@OlafS25

Quote:

OlafS25 wrote: @BSzili without Trevor D. AmigaOS already would be dead, despite high prices and wrong design like in case of Tabor.

In my view, Trevor’s path of extremely high priced HW with substandard performance prevented the exploration of using Apple PPC HW, which could have made OS4 accessible to a great number of people instead of being reduced to a discussion topic in online chat forums. With Apple hardware rather than Trevors, OS4 would have actually been used rather than just talked about. Thus Trevor killed off a potential userbase of people, that has now moved away since long in the absence of realistic and reasonable hardware options.

@TRIPOS

There is a quite sizeable WinUAE based community of OS4 users. Improving such emulation would be much easier and cheaper than building yet another obscure motherboard or porting the OS to some garbage Mac. However, it is his money and he can spend it whatever he pleases.

As of me, I´m still waiting for Tabor.

@TRIPOS

Quote:

TRIPOS wrote: @OlafS25 Quote: OlafS25 wrote: @BSzili without Trevor D. AmigaOS already would be dead, despite high prices and wrong design like in case of Tabor. ... Thus Trevor killed off a potential userbase of people, that has now moved away since long in the absence of realistic and reasonable hardware options.

I don’t see that MorphOS particularly flourished even with access to PPC Mac hardware!

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@OlafS25

Quote:

PPC is in all terms a dead end.

There is no money and too much litigation to port to Arm. It’s either AROS, Vampire or PPC/Power CPUs IMHO.

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@kamelito
Quote:

Even with a strip down Linux kernel if needed with an abstraction layer to mimic Exec.

@OlafS25
Quote:

Best bet in my view would have been to port amigaos to ARM (RPi).

AmigaOS hosted on Linux, running on RPi. It's less work than a port to a new ISA, the performance is good, and you get all those drivers and filesystems.

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@BigD

Quote:

BigD wrote: I don’t see that MorphOS particularly flourished even with access to PPC Mac hardware!

By post-apocalyptic measurements in the aftermath of both Commodore and Amiga Inc blowouts, I actually think it kind of did! Thousands of MorphOS licenses sold for the most Powerful mainstream PPC HW that ever existed (G5), G4 desktops, compact Mac Minis and several models of laptops. Had MorphOS been tied to Trevor’s view of a future, then MorphOS had been equally stalled as OS4 today. Sure, PPC is equally dead for MorphOS now, but at least the MorphOS Team made the very most out of the PPC era hardware, making it possible for MorphOS users to actually use the thing for the last 1.5 decades rather than sitting and dreaming about it since it’s either out of reach money-wise or simply vaporware like the Tabor, which was announced SIX YEARS AGO and still isn’t released. Trevor and ideas like his killed the hopes of a future for OS4. That’s why almost everyone has left by now. MorphOS users on the other hand was able to continue their hobby during this whole time.

@BigD

Quote:

I don’t see that MorphOS particularly flourished even with access to PPC Mac hardware!

So now need to tell my experience trying out MorphOS on Mac Mini G4 1.5Ghz, it felt like Mix between AmigaOS, and MacOS, it was not my computer, but on dads computer, he did not know about MorphOS, clearly they failed to reach out, to people who have the computers.

So after pressing C at boot and installing MorphOS, we wonted to try web browsing and see if YouTube worked, as we know that was something should be really great, but all we got was black rectangle where video was supposed to be, can only conclude that graphic card was not fully supported.

We tried out few thing VLC, and MPlayer, the result was not impressive, in the end we uninstalled MorphOS, installed MacOSX, and TenForFox and was able to play YouTube again slowly.

Anyway I did not have lots of time play around, but lucky I know about a few places to find programs, if I did not, I can’t have install anything.

I was to convince my dad that, it be better to have MorphOS installed, then MorphOS has to be able to do something MacOSX does not, and has to work better, this means it has to have really good drivers. If not, then MorphOS does not have a selling point. And it has easy to find library of software to install, or try/buy.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 25-Apr-2021 at 05:51 PM.
Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 25-Apr-2021 at 05:50 PM.

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@NutsAboutAmiga

The video playback feature is rather new in Wayfarer (since 1.12 only) and some users have indded reported a few quirks that no doubt is being ironed out. Some seems configuration related. But to answer your question - a Mac Mini plays 720p Youtube streams with CPU somewhere around 80% (gfx card of course supported), check the youtube link in this thread:
https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=44115&forum=46

For 1080p you’d need a G5 computer though.

But now I’m curious at what video resolutions OS4 play youtube videos embedded in webpages? Can OS4 running on the €3000 AmigaOne X1000 play 1080p videos inside webpages? Or 720p videos? 360p? Or are you left with a black box? Is moving in street view in google maps smooth on OS4? Browsing Telegram feeds? Twitter? On MorphOS, working with Microsoft Office 365 isn’t exactly lightning fast, how is the OS4 experience in this regard? The MorphOS native e-mail client “Iris”, written from scratch, handles IMAP excellent, auto configuration, works fine with all major e-mail service providers, officially certified by Google even. Reading and writing HTML mails. Multilingual spell checking. Etc, etc. Works fine on a Mac Mini. How does that compare to anything OS4 on the €3000 AmigaOne X1000?

The selling point with MorphOS is MorphOS itself ofcourse. It’s a very specific computer hobby. Just as it is with OS4, don’t pretend it to be different. It’s not about competing with Windows, MacOS or Linux. That would be ridiculous. And this has absolutely NOTHING to do with hardware. Your reason to frown upon low cost, easily availble mainstream hardware does not make any sense at all. The €3000 AmigaOne X1000 only made the OS4 hobby less realistic and excluded 99% of the people interested in it, it didn’t improve OS4’s selling point one bit compared to if it had been able to run on Mac HW. If OS4 isn’t able to play youtube videos on web pages it won’t get a better selling point by not being able to do it on a €3000 AmigaOne X1000 compared to not being able to do it on a Mac Mini, that “logic” of yours is severely flawed. MorphOS can do it though, and it can happily do it on an Aeon Cyrus. But since it does it much better on a Mac PPC at a mere fraction of the cost, why would anyone interested in MorphOS see the Aeon Cyrus as a selling point? Why not for example choose a well supported laptop instead, that OS4 users can only dream of?

kamelito Quote:

The real problem of AmigaOS 4 is legacy. They should have developed a proper design with all the fuzz and whistle of today’s OS. Security, memory protection etc. Even with a strip down Linux kernel if needed with an abstraction layer to mimic Exec. What is the purpose of an OS so outdated in 2021?

Is the AmigaOS so outdated or was the wrong target market chosen? AmigaOS 4 entered a saturated and declining desktop market. Furthermore, it entered a market where it was weak instead of strong. Where was the Amiga strong? Let me refer again to the J-Core video on YouTube.

Why the J-core open processor is cool
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVD1Yws__v0&list=PLxde5XJWZRbTerLRlh0vp43scTA3cfKN8&index=9

Q: "So for Linux on no MMU, is there a way to support shared libraries in your user space?"
A: "We had FDPIC first (before ARM GCC patch in 2019)"

FDPIC is basically scatter loader support for Linux without an MMU. The Amiga was doing something similar but more efficently 34 years earlier. Linux required an MMU until uCLinux (which Jeff Dionne in the video was one of the original developers) patches were added in 2007. The AmigaOS did not require an MMU 22 years before Linux. The Amiga was all about shared libraries in user space allowing for better memory sharing and better performance (there is an earlier conversation about real time processing which the Amiga was good enough at to allow the Amiga to be embedded as a Toaster).

Q: "On RISC-V Kendrite k210, we can really only run on one busy box instance before running out of 8MB of SRAM memory. I'm curious how J-Core handles it."
A: "It just doesn't need to be that large. I'm not sure exactly what the issue is but 8 MB is probably enough. Our boards are quite a bit larger than that because we're DDR memory instead of probably SDRAM but the other problem is RISC-V is sort of an inefficient instruction set architecture from an instruction set density point of view which is kind of the reason why we decided not to go with those traditional approaches either SPARC or MIPS but I don't think that is the reason why. I think there are things which can be done to just improve the situation."

I believe the 68k has a larger code density advantage over SuperH than SuperH has over RISCV32IMC. Does that mean SuperH is an inefficient ISA as well? Did the Amiga do it better 35 years earlier? Does anyone think a 68k Amiga with 8 MB of memory would use memory less efficiently than these embedded projects? Who would be surprised if the Amiga could do the same thing with 4 MB of memory? SRAM memory is expensive but very fast and can exist on the SoC. Adding SDRAM (DDR is SDRAM) is additional expense, slower and takes more board space. The SoC can have eDRAM (on chip SDRAM) also but this adds expense and constraints. Memory can cost more than an SoC with microcontroller. The answer goes on to mentions FDPIC again which allows sharing hunks of executables. Most of the AmigaOS is what we call "pure" including modules like libraries, devices, etc. and many can be used directly from ROM (flash memory today) saving memory at the expense of performance. Another advantage of the Amiga is the modularity.

Linux is catching up to where the AmigaOS was strong. AmigaOS 4 sometimes forgot about those strengths by switching to the fat PPC ISA, introducing inferior .so libraries and trying to compete on the desktop. The AmigaOS still has some big challenges as even for embedded use SMP is becoming more popular, security is becoming more important and MMU use is on the rise. There are still plenty of mass produced embedded systems where an MMU is not an option as can be seen in the video.

kamelito Quote:

They could also have just invested in the 68k HW and Software only. If you want a modern OS you’ve to break compatibility and use a sandbox for 68k and PPC applications. Hopefully MorphOS will do that.

If they had "invested in 68k HW and software" then wouldn't it be broken when they break compatibility? The problem with so many upgrade paths is that they are often less efficient with emulators, sand boxes and/or endian conversions. FPGA 68k Amigas haven't even explored the possibility of SMP without breaking compatibility as affordable FPGAs don't have room for multiple high performance cores. All the AmigaOS R&D has been focused on the software side and ignored hardware capabilities except that of commodity hardware.

BigD Quote:

I don’t see that MorphOS particularly flourished even with access to PPC Mac hardware!

The big question is whether MorphOS was financially successful. A few thousand licenses is likely *not* enough to pay the programmers for the work they did. I doubt the percentage of PPC Mac users using MorphOS surpassed single digit market share and most of the users were likely familiar with the Amiga. Considering the cost, most users were likely serious Amiga fans.

What OS has successfully replaced the original OS of computer hardware and become more popular? Windows replaced MS DOS but it was seen as an enhancement or upgrade of the original OS from the original developer. That was in the dinosaur age of computers when OS upgrades were very profitable too. Does a free OS have better chances of success? Does open hardware have a better chance? Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) is still by far the most popular OS for the Raspberry Pi (likely over 75% market share) with over 30 "free" 3rd party OSs available. The way to proliferate an OS is to install it as the original OS for hardware.

@TRIPOS

Quote:

The €3000 AmigaOne X1000 only made the OS4 hobby less realistic and excluded 99% of the people interested in it, it didn’t improve OS4’s selling point one bit

But things need to be seen in context, and this is where your argument is somewhat lacking. The reason for the limited adoption of OS4 is not the high price of the X1000 (or the X5000). The actual reason is A-EON's failure to go through with their own hardware strategy, which was to introduce high-end machines along with accessible low-end ones. So when ACube stopped producing their Sams and the Tabor/A1222 got massively delayed, for several years the OS4-interested crowd was only left with the very expensive solutions on offer. This, naturally, slowed things down, as the high-end systems could only have been adopted by people willing to invest in them.

ACube's recent re-introduction of the Sam460 has stolen further thunder from A-EON, making their hardware strategy failure even more pronounced and painful. But old as the Sam460 may be, the two new production runs suggest that if there's a cheap-enough alternative, there is interest in OS4. I'm not saying that going the Mac route wouldn't have been helpful, and I quite agree with your argument here. But it's easy to be wise after the event.

At any rate: let's not blame the X1000/X5000 price as the culprit of the OS4 situation. If my local car dealer only sells Lamborghinis (which I can't afford), will I blame Lamborghini? Or will I blame the dealer for not giving me feasible options? I say, if the original A-EON plan was fulfilled and a decent cheaper alternative was available in due time, we may not have needed to discuss this at all.

Last edited by Trixie on 26-Apr-2021 at 01:16 PM.

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@thread

Most complete public reference to history on this topic

And since AmigaOS on Mac was part of the legal paperwork for the 2007-2009 case, let's not assume decisions were all based on practicality. ok?

#6

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@Trixie

Car analogies are always bad.....

Quote:

If my local car dealer only sells Lamborghinis (which I can't afford), will I blame Lamborghini?

But in this case it's a Lada with a Lamborghini badge and price.

@Rose

We know, but that's not my point. Simply take "Lamborghini" as something out of most people's price range. I'm not comparing the bang for the buck. (How could I when we're discussing Amigas?)

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@Trixie

Quote:

Trixie wrote: @Rose We know, but that's not my point. Simply take "Lamborghini" as something out of most people's price range. I'm not comparing the bang for the buck. (How could I when we're discussing Amigas?)

Easily, you know that Amiga Reality Distortion Field™ is mighty strong. Fairy normal to hear on these forums how Amigaones are par with i5.

@Rose

Quote:

Fairy normal to hear on these forums how Amigaones are par with i5.

Are they? I wonder who says that on a "fairly normal" basis? Because we don't hear such nonsense on Amigans.net - and that's a place occupied by real AmigaOne users who actually have a clue.

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@Rose

Quote:

Easily, you know that Amiga Reality Distortion Field™ is mighty strong. Fairy normal to hear on these forums how Amigaones are par with i5.

That's a very stupid argument because someone might think that AmigaOS/One-users this days are crazy or have no sense for reality.

Please accept that we know the reality and have fun with our hobby nevertheless. I had fun with my AmigaOneSE and AmigaOS4 in the old days, why shouldn't I have at least the same fun with a more powerful system like the X5000? Outside your AOS4-hater- Distortion Field™ you would recognize this

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@AP

Quote:

someone might think that AmigaOS/One-users this days are crazy or have no sense for reality.

That's why I'm asking where this "fairly normal" bit comes from. Because I think it's another piece of forum nonsense made up and projected by people who talk about OS4/AmigaOne, rather than their actual users.

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@Trixie

Quote:

Because we don't hear such nonsense on Amigans.net - and that's a place occupied by real AmigaOne users who actually have a clue.

And this is Amigaworld, where having a clue is trolling. I mean you don't see much people dreaming of rise of AmigaOS on mainstream on Amigans either.

Trixie Quote:

At any rate: let's not blame the X1000/X5000 price as the culprit of the OS4 situation. If my local car dealer only sells Lamborghinis (which I can't afford), will I blame Lamborghini? Or will I blame the dealer for not giving me feasible options? I say, if the original A-EON plan was fulfilled and a decent cheaper alternative was available in due time, we may not have needed to discuss this at all.

A Market usually supports a few mass production businesses and more niche businesses. AmigaOS 4 systems are low production niche market products much like Lamborghini vehicles. Could Lamborghini replace a V12 engine in one of their cars with a mass produced Suzuki 3 cylinder engine to make a cheaper vehicle? Wasn't the 1022 trying to do something similar with its custom designed board and cheap CPU?

CBM mass produced computers. They were producing 400,000 C64s a month for a couple of years where A-Eon is producing 500-1000 AmigaOne units every few years. The Raspberry Pi entered the mass production market and surpassed the total C64 sales to sell 30 million units. The Amiga is a niche producer now though. Anyone want a Lamborgini with a 3 cylinder engine for 75% of the cost of one with a V12?

@Trixie

Quote:

The reason for the limited adoption of OS4 is not the high price of the X1000 (or the X5000).

The X1000 and X5000 are completely absurd projects. The question is not if there's a cheaper alternative available, the question is what will sane people think if they see the price tag, the lack of availability and the amount of months you have to wait for delivery once you paid the ridiculous price for your machine. Not to mention the only reason ever given for continuing with custom wannabe PC hardware was: "we don't want to compete with Windows".

If you're not a diehard Amiga nutjob, the only possible reaction to that whole fiasco is: "I should probably avoid that crowd".

Quote:

The actual reason is A-EON's failure to go through with their own hardware strategy, which was to introduce high-end machines along with accessible low-end ones.

There are multiple reasons for the limited adoption of OS4: Lawsuits, lack of progress, stupid hardware, lack of available hardware, the high price of the X?000 and Hyperion's Zombie-like existence. Oh, and maybe the alleged (according to his business partner Trevor Dickinson) theft of half a million Euros by Ben Hermans?

And please don't use the terms "A-EON" and "strategy" in the same sentence. You can sum up their entire hardware "strategy" in one word: Xena.