OS4 on the pegasos

[KennyR]

I don't know much about Morph Os, can somebody tell me if it's any good and are there any new games or games planned for it?

MorphOS is everything people wanted from OS4 except the name, but implemented more cleanly, running on better hardware, and out two years earlier. It will run most Amiga PPC games and already has its own games like Knights and Merchants. And boy, is this post ever going to make me popular with OS4 loyalists.

[KennyR]

I'll give another straight answer: neither OS4 or MOS have any compatibility with the PC at all. To play old PC games you can use an emulator, but to play any PC games remotely modern you need a PC running Windows.

[KennyR]

A link to PC is fairly simple. You need a nullmodem cable or a proper LAN, but it's not hard to set up.

[KennyR]

Hyperion Quake 2 will work on MorphOS. WipeOut 2097 will. Heretic II and Shogo will. Payback won't (it bangs the hardware). Playing 3D games using 3D hardware assumes you have a card with working MOS 3D drivers, currently only Voodoo 3 and 5 cards have them, Radeon cards will follow in the future.

MOS has been promised Papyrus Office as an office suite, it exists but nobody knows how far it is from release.

[KennyR]

Yeah OS4 is taking forever but consider you need an Amiga One to run it, it seems to me like the pegasos is like half the price and the same sort of hardware spec, or is that just in England?

No, AmigaONE is expensive. And probably even more so outside England (shipping).

[KennyR]

Magic-Merl wrote:
MOS, however, do tend to be ignoring one major fact. When it comes to 3D hardware Nvidea rules the roost, at least in the UK, but no drivers! No support for this hardware.

I'm no fan of nVidia - they make overhyped, hot, noisy cards that are strictly only for heavy gamers. I wouldn't get one.

But that said, MOS doesn't have any choice. nVidia don't give anyone access to documentation they need for making drivers. In fact, they've been known to legally threaten anyone who tries doing it on their own. nVidia support even on Linux is poor, and doesn't support 3D. Only the binary drivers nVidia release themselves for Windows (and which are notoriously buggy) have 3D support.

So don't think for a moment OS4 will support nVidia either. It won't.

I'm not totally convinced that Eyetech will maintain it's alegence to AOS4.0. It has found other markets to support it's hardware and Pegasos does seem like the better hardware option.

Not true. A1 is basically only sold for OS4. Pegasos is cheaper, meant for a much bigger market, and OS's for it don't need workarounds for problems with the Articia chip. You just port it and go. A1 on the other hand is badly priced for these markets and has problems just running Linux. No-one wants to adapt their kernel to run on an expensive PPC board when they can do it for half the price with no workarounds on a Peg.

[KennyR]

@xeron

Well, considering how they implemented 68k emulation (slow MMU stuff), lib stubs (now they can't transparently use WOS or PUP), the whole memory protection farce, and recently how altivec has been implemented, I'd say that without a doubt and objectively, MOS does it cleaner.

[KennyR]

@Mr_Capehill

Altivec has been implemented in MOS1.5 betas for months. In fact the first news of it we got was when MOS core devs started cracking 10 million RC5-72 keys a day instead of 3 million...

Memory protection is not possible in MorphOS ABox, or any shared memory address OS, including AmigaOS, and AmigaOS4. Despite the continuous hype that has followed AOS for years about this, it remains as impossible as ever.

(I'm aware that OS4 claims to have some memory protection but I doubt very, very much if this is worth the overhead it will cause. AmigaOS just wasn't designed for memory protection, period. )

[KennyR]

Bhogget wrote:
nVidia themselves release Linux drivers, and actively update them.

The point is they're still BINARIES, not source or any kind of API documentation. Go to nVidia and ask for hardware documentation and you'll be politely told to f*ck off. Welcome to the world of open x86 hardware.

The A1 was built to satisfy Eyetech's need for a custom system their industrial customers could not purchase from anywhere else, therefore allowing for high profit margins per unit to be maintained.

I don't believe that for a second. A1 was designed (and later replaced by TeronCX) for one purpose, and one purpose only - to run OS4. No real effort has been made to get it to run anything else, except by Mai.

Pegasos ports still need workarounds, even if not for the Articia chip. Otherwise all those ports that have been almost done for over a year would be available for download.

Since when?? Workarounds for hardware? You're kidding, right? When someone makes a UDMA IDE driver on another PPC system, it should work on Pegasos, right? Well, maybe with a few tweaks. Not with the massive changes that Articia enforces just to get around the PCI bus locking alone! And that's not even going into the workaround for the cache integrity bugs!

Both Peg and A1 are overpriced and overhyped. One rates as distinctly mediocre hardware, while the other borders on being downright poor. In both cases the operating systems are raw and unfinished.

Most hardware is overhyped and/or bad. I'm fed up off all these sh1tty PC motherboard with huge design flaws being sold off as packaged PCs, for instance.

[KennyR]

Bhogget wrote:
The drivers exist - in binary form - but they're good drivers, they're free (as in beer) and they fully support the card features.

Good if you define "good" as being "incompatible and buggy as hell", that is. The complaints of Linux users about these drivers are constant. Change kernel, you have to wait for update. Choose any CPU but x86, too bad. This goes totally against the Linux mindset.

The suggestion that one company is evil and closed while the other is open and helpful is laughable.

And your implying that if one doesn't use these big companies for a computing solution then the result must be crap by default is equally laughable. You are trapped in this world where only the cutting edge is any good, which is really not better than some who believe anything x86 is inherently evil just by existing. Or is it that you simply believe that supporting any hardware other than that you currently own is a waste of time?

So the A1 was designed specifically for an OS which would only exist years later, right?

YES! It was! Hardware designs for the A1 were being processed years before a single line of code were being written for OS4. How have you missed that?

And then, when it was decided that the Escena A1 was vapor, and Eyetech offered the TeronCX (the board that mostly closely matched what Escena A1 would have been), OS4 was still only just a bare skeleton. So I'm not wrong, it's just you who who seem to be rather ill-informed. Which is surprising considering how long you've been hanging around the forums, even if it is only to push one subject always only.

A1 was meant for OS4, and isn't priced or supported or publicised for anything else. Who'd even pay Amiga Inc.'s brand tax for a board that wasn't intended to run OS4?

"tweak" to one person is a "workaround" to another one. As long as special mofications are needed, of any sort, that's a workaround to me. Scale is irrelevant.

Oh, really. The difference is that one will be totally unstable and lose data, the other that it will be inefficient. How is that insignificant? Don't mix semantics with practicalities, Bill.