@Karlos
Quote:

MorphOS is developed by a bunch of fans that are basically making bugger all from sales too, ...

As worded by (correct me if I'm wrong) Hans de Ruyter, the man behind the (OS4) drivers for Radeon videocards:
The MorphOS team seem to have a starving artist "we're in it for the art not the money" vibe. That's nice and all, but artists who don't figure out the business side don't get to practise their art full-time.
My opinion: Quite telling.

@Kronos
Quote:

Most users being 50 year old geeks means that everything "Amiga" will die off at the same time......

Although being 20 years beyond, I seriously don't hope so! My MicroA1 died quite some years ago. My X5000 is 'seriously ill' (and some company taking (a-)eons to answer my emails if at all). And all this while I'm still 'alive and kickin' (to some extent).

@Kronos
Quote:

We are kinda back to the platform wars, but while Amiga vs. Atari, PuP vs. WOS or Red vs Blue still had some entertainment value this round is just pathetic.

It's not a war of any kind, it's the maggots digging around the corpses that make it look like 'there's still some life left' and technically it is, but don't be fooled. This sums it up quite neatly.


@Karlos
Quote:

The only chance it has of being a platform is to migrate away from PPC. Therein lies the biggest irony of it all, unlike 68K, NG could move away without that much effort. It's almost entirely written in compilable languages already, as is the software base. It has far less reason and excuse to stay on PPC than the Amiga had to stay on 68K in the first place.

Exactly that! This transition to ARM could have (should have!) started when RPi3 came along.

@Kronos
Quote:

Point me to an ARM device with a fully "open" GPU or one that can take a PCIe card and we are in business.

Orange Pi 5 and 5+. Albeit not in the form of a slot fit for a PCIe-expansion card as we know from the generic PC.
And as Karlos stated:Quote:

Raspberry Pi 5, PCIe connection to an external GPU has been done already. I mean it looks physically ridiculous and it barely works, but the biggest technical issues so far are largely overcome.

Concerning my own 'feelings' towards the scene, heavily OS4.1 biased:
The whole package reeks of a stale mess, to the brink of being in decay. The wiki on AutoDocs is a hell to traverse and little effort SEEMS to be put in its maintainance. As an example, in 'https://forum.hyperion-entertainment.com/viewforum.php?f=56','AmigaOS Documentation Wiki', on August 11, 2022 I entered a topic 'Minor error in AmigaDOS_Command_Examples' about a hilariously small 'error': use of the word 'sdtop', where it should have read 'stop'. I checked, the error still persists, yet it generated 28.500+ views to this date, the second highest in viewranking.

Stop beating this poor dead horse...

OldFart

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@OlafS25

Quote:

Many projects are dropped because developer have the impression there is no interest.

Or the hardware on which to develop gave up...

OldFart

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@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @Karlos I think Raspberry would be a cool new hardware base, expecially because it is very cheap. Amiga hardware would only have a chance in a broader market if it is somewhere special and offers a cheap entry. But as modern platform you would also need a lot of changes and rewrites of the OS like 64bit, full memory protection for stability and security, SMP support. A modern experiece and not to forget exclusive software.

You can stomach not being able to make full use of your extra cores and 64-bit memory model from your 32-bit OS when it is on affordable hardware. Moreover, there could be other ways to make use of the extra resources in the emulation layer itself for anyone that's interested in designing their own "virtual hardware" to add to the system.

That's a lot more difficult when the 32-bit OS is the thing actually managing real hardware.

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Doing stupid things for fun...

@Karlos

SMP also needs adapted software to make a feelable difference

@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @Kronos it is the retro feeling for most. It is basically a retro community. And yes for me also the hardware is no longer most important but the available software. Most of the software is 68k and if you are more retro orientated you will run 68k software on original harrdware or something like PiStorm/Vampire or emulation.

The 68K Retro "community" is bigger than AmigaOS. There's Atari, QL, Human68K and various others.

I am sure that right now, someone somewhere is adapting the PiStorm concept for each of them.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@Kronos

Quote:

Point me to an ARM device with a fully "open" GPU or one that can take a PCIe card and we are in business.

If I were in charge of migrating the OS to ARM, then I'd be looking into side-stepping this issue by using the GPU manufacturer's own drivers. Yes, even the binary-only ones. In addition to a Linux compatibility layer, we'd have to use the same ABI as Linux as well. That would be worth doing anyway, just to minimize modifications needed to compilers.

Getting drivers written/ported has been an ongoing problem. We need to be using the manufacturer's own code wherever possible. There's just too much work to be done otherwise.

Hans

_________________
http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Hans

It's a thankless task, for sure. If you were to adopt something like the RPi, you'd be mad to not want to use the existing vendor provided support. I do see the benefit of being able to use support an external GPU however, but I expect it's a subset of users that want that.

_________________
Doing stupid things for fun...

@OldFart @Karlos


MorphOS is developed by a bunch of fans that are basically making bugger all from sales too, ...
"
As worded by (correct me if I'm wrong) Hans de Ruyter, the man behind the (OS4) drivers for Radeon videocards:
The MorphOS team seem to have a starving artist "we're in it for the art not the money" vibe. That's nice and all, but artists who don't figure out the business side don't get to practise their art full-time.
My opinion: Quite telling."

We can come up with whatever comments or thoughts of what the MorphOS team is and or is not. But...

They alone have a very active development base, Wayfarer is going version 7 in a few weeks on the latest webkit after a yet another rewrite over 4 years and countless updates, Iris already has vcard and will have calendar/invite (all firsts), and PolyOganiser added enhanced search in their latest beta that came out over the weekend and the weekend before that the toolbar was rewritten for Reggae. Those are only 3 examples that have had 30 or so updates in the last 6 months.

Then of course the OS maturity and features and updates that are in active development with 3.19.

When/if they make an ISO shift they already have software you can be very productive with.

If that is what a bunch of starving artists look like, then happy to have more of that please...

Concerning 4.1, I haven't used it in a while now and got rid of all of it, so I can't really get back into it. I had the same feeling concerning it. It seems dead, some have chimed up saying there is life but I haven't seen any examples of it. The OS is just abandoned and the support apps and toolset are the same, except for a few isolated examples. Watched the videos concerning 4.x from Amiwest and they were embarrassing frankly, it is like a skipped record for 3 or so years now with no advancement. That is why to me it makes sense just to adopt MorphOS and let 4.1 go at this point, since I really can't see how else it would go. Thats what I did because it makes sense... Besides, it would help feed the starving artists more :).

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@Matt3k

Quote:

If that is what a bunch of starving artists look like, then happy to have more of that please...

Imagine what would happen if they figured out how to make it a viable business...

Likewise, if Hyperion became a company that focused on serving its customers instead of just owning IP, then things would be very different.

Hans

_________________
http://hdrlab.org.nz/ - Amiga OS 4 projects, programming articles and more. Home of the RadeonHD driver for Amiga OS 4.x project.
https://keasigmadelta.com/ - More of my work.

@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @Karlos Point me to an ARM device with a fully "open" GPU or one that can take a PCIe card and we are in business.

As per your request:

https://liliputing.com/firefly-itx-3568jq-is-a-mini-itx-motherboard-with-a-quad-core-arm-cortex-a55-processor/

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@Hans

Good points.

The MorphOS Team could have been a full time gig/company for them if:
1. Everyone backed MorphOS when it came out as the successor to 3.x, like it really was or should have been. MorphOS was working very early on Phase 5 PPC before 4.x was even a thing. So really Hyperion never should have existed as an Amiga OS developer. Out of the gate, it got crazy with personalities and pride that killed what hope the Amiga may have had at that point.
2. All the people should have worked together and put some structure in place. Lots of big heads should have found a business plan and made it work. In hindsight BBRV early on did a better job with the Hardware and support of their hardware, so maybe they should have split operations at that point. Others could have handled the OS division.

The funding all being channeled into the OS would have given what we are seeing in MorphOS today a chance to exist in the late 90's/early 2000's. So they could have been on to more apps.

If history were different and MorphOS wasn't already running and running well on PPC hardware then sure Hyperion should have focused on getting the OS created and serving customers and not the petty stuff I dealt with back in the day.

Since MorphOS was running and pretty darn good already, AOS4 was totally redundant before it even existed and not needed before the first line of code was written for it. It would forever be playing catch up and just was meant to create turmoil and division at that point. Two solutions that do that same thing was doomed to fail with the shrinking size of the market it served.

IMHO, Trevor could help fund MorphOS to a new platform, to heal the past and give us all more offerings so everybody wins. Everything else 4.x is folly to me anyways. I dumped 4.x for good reasons and I don't miss it, so have many others. The reality sucks and even sucks more if you have invested in AOS4 hardware, I get it. But there comes a time when reality takes over and for my needs, I'm having a blast with all the MorphOS software and doing productive work every day on it for my work (entirely impossible or majorly weak on 4.x, believe me I tried). They are a great group on the move and have always took care of their clients. I get to test software and see new features that are arriving all the time Doesn't get much better for me anyways...

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@Hans

Imagine if OS4 had not been so hostile towards them or Ben, with the applaud of TeamOS4, had not kept threatening them with lawsuits for being parasitic competition and being illegal.

If Ben and TeamOS4 had not done that harassment for over a decade maybe they would have become a viable business.

@Matt3k

You do not understand what Trevor motivates. He is a AmigaOS 4.X fan. He is only supporting bounties if AmigaOS is propably benefitting from it. He certainly has different hardware at home like different classic hardware and even propably MorphOS but that is not what he is interested in. It is a kind of costly hobby to him, others buy and repair oldtimers, he spends parts of his money in amiga, but only in 4.X on PPC So i do not think he will change mind and support another platform, even if that would make more sense. And to be honest best would be to use something that is already open and free like AROS and finance the own distribution with specific components and extensions (what would be legal). You could even use a common hardware like X86. But as I wrote... that is not his motivation. He is not doing it for business and making money

@V8

who knows what would happen... favorite of amigans... what would be if... it is not

and I do not see any chance for a obscure platform like all amiga platforms are to become more than a obscure OS

@OlafS25

I must agree, even if got SMP support tomorrow, JS JIT, and virtualization, 64bit and all the other goodies, it will be a obscure OS, with relatively few usable productivity applications. And if cut support to the past even more so.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

you need modern OS and modern desktop. And even if you have that, you need modern and even exclusive software. Without exclusive better software people will not change the OS. That would be very costly to get there. Most people today not even know what they use. They are not interested in what they use, they are just interested in if they can do what they want and that more comfortable or better. And if there is software that is exclusive for that platform or at least the software they use so they simple change platform, install software and transfer data. Also the user interface must be easy to adapt so that they have what they already know. Many people are not enthusiastic to learn all new, even if the new interface is potentially more modern.

Idea would be we want to make the best gaming platform available. Or we want to create a plaform best for desktop video. Then you can selevt hardware and components you need. And look where to develop the OS, what software is nedded to get there. I do not see any idea out there currently.

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@OlafS25

Amiga *is* an obscure platform. Only our generation really remembers it. Switching to PPC, while seemingly a sensible move at the time, turned out to be something like making a parachute jump from your doomed 68K plane as it nosedived towards a mountain, then realising later as you pull the cord, you packed an anvil by mistake.

Few people remember AmigaOS and almost nobody remembers PPC after Apple and console manufacturers moved on. The intersection of those two things is... Well, you can figure that out.

PPC was interesting and even fun in the late 90's. I'm sure that some people feel an affinity for it, but to everyone else, it was just "one of the... architectures of all time".

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@OlafS25

Agreed, I don't know what motivates Trevor. Don't know the man. But given the reality, it makes the most sense to proceed that way. This would be a very big move where he could do so much more than he is doing today. It would go beyond trying to continue a hobby and would be so much more.



Getting anyone onto a platform requires some angle to exploit or motivate, as suggested.

I also agree that modern software will be a big component of that. We can bullet point features, but I'm pretty confident that MorphOS has pretty much cornered that market of Amiga Land.

Realistically we aren't going to get many new users, into Amiga Land regardless of the OS and platform. So that leaves the existing userbase that is splintered and the ones that were put off by various items. I know some AOS4 users that ended up in the MorphOS camp and are happy to be here. So we either pull back lost users or take away from other Amiga camps.

We all will most likely just stay where we are, as I don't see any massive movement to change that. As said, even if AOS 4.x gets resurrected and a miracle happens or MorphOS gets ported to RP or something else, I don't see a sustainable model for a full time and prosperous business. So we will all just keep doing what we are doing and enjoying what we have.

As of today though, MorphOS has been on an undeniable war path to get it done, would be kinda nice to harness that for everyone... Lots of different team members all heading in the same direction with different programs or items. Pretty cool to be part of it... The hardware will sort itself out if it's meant to be, but I really don't care that much as what I have works great for most things...

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@Kronos

Quote:

Kronos wrote: @Karlos Point me to an ARM device with a fully "open" GPU or one that can take a PCIe card and we are in business.

As per your request #2:

PCIe Gen 2 x1 socket with Raspberry PI 4 Compute Module:
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4-io-board/

single-lane PCI Express 2.0 interface on Raspberry PI 5
https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-5/

@Karlos

Quote:

The 68K Retro "community" is bigger than AmigaOS. There's Atari, QL, Human68K and various others. I am sure that right now, someone somewhere is adapting the PiStorm concept for each of them.

That's strange, all they have in common is the 68k and they replace it with an ARM simulating a 68k

If you have good software APIs you can go to ARM directly and include an Unix Amiga Emulator if needed.