
Turn your G4-era Mac into a next-gen Amiga - rbanffy
http://www.macworld.com/article/2363177/turn-your-g4-era-mac-into-a-next-gen-amiga.html
======
wmt
"After noodling around with MorphOS for about 30 minutes, you will notice a
pop-up window that asks you to register, and then the system will become
unbearably slow. This is where MorphOS reminds you that it is not free
software."

What a letdown at the very end of the article. It would've been nice to
mention this a bit earlier, like saying "trial version" in the title.

~~~
SwellJoe
I was an Amiga fanatic. Spent every penny I had on my first Amiga (and then
again on my second Amiga), and loved everything about it. But, here's the
thing: Linux, which I discovered not even a year after giving up on the Amiga
(I bought a Windows 95 PC in 1995, and mostly switched to Linux as my primary
OS the same year), is (nearly) everything I ever loved about Amiga...only
moreso.

It has a fantastic user community, even better than the Amiga, that focuses on
great technology over marketing. It has a great developer community, with even
more available code to study (and in fact, a lot of the stuff I liked most on
the Amiga was derived from UNIX utilities). And, it has a hacker mentality
above all else...doing novel things with Linux is expected, respected, and
supported (just as it was on the Amiga and the C64 before it).

The only thing I've never quite gotten from Linux was the way the Amiga always
treated the arts as a valuable part of the computing equation. Sound and
graphics Just Worked. Linux has had an awful, effectively unusable, sound
subsystem for its entire history...and still does, to this day. I recorded
more music with my Amigas in maybe four or five years than I have in nearly 20
years of Linux use (I still reboot into Windows to record music).

Anyway, my point is that I loved my Amigas. But, it's not something I want to
use again. I'm impressed that a small team is delivering a functional Amiga OS
clone, but it's not an OS that I would want to use daily or develop for. The
fact that it's not Open Source is just one more reason why I wouldn't have any
interest in it.

------
fit2rule
Rehabilitation of old computers is a pet topic of mine - I still have pretty
much every computer I've ever owned, from the Oric-1 machine that got me
going, to the Atari Portfolio with onboard C compiler that I used for many
great things in the 90's, to the BeBox that I boot up every year, my old O2
that is still sitting there, in all its 200mhz glory, just because .. but one
thing that has always kind of bugged me is that I missed out on the Amiga
revolution, having gone from developing at first for my home 8-bit machines,
directly to Unix and machines like the MIPS Risc/os Pizzabox .. which then led
to SGI, and so on.. so I feel like I missed a serious aspect of the computer
revolution by not ever really having much Amiga time .. all my mates ever did
with theirs was play games, and I was much more interested in coding the thing
than anything else.

So every few years I get the urge to have another look and try to figure out
what all the fuss is about. It seems like MorphOS is a good way to do that -
but I have to say that I'm a little disappointed that its crippleware,
although I understand that with practically no market for their work, the
MorphOS developers have to make a buck somehow.

Anyway, one thing that has really helped me get a bit of that lost spirit of
Amiga computing has been the Open Pandora console:
[http://openpandora.org/](http://openpandora.org/) which is, essentially, an
emulation paradise .. this allows me to run the UAE emulator and others, as
well as a veritable cornucopia of emulators for other systems .. plus, its
extremely portable, to boot.

I even once ported BCPL to the Pandora, just so I could get a working EDSAC
emulator, grin..

For anyone else interested in archaic computing platforms, the underground
movement behind the Pandora can be a very comforting community to join.

------
trevoro
How terribly disappointing.

If you're going to get all nostalgic about running Amiga applications then you
may as well just go and download the original kickstart and workbench ROMs and
fire up an emulator. FS-UAE(1) works pretty well. Someone even wrote a PNaCl
emulator for Chrome.

[1] [http://fs-uae.net](http://fs-uae.net)

------
yardie
Dammit! I just put my PowerMac G4 MDD on the corner last weekend. With screen,
keyboard, and mouse.

The disclaimer at the end of the article was a huge letdown. No way I'm paying
111EUR license for a hobby. That's about 3x more than what my G4 is worth.
Probably more since I couldn't find anyone to buy it much less pick it up.

~~~
fzzzy
What? The MDD is a relatively rarer model that has some sought-after
capabilities. :-( Should have put it on ebay to give it a happy home.

------
josephlord
I've put a working G4 iBook in the bin this week (it can probably be rescued
until tonight) as I couldn't think of any real use for it. I felt bad throwing
a computer away but I couldn't think of a reason to keep it or of any value it
might have.

~~~
justincormack
They are well supported by NetBSD, and there is demand for them for testing
and development. (There is some Linux support but less, most of the distros
are now mainly supporting IBMs ppc64 hardware).

~~~
josephlord
Well if anyone wants to collect it from North West Surrey (UK) get in touch
with me.

I may even be able to bring it to London in a couple of weeks if you want. It
is in a case so won't be messy from the bin.

~~~
justincormack
I'm in London, and have a list of people who were looking for ppc machines (in
process of distributing some ppc mac minis I acquired), email in profile... I
might be able to get to north west surrey too...

------
thejosh
Autoplaying video with sound, what a crock.

~~~
mrkipling
Autoplaying video with sound = me closing the tab immediately and refusing to
read the article.

