iFussion embedded to OS4 ?

[mantisspider]

hi guys,

i been thinking about how the amiga can be a platform with a real presence in today computing world.

games platform? nah it cant compete with even the amount of games out for the Mac let alone try and compete with X-Box and all the other doodahs.

Office platform? eeek looks like every office you go to nowadays is running windows based office suites, Lindows is on the right track. Offer people the ability to edit all the MS Windows compatible file types (.doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf, etc.) but on software that saves thousands of pounds to the user.

DTP platform? No quark express, no adobe ... amiga dtp apps dont come close unfortunately.

Graphics Platform? days of amigas being used to make TV shows and movie graphics are behind, outdated apps and underpowered machines.

there is no way that development for any amiga platform (OS4 or MorphOS) can move fast enough to catch up on Macs or Windows platform.
The slowly increase in development aimed at taking advantage of all the cool stuff the hardware and OS can do will happen if there enough 3rd party companies supporting the platform. But the Amiga (in whatever shape it is; os4 or morphOS) needs a boost headstart.

I remember when the shouts that the Amiga uses the 68k tech more efficently than the Mac and even ShapeShifter on the Amiga ran faster than a native Mac at the same specs (not sure how much of that is true; showshifter did run nice n fast on my Amiga)

I havnt used iFussion PPC (as i dont have a PPC amiga yet) but I see that it supports OS8.6 through OS9.1 (is there a version that does OS10? will there be?) Embedding the emulator into the amiga operating system so that it is able to run Mac software without needing to boot up the emulator. Quark Express and photogenics running side by side anyone?

its kinda like the way Linux based systems that have WINE embedded to the OS.

WarpOS has the ability to run Amiga software but what about emulating Mac too?
Ok a lot of legal issues on supporting Apple but if IFussion is already out there why not try and merge?

worst comes to the worst just run it over the OS... not so good.

anyone got any reviews or comments on the performance of Mac emulators on the Amiga? forget trying to play games, i mean just for apps like office, dtp and graphics.

cheers.

............ amiga also needs to support windows filetypes natively too :-D

What you're asking for is something comparable to WINE, the API wrapper sort of thing that lets Linux run some Windows apps/games, to let AmigaOS run MacOS apps/games. I'd also love to see such a thing. I mentioned it a while ago in one of these forums but not many people seemed interested in such a thing. I think part of it is marketing related, the people able to do such work such as Hyperion, would then not have a market to sell AmigaOS-native things to, as we'd all be running Mac ports of things, so I don't expect them to wreck the native apps/games market for their own OS, even if they aren't going to port/create equivalents to everything for Mac that we'd like to have.

[that_punk_guy]

It's interesting, but to put this in OS4 at this stage would be impossible. It's apparently not far from finished, and obviously it wouldn't have Apple's blessing, and implementing MacOS's API without their help would be a mammoth task to do properly and would set back the release date much much further.

Also consider the price of new PPC Amiga hardware is similarly expensive to Apple's (and there's no G5s yet.) If you want to run MacOS (and OSX) software, you'll go for the Apple because that's the one that runs these programs flawlessly (again, look at WINE, it's far from perfect) and it has a nice pretty box to go in, and other Apple hardware standards that don't appear on A1/A1Lite boards.

Also, a note about file types, etc. None of the filetypes you mentioned are Windows 'native' in any way, they just happen to be the file types used by the most popular Windows programs. PDF for example was designed to be totally portable.

[mantisspider]

If amiga systems can under price Mac systems and allow the mac users to run the major Mac applications on the Amiga, read and save data in Mac formats, then it could really be the way to get the Amiga into the workplace.

The more native software written for OS4 and MorphOS the better. But to allow the Amiga to ease the migration of Mac users over would be a big benefit.

Amiga needs an office suite that can compete with MS Office and packages to compete with Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark. Until they come, why not emulate?

mate, have u tried iFusion PPC? can it run photoshop well? does the machine crawl or is it useable?
If the amiga has a app that can read photoshop files and support the layers and all the cool vector txt and graphics features then they wont need to run photoshop, just read and write to the same format to enable sharing between macs and amigas.

its good that OS4 is near completion, at least there is a chance that OS4.1 may include MacOS APIs.
rather than needing to spend resources emulating the entire MacOS and then running the apps, running the Mac Apps natively on the Amiga OS would be sweet. Sweeeeeeeet

edit:
what about sheepshaver? i read on http://members.ozemail.com.au/~cyberwlf/MacEmul.html that it will be the ShapeShifter for PPC emulation. But cant find any other sources for this app. their official sheepshaver site seems to be dead. :-(

no way that Apple will help to emulate their OS so why not team up with ShapeShifter or the owners of iFusion PPC (blittersoft now Virtual programming? did they sell the rights to the app?)