Native Amiga Filesystems on macOS / Linux / Windows with FUSE

Very tangential, but Amiga has been a recent fascination of mine. I've been playing with a few AROS distributions in QEMU; a part of me wants to take the plunge and run it full time as my primary operating system, but the lack of a decent web browser is a pretty hard limiter in 2026. I guess my brain has sort of fetishized the platform; I didn't grow up with an Amiga, but I did get to play with one when I was a kid and I always thought it seemed cool, and as a grown-up who roughly understands how operating systems work I do think it was somewhat ahead of its time. Yes, I realize that there was a lot wrong with the design as well (e.g. no protected memory and programs being able to modify each others pointers), but even still I think it was pretty neat.

It's fun to think of the alternate universe where Commodore had been competently managed, and we wouldn't have the codified mediocrity of POSIX driving everything today.

It would be hard for me to justify the time sink, but I would like to port over the most recent Firefox/IceWeasel and bring Amiga into the 21st century.

In a world obsessed with AI and distributed everything, simple problems like "mount this USB drive on every OS without headaches" still feel unsolved. That’s both humbling and oddly comforting.

Pretty cool. This isn't what I first thought of as native Amiga filesystem support - this is support for the native Amiga filesystem drivers, through m68k emulation.

In case you don't follow the link: The novel thing here is they're running the actual Amiga filesystem code in a 68K emulator, rather than relying on their own implementation.

Because AmigaDOS filesystem handlers are pluggable it's possible others could work, too. I wonder if you could get CrossDOS[0] working and use this to access FAT filesystems for Inception-like fun.

Edit: Oh, shit! I haven't used AmigaDOS in years, but I'm seeing NTFS-related commands in the AmigsDOS 4.0 documentation[1]. I wonder if this means there's a 68K NTFS filesystem handler this could run! That would be fun.

Edit on Edit: I am continually amazed by the forethought that went into the Amiga. I first ran into them around '92, after having grown up on Apple II, Commodore 64, and finally PCs. Pluggable file systems, data type handlers, AREXX, and the general extensibility of the ecosystem absolutely blew my mind. Plus there was still juxtaposition of games and demos that booted from disk and ran directly on the metal. It felt like it had a leg in the past and in the future. (I always wished for memory protection on the Amiga, though. It could have been so much more stable, albeit I know that in '85 the cost would have been prohibitive...)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossDOS

[1] https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS_Manual:_AmigaDOS_Comma...

Meanwhile, also in 2026, we still don't have a filesystem that works on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux.

NTFS is the closest you can get, and it's read-only on Mac OS.

I don't mean this to be funny. But given that this is running the actual drivers. Would it be possible to take a standard PC floppy drive, and have it read at Amiga OS disc?

I could really use a USB "flash drive" that has two connectors on it. You would plug each of the connectors into two different devices. They could both see the same file system. You could implement this in a number of ways. Trying to edit the same file at the same time would not really work well, but otherwise it would work great. And it does not depend on any network and it is cross platform.

Thanks!

How does this compare to the Amiga filesystem support built in to the Linux Kernel? https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/affs/Kconfi...

It looks like it shoehorns proprietary binary blobs into Linux, but what is missing from the built-in drivers?