ausPPC,
Quote:

I don't know much about MorphOS, honestly. I know it was sold as a replacement for AmigaOS. I'm convinced it's not, but not in a good way. Can anyone explain this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvmWIqqRR-g

I mean, what happened to Intuition, or whatever the equivalent in MorphOS ought to be? AmigaOS fundamentally doesn't lock up when overloaded, doesn't stutter in audio even when overloaded, doesn't get a jittery mouse, etc. I might expect those web browser windows to redraw slowly if the system were overloaded in CPU, but Intuition should always run at a higher priority, along with the whole UI event chain.

Even on Amiga-like OSs. Metabox's CaOS wasn't an AmigaOS clone... it wasn't API compatible or anything. It was similar enough to port over AmigaOS code without too much work (we hired a number of Amiga developers to do just that in the late 90s, which helped keep things like Voyager alive just a little longer). In those days, it took about 90% of a 90MHz Phoenix (Metabox 1000) to play an MP3... no FPU in that sucker. And still, I could move Windows around, browse the web, etc. without glitching audio even slightly... sure, the non-realtime stuff like the web display would be crazy slow.

Anyway, I'm not absolutely convinced that MorphOS has nothing to do with AmigaOS. There is no possible good answer for why it's so slow, compared to something like MacOS. In fact, I would have loved to see the same demo, on the Mac under MacOS running UAE. Betcha it also embarrasses MorphOS.

I used to have a Mac in my lab, back in the late 80s and early 90s. It was basically just a display device for a $50,000 logic analyzer... the Mac communicated through SCSI to the analyzer, drew pretty pictures, etc. One day I was working on the Mac/analyzer, when I noticed Chris Green, our graphics wizard (these days working at Valve Software, game credits here: http://www.giantbomb.com/chris-green/72-5032/), looking over my shoulder. He said "I'm trying to figure out why it's so slow", referring to the Mac's graphics display.

And that was old MacOS, before Quartz (which uses a PDF-derived rendering model). But also at 25MHz... run this at 1.5GHz, maybe even use a GPU (though MacOS has been pretty bad at that), and yeah, it'll go faster. So what's the deal with MorphOS?