New Amiga Technologies
by Eric W. Schwartz
from the October 2002 issue of the AmiTech-Dayton Gazette
Welcome to another month. As the holiday season approaches, it seems more and more that the next generation of technology may well be our Christmas gift. The release version 1.0 of Morph OS should be in beta testing as you read this, and it will also be possible to buy a PegasOS board or system without having to sign a NDA. It seems Bplan and Thendic and the MorphOS people are well on their way to bringing us their vision of what the Amiga's future. Supposedly Hyperion, Eyetech, and Amiga Inc. are on a similar schedule to bring us the "official" next-gen Amiga, in the form of the Amiga One with OS 4.0. It's harder to say exactly how far along they are, but it's obviously in their best interest to not be left behind by the Morph-based machines. Of course, it's also in their best interest to deliver a stable product, because shipping a rushed, buggy product is a great way to send your customers flocking to the competition, assuming they can do better of course. In any case, I'd imagine that while one of these two PPC-based Amiga (or Amiga-compatible) solutions will probably beat the other to the marketplace, it won't take long until both are there.
Regardless of who gets there first, the system and OS has to attract its customers. Quality, capability, available software, look and feel all come into play to determine which system people will want to buy, if any. From an outsider's relatively uninformed perspective (my own), MorphOS seems to have the better foundation, while AmigaOS4 has the prettier facade, and either approach could draw consumers to their side. I'll have to see, touch, taste, whatever both options to see which one works best for me. One last issue seems to be the one of locking the software to the hardware. AmigaOS4 is supposedly geared to run only on hardware with a hard-coded -urn- code, so the software can identify what it's running on, while Morph does not appear to be restricted in such a way. In short, this means OS4 only runs on the Amiga One (and maybe the Cyberstorm/Blizzard cards in Amigas), but not PegasOS, while it has been shown that running MorphOS on either PegasOS or AmigaOne would be a trivial matter. I can (vaguely) understand Amiga's intentions in this, but I would also expect them to reverse their position in an instant if it costs them too many sales. I also wouldn't be at all surprised to see one or both systems gain software compatibility for each other, enabling OS4 software to run on Morph, and vice-versa. There are undoubtedly legal issues to deal with there, but it's been shown possible in the past to run software designed for one PPC kernel on another, so someone's got to be thinking about gaining better marketshare by running the widest array of software. This can apply on the hardware level too, and whatever hardware handles your choice of operating system is worth a second look for many consumers, especially with this tiny market as fragmented as it is. I don't know which system I want right now, but if my choice serves me well for anywhere near as long as my A4000T, I'll be pleased.