@guruman;

Yes, although I think people are mindfully confusing the issue of discovery in a software development project, and predetermined development.

What I am talking about is a SIGNIFICANT cost saving (let's say $30 instead of $3000 :) on test driving MorphOS to see if it is suitable for development.

I am not talking about saving money for companies that have already pledged or are to be coerced immediately into developing for MorphOS. They have already decided and are going to be in the phase where they can lay out HUNDREDS of thousands of dollars for development tools.

For the initial stages of a project, where you decide.. hmm.. do we use ucLinux or VxWorks or MorphOS? Buying an ODW box makes little sense just to determine that. VxWorks and ucLinux already run on x86 so booting them on your PC or in VMWare is a simple task - and you can determine then whether you want to use them. MorphOS requires dedicated hardware to test and runs the risk of being instantly discounted because of it.

For embedded developers choosing processors, the major aspects they are faced with are power consumption, heat characteristics, overall functionality and of course availability. It's generally not "how fast does it resize a window", although that functionality alone is what impressed the hell out of some academics wanting to produce clusters - the responsiveness of MorphOS on our hardware proved in concept the efficiency of the hardware itself.

There are lots of PowerPC solutions on the market from full blown desktop-style processors (G4) to SoC (IBM 440GP) to highly embedded signal processing and communications (PowerQUICC). MorphOS can run on all of them, if so needed, and in general the processor is already chosen; all that remains is what OS to run on it.

At the lowest level, we would tap into that market by having it offered, resold as an evaluation package, alongside the full-fledged ODW and individual Pegasos boards.

MorphOS under PearPC is not going to be slow. I have been running MacOS X on my Pentium 4 here and it's definitely more than usable - given the incredible performance requirements of MacOS X, that is really quite impressive. We all know MorphOS is much more efficient than that! With work, PearPC could provide all the acceleration features MorphOS could want (CyberGraphX interfacing with the host OS). Remember we're pushing our own OPA which is PERFECT for this, in context.

Neko