Slashdot Mirror
Genesi Introduces Dedicated MorphOS PCs
Velcro_SP writes "When was the last time a company had the nerve to attempt a worldwide introduction of an all-new desktop computer with dedicated OS? Genesi has been demonstrating
prototypes all around Europe, most recently in Poland, in the USA, and is even making noise about Moscow. Throwing all caution to the wind they are moving past beta stage, announcing the consumer release scheduled to occur at an Aachen, Germany convention on December 7th and 8th. The Pegasos is a PPC processor-based computer designed and manufactured in Europe. It runs MorphOS, a PPC OS based on the Quark microkernel."
When was the last time a company had the nerve to attempt a worldwide introduction of an all-new desktop computer with dedicated OS?
Ever heard of Be, Inc. or the Be Box?
Desperation is a stinky cologne
are here.
It is compatible with all existing Amiga software.
which isn't surprising as a fe years back when Gateway owned Amiga and wanted nothing to do with a new OS, the MorphOS crew started writing an Amiga-compatible next generation PPC-based OS.
Later, then Gateway sold Amiga to AmigaInc, and enough users pestered them, they decided to do a new AmigaOS. there was a possibility of them adopting MorphOS, but sadly internal politics (AmigaInc were friendly with Hyperion who hate the MorphOS crew, so AInc listened to Hyperion and gave them the contract instead) screwed it up.
Meanwhile, MorphOS has gone from strength to strength and advanced way beond a mere next-generation AmigaOS.
Shoudl be good!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
My guess is that it's AmigaAMP (or a dirivative thereof), rather than some sort of kludgy Win32 emulation...
I hate Grammar Nazi's
The target of the Quark microkernel is to provide modern functionality for a new OS layer and to run as many RTG friendly applications we loved from our old Commodore(TM) A1000, A500, A2000, A1200, A3000(T) and A4000(T) systems as efficiently as possible.
Therefore we are doing an API compatible PPC reimplementation of the OS using our own and AROS' technology, which we call A-Box. The goal is to extend the A-Box with new functionalities which it painfully needs and also work on a new OS layer using Quark functionality called Q-Box.
Older software, which accesses the custom chip hardware, will directly play no role in our OS plans. This is because it would only hurt the project's goal to be as fast as possible as custom chip emulation requires too much cpu performance.
We believe that UAE is good enough to provide the functionality for applications that demand very true custom chip hardware emulation. Demos & Games are programs that are outdated very fast and they don't play such an important role to set the direction of future OS development. A version of UAE for MorphOS is available here.
Because we believe that the original OS design has strong limits for newer technology through its design structure, we also plan a completly fresh and clean OS layer on top of the Quark kernel (called Q-Box now).
The A-Box API was nice in its time, but today it has serious limitations because it doesn't hide OS structures and has no concept of memory ownership. This doesn't even cover all kinds of problems in many of the other system modules like layers, graphics, intuition or DOS which we at least try to resolve as far as possible with our A-Box extensions. As a consequence, we will not replicate the A-Box API in the Q-Box but we will try to do a new API without any compromises to the past but based on past experience.
There is a general MorphOS FAQ on the Support Page. This answers many general question you may have.
The people behind MorphOS have worked on most of the key products for this market since Commodore(TM) died. A few products we developed were:
Fastlane - First Zorro3 DMA SCSI controller
CyberStorm - First 68060 CPU card
CyberGraphX - The first 24Bit OS RTG
Several innovative Graphics Cards like
CyberVision64
CyberVision64/3D
CyberVisionPPC
CyberStormPPC & BlizzardPPC - The only PowerPC CPU cards & Wide SCSI system for this market
New Hardware developments
G-Rex - DMA capable PCI extension for the PowerUP cards
Pegasos - A PowerPC 2xAGP MicroATX CHRP system
Both will be supported by MorphOS
Anon cos i dont need the karma
It is compatible with all existing Amiga software.
Wrong. It is compatible with all RETARGETABLE Amiga Software. Anything that uses the original Amiga chipset (what a work of art that thing was!) will not work. In summary, apps will likely work, classic games will likely not.
Of course, you can always run UAE on this box, and I think you can be sure there'll be a LOT of attention paid to getting Amiga emulation going REALLY nicely on this new platform. This community, even moreso than the linux gang, are used to doing it themselves. More power to them!
For more powerful Screenshots showing the Pegasos (Motherboard) and MorphOS (Operating System) in action please go here. A lot of Galleries!
TI understand this and look who won the DSP battle. (other reasons granted)
Moto will charge you twice the price for half the performance vs x86 and still wonder why they are not able to make inroads. By the way Coldfire next gen. 68k has done ok but they are fumbling / killing this as we speak, ARM / Xscale will be the winner.
Help fight continental drift.
Well, they actually don't present prototypes, these boards are the production version of the Pegasos MB. What is still in beta (and will still be for some time, probably till 8/Dec) is MorphOS.
The Amiga format actually ignores the physical sync hole in the disk, and writes in a sort of track-at-once mode. It *is* possible to read the disks with a standard PC floppy and controller, but only with low-level access to the controller (read: as a hackerly DOS util, perhaps portable to root-mode in *NIX).
However, as all the 'smarts' of a PC floppy are really in the controller, you can replace the controller with something a bit more flexible, as noted- Individual Computers' Catweasel being the leading example.
What's interesting is that the characteristic Amiga "click" comes from the use of what were then cheaper, non-PC drive movements that didn't support a diskchange switch (not that any PC software actually takes advantage of it today!).
...is that, eventually, it should be possible to build a much lither VMWare-like solution on it. This means multiple concurrent copies of a yet-to-be-developed qkLinux running on one box, perhaps with MOS as a frontend if you want, or not.
That's where the team seems to be trying to take things, anyway, and it'll be a few years before we see it realized... but no, it's still a bit more than a game emulator... more of a total system emulation, not entirely unlike the Linux-based 'Amithlon' product for x86.
Of course, OS4 will provide stiff competition on the Amiga-compatibility front... and the MOS team's public image steers like a cow, so it'll take them a while to make their destination clear.
http://www.morphos-news.de/help.php?lg=en&id=i nst
"Its important, to have an 68040.library higher then 46.2 and quite a lot of memory, means, who has less then 32 MB should better not start (MOS itself gulps 16MB). Furthermore the AmigaROM 3.1 is needed (Version 40.68, incl. 40.70). It play no role, if this is in existant via the internal ROM or a ROM-File. If its a File, it has to be added to Butterfly/extensions at Kickstart! Without this ROM MorphOS wont start!
Maybe its also important to know, that MorphOS aims on OS3.1 compatibility, not on OS3.5 or 3.9, although it runs with both of them.
From OS3.5 on: Regretfully in this Versions there are still problems with "Reaction" left, so it might be, that when starting the Preferences in Sys:Prefs and change something there, the Amiga-Emulation-Box (A/Box) of MOS immediately freezes.
Another point: dont be worried at the installation, no files will deleted, overridden or otherwise changed. Improtant: Copy the files unchanged!
And dont worry, the copied files delete no others, they also dont disable the normal 68k-operating in any way.
Concret: If a file is named "blabla.elf", it will be copied as "blabla.elf" and not "blabla". "
you need 2 os'es to run this thing ? man..wierd logic
SGI wasn't ever a "desktop" company anyway, contrary to what the parent poster said. They were always a workstation company, and Indys and O2s were intended for power users (though I've heard of them being used as office machines). They filled the same niche as the Sparcstations- the Indy and the Sparcstation 4 were introduced at about the same time.
I haven't had much trouble with the O2, but I've never been very impressed either. SGI's customer base was people who needed something twice as powerful as the best PC and were willing to pay through the nose for it. The Indigo2 cost as much as a luxury car but was worth every pennny. Now with PCs (and Linux) not sucking quite so much, and with NVidia et al. churning out cheap, fast graphics chipsets, SGI has to focus on a higher-end (and lower-volume) market. They still make great "superworkstations" and visualization systems, but they'll never be able to make another Indy.
The Cray-style systems are the one area where SGI is still going strong. We just bought an Origin 300, and even though the processors are slower for most tasks the overall architecture is far superior to anything in the PC world, and will probably remain so for years.
What continues to impress me about their machines is how well they age; I still use an Indigo2 and I'd never call it "fast" but it runs "smoother" than any other computer/OS I've ever used. And that's with a recent Irix revision- not bad for a 9-year-old computer.