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Just run UAE on Linux.

I haven' red everything in this topic but this is what I think about the MorphOS prices.

I have a Mac Mini G4 with MorphOS and I think the price is OK. What I don't understand and don't like about the prices are the different prices for the different systems. I mean: WHY? I don't understand this. For me this is illogical.

Anyway: I paid for MorphOS because I want to support the AmigaOS like OS. I'll be honest: For me there is so far only one advantage: It boots REALLY fast! Everything else works for me better on my Linux system, especially the Amiga-Emulation with UAE/FS-UAE. If I would get a nearly perfect AmigaOS clone for x86 architecture I would pay even more (up to 250 € without thinking about the price).

Of cource there i another big advantage about MorphOS: It feels like AmigaOS!

[ Editiert durch dexter 22.06.2016 - 00:28 ]

You should probably stay with emulation.
Personally, I have a couple of legacy systems for Amiga software.
But the latest emulators do a great job of running legacy software with what ever hardware you would like to be emulated.

I am relatively sure that most of us are ready to jetison legacy compatibility.
After all, old Amiga software is just that...old (and pretty obsolete).

So what is likely to move to X86 is the best features that MorphOS has (enhanced without the constraints that legacy compatibility requires), not necessarily features of AmigaOS.

> What I don't understand and don't like about the prices are the
> different prices for the different systems. I mean: WHY? I don't
> understand this. For me this is illogical.

See comment #186.

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I think that MorphOS is very "Amiga-Like" (though I dislike that term), when compared to anything other than the "Real" thing (AmigaOS1.0 to AmigaOS3.9), or AmigaOS4.1FE. Those are the only two OSes that can claim a more original Amiga experience (IMO), that I know of. MorphOS is more advanced and faster than any other Amiga inspired OS, and I expect that it will remain very "Amiga-Like", even after the platform switch to x64. I expect the MorphOS Dev. Team to keep all the best features of our current MorphOS, lose the Petunia compatibility layer, and give us real 64bit, memory protected and text book SMP.

Those are my expectations anyway, and from what little has been shared about the goals of the team, I don't think my expectations are far off from what they are working to accomplish. Maybe some of you have heard or read news that tells a different story?

[ Edited by amigadave 22.06.2016 - 00:37 ]

No Dave, I expect it to be a very familiar environment.
And we can hope for a good uae port.
That shouldn't be a problem with an X64 system.

But if all you want is legacy software, emulation has gotten pretty damned impressive at this point.

I was just discussing this with a friend who stopped by to drop off a CD32 system (a neat little toy, I may just burn all my legacy games to CDs for that).
And what we can now do under emulation surpasses what legacy hardware can do.
It seems to be encouraging new development.

With a faster X64 processor we will actually see an improvement in the performance of legacy software.

As titles are still being introduced for the 68K Amiga, AND the new software usually demands high end hardware, emulation is a bright spot in our future.

After all, it is much cheaper to buy an X64 system than it is to obtain a well expanded Amiga.
And those are much more capable than legacy systems.

What I really meant in my first post is if you want legacy support, it is not required at the OS level.
Emulation has become a more than acceptable solution.

And, if you just want to run legacy software that capability is available on a lot of platforms.

What we will have with an X64 platform for MorphOS is the best Amiga like OS running on more capable hardware, with full support for features that legacy support limits.

It should be too cool.

Edit - I think we are really leaving Hyperion in the dust with this move.



[ Edited by Jim 22.06.2016 - 11:16 ]

@Jim @Amigadave

I had a discussion with one NG game developer recently why there is no 68k version of his game. He first mentioned speed but then admitted that emulation would be fast enough but in his view would make no sense because then you could also use the Windows version. That on the other side made no sense to me either because why amiga NG versions at all? People buy it for nostalgic reasons and because they want to play it on the platform they like. I am personal very happy with using my virtual emulated environment and do not need real hardware to be happy. You have everything you need, you can do all sorts of things and you have much more resources than on any real hardware, even more than on the so called NG systems.

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A big concern is that, after decades of neglect, the development environment is simply very much outdated on 68K platforms, which makes porting various types of software (3D games, for instance) especially challenging.

Plus, developers obviously target platforms that they themselves are interested in. If someone prefers an NG platform, then this is where the focus is. Now imagine a port to 68K actually requires more time than the inital work on an NG platform (see my previous remark about the development tools), then it should not be surprising that there is limited appeal here. A straight recompile is not going to work for many titles, unless you happen to be using Hollywood or FreePascal.

Moreover, many developers involved with retro and related platforms derive pride from writing efficient code and finding out how much performance you can get out of hardware that is generally seen as "underpowered" by outsiders. When you are developing for emulation, this motivation is lacking since even the most efficient code is going to be slower than a native implementation.

I just burned a new CD32 game today.
Not written with particularly efficient code.
But its entertaining and it did not appear too hard to create.
But then, my idea of tough used to be trying to get an 8 bit system with 64k or less of memory and video that was often little more than a dumb frame buffer to do something useful.

The flip side of that being the far more complex task of attempting a project on a PPC based system.
Learning MUI, tiny GL, C, Python.
Seriously Andre, I'd find 6809 or 68000 machine code simpler to work with.

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MorphOS Dev. Team left Hyperion "in the dust" a long time ago. In fact, I don't think that Hyperion has ever been close enough behind the MorphOS Dev. Team to even see them flying further ahead at an ever increasing pace. Without A-Eon and AmigaKit support, would we even have any progress made on AmigaOS4.x anymore, or would Hyperion have just given up (as they probably should do), and just Open Source the OS and write off their losses as a tax loss, if that is possible. There is no doubt in my mind that the Amiga community would do a much better job at upgrading AmigaOS4.x at a much faster pace, than Hyperion has done with their limited (almost non-existent) resources and budget. Development of AROS has been slow, but not as slow, or as misdirected as AmigaOS4.x. I often wonder if AmigaOS4.x users maybe would have been better off if Hyperion had never tricked "McBill" into losing the IP rights to AmigaOS? McBill certainly couldn't have done much worse than Hyperion has done in the same amount of time Hyperion has been in control, and McBill maybe would have sold the rights to someone more capable, or otherwise found a way to get development going again, perhaps with community funded support, or perhaps funding from Trevor and Matthew, in exchange for a percentage of the sales? Who knows what might have happened, but I can't imagine anything that would be much worse than what we have now with Hyperion in control.

Edit: (spelling and grammar corrections)

[ Edited by amigadave 22.06.2016 - 22:51 ]

@amigadave

The only thing McBill would have done (or better tried as he was and is a complete failure) is coming up with an investment-scam around OS4.

Cos that is what Amino has been about from the start.

[ Edited by Kronos 23.06.2016 - 11:35 ]

@ASiegel

The developer I talked to has a self-developed framework that he uses to create games so I would say supporting 68k basically mean adapting it one time. Yes certainly supporting NG is for fun mainly, obvious not for commercial reasons (or at least not much), but besides personal interest or fun the 68k crowd including those who use emulation is by far the biggest market so I am wondering why it was not supported by all amiga developers that are left.

@Amigadave

Just my personal view, most in the amiga community that are still active are here for retro reasons, for daily work they use a modern PC or Mac, have smartphones and tablets. The interest in another "modern" platform is limited (expecially if it will not offer real advantages compared to current mainstream platforms). Vampire/Apollo perfectly fits in the market and will sell in thousands. NG platforms will always compared to the other platforms and not accepted as long they not offer real advantages. I (as many others) feel at home in the 68k "retro" world, I do not need or want a "hyper-OS" with 64bit, SMP and MP because this already run on my notebook (including plenty of software not available on any NG platform). The competition on X86/X64 is very heavy, on ARM there might be more chances (f.e. Raspberry) but only "if" there is enough modern software. People in the community are still too hardware and OS-feature orientated, people today use devices and apps, content rules. Even Microsoft gives development software for free because they understood that only content sells today. In this high-competitive world MorphOS NG or whatever has no realistic chance except one of the camps manages to create a modern platform with up-to-date software even more advanced than what is available f.e. on Windows. Of course MorphOS developers finally do the ISA transition for fun and personal interest but I do not think it will add many new users or developers, this change should have done 10 years ago at a time where still were relative higher numbers of users and developers left, today it is too late already. Some existing users might buy it, perhaps even some might join but the "counter" will be steep at first but then will be flat again. It is funny today that it seems many former NG users and developers seem to go "back to the roots" again and drop NG and develop for amiga (=68k).

[ Editiert durch OlafSch 23.06.2016 - 11:31 ]

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Have you considered that this "one adaption" is already going to require a substantial investment in terms of time? Plus, I was talking about development in general and not one very specific use case.

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You just acknowledged that people develop for self-gratification and then you start talking about "markets"...

Plus, even if one were to assume that there is a market to speak of and that it somehow mattered, the total amount of theoretical users is hardly the only applicable metric. What platform is being used the most in terms of hours? What percentage of the users are interested in your particular type of software? (How many people run productivity software via emulation, for instance?)

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Read my previous post. Because it is a goddamn pain to properly support for more complex projects.

Is gaining X amount of users worth to spend Y amount of hours of your limited free time dealing with archaic development tools on an emulated platform that you personally do not care for much?

As A-Eon continue to back port some of their software titles to 68k, perhaps the development environment is going to be improved out of necessity. But as it is, I find it quite easy to understand why 68k struggles to get ports from NG platforms.

@ASiegel

A number of developers return (I can remember one here posting recently) because it seems that it is offering more fun and additional it will give them more potential users and easier distribution because you can run it almost everywhere. The "pain" can be solved easily, drop "NG" . We will see how the situation will be in a year from now, I do not believe that much will improve regarding "NG".

Regarding users, for me a user is someone who can theoretical use (and buy) my software, if he uses the OS daily or a couple of hours weekly is not interesting to me. If you look f.e. on facebook pages you can see how much bigger the potential 68k market is compared to NG, you also see it when looking at amiga 68k orientated hardware projects, activity on 68k orientated forums, there is nothing NG related that can compare.

@ OlafSch

>>The "pain" can be solved easily, drop "NG" . We will see how the situation will be in a year from now, I do not believe that much will improve regarding "NG".

Seriously? The only thing slower than the development pace of OS4 is the development pace of the legacy community.
See you next year.

>> If you look f.e. on facebook pages you can see how much bigger the potential 68k market is compared to NG, you also see it when looking at amiga 68k orientated hardware projects, activity on 68k orientated forums, there is nothing NG related that can compare.

So what do you propose they run their software on?
Machines that are 25 years old or via hardware or software emulations of machines that are 25 years old? ;)

You really can't compare NG to legacy 68K.
We can actually run modern applications.

Hey, I play around with the old stuff, I get utility from the new.




[ Edited by Jim 23.06.2016 - 08:10 ]

the emulation outperforms most of your NG machines (except G5 or X1000 or similar). Modern software? Which? Even the browser is old and expecially slow in modern terms (without JIT) today.

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"Fun" is subjective and individual. Of course many people enjoy retro computing, there are different things appealing to different people about it. Nothing wrong with that. The C64 scene is also full of fun-having people I heard. Good for them!

But what you seemingly constantly fail to understand is that not everyone is interested in retro computing. Some wants an evolved environment. There is no right or wrong here, just different scopes and interests, and they are not the same thing, so they are not interchangeable.

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Or make it truly NG. Which is what us NG people are interested in. Going retro is sufficient if you like to play with the old, real gears, but that's not the issue here really.

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The NG is a long term project, don't pretend otherwise, and please don't set up nonsense deadlines.

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Yeah, and if you look at web traffic of AmigaWorld.net and Morph.zone it's obvious that OS4 is so much more alive, right? Lol! Look, there is no market, nowhere! Development isn't market driven, not anywhere. It's all down to personal interest.

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I see Jens is about to release a new "A1200". That's interesting from a retro point of view, I would have considered it myself at a reasonable price, as some kind of a toy. But that's about it, IMHO, and it will be a one-time happening.

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Apples and oranges.

I just can't see me going back to 68k for everyday/productivity use, it would just be too big step backwards when comparing to MorphOS. And I can't see why anyone would develop such software for 68k anymore. Would anyone seriously expect someone using such software under emulation if their main OS is something else? Real and emulated HW is also way too limiting. Speed can be good, but all the other limits by HW and OS.

I've kept my 68k Amigas up and running and use them weekly, but they're used purely for gaming and demos nowadays. It just would be unpleasant to go back to OS3.x with productivity use, I just love the _existing_ improvements on MorphOS too much and take them for granted now. If something should be emulated, it should be some MorphOS compatible machine, and not the old Amigas with their restrictions.

68k scene seems to be nowadays more like "Look I can do this and add this with this old machine! How cool! We're getting this and that soon(tm)!" which results one test with the end product by the end user, and maybe photo of doing it, but do they actually use any new things for real (except some HW addons)? I don't think so. It's old games which people use 68k machines really.

[ Edited by jPV 23.06.2016 - 17:14 ]

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Our browser is SO much more up to date than yours that your comment is laughable.

And emulation still limits what software you can run so your idea it "outperforming" anything more modern is rqually ridiculous.

@OlofSch

I don't understand why you keep coming here to tell us we don't really exist.

[ Edited by Yasu 23.06.2016 - 17:31 ]

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My following comment does not include AROS or MorphOS, both of which have different goals and to varying degrees achieved those goals. Neither claim to be "teh true" Amiga either.

The C64 scene is so, so much healthier than than Amiga scene. I gave up on the Amiga scene years ago as it is a toxic wasteland. Sure there has been a (very) small handful of cool products, but they are few and very far between. Only the new Vampire stuff raises a slight eyebrow with me. So much effort has ben placed on killing the "Amiga Classic" over the last 2 decades, starting with Gateway/Amiga through the McBill and now HYPErion years. Too many people waited for the fake dangling carrot that they never got. The current OS4 machines are a joke to me. Ridiculously overpriced boutique systems will never have a healthy following.

The C64 scene OTOH is truly going through a 2nd golden age. From truly nifty hardware constantly being released, to a plethora of quality new commercial game releases, to daily releases or quality software (not even mentioning demos). While there are some knuckleheads in the 64 community, overall the market and the community is vastly superior. It is a really a fun time to me a C= user these days.

Yes the 64 and 128 sold more than the C= Amiga line, but that's no excuse. The C= Amiga lines sold in the millions too. I'd argue even the Atari 8bit community is healthier than the Amiga community in 2016. That thought is just pathetic, but there weren't companies and people actively trying to kill the Atari 8 bit community off.

Well, those system died an honorable death. The Amiga didn't. It was slow, painful and full of false hope. Which has colored the souls of the hardcore few to this day.

@ redrumloa

I have an Atari XE with a 6809 processor, expanded memory, an video enhancement board and a second sound chip.

But some of that hardware was created (or is neing sold) by the guy that developed the Mist board.
And he has his hands in other Amiga related projects as well.

I have no particular love for the C64.
It uses a 6502 based processor and I was mever impressed with that.

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You do realize the Atari XT computers were released in 1985 while the C64 was released in 1982? A little bit apples and oranges. A better comparison would be the 128D. Basically Atari's last 8bit compared to Commodore's last 8bit. The 128D(and 128) had both an 8510 and Z80A. The 128 line sold about 6M units worldwide.

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Why? From a programmer's perspective?

There were a few really nice 65816 based accelerators for the C64 and C128 if you like those better. They are a bit hard to come by these days and expensive, but a few projects out there may bring a new one in the future.



[ Edited by redrumloa 23.06.2016 - 16:58 ]

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Yes, I agree that McBill was (and is) nothing more than a con man trying to make a quick dollar any way he can, but towards the end of his ownership of the IP rights to AmigaOS, he realized that non of his other scams were working out, and that there was still some interest in a continuation of AmigaOS on PPC hardware. Even though McBill never created anything tangible, I am sure he would have found someone else, or some other way to move forward with AmigaOS4.x, if he had not contracted Hyperion to do the port to PPC. In fact, if there had not been the interference of Hyperion and their scheme to steal the IP rights to AmigaOS from McBill, there is a strong possibility that McBill would have reconsidered the offer of the MorphOS Dev. Team, or reached some kind of compromise with regards to ownership of the new code created.

Wow, what a difference that would have made. Just imagine how different things would be if there were no Hyperion involvement in the Amiga universe, and MorphOS was supported by all NG Amiga users (maybe not the AROS group, as they only wanted Open Source from the beginning) from the start, as the official continuation of AmigaOS. I believe we would be much better off, and years ahead of where we are now, and that it would have made a difference even on the hardware choices that A-Eon has made, or A-Eon would have never needed to be created, if Amiga Inc. and AmigaOS4 (created by the MorphOS Dev. Team) were the reality we had lived through, instead of the impossible situation of a thief dragging a struggling company with a con man running it through years of court battles. If I remember correctly, McBill contacted, or was contacted by Ralph Schimdt and the MorphOS Dev. Team first, well before the contract to create AmigaOS4 was awarded to Hyperion.

No use speculating how things would be though, as that boat has sailed long ago, and can never return.