New guy with questions!

[Matt_H]

Welcome! It's always nice to see someone new getting involved. The Amiga can be a strange beast, but I hope you're having fun with it so far.

1. Unfortunately it's very expensive to get OS4 going on real hardware. The cheapest option available now is probably one of the boards from ACube. Odds are that you'll need to order it from abroad, if anyone has them in stock. Have a look at dealers like Vesalia, Relec, Alinea, and Amigastore (in Spain). There are others dealers out there but I can't  recall them off the top of my head.

There is a new board in development called the A1222, aka Tabor, that should be in the mid-hundreds range when it comes out. Not sure when that will be, though.

High costs are due to the low production volumes for the small market.

2. MorphOS is Amiga in everything but name. A short history: in the mid 90s official Amiga OS development was stagnant. Various developers came up with new standards to extend the existing operating system. In most cases, there ended up being two different standards for similar functions (GUI tool kits, graphics APIs, file systems) When PPC accelerators for the old Amigas appeared, some developers started a full reimplementation of the OS to run natively on the PPC (as opposed to the PPC being used as a coprocessor under the old OS). This reimplementation became MorphOS. Later, formal AmigaOS development started up again and the result was two Amiga-like operating systems descended from the original OS. Generally speaking, MorphOS ended up with one set of the late-90s APIs and AmigaOS4 ended up with the other. Point being, both can trace their roots to widely accepted - but different - Amiga standards.

MorphOS has a higher software cost than AmigaOS, but given that the hardware is cheap and easy to find your whole investment outlay will probably be a lot less. MorphOS has a very generous demo mode. You can install and run the OS as much as you like, but the system will slow down to be effectively unusable after 30 minutes of uptime. With a quick reboot (~5 seconds) you can continue working. Registering removes the time limit.

2.1. Politics. We don't know why AmigaOS was never ported to Macs. It would have made a lot of sense, although a few of the more... eccentric members of the Amiga community railed against it as corrupting the platform or some nonsense like that. Thankfully the MorphOS guys did it, though, which has made it far more accessible than OS4 (although that has finally started to change now that OS4 can be run under WinUAE). There was an AmigaOS port to the Mac Mini in development, but an alpha got leaked/stolen, a bunch of people got mad and that was the end of it

3. WinUAE would be your cheapest and most space-saving option . But only you can decide whether you want to play with real hardware. My recommendation would be to continue with WinUAE for AmigaOS and get a little Mac Mini for MorphOS. There's also AROS, an OS reimplementation for x86, but I know almost nothing about it, especially recent developments.

Hope this helps! Keep asking questions!

[Matt_H]

@Matt_H: I've Seen word of that a1222 board, but dang it still pretty pricey!
I actually like the looks of Amiga 4.1 better than morphOS it has a nice retro vibe and feel to it. Also great post and information!

Glad it was helpful! FYI, you can make AmigaOS "look" like MorphOS (and vice versa). The core GUI elements are identical and can be reconfigured and skinned for a variety of appearances. For example, I have my MorphOS system using a skin that makes it look like AmigaOS 3.x. I've configured my AmigaOS 4.1 system similarly. I like the classic look . The icons can be used interchangeably on each system as well.

Also Is Winuae slower than higher end Amiga 4.1 builds? I would assume it is but by how much?

WinUAE emulates a CyberstormPPC board, an accelerator for the A4000/A3000 that uses a ~233MHz pre-G3 chip and which is limited to 128MB of RAM. With the latest OS4 update, RAM from the Amiga's Zorro III (expansion bus) slots can be used as well, which removes the practical memory limit, and WinUAE supports this in emulation. But on a real Amiga, Zorro III RAM is slower than accelerator RAM. (But better to have slow RAM than no RAM, I say.)

If you've used WinUAE to emulate a classic 68K Amiga, you'll know that the emulation can be made to be a lot faster than the real hardware. I don't know if that's also the case for PPC emulation. The dedicated OS4 motherboards (and MorphOS-capable Macs) are considerably faster than the original hardware that WinUAE emulates, but perhaps the emulation overcomes some of the original bottlenecks.