Turn your G4-era Mac into a next-gen Amiga | Hacker News Reader

Turn your G4-era Mac into a next-gen Amiga

macworld.com

49 pointsrbanffy15 comments

"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.

The MorphOS license cost 3x more than the value of my old G4 laptop.

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.

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/ 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

You could have recycled it (there are places that specialize in recycling electronics). Also, you could have sold (or given it away) on eBay...people still use (and buy) old computer hardware.

And I think a PowerPC-based Mac can already qualify as "vintage computing" ;-)

Autoplaying video with sound, what a crock.

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

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