Yet another PowerBook G4 MorphOS video

[Piru]

Here's a small video I made of current MorphOS development version (so called "3.0") on PowerBook G4:
PowerBook-G4-MorphOS-3-newyear-teaser.avi

This is on PowerBook G4 rev e, 7447B (or 7448, not sure which one) @ 1.67GHz, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 250GB HDD, DVD-RW, Radeon 9700M 128MB.

As always, the quality of the video could be better...

Happy New Year 2010 everyone!

[Piru]

so no P-Book support till 3.0?

The 3.0 there is just the version number used in the development branch. It has no relation to current or future MorphOS release versions. Except that we need to call it something else when we do release 3.0 :-)

[Piru]

Work continuing on Powermac G4 towers?

Sure.

Did you guys work through Christmas or Winterfest or whatever?

Long holidays are often quite fruitful, indeed.

[Piru]

Any chance to run MorphOS on iBook G4 with ATI Mobility Radeon 9550?

@Piru
Will 3D support be available for the Radeon 9700?

We don't have definite answer to these questions yet.

[Piru]

for MorphOS (or any other OS for that matter) to be of much use on a laptop, wireless networking is quite important, dont you think?

Release of MorphOS doesn't exclude the possibility of writing a WLAN driver.

What we have decided, however, is that lack of WLAN driver doesn't block release of MorphOS for specific hardware.

In a similar manner we're not considering PC Card or bluetooth support critical for release.

[Piru]

There's more to it than "a WLAN driver", as you know.

Yes I do. That "more" part is actually what is the hard part (all the infrastructure needed to manage encryption and other options and so on). WLAN without encryption (or with WEP) would be kind of a bad joke really. WPA2 (IEEE 802.11i) would be kind of a requirement. This is why we're not going to spend resources on it for now.

[Piru]

@Piru,

Watched your video on morphos, OK, I hate anything having to do with Apple, will morphos also run on a A1200 with a 250 mhz blizzard board or will I need an apple to run it.

You can (for now) use the following HW:

• Pegasos I (slower than Peg 2)
• Pegasos II (moderately fast, best expandability)
• Efika (slowest of the bunch, but also cheapest, very limited RAM)
• Mac Mini (fastest, somewhat limited gfx memory for the non-1.5GHz models)

What are the advantages of morphos over say an Amiga Emulator?

Amiga Emulator is limited to running AmigaOS 3.x. Regardless the performance of the 68k emulator, the OS itself will never advance.

MorphOS on the other hand is fully PPC native. When running old 68k applications on MorphOS they'll use all the PPC native components of the OS, and appear 100% identical to the native applications (there is no separate window or difference in appearance). MorphOS is under constant development and new innovative features are added constantly.

MorphOS comes with latest Magic User Interface 4, giving the best and latest in amiga like system UIs.

MorphOS can run WarpUP and PowerUP applications, including Warp3D games.

However, it really depends on what you want to do. Are you interested in mostly playing old amiga floppy games? If so, you're probably better off with WinUAE or like. However, if you want to run the demanding, high end amiga OS compatible applications, watch movies and browse web with CSS and flash capable browser, and have extremely fast UI experience, then perhaps MorphOS is best for you. Sure, UAE can do that as well, but while UAE itself can get better, the OS will not. It will still be the 3.x line, stuck there forever.

If you have a Mac Mini nearby, or perhaps some friend has one, it is very cheap and easy to test MorphOS: Just download the ISO image, burn it on a CD and boot the Mac Mini with the CD by holding down the 'c' key. The Mini will boot into MorphOS, in "Live CD" manner. No data will be destroyed from the HDD (unless if you continue installing the OS). The fully working demo version of the OS has a session limitation of 30 minutes, after that point the OS slows down and you need to reboot. You can have as many 30 minute sessions as you like.

Do you know anything about AROS, how does morphos compare to AROS?

I hate doing such comparisons myself, especially since I haven't looked into AROS in detail for years. What I can tell however is that AROS has come a long way lately. Yet, MorphOS has several advantages over AROS, even today:

• MorphOS has very high amiga compatibility built-in. MorphOS can run OS compatible 68k amiga applications without resorting to UAE. AROS is trying to integrate UAE seamlessly, but it still has a long way to go, and arguably it can never integrate as well as direct support for amiga applications, such as in MorphOS. You can for example take some 68k OS component and install it to MorphOS system. The OS and all applications (even the native PPC ones!) will be able to take advantage of this component. This will not be possible with integrated UAE.
• MorphOS is more polished and mature. AROS still has several rough edges and some stability problems.
• MorphOS has very highly evolved desktop environment - Ambient - in many aspects similar to Directory Opus Magellan.
• MorphOS has native support for VFAT, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3, XFS, HFS and HFS+ (some read only), some with 64bit file size support. To my knowledge AROS has VFAT.
• MorphOS can run WarpUP and PowerUP applications.
• MorphOS has mature 3D support (Rave3D, TinyGL, GOA Warp3D wrapper for 68k and WOS Warp3D applications).
• MorphOS has hardware accelerated graphics with transparency effects.
• MorphOS comes with highly advanced console (MUICON-handler/PowerTerm) which provides not only tabbed console with review buffer and sessions, but also SSH2 remote shell connections.

This is what I could think of right now. There are tons of small things that I probably missed, and I perhaps have a bit different view of things than others.

For the closing: While MorphOS certainly has a lot to offer, do not be fooled: It cannot seriously compete with Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, except for some very limited areas (for example overall responsivity). It is a niche OS, written by bunch of ex-amiga coders. It is a ton of fun, however.