MorphOS has got the best graphics driver for PowerPC's. I once tried to play a 720p movie on a Mac mini G4 and only with the MorphOS did it play smoothly albeit with the audio going asynchronous after 4-5 minutes.
So it's smooth but doesn't do synch properly? That's kind of a deal breaker – keeping in synch is (or should be) a higher priority than not skipping frames.
That sounds amazing! I’d love to try MorphOS on my 20-inch iMac G5 (iSight)¹ which also struggles a bit with H.264 720p+ video (especially when using QuickTime Player, which seems to be pretty inefficient), but unfortunately, judging by the hardware requirements page², G5 iMacs don’t seem to be supported…
I always wondered who is using MorphOS and why does so. Also, how is it in a day to day usage, does somebody develop on that platform, how big is the community and so on.
I'm 19 and I've used MorphOS for almost a year, sometimes even as main OS (it does its job pretty well).
In short, the OS is very good, but the devteam isn't - they're just old Amiga scene chaps with closed minds and some sort of schizophrenia. They hate FLOSS, they can do a huge flamewar if you say 'Linux' or 'Unix', they don't care about users which they doesn't met.
On a technical side, it's just a Quark kernel (L4 fork) with ABox "VM" which is compatible with m68k binaries via JIT and AmigaOS 3.x api via compatible MorphOS API.
Overall pros:
* Very fast OS
* High responsibility of UI, low latency on FS operations
* Backwards compatibility with AmigaOS 3.x software which doesn't call Amiga's hardware directly
* AmigaOS4 compatibility can be achieved using external library, but it's not so good
* Lots of native software written especially for MorphOS
* nix software can be ported using MorphOS SDK and LibNIX, but it's not seem good by community and developers.
Port of SDL library, which can help you with porting SDL and OpenGL games
* Own browser (Odyssey) with WebKit engine, but sometimes you need to prepare own ca-certs, cause maintainer doesn't packages they all
Cons:
* No memory protection - when something crashed, your system likely will be unusable
* Tasks cannot be killed easily (see above)
* Limitation to 1,5 GB of RAM "because compatilibity" (xD)
* Uses own properitary technologies, APIs, GUI toolkit
* Developers and community doesn't like open source technologies
* Paid license:
* 111 EUR for PowerBook G4, iBook G4, PowerMac G5
* 75 EUR for PowerMac G4, eMac G4, Pegasos I or II
* 49 EUR for Sam460[e[xp]]
* 45 EUR for Efika 5200B
License is bound to hardware which needs to be registered by internet connection, you'll receive a keyfile which is a system driver for removing time limitations
* Lots of poers are outdaed
* You need to grab an external E-UAE emulator to use a software which needs to acces Amiga hardware, it was received a JIT some month ago.
* System doesn't support NVIDIA cards and won't be
* SDK uses GCC 2.95 (!!!) and system is compiled using it, but GCC 4.5 is an option
* Part of API and "LibNIX" is an wrapped OpenBSD libc
* I've a some suspicion about violating GPL license.
* I've ported a Vim some time ago, but they rejected to add it for MorphOS-Files (WWW-based package manager), they use own Scintilla-based editor
* Users and developers doesn't care about security
* You'll not found multiuser capabilities, or any servers.
But decision is yours, I've pointed only some causes, but I feel that I can write a book about my experiences with this OS.
The main selling points is to run an AmigaOs like OS on cheap PowerPC (Apple hardware).
It is a hobby. Some people prefer to build the ultimate DOS box for playing DOS games and demos on real hardware or go nuts and play with expensive japanese computers (NEC 9801, X68000 or FM Towns).
To build on a similar comment to this effect, I have four Apple-built PowerPC machines. In order of acquisition:
* 1 eMac (G4 processor, Radeon graphics): $40-worth of labor
* 1 PowerBook G4: $80-worth of labor
* 1 Power Mac G5 (single processor): free (was being thrown out)
* 1 XServe G5 (dual processor): free (was being thrown out)
Meanwhile, you can buy quite a bit of Apple's PowerPC hardware in working condition for anywhere between $25 and $200+ on eBay. Many of them will come with either OS X Tiger or a botched OS X Leopard (which I've found to be notoriously unusable on most PowerPC Macs). I personally run OpenBSD on my own such machines (I'd dabbled with GNU/Linux previously, but there were significant stability issues, particularly with hardware support; while OpenBSD's hardware support isn't that much better, at least it's more-or-less consistent across targets, so when graphics enhancements arrive on one platform (for example), they'll typically hit my PowerPC boxen, too (which is precisely what happened with 5.5 when OpenBSD adopted a DRI implementation)).
Ok, that is their choice of course, but this is not about making money (from the numbers I found they cannot be making much of that) or they would be working on something else?
Demos are an outgrowth of the software-piracy scene. Most developers of non-grey-market software expected to be compensated for their work.
In fact there was one case where Microsoft used open source to destroy an entire software niche on Amiga: they acquihired the developer of Bars & Pipes Professional and got him to open source it, destroying the market for Amiga sequencing software. When you consider that musicians have kept their old Atari STs going until well into the 2000s, that market was bigger than you might have supposed.
