Scalos is a desktop replacement for the original

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore International, Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and sign ...

Workbench

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

, based on a subset of APIs and its own front-end

window manager A window manager is system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system in a graphical user interface. Most window managers are designed to help provide a desktop environment. They work in conjunctio ...

of the same name. Scalos is NOT an

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

replacement, although its name suggests otherwise. Its goal is to emulate the real Workbench behaviour, plus integrating additional functionality and an enhanced look."Scalos – About Scalos"
/ref> As stated on its website, the name "Scalos" was inspired by the fictional time-accelerated planet Scalos in the ''Star Trek'' episode " Wink of an Eye".

History

Scalos is a former commercial product originally written in 1999 by programmer Stefan Sommerfield for a software house called ''AlienDesign''. The purpose was to recreate the mouse-and-click experience on Amiga, offering an alternative to the Workbench interface present in versions 3.0 and 3.1 of AmigaOS (at that time already considered obsolete). A group of English programmers known as ''Satanic Dreams Software'' (a software firm developing for

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

) took over. The release versions 1.1 and 1.2 (internally versions 39.2) came out in 2000 as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the ...

. These may be found on the Amiga

Aminet Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web. According to Aminet, as of 3 September 2022, it has 83930 pac ...

official online repository. Scalos was finally open sourced in 2012. The last release candidate is version 41.8 RC1; it is compatible with AmigaOS 3 for the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Secto ...

family of processors, with

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 developed by Haage & Partne ...

and

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale dev ...

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

machines, and with

AROS Aros may refer to: *Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...

, at the moment on computers with processors from

Intel 80386 The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistors SourceForge SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, mirroring ...

Versions

*v1.0 (V39.201) – November 1999 *v1.1 (V39.212) – 1999 (?) *v1.2b (39.220) – June 6, 2000 *v1.2d (39.222) – 2000 (latest public beta executable) *v1.3 (40.7) (beta) – August 2, 2001 *v1.3 (40.22) – September 25, 2002 *v1.4 (40.32) (beta) March 31, 2005 *v1.6 (41.4) – March 27, 2007 *v1.7 (41.5) – August 12, 2007 *(41.6) – March 12, 2009 *(41.7) (beta) – March 15, 2010 *(41.8) (RC1) – August 25, 2012"Scalos – Version History"
/ref>

Features

Scalos is a Workbench-compatible replacement which is declared by its developers 100-percent compatible with the original Amiga interface. It features internal 64-bit arithmetic which allows support for hard disks over 64 GB, and a complete internal multitasking system (each window drawn on the desktop is represented in the system by its own task). It is completely adjustable by the user, and features a system for drawing and managing windows (as in the standard Amiga

Intuition Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning. Different fields use the word "intuition" in very different ways, including but not limited to: direct access to unconscious knowledge; unconscious cognition; ...

system). Each window may have its own background pattern (sporting an optimized pattern routine and scaling) and automatic content-refresh. Menus are editable. Standard Amiga "Palette" and windows "Pattern" preferences have been replaced with new ones. Scalos maintains its own API and its own plug-in system for the benefit of developers who want to create software for Scalos and enhance the system. Scalos supports as standard icon sets the Amiga NewIcons replacement icons, and the Amiga GlowIcons set on older versions like AmigaOS 3.5, including thumbnail previews of files as icons. It therefore represents a whole Amiga ''icon system''

Datatype In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most progra ...

capable of supporting various types of icons. This includes png icons with

alpha channel In computer graphics, alpha compositing or alpha blending is the process of combining one image with a background to create the appearance of partial or full transparency. It is often useful to render picture elements (pixels) in separate pas ...

and transparencies, and ''scalable icons'' (the aforementioned NewIcons and GlowIcons). ''Italian programmer Elena Novaretti, author of ZoneXPlorer

fractal In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as ill ...

software, stated in the article she donated source code for loading and viewing 32-bit PowerIcons based on PNG files to the developers of the Scalos desktop environment.'' Scalos is also fully truecolor-compliant.

References

External links

Scalos Homepage
*
Scalos 1.2
Info Page at

Amiga Official Repository
Scalos
article at AmigaHistory site. * {{AmigaOS Amiga software AmigaOS AmigaOS 4 software AROS software MorphOS software Desktop shell replacement