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What part of what I wrote seems like "pipe dreams and fairies" to you?

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Everyone knows that any OS is only as good as the software applications and games and tools/utilities, that are available to run on it, but all of that cannot be created until the OS is first created. Emulation is a perfectly acceptable short term solution to allow some software to be used, until ports of existing software, and the creation of new software, can be completed for MorphOS-x64. That is unavoidable if MorphOS is ever going to move forward and have any chance of doing modern computing tasks in the future. If all you want is a retro computing experience, you can stick with the PPC version of MorphOS, or go back to the original AmigaOS on 68k hardware (or FPGA clones), or even switch to AROS, or AmigaOS4.x. No one is forcing the user base to switch to the new x64 version of MorphOS, but the Dev. Team will attempt to make an OS that has many of the features that keeps most of us wanting to use MorphOS instead of any of the alternative operating systems, while also adding the features of modern operating systems, which allow development of software that allows us to do almost everything other users do on the Windows, MacOSX, and Linux platforms, in a better, faster, more elegant and pleasing way, without the bloat and unnecessary confusion used in all other operating systems.

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If you are satisfied with the performance and user experience of Windows, MacOSX, or Linux, then maybe a new x64 version of MorphOS is not for you, but I strongly believe that a better solution is possible, and I welcome an opportunity to use a new operating system similar to MorphOS, or new, or nearly new x64 hardware, that is available at a reasonable price, all over the world. I do not enjoy how Windows, MacOSX, or Linux work, and frankly get very frustrated often, while using those systems. I only use them because they are the only alternatives at this point in time, to run specific software I want to use. Hopefully, within the next 5 years, many/most of the software I want to run, will have port available, or an equally satisfying alternate program written to run natively on MorphOS-x64, and I can further reduce my dependence on Windows, MacOSX, or Linux.

To each his/her own! Use what you want to run what you need/want to use, and enjoy life, because it is very short, and time is precious.

It depends on what Morphos x86 will be.
If Morphos x86 will be amiga gui and graphics on top of unix then morphos x86 may have some future.
And it will be easy to port new morphos to arm,ppc and any other architecture.
If Morphos x86 will be crap like aros morphos on x86 end like aros.
Not worth of use crap which is not binary compatible with amiga os and is not modern and fast.
Ofcourse that crap will be not worth porting, on x86 is already cheap and fast winuae.
It is not too late to make morphos on x86 worth of use.

One day "This time next year" (Fools n Horses!) we gonna buy out AmigaOS, MorphOS and AROS and fuse them to just AMIGA! Hardware, as imagined is less relevant.

Its first time Amiga chant of "Wintel is dead" is true, but just because of ARM devices progress and ... portability of taking tablet, smartphone or such small computer as Pi (if packed with old Sinclair style small but nice LCD and BT keyboard and mouse it could do magic)

YEs, it could be $100 machine for half of the world which lives in Africa, Asia and less developed parts of Latin America, or are poor in US, East Europe ...

With crisis its no longer high end but buy cheap use a lot world ...

So yes, x86/AMD64 isn`t a good way to go. Just go look at sales number of ARM devices and you will get it.

Linux is stable ARM and even Windows 10 - first time since NT4PPC is no longer just x64

> NT4PPC

...and NT4MIPS and NT4Alpha :-)

I cannot believe I forgot these:

Blueberry Pi.
Pumpkin Pi.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq4lBh2I8D8&ab_channel=Morph

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Nonsense. Even the fastest ARM is left in the dust by a mid-range x64 processor such as an i5. ARM didn't scale up - the moment they started making it try to compete with actual notebook and desktop CPUs, it ended up using almost as much power and being much weaker. Not to mention that the fastest ARM is not actually that easy to get in a board - the original Raspberry Pi is about four times slower than a single core 1.6 MHz Atom from 2009.

I heard all that "x64 is dead, ARM is the future" back in 2013. Now it's 2016, and no sign of that. No sign of notebooks and desktops being replaced by tablets either.

[ Edited by KennyR 30.07.2016 - 22:41 ]

> four times slower than a single core 1.6 MHz Atom

That's slow indeed! ;-)

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I know your reply was for Vox, and his nonsense posting about purchasing AmigaOS4.x from Hyperion within the next year, but I am replying to what you wrote above anyway.

I don't think anyone expects to get good computing performance and user experience from trying to run a port of MorphOS on the original Raspberry Pi device, but the Raspberry Pi 2 is much faster, and IIRC, it has 4 cores. The Raspberry Pi 3 is even faster, and there doesn't seem to be any reason for the people responsible for creating all Raspberry Pi models, to stop improving them, and making new models of the design, that are even faster in the near future. Porting the x64 version of MorphOS to the Raspberry Pi 2, or 3, or later, faster models, should provide acceptable performance for many computing tasks, and would provide a low power way of running MorphOS, but in no way would be meant to compete against MorphOS-x64, on Intel, or AMD hardware. Of course this also depends on how successful the MorphOS Dev. Team members are at keeping the x64 port of MorphOS compact, efficient, and if it still uses a micro kernel as its base. I speculate that the x64 version of MorphOS will be very similar to our existing PPC version of MorphOS, specially with regards to being small, or compact in size, running at a very fast speed (it should be much faster, due to the faster hardware that it will support), and eventually, due to the talent of our MorphOS Dev. Team members, I believe that it will result in a very efficient new operating system.

If this new x64 version of MorphOS is EVER ported to any model of the Rasperry Pi, or any other ARM device, I imagine that the ARM version & devices, would be used in different ways, than users would use the x64 version of MorphOS on desktops, and/or laptops. But my imagination of how things might be in the future could be totally wrong too.

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Morph is small company that owns The Morph Franchise such as MorphOS and MorphZone.

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This sounds like Commodore USA's mission. Or perhaps Apple's. Or perhaps ... Everybody Else. I do not like MorphOS if they are going to be everybody else. I like MorphOS for being an OS programmed Correctly, and not only that but also much differently than everybody else. I also have somewhat devotion to RISC OS, the OS included with The Acorn Computer which invented The ARM Processor. While Acorn is not so popular, their ARM processor is and The ARM Processor is everywhere.

And specifically regarding UNIX? A Very Nice Operating System. Perhaps the first successful Operating System ever! It only make sense for it to be a leading OS and everybody have a Unix-like operating system.

However, I still support Quark Microkernel, and not Unix.

[ Edited by In_Correct 31.07.2016 - 08:00 ]

> Porting the x64 version of MorphOS to the Raspberry Pi 2

...wouldn't be the most sensible idea as the Raspberry Pi 2 is a 32-bit device.

> Morph is small company that owns The Morph Franchise such as
> MorphOS and MorphZone.

Can you give more details about this alleged "Morph" company? I can't find anything about it on http://www.morphos-team.net/imprint or MorphZone website.

But MorphOS is a commercial Operating System.

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Because they charge for it, yes.
But its hardly a going concern, the programmers all have full time jobs.

> But MorphOS is a commercial Operating System.

Yes, it is, but there's no "Morph" company (or any other company for that matter) behind it.

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yeah, remember how it perfomed on the Efika, appart from the lack of RAM on the Efika making it difficult to use, it was really acceptable in terms of performance. I had fun on the Efika. I'd sign up for a Raspberry pi3 running Morphos !

The Raspberry Pi is an educational device. It was built because the graduates coming into companies were no longer being trained in computing properly. They built the Raspberry Pi as a really cheap computer so it could be used in schools. Performance wasn't really a consideration, price was.

Turns out it was a roaring success and they've sold millions of them now. They've also achieved their mission of turning the UK education system around. They're now teaching computer science again. Even the BBC have got in on the action, every year 7 is being given a micro:bit, which is another educational device.

There's a whole stack of OSs available for it now. Granted many of these are Linux based but there's also RiscOS, BSD, NetBSD and even a version of Windows 10. Interestingly there seem to be quite a few special purpose OSs for media centres, audio players, retro gaming and such like.

As for MorphOS...

No, it's not the fastest machine out there (RPi 3 is probably around a Peg G4 / low end G5) but there are 5 million of them out there.
A lot of those using them are interested in tinkering with computers and operating systems. A version for the RPi could get thousands of new users on board. New users means new developers, and that could inject a whole new life into the community.

It is essentially the perfect board to port to because it's already got exactly the right sort of users. Exactly the right sort of people who'd be interested in MorphOS. More importantly, there'll be a lot of young people, which you need if you want to keep MorphOS going over the long term.

Interestingly a lot of the people using PRi and other small boards don't care about performance. I was reading the article comparing a bunch or boards (linked in this thread) and part of it asked about the things the users look for in little boards. IIRC performance was about 10th! I guess if you need performance you just use a PC or Mac, but for most users now even low end boards are good enough.

This poses an interesting question. Is the priority just performance, or is it about getting more users.
If the priority is performance, what is it needed for?




BTW This thread is very well timed, I just got a Raspberry Pi 3 today so I've been reading up on this stuff!

Thanks for your input into this thread. What you wrote covered about every reason why I am so interested in seeing an eventual port of MorphOS to the Raspberry Pi3, and later models that have the same or more power.

I totally agree that targeting the Raspberry Pi users is a perfect way to gain more (and young, & new) users, to re-invigorate the AmigaOS/MorphOS community. I am not foolish enough to think it will allow us to make a come-back, as I don't believe that will ever be possible, but I do believe that we can grow our user base from a few hundred active users and a few dozen programmers, to thousands of users (perhaps as high as 20 to 30 thousand, if we are lucky), and double or triple the number of active programmers.

I understand the decision to go x64 first, and I am not against it. I just hope that after the x64 port is created, it won't be too difficult to then port that version to the Raspberry Pi 3.

Just noticed that my Pine64, which I got from supporting it on Kickstarter, uses the exact same 64bit ARM CPU, as the Raspberry Pi 3. I wonder if it has any other identical components?

Wouldn't it be great to have a $15 MorphOS computer, that ran at about the same speed as any of your current G4 Mac systems, and was only a little larger than a credit card?

> my Pine64 [...] uses the exact same 64bit ARM CPU, as the Raspberry Pi 3.
> I wonder if it has any other identical components?

While the SoCs of the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Pine64 have the same CPU cores (Cortex-A53) at the same quantity (four) running at the same clock rate (1.2 GHz), the SoCs are not the same. It's the Broadcom BCM2837 in the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Allwinner A64 in the Pine64. That's why the GPUs are different. The BCM2837 contains the Broadcom VideoCore IV while the A64 contains the ARM Mali-400 MP2.

Morphos is avaible on cheap an fast mac hardware for more than 5 years.
For more than 5 years everybody who want may get mac for few euros and run morphos.
Many people get that ppc amiga is the same amiga as 68k amiga only better because many times faster.
Many people get that BS about ppc amiga spread by some WC-Fachmanns like Olaf Schickelgruber are pure BS spread by WC-Fachmanns who never ever see ppc amiga on their eyes.
But even if morphos on mac is cool it will not result in new users from outside amiga community.
New users from outside amiga community may only come if there will be something which really deserve on name Amiga OS on x86/arm - which means amiga gui and graphics on top of unix.

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Interesting! Thanks for that info, though I'm sure I would have figured it out eventually, if I took more time to read, instead of quickly skimming through web content, and moving on to something else, but since those items are not high on my priority list of things to do, or items to play with right now, I don't spend much time researching them. Later, when I have more time to learn, as I prepare to actually use the Pine64 for a project, or get Linux running on it, I will spend the required time to read more about what other people are doing with their Pine64, and what drivers are available for it. The home security options interest me the most for that device, so I hope they are making good progress with Z-wave tools working on it.

I'll have to read up on the video core used in the Pine64 to find out if it is easier to program for, as I had read previously that the Broadcom GPU used in the Raspberry Pi series of boards is difficult to get documentation for, so writing a native driver for say MorphOS, to be able to use the RPi's GPU directly, and get 1080p resolution with 3D support, might be very difficult, or impossible. I hope that is not true, and don't see why Broadcom would withhold such information on a device intended for teaching and learning, but stranger things have happened in the computer world before, so I shouldn't be surprised. I also read here in these forums criticism of the All-Winner SOC's lack of documentation which would make writing native drivers difficult, or impossible.

Without full support of the GPU, the RPi & Pine64 boards are much less powerful for general use as a computing device, when they also have to do software rendering.

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I tried RiscOS on RPi, because I remember using it back when I was at high school in 1993 on Acorn Archimedes computers. I played for it for about 10 minutes, then gave up because it had no software, and then installed Raspbian.

I suspect most people's response to MorphOS would be the same, especially if it was a brand-new supa-dupa "not legacy compatible" MorphOS that runs even less stuff.

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Yep. Even the long standing and most native ARM desktop environment - Risc OS - has more or less no impact. I would have absolutely no hope for MorphOS in this regards. To be true: my assumption is based on the comparison between MorphOS/Risc OS and ARM-Linux variants. Not fair, eh?

Of course Risc OS had a real boost regarding user count with the PI (and BeagleBoard etc.).