Is MorphOS worth it...
 

I have an old G4 mac I can run this on but it seems like a rather costly investment...

What is the compatability like for MorphOS...

Sadly there is not a great deal of info out there... Was wondering if anyone has some recommended sites or videos to show it in use.

It's free to try it out, so well worth it to see how compatible it is. It works fully for 30 minutes, then slows down to a crawl in demo mode. But that should be plenty to be able to tell if you wanna take the plunge with it or not.

I've found the compatibility is pretty good for system-friendly stuff, but for most older games you need an emulator instead. So I guess it depends on what you want from it.

Did you notice that older machines have cheaper licences too?

I'm using MorphOS machines as main daily computers. Compatibility with system friendly software is pretty good, but not perfect. Most newer software and especially MUI software should work just fine. Hardware hitting games/demos don't work as said, because MorphOS only emulates the CPU, not the other chipsets, but those which use AHI and RTG are likely to work.

68k software I still use are for example Magellan2, DCTelnet, BackUp, fxPaint2, PPaint, ArtEffect, ImageFX, Photogenics, TVPaint, PageStream, FinalWriter, AmigaWriter, VirusZ, TurboCalc etc.. and lots of 68k shell commands, libraries, datatypes etc. And many good old 68k programs have MorphOS ports (and unless them they'd still work as 68k versions), like CEd, SimpleMail, AmIRC, etc. For many other (internet, cd-burning, imageviewing/processing, audio, movie etc) there are better more recent options natively for MorphOS although 68k counterparts would still work too.

I guess a good starting point to find the info and the stuff would be the MorphOS Library, and Papiosaur's playlist for some videos.

Tested on G4 and G5. The G4's CD drive needs replacing so it just kept seeing as a blank. However it ran fine on the G5 in test from CD but it only sees 1.5Gb of the 4Gb of memory. That was using MorphOS 3.8 so its the most recent version. Is there a way of getting it see all of it.

However it's €111 to register for a G5 and that's a bit rich for my taste. Especially as it's non transferable.

It seems that it's kept that way to keep 68k compatability... As I understand it.

MOS is limited to 1.5GB memory visible to the user.

G5's are huge and power hungry, if you really want a MOS box a G4 Mac mini is probably best, its fast enough for anything you can reasonably do on MOS while being small and tiny, and the MOS license for it is cheaper.

Regarding this info some G5 systems can see up to 2 GB RAM, some just 1,5 GB. Yes its pity you cant see all 4, but on the other hand even 1,5 GB looks like more then enough for any Amiga of MOS app or game ;o)

Yes its 68k compatible, so in some ways its very faaast Amiga ;o)

Actually, all systems are limited to 1.5gb user memory, since A-Box is what MorphOS runs under and that's its limit regardless of the hardware, the extra 512mb are reserved for other tasks.

OK thanks for the info, I just bought Macmini G4 with 512 MB and I will upgrade RAM to 1 Gig (hopefully I find some working module soon) a I am going to give MOS a try. I sold my Pegasos long time ago when I had 1.45, now I am looking forward to see changes made since that version.

You might also try to burn the image to DVD instead of CD, sometimes it's just other part of the mechanism which is broken. There's also USB Boot Guide.


And to be noted, 1.5GHz model (silent upgrade) of Mac mini G4s is the best for MorphOS use, because it has 64MB graphics memory, while other models only have 32MB. 32MB will do if you don't use big resolutions or are willing to compromize with eyecandy. More info about different systems at Supported Computers list.

You can also read about changes to 1.4.5 in my "MorphOS 2 Review" (quite extensive) and "What's New in MorphOS 3" articles found at my MorphOS pages. You might not notice everything by just trying quickly yourself ;)

A few years ago I bought a MacMini 1.5GHz and also bought MOS to install on it. I couldn't be happier with it, the OS is really nice with plenty of free varied apps to try and use. If you want to run hardware banging 68k stuff you can just set up UAE and use that within Ambient (the mos desktop).

I highly recommend anyone whos thinking about it to try MOS for yourself, you wont be disapointed.

Why not try AOS41 ?

Why should he? OS4.1 would need buying some expensive hardware and he already has MorphOS compatible hardware, and free test version of MorphOS. Also MorphOS and OS4 do exactly the same from technical point of view, although MorphOS is in a bit more advanced state.

And using OS4.1 in WinUAE is very crippled experience and not practical for real use, and would need some blind investment to get it tested because there isn't any demo version of it available.

Really in what way?
I have been using it in a practical way for ages, the only thing it lacks is 3D acceleration. Been using my Micro A1 setup on it and it works very well.

The major thing is that it is only possible to use 128MB of memory, cuts out the browsing and too many other things. OS itself consumes more memory than 3.x versions, today's resolutions and eyecandy take big part too, not to talk growing requirements for programs generally. And then of course the lack of 3D, general speed, network speed, other device support etc.

Well I am sure that after a few weeks of testing MorphOS while ok, is just not up to scratch for what I want.

The G4 while ok seems to require more processing power than I actually have.

The G5 it seems totally unstable and locks up at the slightest volition and the AHI sound keeps cutting out.

Trust me I have been testing it for over two weeks and it needs just a lot more work to make it worthwhile for me to invest in it. It's not bad but not great either.

What was the G4 you tried it on? In any case I'd recommend >1GHz ones if you want to surf with nowaday's bloated web sites. Lesser should be quite snappy for other uses though.

G5 experience sounds quite unusual. In what situation AHI cuts out? And stability should be similar with any other machine... is this with clean system or did you install some potentially unstable stuff like Chrysalis pack?

And most importantly, did you use MorphOS 3.9, and not 3.8 which had a major bug on certain G5 machines (7,2 model IIRC)? Now to think, you might been using the very buggy one, because the fixed 3.9 is only a week old. In that case you didn't get the correct impression at all...

The G4 is 800Mhz Quicksilver 2002 model (Mac 3.5) it does the job reasonably well actually once I sorted the sound issues. In fact all I need is internet and I could live with this. Minor slowdown when running games in E-UAE but thats probably not a surprise.

The G5 (a 2.0Ghz DP (A1047) with ATI Radeon 9600, 4GB RAM, PowerMac 7.5) was a clean install of MorphOS 3.9 but it seemed to regularly freeze. Sound would work intermittently. Sometimes it would be fine other times it just refused to initialise.

It also seemed to be running exceptionally warm, now I know the G5 can be a power monster but it runs OS X without almost melting down.

I also could not get the E-UAE setup working no matter which setup I used. It would acknowledge the HDF but refused to allow the filesystem pickup which had many WHDload games. Ironically the G4 did this no worries but the G5 just would not play ball.
Now that's not a fault of MorphOS probably my incompetance.

Several programs that worked on the G4 such as Poly Organiser worked on the G4 after a bit of library installation on the G5 it would not and I installed the one missing library it refused to acknowledge it.

Also I could not get the Airport card to connect and stay connected. This is probably due to my network being WPA2 so it just connected and disconnected. Setting up DNS servers refused to work even when it did connect.

I have been playing about for weeks and although it has been an experience I do believe that MorphOS has a bit further to go before I consider it worth paying for.

/gets off soapbox

To be honest I will keep MorphOS on the G4 but it seems to be tempermental on the G5.

I also never got the G5 to play nice with E-UAE. I posted about it a few times on morphzone but nobody really seemed interested I guess. :/

Hmm.. only PowerMac 7,2 and 7,3 are supported, I guess it must be either of those. But maybe a bug report would be worth making? You can report bugs from the Support tab in About MorphOS window on the live system. It sends the technical information of your system to the developers and maybe they could identify the problem.

BTW. did you check the debug log (from the debug screenbar module for example), if there was any hits (looong list of output lines) which would tell that there is something nasty going on?

With the 3.8 these would be more obvious, but if it really was with the one week old 3.9 (released Jun 19th) too... haven't seen such reports elsewhere.

Was there any gfx slowdown or any other issues when you got the audio problems?

That sounds really weird... it would be interesting to find out what the real issue has been there...


WPA2 should work just fine. In fact it's harder to configure the system lower security encryptions like WEP (you need to edit configuration files manually for it). Only the best encryptions are supported from the GUI.

In my experience with G4 laptops the WPA2 connection has been stable, although not the best quality always. But wired connection is the best always.