The Amiga, a once-dominant force in the personal computer world, continues to hold a special place in the hearts of many. But with limited next-gen hardware available and dwindling AmigaOS4 support, the future of this beloved platform seemed uncertain. That is, until four Dutch passionate individuals, Dave, Harald, Paul, and Marco, decided to take matters into their own hands.
Driven by a shared love for the Amiga and a desire to see it thrive, they embarked on an ambitious project: to create a new, low-cost next-gen Amiga mainboard.
↫ Mirari’s Our Story page
Experience has taught me to be… Careful of news of new hardware from the Amiga world, but for once I have strong reasons to believe this one is actually the real deal. The development story – from the initial KiCad renders to the first five, fully functional prototype boards – seems to be on track, software support for Amiga OS is in development, Linux is working great already, and since today, MorphOS also boots on the board. It’s called the Mirari, and it’s very Dutch.
So, what are we looking at here? The Mirari is a micro-ATX board, sporting either a PowerPC T10x2 processor (2-4 e5500 cores) up to 1.5GHz or a PowerPC T2081 processor (4 dual-threaded e6500 cores with Altivec 2.0) up to 1.8GHz, both designed by NXP in The Netherlands. It supports DDR3 memory, PCIe 2.0 (3.0 for the 4x slot when using the T2081), SATA and NVMe, the usual array of USB 2.0 and 3.2 ports, audio jacks, Ethernet, and so on. No, this is not a massive powerhouse that can take on the latest x86 or ARM machines, but it’s more than enough to power Amiga OS 4 or MorphOS, and aims to be actually affordable.
Being at the prototype stage means they’re not for sale quite yet, but the fact they have a 100% yield so far and are comfortable enough to send one of the prototypes to a MorphOS developer, who then got MorphOS booting rather quickly, is a good sign. I also like the focus on affordability, which is often a problem in the Amiga world. I hope they make it to production, because I want one real bad.
MorphOS and AmigaOS can still not do SMP? I know this has been promised for ages, but AROS can do SMP, and have been able too for a very long time by now. So what would the extra cores be used for in the previous two examples? Running linux? Unless the price is exceptionally low, like a Pi, i would rater run linux on an ARM system than on ppc.
AmigaOS 4.2 was supposed to come with SMP, but i now doubt it would ever come. And this comes from a former diehard amigan.
AROS has the benefit of being its own thing, with little regard for source/binary compatibility with AOS.
I don’t know how much MorphOS is tied to the originalish Amiga code base/binary compatibility.
But the original AOS is a complete mess. And the teams developing it now must be minuscule. So it is unsurprising it ain’t never going to get SMP. One of the original devs is a personal family friend, and from his description that codebase sounded like an absolute nightmare.
I am more fascinated by the fact that there is even a market for any of this.
I wonder if they could play trick that Apple did with their SMP machines and classic macOS: give CPU to an app! Usually it was Photoshop, back in the day. Then the rest of OS and most apps still run on one CPU, but one app may use extra CPU for some heavy computations. Today this would be browser, in typical configuration, I suspect.
9500 MP/200 was that best smp system that apple provided. PoWER did 4 cpus. And god dang it using photoshop on shose was around 9x times faster than a pentium 4 at 2.4 ghz.
AROS explicitly aims for source-level compatibility with AmigaOS 3.1 APIs, and in many cases also provides binary compatibility for m68k applications when running on m68k hardware or under emulation.
While AROS does introduce its own features and isn’t bound by all legacy limitations, it is not simply “its own thing.” Compatibility is central to its design.
AmigaOS doesnt need SMP. It doesnt need to be Windows or Mac. It needs to be the alternative choice it is. You can build your AmigaOS as you want. Its for beginners, novice users and experts. In all categories you get pretty far. AmigaOS doesn’t need SMP! It slows down the experience. AmigaOS is unique because its one of the few that lets you talk with the entire machine you have. Either as a end-user or as a coder. I don’t want AmigaOS to become Windows, Linux or macOS. I want it to be the OS that all loves it to be. An alternative OS that is the perfect OS for home computing usage.
Then why have a CPU with four or more cores? One 1.4ghz core with altivec is not fast enough for web browsing theese days.
Could they even buy a single core CPU as fast as they needed, for any cheaper than a 4 core?
Might as well have the 4 cores for AROS, Linux or BSD or whatever, and if at some point MorphOS or AmigaOS support it, great.
I only own 8 Mhz Amigas but I think the available web browser(s?) isn’t top of the game anyway. If you buy Amiga hardware just to surf the web you’re fishing in the wrong pond.
My team created AmiFox. Its a Opera Mini browser for Amiga. It allows to browse on several sites with a classic Amiga. However, AmigaOS4 and MorphOS does have webkit browsers that can read most of the web without issues. We have also created AmiTube, which is a YouTube client for all Amigas. Yes it does cheat a bit but the server finds clips, converts them to CDXL format that can be viewed on any Amiga with 1MB RAM and storage speed at 150kb/s. I use my Amigas as far as I can, before I need to use a PC or Mac.
From the description, AmiFox is also sort of “cheating” no?
It just displays the images served from a real web browser running somewhere else.
It’s a weird project, but Jesus, why? LOL
Are they actually compatible with AmigaOS 4? AmigaOS 4 is not some open-source project that can accept patches to add support like MorphOS, support has to be explicitly added by the company that maintains AmigaOS 4.
Its probably just a matter of writing drivers, they aren’t trying to get it to boot on an alien architecture.
Sure, but do they want to write those drivers? The AmigaOS 4 people don’t want to write drivers for PPC Macs for example, despite MorphOS supporting some PPC Macs (which means it’s possible).
So, the article title “A new PowerPC board with support for Amiga OS 4 and MorphOS is on its way” makes an unsubstantiated guess by saying the new hardware will be supported by AmigaOS 4.
Because you know for certain the developers didn’t contact Hyperion to discuss it?
From what I read in the links the Thom shared–yes, they are going to write those drivers (for AmigaOS). The are showing MorphOS running so I assume drivers are available there. They talked about Linux working on the same hardware. It seems there are already drivers for Linux except for audio (as I understood it).
It’s not about writing drivers, third parties generally do that and there are all manner of third party peripheral drivers available for amigaos. There was already an attempt to make amigaos 4 run on a particular model of mac mini a few years back.
It was a political decision made early on to only support hardware built to run amigaos and shipped with it, and intentionally not support any other (ie powerpc macs were current at the time, there were still chrp/prep boards around too). If i recall correctly it was a fear of piracy, that mac users would pirate amigaos somehow and run it on their macs. You can’t avoid paying for it if it comes bundled with the hardware.
Is Morphos OSS? Thought it was a commercial os
It’s a mix of FOSS and proprietary software, just like macOS.
Being a musician, I was more an Atari ST fan.
But I’m really impressed by the dedication that Amiga people still show to their platform. Despite the fact that AmigaNG is almost a dead end, it’s amazing there are still people working on new PowerPC motherboards.
Considering that Hyperion pretty much gave up on AmigaOS 4 and shifted their focus to improve the 3.x line, the die-hard fans are probably better catered for by sticking one of these Apollo “68080” accelerator cards in their original Amiga. I just had a look at their website and was quite surprised there was a model small enough to fit inside an A600.
The funny thing is I remember reading that before Commodore’s demise, the Amiga team chose PA-RISC for what would have been the next generation. It certainly would have been interesting if they had the time to deliver. This computer would have been able to run the next version of AmigaOS, Windows NT and HP-UX…
A PA-RISC machine could have run Doom and Amiga would have been saved! I can visualize how it would have happened. The nasty accountants in their suits would be just about to padlock the entire building when suddenly the Doom guitar riff is blasted out of the PA system. All the nearly ex employees rise up and wrap the evil men of finance in their own chains and throw them in the nearest lava pit, followed by a fireball for good measure.
I’ve never had Amiga but always wanted to try one. Is MorphOS compatible hardware some sort of Unobtainium ? When I go to the MorphOS website there hardware list point either to something that is no longer manufactured or has undefined shipping times with price tags of a good gaming PC for just a motherboard.
Do you not have eBay? PowerPC Macs are still common hardware.
That would be the “that is no longer manufactured” part of the post you’re replying to…
Vintage hardware is often unreliable as parts are starting to wear out. I have a late model G5 where half of the ram slots stopped working, and some other hardware that doesn’t boot at all any more.
I guess I just don’t quite get what anything PowerPC-based has to do with Amiga. If you’re just gonna substitute another CPU architecture, why not go with something more contemporary?
Beerfloat,
It would seem more practical that way. But if they went with generic x86 parts it would be impossible to compete with existing x86 hardware and they’d clearly have less control over things. By using a niche architecture, they at least have a chance to sell hardware with more controlled standards. Honestly it’s just a guess and I don’t know how much of a factor this is. People who use alternative operating systems are cut from a different cloth, so breaking with tradition might just be par for the course, haha.
Imagine a talos 64 core 256 thread cpu. And then imagine double those or quad those. IBM POWER is of course not PPC but it has support in almost all archs through qemu if you need that.
Wasted because AmigaOS will only use one of those threads, leaving 255 idle threads and 63 idle cores.
^^ this. I stopped following Amiga so much after the PowerPC move because it’s only slightly less of a dead end than 68K. Apollo (https://www.apollo-computer.com/index.php) piqued my interest again as 68K + extended graphics in FPGA feels more Amiga than another PPC board. If I had the time I’d get an Apollo board and hack on it but… I don’t. ATM I’m spending my “spare time” on synth engines and there’s SO little spare time. Good luck to the guys it’s fun project (but this isn’t even”next-gen” HW. Sorry if I sound negative – it’s a road I never traveled because I never much saw how PPC+Radeon = Amiga.
Mainly because MorphOS and Amiga OS 4 run on it. If you want something x86, you can build it yourself with an older generation, vanilla Intel APU and run AROS on it, I’m pretty sure some of that hardware is decently supported, as I was planning on installing it on my EEE PC back in the day.
It made sense at the time as the platform used Motorola CPUs and Motorola were transitioning from 680X0 to PowerPC.
Motorola basically just dropped m68k, and PPC was incompatible (they also had m88k as an option). It was only really Apple that transitioned from m68k to PPC. Pretty much everyone else abandoned Motorola entirely. Sun went to SPARC, HP went to HPPA, SGI went to MIPS etc.
Commodore were planning to go to HPPA too, but went bankrupt before anything went on sale. So PPC was never the official migration path for Amiga, it was just some third parties that developed PPC accelerator cards where the PPC was initially just a coprocessor used for offloading certain tasks.
@BeerFloat
https://www.amigaos.net/content/72/supported-hardware
https://www.morphos-team.net/hardware
There have been PPC upgrade cards for the Amiga since the 90’s, so a modern PowerPC board will run existing older software natively
Indeed “affordability” has always been crazy in Amiga-land.
After reading through quite a few links, I did not see any estimates for what this kit is expected to cost. Has that been shared somewhere?
Only post Commodore…
The original Amiga line was quite affordable. You had lowend models like the A500 and A1200 which could connect to a TV so you didn’t have to buy a separate monitor. For the price they had excellent graphics/sound capability, and could even run a multitasking graphical os.
Comparable ibm compatibles cost a lot more, as did apple hardware, and neither had a comparable os at the time either.
It’s only the post-Commodore things got expensive. Software got expensive – simple things that were free even on windows, had a price tag on amigaos – they were even selling a telnet client at one point. All of the hardware made since then has generally been very niche and thus highly expensive too while also being lowend.
If you compare that to another os that was around back then – riscos for example. You can now get riscos for free, and run it on hardware that’s both cheap and widely available.