macintosh)" Sorry, having used both Amiga and Mac in the late '80s, I have to disagree here. Call them personal tastes, but I felt the 1-button interface of the Mac quite bulky, if compared to full right-menu 2-buttons paradygm of the Amiga. Both AmigaOS (pardon, Workbench, at the time) and MacOS had their examples of wizardry - after all, hardware resources were scarce at the time - but in the end the Amiga was the platform which got the most of them. The evidence is the *fact* that Amiga could emulate the Mac and even run its software full speed, while the contrary was not possible at all. There were many advantages with Amigas: public, draggable screens for instance (I saw that latest version of MacOS X has something similar... good thing to see, 25 years after), the ability to choose what files had a icon and what hadn't, the ability to switch without issues from a graphical to a shell-driven way of doing things... The Mac always gave me the feeling that it could somehow "understand" what I would have liked to do, and it was really amazing, but it also gave me the sensation that all my possibile actions were previously decided by Apple, and that I couldn't hack very much about them. The Amiga, on the other hand, was the total freedom of expression. Great times, the Eighties...

"What upsets me is that I can't, any longer, jump on something so wonderful. There's no point." Why? The AROS community enjoys spending some of its spare time on this.

"Because back in the early nineties, we were obnoxious." Yes. Sure to be the owners of the best machine around, and totally unwilling/unable to see world around us started spinning at a faster rate. I stopped using Amiga machines in 1995, but still missed AmigaOS habits and responsiveness for the years to come. That's why I joined the AROS project really soon: because having a port of AmigaOS to PC was my dream and AROS' open source nature would have provided some warrantees that other commercial alternatives couldn't. We needed a lot of years to have an acceptable degree of reliability, stability and features. But now we are at a good point of the walk. Funningly enough, if we took so long to get here, it's due mainly to the low acceptance of the project in the Amiga community. The same obnoxious people who survived to Commodore death and the first step of Amiga Inc' odyssey just couldn't accept the idea of an Amiga environment running on the x86 platform and started bashing us every way they could. Most of them just preferred to believe in little companies that repeatedly announced new products, new features and new Amigas that never came to reality. While BeOS survivors re-organized themselves and helped as they could the Haiku project, making it a promising alternative niche OS, Amiga fanactics just dreamed for ages about new incledible PPC machines and new amazing releases of AmigaOS 4.x. The end result is AmigaOS 4.x running on the X1000, a netbook-like grunt PPC machine which costs 10 times a good netbook. AROS would have been far more advanced, if only Amigans would have understood its importance for the survival of the platform - or, at least, its philosophy. But blaming people for what's been is not my cup of tea. I am just happy I can now provide a funny OS for people's spare time. Maybe an amusing geek's toy, but that's OK to me. If you like Icaros, download and use it, otherwise don't. It's free, after all. kind regards p.bes

Yep. Games already run on AROS without any Amiga licensed ROM. Just fire up UAE with AROS' own KickStart, and games should run wihout any major issue. We are now working on Jenus-UAE and AROS M68K to completely replace AmigaOS 3.x files, and run old workbench applications (like Wordworth, PageStream, ImageFX etcetera) in a coherent environment. Just think about Windows 7's XP mode, or any OS running VirtualBox or VMware with desktop integration. We can't do otherwise, since classic Amigas had completely different hardware and processor architecture than modern PCs.