Nicholas Blachford: The Pegasos is a MicroATX motherboard so the resellers are free to decide which sort of components are used. The current CPU is a 600Mhz G3 which is attached via a CPU card. This can be upgraded later to a G4 or dual G4 card (up to 1.4 GHz).
The system requirements for MorphOS are low, much lower than the lowest cost systems our resellers provide. It runs happily with Apps in 64MB on a 160Mhz PPC 603 (G2), a 100MB HD should provide ample storage.
5A. Will there be *hardware accelerated* 3D support and OpenGL?
Nicholas Blachford: There is Hardware 3D support via the Rave3D and Warp3D APIs. OpenGL API compatible support in hardware and software is being worked on for a number of cards. We expect to be able to provide good support for ATI cards in the future.
5B. Will there be support for professional audio?
Nicholas Blachford: There is basic audio but not much for Pro Audio *yet* but that is an important target market for us. Audio users can expect OS level support for Pro Audio in the future.
6. What kind of performance are we talking about on MorphOS in regards to both YellowDogLinux, OSX and the classic AmigaOS?
Nicholas Blachford: If you mean responsiveness, it rocks. It destroys everything – even BeOS - and that’s on a G3! MorphOS boots in under 3 seconds. As for classic AmigaOS our JIT engine can run apps at up to 75% of native PPC speed. Even the slowest PPC Amiga accelerators running MorphOS can outrun the fastest Amigas ever shipped.
7. What is the main web browser in the OS? Is there a possibility for Mozilla?
The system is shipped with a browser called Voyager which has flash support, another browser called A-WEB also runs fine. We are looking into getting Phoenix (a smaller version of Mozilla) ported.
8. What language is the main API based upon? Is there support for Java, C++?
It’s written in C with a little assembly. It can be programmed with a variety of different languages. You can essentially use whatever language you want. Java isn’t available yet but it is in development.
9. AmigaOS 4 comes out soon, and so is MorphOS. Please compare the two for our readers and explain their good, bads and differences between the two OSes.
Nicholas Blachford: The aim of the two systems is the same but the approaches are very different. We are creating an entirely new operating system (architecturally similar to BeOS) and inside this we have created an “A-Box” which is compatible with the Amiga OS API. This may sound incredibly kludgy but the original OS has some pretty fundamental limitations and this approach contains these within the box allowing us to create a new modern OS from a fresh start without being tied down.
Amiga’s approach is to port AmigaOS to PowerPC and at the same try to remove the fundamental limitations. This is in our opinion a great deal more difficult and is very likely to break existing applications. They do have an advantage over us in that they have the original source but this is tempered by the fact they don’t have the original programmers and at least some is known to be in assembly code.
It’s very difficult to compare the implementations of the two as Amiga have never really shown much working in public yet whereas we’ve just shipped our first production systems and had a public beta going for over 2 years.
One advantage we have is integration of OS and hardware. We are one of the few companies in the world who design our own hardware and write our own OS (Amiga do neither). When we recently found some hardware bugs in one of the components we were able to get a workaround added in hardware, this can be done in software but that may work by simply disabling something, this is obviously not an ideal solution so in this case close integration worked very well.
10. Which Mac hardware will be able to run MorphOS? How easy it would be for a Mac user to install MorphOS in his Mac? What about the bootmanager?
Nicholas Blachford: This is planned for development, next year. Can’t give any details as yet.
11. On average, how many applications will be available for MorphOS at the time of its release?
Nicholas Blachford: We can run Amiga apps so we have a running start with the thousands of apps already available, we can’t run apps that required the custom chips but well written applications haven’t done that in a long time. 68K apps can be made PPC native as this is pretty much a recompile with perhaps a few minor tweaks. This has already been done for many apps and many more are in the pipeline.
There are no Q applications yet as that is yet to be developed but we will have a transition phase so applications can time gain access the more advanced Q functions as they are developed then once Q is ready complete switch completely over.
12. How exactly do the AmigaOS classic applications will run on MorphOS? Will they share the same desktop with Ambient, or the AmigaOS emulated apps will have to load in their own workbench or another full screen window?
Nicholas Blachford: Before answering this I should explain a difference between the Amiga and other platforms:
Amiga apps either opened on Workbench (the desktop) or in many cases opened their own screen, games are usually the only things that do this on other platforms.
On MorphOS they do much the same (with Ambient replacing Workbench). The emulated apps don’t appear any different from native apps apart from a difference in speed.
13. Do you have plans to use AA fonts and maybe the Freetype Font library?
Nicholas Blachford: It’s not in the first version properly but we do plan to support AA fonts. Freetype 2.0 is supported so applications using it supports AA fonts.
- "MorphOS, Part I"
- "MorphOS, Part II"
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