Hi,
I would like to share my impression of MorphOS after four weeks of usage.

First of all what got me into MorphOS was the very low barrier of entry. There are plenty of old mac mini G4's on the used market here and I was able to pick one up for cheap on a lunch break at work.
The availability and price of hardware for running MorphOS is a really great selling point for this operating system!

(I was looking at picking up a Sam440 or Sam460 for AmigaOS4 but the price of entry for MorphOS was just too good to pass up on. I might still get myself an OS4 machine just to make sure that any code I write builds fine for both platforms).

Being completely new to this, the first week or so I had great fun customizing the look of the OS, replacing all icons with glowicons and so on - I love that it even let you change the bootup picture :)
I also tried out a bunch of different software from Morphos-files and Aminet. The fact that it runs legacy 68k apps so well is awesome, and for me one of the selling points.

The intention was (and still is) to use the computer as a hobby machine pretty much only for programming. After all, I have a "real" computer at home so any lack, or immaturity of software for MorphOS wouldn't cause much of a problem.
But to my surpise there is enough, very good software available that cover all the basic computer needs that I haven't really needed to use my "real" mac during these past four weeks.

I had to VNC to the mac once because OWB did not agree with my banks website but other than that I have used only MorphOS for the past four weeks and never missed OSX during this time :)


I would say that much is thanks to OWB. Without a good quality webbrowser I think the situation would have been very different.
For email I tried both Simplemail and Yam. I ended up selecting Yam since I wasn't able to get Simplemail to send emails using my Yahoo account. They seem pretty equal in features.

I thought that I would miss Spotify, but AmiNetRadio does the trick fine for listening to music. I ended up thinking it would not work at all because the shoutcast search does not function in the application, but then I found out that I could just search on the shoutcast website and download the .pls files for the stations and put them in the AmiNetRadio media library -- problem solved and I have a bunch of great radio stations to select from for music! :)

Having a good webbrowser, email client, streaming music and video player covers most of what you need and MorphOS delivers well on these points.

For programming I haven't found an ultimate IDE yet.
I like Scribbe since it has similar keyboard controls as Visual Studio (this is a huge plus for me since I use Visual Studio for 8hrs a day at work - it's nice to have as similar interface for copy/paste moving the cursor as possible both at home and at work).
It does seem to have issues remembering things between sessions, and project files are having issues, but for now I am happy with using Scribble as a text editor and building and running from the commandline.

Longwinded post, but all in all I am very pleasantly surprised with MorphOS. I ended up using it for way more than I though I would.

I still need the OSX machine for my photography workflow (scanner and printer driver+software and Adobe products) but other than that I will likely keep on using this little MorphOS box as my main computer.
Oh, and the operating system really flies on this little mac mini G4. Everything is super-quick and responsive.
Not bad for less than 150 eur!
A big thank you to the MorphOS team!


I attached a work in progress screenshot of "Aliens vs Predator" running on MorphOS. Functioanlly most stuff is working save for a few remaining bugs to track down. The whole package also needs a fair bit of general polish before I can release a first version.
Seeing as I code at work, I don't spend an enormous amount of time programming at home so it'll be done when it's done.. at least a couple weeks :)

[img=http://s5.postimage.org/yt3a4pimb/wip_avp1.jpg]

Cheers,
--Anders

Damn man!
You are up to speed quick.
Welcome.

Congrats! Glad you liked MorphOS and even better to see you working on Alien VS Predator. I got hooked back in 2010 with a Mac Mini and glad I took the step.

Thanks for your report.

For photo works, you can connect a laser PostScript printer on your Mac, so the results would be very nice. Same for the scanner, FxScan can do the job (and perhaps also Scandal - not tested). And there lots of 68k or native gfx applications for image manipulation.

Great post! Thanks for positive feedback :)

Very interesting post, and thank you for already working on providing us a great game port :thumbsup:

OMG, are you porting AvP from Monolith?

> are you porting AvP from Monolith?

I guess he is porting 1999 AvP from Rebellion, not the 2001 successor from Monolith:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_versus_Predator_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliens_versus_Predator_2

There's been an AROS port for a while after all:

http://aros-exec.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7200
http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php?function=showfile&file=game/fps/avp.i386-aros.lha
http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php?function=showfile&file=game/fps/avp.src-aros.lha

Ah, damn, the screengrab tricked me :P
AvP2 still hunts me. One of the best fps games i have ever played. Would love to give it another go in Mos if that would be possible.
Still having AvP from Tebellion will be equally cool :)

Touchdown Entertainment GPL-ed the LithTech Jupiter Ex engine before closing its doors:
https://github.com/penenin/lithtech
In theory an AvP2 port would be possible, but one would have to write an OpenGL renderer and port the game AvP2 game logic from Talon to Jupiter Ex.

[ Edited by BSzili 30.09.2013 - 12:39 ]

Yes, that is indeed Rebellions version of AVP. It would be great to also have an AVP2 port (I played both AVP and AVP2 a lot back then, they are great games)
I am not sure if the sourcecode is available and free to use though?

I remember that they released the gamelogic sources for AVP2 at some point but then it was quickly recalled by Sierra. Not sure if anything happened since in regards to AVP2?


--Anders

There haven't been much activity, the GPL release of LithTech went largely unnoticed by the open source community.

Good to see that other people outside of the Amiga world take notice of MorphOs.
AvP is real classic schooner with a very impressive atmosphere.
I really liked it those days and looking forward to play it in MorphOs.

@agranlund
In case you miss Spotify, a bounty has just been set up to port despotify. It's a library and text mode client to access the spotify service, but only with premium accounts - they have blocked free ones for 3rd party clients. Once the bounty is done, one could write a nice MUI player, or ANR plugin using the despotify library.

Thanks for a interesting summary =)

@agranlund

that was an enjoyable review, thx nice to see you are having fun with MorphOS

I use http://www.goear.com it's not spotify but it works nicely from Odyssey.

@agranlund

Thanks for your report, and welcome to the MorphOS platform!

welcome.

This is the only OS since I jumped on the Linux bandwagon in '96, that has given me as much fun as the Amiga days. Its cheap and runs on better hardware than my 4000 desktop.

agranlund,

Welcome! Good to see you here and ever better to see you porting AVP!

Great port you are working on :D