As for OS4, then I agree with you that the costs is too much. I run it on a Pegasos II but your only option if you don't want second hand hardware seems to be the $3000 X1000 or various models of low performing SAM mobos.
Project Moana should have been a proper release from Hyperion years ago.
I agree totally, but ......................
I don't remember who started the work on project Moana. Seems that I read it might have been the guys at ACube, or it might have been someone else, but I don't think it was Hyperion's developers. Who ever it was, they got it to boot, but didn't go any further with driver development for Mac hardware. I suppose you can ask the MorphOS Dev. Team about how hard it was (and still is) for them to write all the drivers to handle Mac hardware, as there is no documentation for any of the Mac hardware available freely, outside of Apple.
I agree that completing project Moana would have been great for AmigaOS4.x users. I think it would have converted many more AmigaOS3.x users, if they had been able to purchase cheap but high performance used G4 Mac hardware to run AmigaOS4.x, and I don't really understand why Hyperion has not pursued this idea by dedicating some of their programming resources to complete a port of AmigaOS4.x to PPC Mac hardware, so they could increase the size of their user base. Of course there are many Classic Amiga users who will never convert to any NG Amiga platform, but I think that there are many who watch what is going on with AmigaOS4.x that would try it out if it were available on $100 to $300 used hardware and the OS price were around $50 to $100 per license.
In my opinion, each day that Hyperion wastes in not porting AmigaOS4.x to some kind of cheaper hardware that most Classic Amiga users can afford, is another day where more users leave the Amiga community behind completely. We were once a community of 10's of thousands, and now we are only a few thousand (I am counting all people in our combined community of Classic, OS4, MorphOS, Emulation, FPGA clones, & AROS), and if the decline in number of users is not reversed soon, we will only have a few hundred die hard users left in the near future. Not that such a port of AmigaOS4.x to cheap Mac PPC hardware will make much of a difference, but it certainly won't hurt and it might slow the exodus of users who finally give up on anything Amiga related.
Some will say that if any Classic users wanted a NG Amiga system that runs on PPC Mac hardware, they would have already started using MorphOS. That is true for some users, but unfortunately, there are a few users in the MorphOS community that have behaved in a way that has "turned off" some of the Classic Amiga users so much so, that no matter how good MorphOS becomes, they will never choose to use it as an alternative to Classic AmigaOS, but they might consider moving to AmigaOS4.x. I say this from a perspective of a "die hard" MorphOS user and promoter. But I also use and hope for the success of AmigaOS4.x, which is why I would wish for them to complete the Moana project and get some new users and interest.
It is a real shame that the Natami team fell apart after one or two of its members pissed off the man with the original idea, who has since gone into hiding and is now working alone on his ideas, probably to be released under a different name (if he is ever able to complete any of it). The Natami project captured the imagination of a large segment of our community (including myself) and I think that it could have generated a large amount of enthusiasm and renewed programming interest on 68k Amiga. Hopefully the Apollo boards will have a similar effect and besides being just FPGA accelerators, they will be expanded some time in the future, to include much of what the Natami had aimed for.
