In many ways Amiga OS 1.3 was very much more usable than later versions. With 1.3 Workbench Icons have transparent backgrounds (no box like 2.x), of nearly unlimmited size. There are many tricks that are unique to Amiga OS 1.x, and 1.3 was the best of the 1.x versions. With 1.3.2 and later HDD booting works well, so long as you remember to install the fastfilesystem.library into the RDB of the harddrive. There are many of the best Amiga programs that never made it to Amiga OS 2 and beyond.

Amiga OS 1.3 will work with CPUs up to and including the 68030 unmodified. There are known tricks to use 68040 CPUs with Amiga OS 1.3 as well, though these require boot time patches. Some programs will complain if ran with later CPUs having a larger address space, though these are rare cases (just about everyone had an 68020 or 68030 in there Amiga 2000HD with Workbench 1.3). Also 1.3 does just fine on ECS Amigas.

Of course there are limits, mostly do to the timeframe of which Amiga OS 1.3 was released. These include the default of only 4 colors (2 bitplanes) on the workbench screen (there are third party ways around this), 40MB maximum partition size, less than ideal color scheme by default, no easy RTG support, etc. These are all limits that can be overcome, and I would like to encourage developers to overcome for the Amiga world into the future. Some ideas are below the contents in this page.

For modern stuff an AGA Amiga running Amiga OS 3.1 or 3.1.4 is the way to go, or a Vampire with Amiga OS 3.1.4 or 3.2. Though for many things nothing is better than Amiga OS 1.3.

Sorry for the large number of blank lines, this section is still under research.

• Why use OS 1.3: Some good arguments for using and updating Amiga OS 1.3.
• Updating the OS: A look at software that does exist to improve the usability of Amiga OS 1.3.
• Amiga OS 1.5 anyone: We are seeing updates from the 3.1 code base, what about 1.3?
• Replacing the Workbench: Ideas for a Workbench Replacement on Amiga OS 1.3 to overcome some of the limitations.
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I do still use Amiga OS 1.3 a lot. Though it is that I am not able to do much to help improve the OS. Here are some ideas for current Amiga users that are more deaply into coding than I am. There has been some effort to do enough research to verify that these ideas are doable without any extreme needs.

REPLACEMENT WORKBENCH: Write a program that is functionaly like the Workbench in almost all ways. Add to this better snapshot options, support for showing hidden files, and the ability to easily use up to 5 bitplanes (32 colors) on the workbench screen, with support for up to 32 color icons. Also add a ScreenMode prefferences application to more easily define the bitdepth, palette, and resolution used by the WorkBench Replacement.

TODO: in detail