DOdoener·Jan 8, 2026Submission
The virtual AmigaOS runtime (a.k.a. Wine for Amiga:)
127 points · Open discussioncnvogelg
amitools
Python2018–2026
cnvogelg / amitools
amitools
Various tools for using AmigaOS programs on other platforms
5Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
362GitHub stars
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Various tools for using AmigaOS programs on other platforms
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-10-04 06:13:34 UTC to 2026-01-08 00:48:17 UTC.
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Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesI also note that the most recent changes to amitools / VAMOS are from the amifuse guy, e.g. https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/commit/7be270c4c844127e...
That's a lot of PRs from him: https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%...
There's a lot more AmigaOS API calls and infrastructure that filesystem handlers rely on than just BCPL, e.g. I see here he added a fake input.device to make FFS happy: https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/pull/231/files#diff-938...
And to answer my earlier question, how does one get the filesystem handler out of ROM, the answer is amitools's "romtool" based on data taken from the Amiga ROMSplit tool.
So I guess he's working hard on beefing up VAMOS's AmigaOS emulation to get filesystem handlers working. Great stuff!
In Native Amiga Filesystems on macOS / Linux / Windows with FUSECrossDOS was a combination of mfm.device (asking the disk hardware to do funky things) as well as CrossDOSFileSystem (FAT12 filesystem handler).
What's interesting is not so much the 68K emulator (though that is interesting for Python), but rather that it's using VAMOS - the most amazing thing about the amitools project.
VAMOS is a full-on pretend version of AmigaOS in Python, that hooks everything up so that e.g. dos.library's Open() actually calls Python's open(), and so on.
https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools
Here is, for example, its fake implementation of dos.library: https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/blob/main/amitools/vamo...
The "libcore" code reads a .fd file (which on the Amiga is a parseable description of the API calls in a library, for generating include files and stubs), then it creates a fake library base in memory with
Read the rest
fake jumptable entries... which jump to two instructions, an "ALINE" trap (any two bytes from 0xA000 to 0xAFFF, which trigger the 68000's ALINE trap handler, one is allocated for each library call), then RTS... That's enough to let Python take back control from the emulator when the trap arrives, and emulate the API call.
It does make me wonder how scalable VAMOS if there are no more than 4096 library calls possible.
Anyway, what concerns me about amifuse is that VAMOS has no BCPL internals. pr_GlobVec isn't filled out. AmigaDOS 1.x was written in BCPL (it's an Amiga port of TRIPOS), and AmigaDOS 2.x/3.x went to great pains to pretend BCPL internals were still there, even though they weren't. I'm sure I've seen a number of filesystem handlers that relied on BCPL internals... these just won't work in VAMOS as it stands, and therefore won't work in amifuse.
It's a little bit odd that amifuse only demonstrates working with PFS. Does it work with AFS (AmiFileSafe), SFS (SmartFileSystem)? What about FastFileSystem, CacheCDFS, CrossDOSFileSystem, MultiUserFS and so on?
For that matter, the native filesystem handler in AmigaOS 2.x/3.x was ROM resident. How would one extract it and patch it up to run outside the ROM, so that it could then be use with amifuse?
TIL vamos (aka Wine for Amiga :)
https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/blob/master/docs/vamos....
In Amiga Systems Programming in 2023> You might want to have a look at Christian Vogelgsang's https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools collection.
Good stuff.
>AmigaOS 3.5/3.9
Never been a fan of these. I'm glad 3.1.4 took a different direction.
>LoadModule
Was not aware they could load workbench/icon.library, that is all :-)
>This time, however, there is an official FAQ
I read the one in the downloadable archive whole. It's still quite early and i'm sure there'll be much more info everywhere soon :)
In AmigaOS 3.1.4 released> As long as it's fast ram, it's pretty good for a next best thing. I wasn't aware.
The ROM changes which shipped with the AmigaOS 3.5/3.9 updates all exercised the same mechanism by which operating system modules loaded into RAM whose contents would survive a warm reset would supersede the contents of the ROM image.
If I remember correctly, the same tool (LoadModule) had been used then.
Documentation for these technical aspects has always been somewhat lacking I'm afraid... Not everyone wants to trawl the Amiga forums for hints on what is possible and how.
This time, however, there is an official FAQ on the web site of the company which sells the product and further pointers to more information on Amiga forums which cover the AmigaOS 3.1.4 update.
> That's great news. I'm not sure where I heard they weren't. I'm hopeful tools to do that
Read the rest
will pop up on Aminet :)
You might want to have a look at Christian Vogelgsang's
https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools collection.