PearPC

[mdwh2]

rayt wrote:
The problem is that you won't be able to buy AmigaOs4 or Morphos without the Hardware, so there's no legal way of running these in emulation.

What happened to the plans for users with PPC A1200/4000s? Have these been dropped?

In my opinion, there's no reason for a ppc amiga emulation. If somebody wants to run classic amiga programs he can do this with uae and its 1000 times faster than this ppc emu.

There's not a great need right now, but AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS aren't available on 68k, so if these end up having any future, then emulation would be worthwhile.

[Waccoon]

[Selling software with hardware]

StevenJGore:  Where's the logic in that decision? To limit sales? I can hear the nails going in the lid of OS4's coffin already.

Yeah, such an old fashioned business tactic.  I've worked for a small photo business, and worked with many purpose-built systems.  For $5,000, they'll sell you their software, and a cheap, underpowered workstation with a hardware key and no way to upgrade it on your own.  You know what happens to companies that do that?

They ALL go out of business!  Really.  Keep in mind that these proprietary workstations are in the same boat as AmigaOne:  they are strictly low-volume production (in the hundreds to maybe a thousand).

Emulation may be the only way non-Amiga fans ever get a chance to see the OS in action, but even that's not possible without some illegal key cracker.  I know I would like to see OS4 up-close, but I'm not going to flirt with spending $800+ just to see what it's like, only to run cheesy C programs which have been done to death on Windows or Java apps I could easily run on the PC, then have to use AmiNet to find public domain software instead of an official, central resource for Amiga developers.  I hope Hyperion/KMOS/Whoever at least keeps a good database of Amiga developers and tools, rather than just expect people to spread the word through their homepages.  www.amigadev.net is a joke.  Besides, that site is for AmigaDE, not OS4, and DE is about as dead as they come, at least in terms of PR.

[paulvm]

I think the solution is for the makes of os 4 to sell a version of amiga os 4 packed with an ppc emulator for the the X86 the could even charge extra for packing it with an open source emulator. Most OS's sell for about $100 us ill would pay $125-150 for them combined.

[macto]

This sort of thing has been argued over in the Mac community a thousand times over (in the guise of Mac clone vendors and an x86 based Mac).

The argument reduces to this: it costs a lot to develop an operating system.  If you have a limited market, then you have to recoup the costs by charging a lot of money for the operating system.  But people don't want to pay serious sums of money for the operating system.  So how do they recoup the costs?  Well, they bundle it to hardware and make some of the money there.

Other people argue that the platform will gain an astounding amount of support if users didn't have to pay huge globs of money just to try it.  Well, it isn't necessarily so: Linux and several BSD variants are free and they can only gain a few percent of the user base.  Some may argue that they are hard to use.  Then what of BeOS, which tried a fee then free model.  It was pretty easy to use.  What of OS/2, which used a fee model?  OS/2 was Windows 95 done right (and done before Windows 95).  IBM had very little success.

Now chances are that the Amiga is going to loose me as a user because of the OS and hardware model, but that doesn't mean that their business decision is wrong.  It simply means that their business decision cannot satisfy everybody.

[Bodie]

mdma wrote:

JIT Emulation of PPC on a 3000Mhz x86 CPU would be approximately equivalent to a 1200 MHz emulated G3 CPU using the PearPC code, as it's supposed to be 40% slower than the host CPU.  This is faster than any available classic Amiga PPC accelerater.

Isn't it 40 times slower and NOT 40% slower? :-?

Bodie wrote:

mdma wrote:

JIT Emulation of PPC on a 3000Mhz x86 CPU would be approximately equivalent to a 1200 MHz emulated G3 CPU using the PearPC code, as it's supposed to be 40% slower than the host CPU.  This is faster than any available classic Amiga PPC accelerater.

Isn't it 40 times slower and NOT 40% slower? :-?

So that'd be 75 Mhz then! :-)

[Hammer]

@Ilwrath

Note that "PearPC 0.3 Pre" recomplied for Pentium IV is available from http://richardgoodwin.com/pearpc/

[Hammer]

@macto

Compared to Win95/NT4.0, ~1995 era OS/2 Warp’s GUI is ugly in my POV(one of many issues***). I didn’t like BeOS due to the initial lack of software, legacy support and GUI issues i.e. BeOS didn't impress me at all.  

MacOS X has most of the Win32 critical applications and games for a real alternative OS. The barrier to MacOS X is likely be to hardware issues i.e. lack of secondary HW sources("out of the box"*) and uncompetitive mainstream** HW prices (not factoring X86 premium product lines).  

*MOL on PPC clone issue is unacceptable in mainstream.
**Price points (to illustrate an example), 2 Ghz AMD CPU or Intel PIV 2.8/3.0Ghz and motherboards i.e. cheap/barebone VIA, NVIDIA and SIS based.
***Early issues with Win16.

[peroxidechicken]

Man, BeOS was, is and always will be cool.  For anyone who doesn't know, a non-profit organization is being formed to aid the development of OpenBeOS.  There's also a new and improved web site on the way, but for now, check out OpenBeOS.org.  

[Naeem]

OS purists arguing that tying an OS to any specific hardware will necessarily limit any alternative OS's success seems to be a recurring theme :-)

Here we see the argument applied to Mac OSX / Mac HW.  The argument could equally be applied to the A1 / OS4.0 conundrum.

Whats wrong with a "run anywhere" licence based model?  Why must it degrade in to a monopoly on proprietary HW?

If HW is not competitive it should become obsolete as the market dictates.  It shouldnt use any OS to justify its existence.

Tying an OS to under-developed uncompetitve HW is like tying a concrete weight to an Olympic swimmer.

What do you guys think?