Northland coming to MorphOS

[Dietmar]

classic AmigaOS runs only on Amigas wich are very slow and obselete

Repeating this again and again doesn't make it true: Classic AmigaOS probably outperforms Morphos (or AOS4, if it was available) on x86 hardware: the fastest household PC provides the combined speed of five Pegasos mainboards.  There may be other reasons not to support AOS3, and I'm not going to get into that, but it certainly isn't speed.

[Dietmar]

> But is emulation...

Sure. On the other hand, what happens deep down under the hood is of no concern to me (and I understand that the emerging PPC platforms have their share of emulation, too, so maby we don't want to open that drawer). All I want to say is that it's stupid to dismiss AOS3 on grounds of speed: AOS3 has no problem with speed if running on suitable hardware. An AOS3 version would have the added benefit to run on AOS4, x86 and Morphos (assuming that the PPC can run m68k code fast enough; Morphos is said to reach 70% of the native PPC speed).

[Dietmar]

> And MOS or OS4 is the way to go (ppl won't be using emulators with os3 forever)

With no AOS4 in sight and no Pegasos in production, announcing the death of AmigaOS on x86 may be a bit premature. And there is AROS. In another thread here many advocated making Morphos open source. AROS already is open source and has that appeal to geeks. I don't think AROS has a chance if AOS4 sees the light of day and Pegasos boards  are produced again in the fall, but wouldn't totally ignore it. Its developers seem to be pretty resistant

[Dietmar]

sure emulators are fast but so what? their gonna port to an emulator?

You don't have to "port" Amiga software to an emulator or write software "for" an emulator. All you have to do is release an AOS3/m68k version of your software. That will automatically run everywhere: on Amigas, on Pegasos, on AmigaOne, on UAE, on Amithlon. With exception of classic Amigas, these platforms are about equally fast, with the x86-based emulators leading the pack. And don't forget that, while the game's m68k core would run under an emulator, OS functions called by the game, at least to some degree, run native. For example, WinUAE utilizes DirectX and the Windows file system. That very much limits the performance impact of emulation.

Does it take a rocket scientist to release a AOS3/m68k version ? I don't know. If the game is written in C and mostly self-contained, without Morphos dependencies, the porting effort might be minimal (as in hours). What's the alternative ? Target a niche audience and say goodbye to sales ?!

[Dietmar]

> Don't be too sure about that. When you run Amithlon, EVERYTHING needs to be emulated

Are you sure ? I was under the impression that Amithlon is based on a Linux kernel. It would make sense to use its function in the same way DirectX is used by the Picasso driver of WinUAE (whatever equivalent Linux has for DirectX, I don't know).