Would you buy OS4 or MOS for x86?

[Karlos]

Guess what, all my MorphOS capable HW has exactly 1 OS installed.

NetBSD! :lol:

[Karlos]

Would people buy MorphOS/OS4 for x86 if they included no backwards support whatsoever for 68K/PPC applications?

Or are we just assuming that it's a given they'd both include some high performance JIT for such things?

[Karlos]

For PPC they would have to do something like Rossetta.

A somewhat foolhardy assumption if you ask me. Firstly, despite being a JIT implementation, Rosetta's performance was certainly less than stellar on x86/x64 machines that were significantly more powerful than the class of PPC being emulated. Secondly, who is going to write it?

[Karlos]

I can't think of a single piece of MorphOS software that is both un-maintained and must have.

Well, the entire classic version is unmaintained AFAIK, but as we're talking about MorphOS 2.x...

Isn't backwards compatibility with (OS friendly) 68K, PowerUP and WarpOS applications one of the key features of MorphOS? If all that were dropped, what tangible benefits would it have over AROS?

So PPC emulation is not absolutely necessary as a few endian tweaks to the source and a re-compile would be the most effort needed for most software.

I think you are over simplifying it somewhat. A lot of effort was put into optimising areas of the code for the PPC vector unit and while I'm sure there are generic versions of all these, porting the optimised versions to SSE+ is certainly no simple compiler switch change. Just look at the apple developer information pertinent to this.