> I'm going to quote myself here because of pure laziness:
> http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=60755
> [...]
> A clean slate would be required to incorporate features like these and make an
> architectural jump in a "fairly easy" way. This will probably also mean handling
> 68k apps in a similar way as AROS does [...]. I think this approach would be totally
> acceptable for a 4.x branch of MorphOS, incorporating all those new interesting core
> OS features (more addressable memory, true SMP, true MP, 64-bit, etc, that simply
> *can't exist* in a legacy Amiga context without breaking the Amiga part of it (no
> matter what some people claim)), and do an architectural jump at the same time.

Interesting article on this by MorphOS user and MorphZone member Eric W. Schwartz published online in early August:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160820171814/amigamccc.org/journal/1308eric.htm

The article is confusing 'ABI' with 'API' on one occurence but apart from that little glitch I think it's a rather accurate summary of the status quo.


Edit: changed URL to Wayback Machine

[ Edited by Andreas_Wolf 08.05.2023 - 13:59 ]

Quote:


Yes, I agree that Eric Schwartz article sums up the current status of the Amiga, Morph, and AROS communities very well. I also agree with his assessment that we do not currently have enough programmers to create new, or ported software for our existing PPC and AROS platforms, and that if/when MorphOS, or AmigaOS4.x moves from PPC to x86/x64 architecture, we will probably have even less programmers producing new software for our systems to run.

The only thing that might make such a move attractive, would be the ability to also run Linux, or Windows software via some kind of wrapper, or virtual machine, from within this hypothetical new MorphOS, or AmigaOS4.x operating system, until enough new "Native" software could be created.

Yes, good reference.
And it brings a certain sense of deja vue.
We suffered from a similar problem in the '80s and '90s with 68K OS-9 systems.
A small market without many developers.
We couldn't offer the kind of software choices that were available with more broadly adopted OS'.

Frankly, I'm surprised that there is as much software for MorphOS as there is.
A lot of man hours are going into the creation of software for a very small audience.

> IIRC the nVidia president pronounced their "Denver" to be a "x86 killer" though,
> and I think they will make Denver based CPU's for all kinds of applications,
> including desktop and servers

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7675&forum=3&start=568