Scalos

Scalos is the name of a commercial (then freeware) desktop replacement for the Workbench Amiga original GUI, based on a subset of APIs and its own front-end window manager of the same name. It was originally written by programmer Stefan Sommerfield for a software house called AlienDesign in November 1999. The purpose of Scalos was to recreate the mouse-and-click experience on Amiga, an alternative to the Workbench interface present in versions 3.0 and 3.1 of AmigaOS (then considered obsolete). The actual developers are a small group of English programmers known as Satanic Dreams Software. As stated on its website, the name "Scalos" was inspired by the time-accelerated planet Scalos^[1] from the Star Trek TV series' fictional universe.

History

Versions 1.1 and 1.2 of Scalos were released in 2000 as freeware by its developers, Satanic Dreams Software, a small software firm developing for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. These freeware versions may be found on the Amiga Aminet official online repository. The last stable version of Scalos is v. 41.7; this is compatible with AmigaOS for the Motorola 68000 family of processors, for AmigaOS on PPC machines and for MorphOS systems.

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

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 it 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). Scalos supports as standard icon sets the Amiga NewIcons replacement icons and the AmigaOS 3.5 GlowIcons set of icons; it also presents a whole icon Amiga Datatype system capable of supporting various types of icons, including png icons complete with alpha channel and transparencies, and scalable icons (the aforementioned NewIcons and GlowIcons).^[2] Scalos is also capable of correctly representing Amiga GlowIcons on older AmigaOS versions and including thumbnail previews of files as icons. Scalos is fully truecolor-compliant. It is completely adjustable by the user, and features a complete system for drawing and managing windows (as in the standard Amiga Intuition 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 Scalos system.

References

External links

• Scalos Home Site
• Scalos 1.2 Info Page at Aminet Amiga Official Repository
• Homepage of Satanic Dreams Software
• Scalos article at AmigaHistory site.