Submitted by Trevor Dickinson of A-EON Technology compares the performance of the newly released game Tower57 on various AmigaOne configurations running AmigaOS 4.1 and PowerPC Macs running MorphOS:
It’s probably no surprise that the AmigaOne X5000/20 comes out on top by quite a margin. The AmigaOne X1000 was no slowcoach either and pushed the G5 PowerMac into third place in my tests. It was also really good to see the AmigaOne A1222 giving the 2.5 Ghz PowerMac a run for its money. However, the really good news is that all of the Amiga Next-generation machines compared favourably with the commercial Steam release and were all very playable.
I’m quite surprised by the performance of MorphOS 3.10 on my PowerBook G4 1.33Ghz – even on its paltry 512MB RAM (upgraded yesterday to 2GB). The browser is quite worrisome due to WebKit not being built anymore for PowerPC/big endian so it’s quite slow, but everything else is quite smooth. I’m planning on upgrading the mechanical hard drive to an SSD for an additional little boost, but it’s nice to see that such old machines can be revived with something other than a custom Linux installation.
And I think G4 and older support was removed a few days ago from mainline linux for version 4.17. Should have gone with a G5. Look it up in Phoronix.
And who cares? It runs MorphOS fine which has sod all to do with Linux, and is what the article is about!
Thom mentioned Linux at the end of the summary…
Anyway, I wonder if Thom (or anybody with MorphOS machine) could verify if the “super slow when no more vram” bug ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvmWIqqRR-g ) is really fixed? (as jockm suggested here http://www.osnews.com/thread?655289 but he doesn’t have a way to verify this)
PS. Also, it’s Amiga news again!
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-28483217
Edited 2018-04-15 17:37 UTC
I did – there’s nothing on Phoronix about the PPC since Jan when they added memory protection keys to the PPC support in 4.16. A quick check of google shows no mention anywhere about removing G4 support from linux.
The Linux kernel is dropping support for Power4/Power4+ in 4.17, not the G4.
Largely because it was accidentally broken in 2016, but nobody noticed until 2018.
Okay, that does turn up, and is not remotely the same thing. The POWER4 was one of IBM’s super early POWER architectures, dating back to 2001. The fact that it was broken for a couple years and literally no one complained was taken as a sign that the 4 and 4+ could be dropped. Note that the POWER5 and newer are all still supported. And again, this means nothing for the PowerPC line of processors, which are all still supported.
This is mainly a benchmark of graphics cards, as the G5 has a 13 year old Radeon.
I just got a used G5 on eBay for £100 and have been having a lot of fun with MorphOS, the first ‘amiga’ I’ve had in 17 years or so.
After I moved on from my expanded, towered A1200 back then, I have distro hopped, used BeOS/Haiku, Icaros, Syllable, all trying to recreate the fun of using my Amiga. Now I realise I should have been using MorphOS all this time!
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I’ve used AmigaOS for many years (starting with V1.2 back in the 80’s), and like you BeOS, Icaros/Aros, etc. I haven’t tried MorphOS yet though. I have followed it’s directions over the years and took peeks of various screenshots and have always liked what I have seen and read of it.
I think the main reason is because I’ve never had suitable hardware to run it, I think that omission may just have to be rectified in the near future!
Do it, you won’t regret it!
Just got a 1.67 17″ powerbook just for MorphOS. I’m going to switch in an SSD as well. They just added basic support for USB sound cards so I’m going to start testing all the ones I have here. There is a free version of Audio Evolution for MorphOS and cool DJ software called Soundbankster:https://tcheko.binaryriot.org/soundbankster/
Here a youtube video of the game running on an AmigaOne X5000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3hzfMf2BNw
Glad to see the Amiga still sees a healthy supply of games. Another game recently released for MorphOS and AmigaOS 4.1 is Spencer, looks like a good game for all ages:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7pqoKmii1Q (played on an A1 X5000)
Also the classic Amiga still see new game releases like AlarCity (AGA):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KF8Gect6x7I
Even for the Amiga 500, Worthy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c3535fQn4o
And just *wow* a new commercial Commodore 64 game, Sam’s Adventure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uHys7Vr-FY
Retro revival 🙂
It definitely is amazing!
And regarding the C64: a lot of news games have been released recently, very impressive: https://www.instagram.com/p/BhWJPmegXFX/?taken-by=epsilon2012
https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/where-is-powerpc…
Interesting article on what happened PowerPC and some upbeat views on the possible positive future of Amiga machines at the end.