The project began in 1999 and it was produced for the Pegasos computer, as well as PowerUP accelerator equipped Amiga computers, and a series of Freescale development boards that use the Genesi firmware, including the Efika and mobileGT. Since then MorphOS has been ported to Apple'sMac mini, eMac, Power Mac G4 and limited support for Power Mac G5. It is binary compatible with software written for Motorola 68k-based Amiga computers.[3]
History
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Amiga family development tree
The project began in 1999, based on the Quarkmicrokernel.[4] The earliest versions of MorphOS ran only via PPC accelerator cards on the Amiga computers, and required portions of AmigaOS to fully function.[5] A collaborative effort between the companies bPlan (of which the lead MorphOS developer is a partner) and Thendic-France in 2002 resulted in the first regular, non-prototype production of bPlan-engineered Pegasos computers capable of running MorphOS or Linux.[6][7] Thendic-France had financial problems and folded; however, the collaboration continued under the new banner of "Genesi".[8][9] A busy promotional year followed in 2003, with appearances at conventions and exhibitions in several places around the world, including the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.[10]
After some bitter disagreements within the MorphOS development team in 2003 and 2004, culminating with accusations by a MorphOS developer that he and others had not been paid,[11] the Ambient desktop interface was released under GPL[12][13] and is now actively developed by the Ambient development team. Subject to GPL rules, Ambient continues to be included in the commercial MorphOS product. An alternative MorphOS desktop system is Scalos.[14]
Characteristics and versions
Developed for PowerPC CPUs from Freescale and IBM, it also supports the original AmigaOSMotorola 68000 series (68k, MC680x0) applications via proprietary task-based emulation, and most AmigaOS PPC applications via API wrappers. It is API compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 and has a GUI based on the Magic User Interface (MUI).
Besides the Pegasos version of MorphOS, there is a version for Amiga computers equipped with PowerUP accelerator cards produced by Phase5. This version is free, as is registration. If unregistered, it slows down after each two-hour session. PowerUP MorphOS was most recently updated on 23 February 2006; however, it does not exceed the feature set or advancement of the Pegasos release.[15][16]
A version of MorphOS for the Efika, a very small mainboard based on the ultra-low-power MPC5200B processor from Freescale, has been shown at exhibitions and user gatherings in Germany.[17] Current (since 2.0) release of MorphOS supports the Efika.
MorphOS can run any system friendly Amiga software written for 68k processors. Also it is possible to use 68k libraries or datatypes on PPC applications and vice versa. It also provides compatibility layer for PowerUP and WarpUP software written for PowerUP accelerator cards. The largest repository is Aminet with over 75,000 packages online with packages from all Amiga flavors including music, sound, and artwork. MorphOS-only software repositories are hosted at MorphOS software, MorphOS files and MorphOS Storage. MorphOS is delivered with several desktop applications in the form of pre-installed software.
Components
System architecture
ABox
ABox is an emulation sandbox featuring a PPC native AmigaOS API clone that is binary compatible with both 68k Amiga applications and both PowerUP and WarpOS formats of Amiga PPC executables. ABox is based in part on AROS Research Operating System. ABox includes Trance JIT code translator for 68k native Amiga applications.
Ambient is the built-in MUI-based desktop environment for MorphOS,[20] the development was started in 2001 by David Gerber. Its main goals were that it should be fully asynchronous, simple and fast.[21] Ambient remotely resembles Workbench and Directory Opus Magellan trying to mix the best of both worlds.
Features
Ambient does not strictly follow the Amiga Workbench interface paradigm but there are still many similarities: while programs are called tools, program attributes are called tooltypes, data files are projects and directories are drawers.
built-in applications like disk formatting and commodities manager
panels which are used as program launchers
Ambient is localised for various languages and while it is an intrinsic part of MorphOS, it is also available separately. There are various visual effects in Ambient that take advantage of hardware accelerated visual effects within MorphOS.[22]
Desktop icons
The native icon format in Ambient is PNG, but there is built-in support for other Amiga icon formats. Ambient introduced a special icon format called DataType Icons where the icon is simply any image file renamed to include the .info extension. Those icons are read using the Amiga DataType system.
Original Amiga icons
MagicWB
NewIcons
GlowIcons
GlowIcons32
DT Icons
PNG
DualPNG
SVG
Colours
4
8
256
256
16M
16M
16M
16M
16M
Alpha blending
No
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Not sure
Icon size
—
—
36×40
46×46
46×46
128×128
128×128
128×128
128×128
Second state image
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
No
Yes
No
Embedded metadata
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
No
Yes
Yes
Not sure
Development status
In 2005, David Gerber released Ambient source code under GPL[18] and it is now developed by the Ambient development team.
Added support for Efika 5200B platform; native TCP/IP stack, an updated Sputnik release, AltiVec support, alpha compositing 3D layers for the graphical user interface, new USB components (including USB 2.0 support), new screenblankers, and Reggae, a new, modular, streaming multimedia framework[27]
Added support for further PowerBook G4 models, iBook G4 and Power Mac G5 model A1047; 3D drivers for Radeon R300 based cards, wireless networking via Atheros chipset, major overhaul of TCP/IP stack ("NetStack") – improving networking performance[37]
Extended hardware support (AmigaOne X5000 mainboard; new SATA controllers, network controllers, scanners and graphics cards), Flow Studio IDE with built-in debugger, support for time zones, new fonts, new themes, vector graphics, including SVG icons, overall bug fixes and performance improvements[45]
Dual monitor support for select hardware, improved thermal management for select hardware, new FireWire stack, support for more printers and scanners, upgraded Odyssey browser with HTTP/2 and TLS 1.3 and spell checking support, substantial upgrades and new features to Flow Studio IDE, UTF-8 support in MUI, ObjFW runtime with Automatic Reference Counting[47]
Kernel improvements for threading, improved TCP/IP network stack threading support, improved unix emulation layer, Magic User Interface improvements, improved ObjectiveC framework, improved translations for various languages, updated open source components for various libraries and classes, numerous bug fixes. Introduces ScoutNG system monitoring application[49]
Added notification system and email client Iris,[51] replaced Odyssey web browser with Wayfarer web browser, added new application switcher. Improvements for Synergy client, added shared openSSL 3 library. Includes hundreds of bug fixes[52]
New features: Scriptable Hex/RAM/Disk editor, ArchiveIt archiver/unarchiver application, better cooling information display via Thermals application, Samba2/3 support, including integration with Ambient desktop. Extensive improvements to Radeon drivers and improvements to Realtek 8168 driver support. Issues in USB support for CyrusPlus 5040 systems has been corrected. Many system components and libraries have been bugfixed and improved, including MUI, Netstack and Filesysbox.[54]
MorphOS 2 includes a native TCP/IP stack ("Netstack") and a Web browser, Sputnik or Origyn Web Browser.[55] Sputnik was begun under a user community bounty system[56] that also resulted in MOSNet, a free, separate TCP/IP stack for MorphOS 1 users. Sputnik is a port of the KHTML rendering engine, on which WebKit is also based. Sputnik is no longer being developed and was removed from later MorphOS 2 releases.
