The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 2.2, a free update for users of MorphOS 2.1 and 2.0. In addition to numerous bug fixes, MorphOS 2.2 includes additional optimizations and new features such as Kryptos, a disk encryption suite.
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Member since:2005-11-10
Secondly, I would also like to add that historically, Amiga has always been on an alternative hardware platform simply because the IBM-PC "standard" was so utterly atrocious from a performance, design and media standpoint.
Remember that Amiga was doing in 1985, what took PCs until 1994/5.
Member since:2008-12-16
@corto: I'm sure many people would love to try Amiga on x86. Look at the recent RISC OS Virtually Free release, look at Haiku, look at ReactOS. People try them just to see how they work.
Moving to x86 would give the platform more users.
@Kroc: Historically, Mac was also on alternative hardware. However, the transition to x86 did not stop the platform from being useful.
I'm not saying that x86 is the end-all-be-all of CPUs, but porting the OS to x86 would do no harm.
Member since:2005-07-13
porting to x86 would do harm (in the short term) by taking an incredible amount of dev time. and having it on x86 would give it s few more users but not many. the only advantage to x86 is that almost everyone has one. but what people seem to forget is that having an x86 port means nothing if there arn't drivers for your hardware. supporting an achatecture is one thing, thats not all that hard. but supporting a diverse driver set with millions of possible configurations is a head ache. trust me i know.
Member since:2005-10-21
Porting to x86 is not on the agenda as long as there is no big endian x86 cpu available. porting it to a little endian system would either mean to loose binary compatibility or to have a speed penalty because *every* data would need to be flipped endianess-wise during runtime.
MorphOS, just like AmigaOS, shares structs from apps and the system, thus endianess is a matter for these OSes (other than e.g. OS X).
Btw.: No word on the Mini port - there are words out there, somewhere. It'll be available as soon as possible. I just got a mini myself some days ago. I'd expect the mini port to be available at Easter 2009.
Member since:
2005-08-30
I totally agree with with Amix. And I am fed up with x86 users that claim they would like to see MorphOS or AmigaOS ported to x86. If it were the case, I think the same guys will find other arguments to denigrate these alternative systems.
The MorphOS team do what it can improving the system. Porting it to x86 would be a huge task ... without talking the driver availability.
Thank you, MorphOS team. And thank you Amiga in general for giving us so much fun.