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Would there be a demand for portable medical equipment that is low power (runs from batteries/solar) that can be worn/carried, powered by solar rechargable batteries, and used in disaster relief/war zones, etc..

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Oh it goes way beyond that point. Spectrum vs c64, Amiga vs Atari, Amiga vs pc, Playstation vs Xbox, Morphos vs Amigaos

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Somewhere where the primary reason for buying one is something other than "run MorphOS".

As for the NAS question, there are too many NAS and router products already in the market, with very little differentiation. As I've said before on Power Developer and elsewhere, there is very little profit to be made building "the perfect NAS" (by your standards) which would cost $100 more than the competition to pay for it's extra features. The vast majority of consumers do not need or want those features and simply buy the one with the prettiest box and the lowest price on the shelf at Best Buy or the one that's on offer at TigerDirect.

The only way to really, truly cut costs is to reduce the functionality of the product. If we shipped an MPC5200B Efika NAS, it would have no graphics or expansion capability at all, just room for disks and some basic software. You would not be running MorphOS - or doing anything you really like on it. In the end what does it matter that it has a PPC inside? ARM would be cheaper. So would MIPS, in fact you can buy pretty decent all-in-one MIPS NAS and router chipsets from any supplier like Broadcom.

[ Edited by Neko on 2009/2/3 16:33 ]

I like Matt's candor. Genesi needs to broaden its customer base to be profitable. Morphos and Amiga OS4.1 customers at best only represent a few thousand people (and that number may be an over estimate). By refocusing on Open OS and embedded products Genesi's market could be far larger. It's only fair that we not place to much of a burden on them in our quest for hardware support for Morph.
So, the Peg2 design schematics are available, but its a non-Rohs compliant design. Freescale has a motherboard design based on the 8640 and 8641 processors, but it uses a ULi southbridge which is not in production anymore. Currently, outside of IBM, development of the Power PC processor seems pretty stagnant (or at best, very slow moving forward).
What does that leave us. Frankly I think we're back to waiting on a Mac port. If that occurs then maybe enough people will become interested in this to justify a new PPC based design. Until we have that momentum, I don't see a large enough of a market to justify the development costs.
Jim

@ Jim

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Genesi has been focused on open operating systems as opposed to MorphOS for four to five years now. Here is an excerpt from an official statement made in November 2004:

"Genesi has become a partner/sponsor of the Debian, Gentoo and Crux Linux developer communities. Genesi is also enrolled in the official board support/partner programs of Yellow Dog Linux, Montavista and QNX Software Systems. It is in these areas that Genesi is now focused."

So, this is hardly a new development.

> By refocusing on Open OS and embedded products Genesi's market
> could be far larger.

http://www.genesi-usa.com/software only lists *one* that is neither. Guess which ;-)

No, no new observations. Just summarizing the obvious.

In case anyone is still following this thread, I've got a question. I've been looking over the Peg2 schematics and I seem to be missing something. Where are the diagrams for the processor cards?

The info I looked at didn't seem to have the card details either, just signals coming down from the card but not card itself.

I originally started this post out of curiosity and to also field opinions on the subject. Since this time, I have concluded that it would be very difficult to create a new/updated board that would be reasonably priced. Major bummer but a reality.

So only option = mac ports. With no hardware development, this becomes a software development game now and one involving mac. It will also be a game that ultimately keeps Morph a hobby system. A shame because I feel it is a great little OS.

I will be watching what happens with the Anubis OS. Supposedly it will be a combination of Amiga design aspects (Orig-Morph-Aros) running on a custom linux kernal. This could be interesting. I see their logic in wanting the linux kernal. They can ride for free in regards to many hardware support aspects.

Anyway its back to configuring the Efika.....

[ Edited by Rodomoc on 2009/2/11 17:34 ]

If *anyone* is truly planning to do *anything* with the design schematics, I would like to propose a little gadget to make use of the second Gigabit Ethernet connector!

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The Open Desktop Workstation, and the Home Media Center, the last incarnations of the Pegasos 2, did have gigabit ethernet... Or am I wrong?

> The Open Desktop Workstation, and the Home Media Center, the last
> incarnations of the Pegasos 2, did have gigabit ethernet...

*All* Pegasos 2 have GbE. I think he refered to the fact that the Discovery II MV64361 has indeed *two* on-chip GbE controllers.
But instead of just adding a second GbE connector one could also substitute the MV64361 for the MV64360, which has not just three GbE controllers but also 64 bit PCI(-X) instead of 32 bit ones, or even better -- as already suggested by the thread opener -- take a newer Discovery (III, LT, V, VI) :-)

I allready tried to get hold of an gadget to make the 2nd gigabit work.
Does anyone know if there's any standard which this gadget belongs to ?

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Would that work without firmware support?

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Indeed, and the second one is routed to the little horizontal mini-slot at the bottom of this picture (between the memory slots and CPU slot). You will need a little PCB-thingy to plug it in though.

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It's supported already.

> the second one is routed to the little horizontal mini-slot at the
> bottom of this picture (between the memory slots and CPU slot).

Thanks for the information. Being a Peg1 user I didn't know that.