what is MorphOS?

[supernova777]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS
http://www.morphos-team.net/intro

i keep seeing references to this ..
and i finally looked up what it is.. and im a little bewildered.. lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MorphOS
MorphOS is an Amiga-compatible computer operating system. It is a mixed proprietary and open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the EFIKA and mobileGT. Since MorphOS 2.4, Apple's Mac Mini G4 is supported as well, and with the release of MorphOS 2.5 and MorphOS 2.6 the eMac and PowerMac G4 models are respectively supported. The release of MorphOS 3.2 added limited support for PowerMac G5. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as Ambient desktop.

they actually have alot of posts on their forum.... talking about g4 hardware which is what im seeing ... but what the hell is this os? what software would be developed for an ancient amiga os running on ppc?

strange!

finding more info herE:
http://www.morphos-team.net/

http://www.morphos-team.net/downloads
says it supports
eMac, iBook G4, Mac mini G4, Pegasos 1 & 2,
PowerBook G4, Power Mac G4, Power Mac G5

[Ozfer]

Finally, I have been waiting to post this all day since my account needed manual activation.

So Morph OS is kind of a modern continuation of the Amiga os that started on the Amiga 1000 and then when amiga was purchased by commodore continued until the mid 90s. The original cpus these systems had were motorola 68k type and then later on other companies started making Power pc accelerators for them. Since it's the modern continuation of Amiga os it retains some functionality and style of the amiga OS yet it can take advantage of the newer PPC computers out there and that's where the G4 macs come in to play.

While some people may develop new software for it, the main focus I believe is to run old software from amiga. This is more easily achieved through PPC that what somewhat supported with accelerators in the later amiga computers. Some of these accelerators are the Blizzard accelerator and others. Getting a real accelerator like that is very expensive though.

What I like better is new version of AmigaOS 4 that another company has made. Unfortunately it only runs on proprietary PPC hardware that is very expensive or old Amiga computers with the rarest and fastest/most expensive PPC accelerator.

AmigaOS and MorphOS have never been successfully ported to x86 and don't run on intel at all. The closest you can get is emulating it in WinUAE on windows. A long time ago a company (I forget the name) put I believe a version of amigaos on a cd and hacked it together with a lightweight linux distro and wine to allow for a somewhat transparent amigaos on a standard pc. The company I believe was sued and shutdown and it only worked with specific hardware.

ArOS is also somewhat amiga based but will not run amiga apps or pc apps but they have to be recompiled for ArOS but ArOS does run on intel pcs. No normal computer software will run on any of these systems.

Lol so yea you really have to dig into it to find out everything about it. If you get bored looking that up you can also check out BeOS and Haiku if you haven't heard of it before but it goes along with the whole weird operating systems theme.

[supernova777]

welcome oz...!

so what software would they be running on this? old amiga? how old is old if you are calling the g4 macs "new" hehehehe jk;)

[Ozfer]

Well Amiga started in the early 80s and lived until the early 90s. So a mac produced in 2000-5ish would be a good bit more powerful and "new". There is a crapload of software for amiga. This includes many PC games, video software, music software, and pretty much anything we typically use software to do now such as word processing and stuff.

Here is some more specific examples
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_software

What I was really wondering was if I could run MorphOS on my Macintosh G3 Minitower with a Sonnet G4 accelerator. They say G3 isn't supported but nothing of a G3 with a G4 upgrade guess I will have to test it out.

[supernova777]

a g3 with a g4 cpu is a g4 so u should be good   

so i wonder if this morphos is used to run ancient amiga versions of music apps?

[Ozfer]

I just think the rampage ati in my G3 might not be supported but I might be able to get a cheap pci add in that is supported.

I'm sure it could run music apps. it has native 68k emulation and as long as you have supported sound hardware there were many cool music programs written for Amiga. It's somewhat like other operating systems. A pretty good library of programs and no defined thing you "must" use it for. Considering you probably have a few G4's you should give it a try.

[OlaHughson]

I also have a MorphOS machine

[Knezzen]

Me too . I was allways more of an Atari guy. Been using Atari's for music pretty much all my life. Applications like Cubase and Logic debuted on the Atari, so it's like the mother of all music computers

[supernova777]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQxJgw0GhJo[/youtube]

i dont understand what they use this for..
to run amiga software?

what the hell software runs on amiga/morphos?
it looks cool. but .. whats the point?

[Knezzen]

Amiga and MorphOS software runs on Morph OS.

Whats the point of using any operating system? To run applications. Some software only exist for Amiga and MorphOS, so you use MorphOS to run them if you need to use them. Simple as that.

Why do you use Mac OS 9 or Windows? What's the point?

[Mat]

It´s a little bit strange to ask at a forum of a niche system what the point is when others use their niche system, ...
Beside special software, and the pros of their OS, they perhaps simply like it.

[supernova777]

i use mac os 9 because its got applications that i want to use on it..
thats what im getting at.. which amiga apps are people wanting to run with morphos? whats the draw to it?
why are these people interested in it? is there any major apps that u know of that run on amiga os that they are looking to run?

ive searched and from what i can tell theres not many commercial apps for this os..
theres no digital media apps.. theres no digital audio apps.. so what the hell are they running on morphos?
games?

[devils_advisor]

this doesnt run on every power mac. they mainly experiment with it and got stuck with a certain type of cube or mini to make it run on macintosh. its a no go and useless unless you find a major software pool. the audio software they had where trackers and 1 midi app i remember was bars n pipes pro which should be available free now on aminet and some servers.

[dukzcry]

MorphOS is just an another nostalgia OS for these with Amiga past. Another ones are AROS and modern AmigaOS, but these currently has no usable Mac ports.

It's main feature is a 68k JIT translator for fast running of an old Amiga apps together with native ones. I doubt it will emulate an old Amiga chipsets though, so app base is limited. And that's all. Sure if you're not for that, you may still like it , since it is very polished, esp. its UI part.

However, imo their dev team chosen a wrong way. Their product is neither open-source nor free. And license is pricey. You may still run it in a demo mode if your PPC Mac is supported, but this means you have only half an hour to work with it, after which it enables slowdown mode, which is totally unusable, means you need to reboot the OS to make it good again Afaik there is currently no known illegal way to bypass this.

I personally think it's simpler to find a combo deal ofused PowerPC Mac + MorphOS w license, with good price on eBay or Amiga related forums than to buy license separately. Or one could find an old Genesi Pegasos (II?) computer which will allow to run modern AmigaOS together with MorphOS, which is more win - and also frees Mac to run what its supposed to run, i.e. Mac operating systems

[dukzcry]

theres no digital media apps.. theres no digital audio apps.. so what the hell are they running on morphos?
games?

Hey, an Amiga was a first computer which brought multimedia term in use
Yup there were a lot of games. If you mean pro adaptation, original Amigas were usually been used for drawing, video production and early 3D all almost at the cost of a home computer. They were ahead of Macs and PCs of that time. Fast graphics, higher resolution, lower price, etc. Finally apps using programmer hacks to push more from hw.
They also had a good audio, so I suppose there were some audio apps. At least its where first music tracker was born.

As for MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.x, they are mostly an efforts to modernize now dead platform. For correct execution of an old apps Amigans still mostly prefer to use classic Amiga (though usually hooked with a CPU accelerator).

A long time ago a company (I forget the name) put I believe a version of amigaos on a cd and hacked it together with a lightweight linux distro and wine to allow for a somewhat transparent amigaos on a standard pc. The company I believe was sued and shutdown and it only worked with specific hardware.

Do you mean Amithlon? Well if you google with it as query, you'll find some community-updated support packs for it, so I suppose if you have a PC of that time, you're good to go.

[IIO]

Hey, an Amiga was a first computer which brought multimedia term in use

cumulus was awesome, and many black and white people preferred it over quark express for macos for years. the same is true for midi.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Amiga was the precursor of NeXT Cube. One of the first computer with coprocessor for Audio and Video. Also had 4 channels instead of the 3 from Atari ST fm. Trackers born there. And Scene releases too.

There is no nVidia support

http://www.morphos-team.net/hardware

Computers

    Apple eMac*

    Apple iBook G4

    Apple Mac Mini G4

    Apple PowerBook G4**

    Apple PowerMac Cube***

    Apple PowerMac G4****

    Apple PowerMac G5*****

    Genesi Efika Open Client

    Genesi Open Desktop Workstation

Important: Please make sure that your pre-assembled computer was configured to include one of the supported graphics card as listed below. Mac Mini owners must only ensure that their computer includes a G4 processor.

* - Only 1.25 Ghz and 1.42 Ghz eMac models are supported.

* * - Only models with a Radeon graphics chip are supported.

* * * - Lacks support for the bundled USB audio hardware.

* * * * - NVIDIA GeForce2 MX and NVIDIA GeForce4 MX/Titanium cards found in some PowerMac3,x models are not supported. Also, audio is currently only supported for PowerMac3,4 to 3,6 models.

* * * * * - Only PowerMac 7,2 and PowerMac7,3 (A1047) are supported. Also, MorphOS will use a maximum of 1GB of memory even if more is installed in the machine.

Mainboards

    bplan Pegasos I (with IBM G3 processor)

    bplan Pegasos II (with IBM G3 and Freescale G4 processors)

    bplan Efika (with Freescale MPC5200B)


Graphics Cards
With 3d hardware acceleration:

    ATI Radeon 8500 LE (R200)
    ATI Radeon 8500 (R200)
    ATI Radeon 9000 (RV250)
    ATI Radeon 9000 Pro (RV250)
    ATI Radeon 9100 (R200)
    ATI Radeon 9100 LE (R200)
    ATI Radeon 9200 SE (RV280)
    ATI Radeon 9200 (RV280)
    ATI Radeon 9200 Pro (RV280)
    ATI Radeon 9250 (RV280)

   

    ATI Radeon 9550 Mobility (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9650 (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9600 XT (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9800 (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon 9800 XT (no W3D)
    ATI Radeon X800 XT / Pro (R420) (no W3D)
    ATI FireGL X3 (R420) (no W3D)

With limited 3d hardware acceleration (W3D legacy software only):

    3DFX Voodoo3 2000 (Avenger)
    3DFX Voodoo3 3000 (Avenger)
    3DFX Voodoo3 3500 (Avenger)
    3DFX Voodoo4 4500 (Napalm)
    3DFX Voodoo5 5500 (Napalm)
    (recognized as a Voodoo4, only one GPU is being used)

   

    ATI Radeon 7000VE (RV100)
    ATI Radeon 7200 (R100)
    ATI Radeon 7500 (RV200)

Without 3d hardware acceleration:

    3D Labs / Texas Instruments Permedia2
    3D Labs / Texas Instruments Permedia2v
    ATI Rage128 Pro
    XGI Volari V3XT
    XGI Volari V5

   

    XGI Volari V5XT
    XGI Volari V8 (Ultra)
    SiS 300 / 305
    SiS 315
    SiS 6326



Sound

    On-board audio on Power Mac G4 (Digital Audio, QuickSilver & MDD - no recording)
    On-board audio on Power Mac G5 (no recording)
    On-board audio on eMac (no recording)
    On-board audio on Mac mini (Apple I2S)
    On-board audio on Pegasos 1/2 (VIA 8231)
    On-board audio on EFIKA 5200B (no recording)
    SoundBlaster Live! (emu10kx)

   


SATA Adapter

    SiI3x1x two-port cards



Ethernet

    On-board 10/100/1000MBit Ethernet on Power Mac G4 (excluding early PowerMac3,1)
    On-board 10/100/1000MBit Ethernet on Power Mac G5
    On-board 10/100MBit Ethernet on eMac
    On-board 10/100MBit Ethernet on Mac mini (Sun GEM)
    On-board 1GBit Ethernet on Pegasos 2 (Marvell Discovery II)
    On-board 10/100MBit Ethernet on Pegasos 1/2 (VIA Rhine)
    On-board 10/100MBit Ethernet on EFIKA (5200B)
    Realtek RTL8139C 10/100MBit

   


Wireless Network

    Atheros 5000 chipset based PCMCIA and PCI cards (USB versions are not supported)

[Protools5LEGuy]

cumulus was awesome, and many black and white people preferred it over quark express for macos for years. the same is true for midi.

Midi shine on Atari ST, somehow more than in Amiga due to the onboard midi interface. All Amiga user had to buy the midi interface.

Also some "black and white" people loved the Atari ST solutions for desktop publishing.

[devils_advisor]

So I finally downloaded the isolate and started morphos from disc. Works like a charm on that ti book. Even if it isn't directly supported just yet. There are indeed a bunch of audio apps available.

[Protools5LEGuy]

We want a Video!