So I've heard rumblings in the past about the possibility of MorphOS making its way to the SAM440 motherboard. Will this ever happen or is the MorphOS team waiting for new motherboards from Genesi?

No.

That's too bad. I know it's kind of a spendy little board, but it seems like it has some good features too. Plus it has more RAM (than an Efika).

Does the answer of why MOS can't be put on it have only to do with the different firmware, or is this some deeper issue?

Please don't let this become another case of Amiga-ish users suffering a lack of choice in an already limited market, because of some political crap that one cares about anyway. I'm not buying the piracy argument, either.

It seems like right now you can either get a hundred dollar Efika, or if you want more power, (Maybe!) a used Pegasos, or else...? The SAM could fulfill a valuable market segment-I need more than an Effie but don't quite need a Pegasos II. It could be sold with a machine-tied copy of MorphOS the same as it is now bundled with Amiga OS 4.1.

Maybe the answer is about time, motivation and priorities?

Would you invest your free time on a not even proven hardware produced at a thousand scale (at most), when you can instead support Mac Hardware, which is still way more available (even though it's not produced anymore) and was proven to be reliable ?

[ Edited by Fab on 2008/12/6 21:58 ]

And several times faster for a lot less money and pain.

I would love to see a dual boot option for both Amiga OS4.1 and MorphOS 2.1 for something like the SAM440.

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I'd rather have that for Mac Mini.

The Sam i is pointless, it has no purpose. It has a fraction of the Mac Mini's performance at much higher price. Nobody wants that.

If resources are limited you will have to focus your efforts. I'd say that after the Mac Mini port is here, why not focus the MorphOS porting on the G4 Mac laptops?

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I agree about focussing on the MacMini, and then on other PPC Macs (mainly iBooks, PowerBooks and iMac and eMacs with Radeons and G4 CPUs...).
Moreover, a similar reasoning could have been true for the Efika too (very limited, produced in small batches, altough not so expensive). But we know that the port to the Efika was "sponsored" by Genesi.
We more or less also know the conditions, and I have to tell for the n-th time that there have been some contacts between ACube and someone from the MorphOS-team. The point is that the MorphOS team made the same offer they made to Genesi for the Efika port, and ACube did not agree with the terms (probably considering the operation too expensive with regards to the possible incomes).
I think it is just fair that the conditions are the same for both companies, and it is understandable that someone might find them reasonable and someone else won't.
The final point is, the ball was not only on the MorphOS-team park.

Kind regards,
Andrea

Also in my pov porting Mos to the Mac family is the better direction.
They are easy to find in 2nd hand market, chaper & more powerful than Sam.Yes, the Sam is a nice piece of hw, but the cost of the bare motherboard is 2x than a coplete Mac system!
And then, also in my POV, when I can run MorphOS , OSX and a Linux flavour on my computer all natively, I can live for sure without OS4
Hola

The only problem I have with porting to Mac is that you only have used hardware to choose from and I'm not much for buying used computer hardware. Don't get me wrong, all my Macs I use now are PowerPC based and I have held off on getting an Intel Mac until Apple gets the bugs worked out (BTW, I use an Intel Mac at work and I think Intel Macs are not as reliable as their PPC brethren).

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Looks like it's what you did with the Pegasos 2 & Efika...

What's the difference ?

Leo,

There's not much difference to me. It's nice to see new hw products and we can only hope they sell well, but at that scale, business is always quite risky.

However, pegasos and efika designers were known from their previous amiga products, which could give more trust regarding hw reliability (even though we still had this sad articia story, which was handled correctly by bplan/genesi, unlike eyetech). Acube seems to be new company, I haven't seen any previous similar product from them, so we can just legitimately wonder if the hardware is reliable (I'm not saying it isn't).

And finally, Pegasos 2 was quite well spec'ed (when it was designed) compared to existing Macs models from 2003, and also quite cheap. Something which can't be said about current SAM model.

[ Edited by Fab on 2008/12/8 1:17 ]

@Leo

The Efika is/was an e300 evaluation/development platform. It got here in 2006 (already delayed a lot, it was first showed in summer 2005). It was never intended as an end in itself but a means to an end; the aim was set for what we now know as "LimePC", the many devices (handheld, mobile and stationary) using CPU's from the MobileGT Roadmap. *This* was the goal. The Efika/5200B was only a way to get things going while waiting for the new CPU's to get here. The sponsored development program was an important piece of that jigsaw puzzle. The SW for the 5200B Efika was supposed to be easily transfered to the new CPU's that would follow later down the road. Developers got hooked up, partnerships was entered, including with the Chinese THTF (then important aspects of the CPU design (coherency) suddenly (and unexpectedly) changed and the Chinese partners turned up to be a-holes, but that's a different matter).

That's the difference between the Efika and the Sam. The Efika was never an end in itself, but a means to an end, the end would be something enormous. That the MorphOS team never managed to deliver until just a few months ago is a different matter, but it doesn't matter now.

The Pegasos was a project of a different time, a time where the PPC still was considered an option for desktop computers (albeit a bit lower in performance compared to x86 CPU's). But the Articia issues delayed the thing for years, until there was no real market for it any more, other than in small communities like this one (which was further destroyed by Eyetech&Co entering the scene). The Pegasos 2 got here just when the Thendic crashed and burned, which certainly didn't help. All in all, when the Pegasos project was started, things looked different, and you shouldn't forget the "marriage" between the HW/OS. However, the last hope for a PPC Desktop computer kind of disappeared when Apple went intel. The 8610 and 8640 could be the last processors of its kind, who knows.

The Sam is a "Pegasos" (ie a desktop computer) with an "Efika's" performance (but lacking the bigger goal that was supposed to follow in the Efika roadmap), today in 2008, at a price that nobody will pay.

Maybe they have produced as many as 100 boards. I doubt they have made 200. *Definitely* not 1000.

The Mac Mini however, is a desktop computer (albeit a little limited in expandability), its cheap, available everywhere as second hand, it's almost 2x as fast as the Pegasos 2 in certain areas, and *ahelluvalot* faster than the Sam.

Since I am more or less convinced that MorpOS will show up for MM, I am already looking on Ebay to score a cheap Macmini ... if you spend 300 Euro on one, you have one with dvd, upgraded memory, and so on .... compared to 1000 euro for a complete SAM as seen on some websites .... the choice is easy.



[ Edited by Oepabakkes on 2008/12/8 11:42 ]

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Or as *some* say: "The Amiga has never beena cheap hobby!"

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If I can buy a new, slow, expensive system, or a proven, much faster and also cheaper second hand system (especially if a laptop will be an option in the future, afaik, there are no plans for SAM based laptops), that decision is a no brainer for me.

You are now refering to that OS with a 4 in it's name ?

And yes they are used, second hand, discontinued and god knows what else I don't care about ... it will always be a step forward for MorphOSteam and one step ahead against the competition.

I am sure a lot of people are now a happy OS4.1 and Sam owner ... but I am sure they would have been even happier when it was a Macmini with OS4.1 ... who doesn't want cheaper and faster?

Untill further notice it will be the fastest nextgen Amigacompatible.

And now you can start nagging about that PS3-port again

I go for MacMini! Let's say i buy a MacMini and after a week or so it breaks and i can only throw it away, i get another Mini and i spend less money, then buying one Sam Board.

Even when your macmini breaks ... I think it wouldn't be hard to find spare parts at reasonable cost if not a complete machine.

Broken Efika... throw it away. Broken Pegasos ... it might be repairable ...but at what cost ?

Broken SAM ... as long as it is in his first year, you might get a new one when it's broken... but after that time ? throw it away ...

I still have a ?A1 somewhere with a broken G3 ... barely used and it costed me 800 Euro's back then. I am not going that road a second time.

@ guruman

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Just for clarification, the term "offer" implies a serious intent to do a port which is misleading. There were purely informational talks with no actual negotiations whatsoever.

> MobileGT Roadmap

New version (page 4) from FTF China with info on the MPC5125, recently mentioned by BBRV.

Also interesting: page 45 (bottom)

On spot as always, Andreas. I think you don't have a single post here that is not informative. Keep'em coming!

That document you refer contains the most complete public information about freescale's MPC512x project, including a roadmap. Which makes me have this bitter feelings again: It does look so good indeed... What a missed opportunity.

Genesi's latest warning was that key people for this project left freescale, and the whole thing has a very uncertain future.

Of course, I'd like so much not to believe it...

are we talking about SAM or about limepc-things inhere because I am not really following anymore.

> Genesi's latest warning was that key people for this project left
> freescale

The people who "handled the business and marketing", not the developers; and "were let go", not left. Now the business and marketing is handled by the business and marketing team responsible for embedded parts.

> the whole thing has a very uncertain future.

See my reference to page 45. It has its future in the markets it's aimed at: Automotive and industrial.

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Clarification taken (I never explicitedly implyed anything different, though). I guess the informal talks were enough to put off ACube, which means their interest was not so big anyway

Kind regards,
Andrea

[ Edited by guruman on 2008/12/11 23:25 ]