Order of the Butterfly
Posts: 365 from 2003/3/28
Some interesting points raised:
DaveP wrote:
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Firstly, the people on this thread saying that providing MorphOS on PearPC would not bring any further sales or useful penetration are absolutely correct. Gary said it well before. You would need to say "hey, its this slow on an emulator, but look at this video to see how fast it goes" and then demonstrate one or more tangible advantages. This would be if you were sending it to the end user. Anyone with half a brain on a system capable of running PearPC at a speed where they dont want to switch it off after 10 seconds would say "so? how is this better than my Athlon 3200?".
gary_c wrote:
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About the emulation thing, little conundrum: In order to impress potential buyers/developers, the emulation has to fast. If it's fast enough to be impressive, the potential buyers/developers are likely to think why not just use the emulation for the actual platform and not bother about buying dedicated hardware. In other words, is there some sweet spot that's fast enough to impress people but enough slower than a real Pegasos to motivate people to spring for the hardware? (And this assumes the OS will have the feature set people expect.)
This seems like a real challenge to me. If the emulation is slow, the strongest points of MorphOS will be killed. If it's fast, it'll be like using Amithlon as a demo to convince people to buy an AmigaOne. . . . I'm sure we're all curious how this is going to work.
It's about the experience of using MorphOS, not the speed. Actual speed and percieved speed are two different things, a very fast system can feel slow but a slow system can feel fast. The responsiveness needs to be preserved (OS X is usable on PearPC so this should be perectly possible). If you try something which requires a lot of CPU power thats were the system won't perform well and users interested in this are the ones likely to look at the native system.
It's a case of try before you buy, a form of advertising. If a 100,000 people try it out do you really think there'll be *no* more interest. There's a lot of interest in alternative systems these days and hobbiests are willing to look beyond Windows.
If anything the competitor will be Linux, but MorphOS is easier to get into.
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I hope you don't mean MorphOS in its current state. I assume the "cool new OS" will have basic features that people assume every OS has, that are currently missing in MorphOS. I understand the desire to expose MorphOS to more markets, but, like somebody said, you only make a first impression once. Don't you think a lot of people, especially the ones likely to try a new OS, will realize how far MOS still has to go to be a viable alternative?
I think it'll be like the Amiga and other alternative OSs. Many users have other "main" systems such as PCs or Macs. I don't think MorphOS is competing with Windows here.
I do agree however that it may show some of the defficiencies, it'll really need a network stack to be included (or at least bundled). Also the sooner a modern browser appears the better, it used to be possible to get away with an older browser but not really these days, what's more standards are still advancing - i.e. XHTML 2.0.
There is of course the possibilty of users just sticking with their x86 machines and running MorphOS on it, that should not so much be seen as a loss for the Pegasos but a gain for MorphOS. I don't think one should be dependant on the other and opportunities should not be turned down even if they potentially disadvantage the other.
Emulation isn't as bad as it may seem, if you use Perl, Python or Java* they are all running in artificial envrionments.
*Java has a reputation for being slow but thats probably from people's earliest experiences with it years ago. These days Java is JIT'd and can be shown to outperform C in some areas.
