Installed MorphOS on my eMac, Now What?

[Piru]

So how does MorphOS manage to run these classic programs as if native like this without the use of UAE? This just blows my mind!

While MorphOS is fully PowerPC native it implements all the programming interfaces that are used in the classic AmigaOS applications, including PowerUP and WarpUP, Warp3D. MorphOS also includes a 68k CPU emulation (both slower but accurate static emulation and highly efficient Just-In-Time translation that translates most 68k code to native PowerPC instructions on the fly) that makes it possible to execute the amiga 68k applications. This all makes it possible to run old amiga applications as if they were native MorphOS applications.

Needless to say it took years and years to all this working properly, and there still are some things that don't quite work 100% yet. :-)

There also are limitations: Since these new machines don't have the amiga custom chipset, any application banging the HW directly needs to be run inside UAE. This mostly means floppy games and demos.

Is this the sort of features we could hope to get from AROS some day as well?

AROS needs to take a slightly different approach to this emulation, but in theory AROS could have the same features. Here's a project that I believe has most promise:
http://emumiga.com/

Needless to say it'd be ton and ton of work to implement everything.

[Piru]

Very noble project!
So in essence, if this project reaches it's goals, it will more or less alow AROS to have the sort of Classic Amiga compatability that MorphOS enjoys, but without the Kickstart roms?

Correct.

Just to clarify: MorphOS doesn't need KS ROMs either, unless if you want to install UAE of course.

As for Quake II, I'll try a couple other sources, and see what I come up with. I can't even boot the game as of yet.

hmm just to be sure, this is what your quake2 dir should look like:

Code: [Select]

Work:Games/Quake2> list all
baseq2                             Dir ----rwed Tänään    09:53:48
ref_tinygl.so                   236692 ----rwed 20-Hei-04 22:11:10
ref_soft.so                     235008 ----rwed 20-Hei-04 22:04:04
quake2.info                       7313 ----rwed 25-Syy-04 22:59:04
gameppc.so                      677152 ----rwed 20-Hei-04 22:04:58
quake2                          593624 ----rwed 20-Hei-04 22:04:58
5 files - 1 directory - 1749789 bytes used

Directory "baseq2" on Torstai 24-Kes-10
pak1.pak                       12992754 ----rwed 12-Hel-98 23:01:46
pak0.pak                       183997730 ----rwed 30-Mar-97 06:59:58
2 files - 196990484 bytes usedPS. Some stuff will be added (config files, savefiles) when you run the game for the first time.

[Piru]

So how does MorphOS get around the Kickstart issue?

We've reimplemented all (well most) the functionality included in the kickstart. AROS has done the same and we even share some common code. The MorphOS implementation is binary compatible (that is all the public structures and libraries act identical to the classic amiga).

The problem AROS has that it isn't binary compatible (Well it really can't be since it's little endian. AROS has also chosen to diverge quite a bit from classic OS in some respects), so it cannot integrate the emulation directly. This is the gap http://emumiga.com/ project attempts to bridge. Without such emulation layer the only way to run classic amiga programs in AROS is to use UAE (which again requires the original Kickstart ROM Image & Workbench files).

[Piru]

What if I need to reload MOS from scratch, will the key still work after I have activated once? I only have a 40GB and I would love to replace it with a bigger HDD (80GB or 120GB) at some point.

It will work just fine.