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The Amiga's filesystem is now on Linux and Mac, thanks to an emulated driver (www.howtogeek.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/amiga@sopuli.xyz
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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/44181300

Amiga computers may have been popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially in media production, but their filesystems are not directly compatible with modern computers. The new 'amifuse' project aims to fix that with a new filesystem driver built around an invisible m68k CPU emulator.

Amifuse is a FUSE driver for macOS and Linux, allowing you to natively mount disk images using the Amiga's Professional File System 3 (PFS3). The project's documentation says other Amiga filesystems might work, "but have not been tested." Disks are read-only by default, but you can enable the experimental read-write support through a command-line argument.

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[–] 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

An ADF file is just a track-by-track dump of the raw bytes stored on an Amiga floppy disk. It may or may not contain a filesystem. The early versions of AmigaOS used what was retroactively dubbed Old FileSystem (OFS). Later OS versions used the Fast FileSystem (FFS), which also supports hard disks. Games used their own, custom filesystems, if they used one at all.

The Linux kernel has supported OFS and FFS since the early days. However, AmigaOS is very flexible and modular, and many programmers wrote their own filesystems, and released modules that the OS could read from a disk's boot block. The Linux kernel code can't read those, because nobody has ported the filesystem code.

This new FUSE driver takes a different approach, and reads the AmigaOS module from disk, and executes the m68k code, in order to read the filesystem. Very cool.

The Professional File System (PFS) is widely used on contemporary Amiga systems, so it will be very nice to have native support on the Linux side in order to share files. It's less useful if all you want to do is run classic games in an emulator.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I had no idea. I started using an Amiga 1000 when I was 6 or 7, and by the time I was 12 or 13, I thought I knew some things about it. Today I learned I didn't even know the basics, or at least the basics of how the system worked. As a user, I was at least of intermediate skill, I suppose, but I didn't understand a lot of things that were happening beneath the surface.

    Thanks for the explanation.

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