SPACEHAWKS' WORLDNEWS
ISSUE 20

PEGASOS

A few notes in advance

Translation of something from a different language, for a different audiance always results in a slight chance in the content. Lack of common ground, as it's the case with Susu, the dragon, who had only one head, ate pears growing in the wilderness, and always chased a butterfly renders his appearance pretty hard to understand, as it happens to many other elements, which are pretty much tied to the Hungarian cultural environment. They simply vanish or change - and in addition, the article changed it's tone towards a less personal approach. My english knowledge - it's limits, to be precise - is another factor. I express myself in different ways, at times I'm pretty much troubled how to get around the holes in my grammar or vocabulary - these all affect the article's final form.

So, I'd like to apologize for the changes in advance. I'll try to focus on the article's main goal, giving an impression about this system after only a few days experience. It may prove to be inaccurate at points - those are faults resulting from my limited knowledge. Thank you.

The classic to the left, the new to the right.

THE PEGASOS

Our story tells about the Pegasos and the MorphOS. Yet, before we start we have to know, there is, or there is expected a similar solution, namely the AmigaONE/AmigaOS4. Hopefully we'll be able to publish a report about that as well, when available, but after knowing all that, let's begin.

The Pegasos (since the announcement of Pegasos II it's called Pegasos I) is nothing more, than a PPC motherboard. It's manufacturer and distributor is the company emerged from the fusion of BPlan/Thendic - Genesi. It's primary goal was to provide a migration path for the classic Amiga platform and it's operating system to the PowerPC platform.

On this way, Pegasos is not the first step. The very first ones were the Blizzard and Cyberstorm turbocards for the classic line, which had both a 68K and a PPC processor, and required the old, classic motherboards and a PPC kernel (PowerUP or WarpUP) along the original operating system in order to function. The Pegasos is a completely different solution. It's a standalone, new machine, without even a 68K CPU.

A1200 BVisionPPC, in a V-Tower.

Pegasos in an ATX case.

With no intention for a full feature list, let's take a quick glance on what it offers: 600MHz G3 PowerPC CPU, two 133MHz SDRAM slots, 2 IDE connectors for 4 units, a 2xAGP slot for the video card and 3 PCI slots for various others, PS2 mouse and keyboard connector, 2 USB, ethernet and firewire connectors, and parallel, serial, game ports as well.

The Pegasos in no way can be considered as a high end machine today, even if it's far from being a low end machine in the PPC crowd: but there is an important advantage. It's not for the desires of a monster OS - it's intended for something which started it's carrier on a mere 7MHz M68000 CPU.

A little bit closer look at the mobo.

The backplate.

The Pegasos (or the AmigaONE) in context of the current Amiga market is without any doubt in the highest category available, leaving everything else behind except maybe for the Amithlon and AmigaOSXL solutions.

THE OPERATING SYSTEMS

All the HW is nice, but pretty worthless without operating systems. Both the AmigaONE, and the Pegasos is able to run various PPC Linuxs - but let's confess, it's not something that really makes us (except rare species) excited.

Both platrom addresses the issue with an own solution in the form of the MorphOS and the AmigaOS4. The two has many in common, yet most probably there will be many differences too, even fundamental ones.

It's a common point, that both tries to remain as compatible with the classic Amiga applications as possible. However, just as it happened in the past at the previous leaps of technology (graphic cards, newer 68K processors, etc.) many applications will fail to survive, and will be temporarily or forever lost for the users.

In both solutions the AmigaOS API compatibility and two 68K emulators form the basis for backwards compatibility. A static, and a dynamic 68K emulator is applied in order to achieve the best compatibility and speed - of which the latest, the JIT (Just In Time) emulator in MorphOS is called Trance, and Petunia in case of AmigaOS, developed by the hungarian Álmos Rajnai.

Speed must be achieved however - and the best way to provide it is having most of operating system modules running natively, without the need for the 68K emulators. Later, the migration advances. The new programs will be native too, and there will be less and less 68K applications. Sounds familiar? It's not a coincidence. The same happened to the Apple Macintosh. For the Amiga this road takes more time and steps - yet, in my opinion, even if we have still a long way to go we are in a very advanced state now.

THE HARDWARE

At last, the long avaited package arrived: inside a mother board, a CPU module a backplate for the ATX case and Debian linux. Privileges of accessing the closed beta2 mailing list and beta2 ftp are granted for all Pegasos users automatically. That's where I have downloaded the MorphOS 1.2 ISO - and I have to say, it's just for the better. I have recollections of the outdated PowerUP CD for the Blizzard/CyberStorm PPC cards, and obsolete CGX3 floppy for the BVision. This way we have always the latest at our disposal, and everything will be fresh and working.

To tell the truth, the Pegasos is a real cute MicroATX mobo. Real cute, as it's pretty small and compact, but everything fits on it well. (Probably the years of designing turbocards for the Amiga computers didn't pass without sideeffects. I can imagine it was told the developers that we want a normal mobo, but they just couldn't cope with the waste space available-Note)

The Achilles heel of the mobo is the ArticiaS chip. It sits on top of a fix called April, which fixes the well known issues of the ArticiaS. The same ArticiaS is in the current AmigaONE machines, of course a fix was applied there as well.

"Thanks" to this chip, the Pegasos and the ArticiaS based available AmigaONEs are pretty sensitive to RAM modules. Make sure you make inquiries which RAMs are working and which are not, before buying anything. For me it was a Kinston ValueRam 128 Mb PC100 Reg. ECC CL2 one, which now works flawlessly.

Concerning the CPU card, we have little to mention, except that the G3/600 has no fan, just a passive cooler.

The video card is an ATI Radeon 8500LE, with 128Mb RAM. Those with Blizzard/CyberVisionPPC cards, which has 8 Mb of RAM are pretty aware of it's potential I presume.

I have inserted a 80 Gb hard disk, a CD-ROM, a PS2 mouse and keyboard and assembling of the hardware was practically ready.

THE SOFTWARE

At last! Here is the MorphOS CD, we insert it, and off we go! Or...

WHAT THE HECK IS THAT SMARTFIRMWARE?

We were smarts as well, read the SmarFirmware docs, and the Betatester II Quackstart Guide before even commencing the experiment. The SmarFirmware is an OpenFirmware compatible BIOS. When for the first time I read that it has a Forth like interpreter, I thought now I'm finished for good - yet, to tell the truth, one can soon get accustomed to it, and even like it: it's "ugly but cool". Thank god, we have to memorize only one line.

(To deter those with lower morale the documentation contains frightening examples: if you want to print out the result of 3+4, you have to type in the unholy "3 4 + cr" string. Even paths are shown as examples in the documentation, like: "/duart@C0800A00/uart@1:19200,9600,8,1,N". Care little about those, and don't be afraid: it won't be that bad as it seems at first.)

We simple type in: "boot /pci/cd boot.img" and there it is: it's MorphOS, in standard 640x480 resolution. So much for remaining unbiased: the beast is extremely beautiful even in it's default, "primitive" state.

MorphOS looks identical to this when booted from CD, except the console and HDD icons.

MorphOS looks identical to this when booted from CD, except the console and HDD icons.

All the icon texts in the window has blurred, alpha shadow, the PNG icons are beautiful (let me point out the Ram Disk icon!), and following the trend of OSX, WindowsXP and the rest: even the cursor has alpha shadow.

MORPHOS

Do you remember the times of the A/Box, Phoenix Consortium, etc? (No, it's not a corporation for distributing MooVId, it's not pH03N1x Consortium-Note) Do you remember when were these actual issues? Yes, that long before. Remember exact year? No? Nothing matter. It was so long ago that the MorphOS started to materialize.

It had an eventful history: thanks to that it's rather unique. As it's authors had to rewrite almost everything from scratch, it affected the final OS, both in positive and negative ways.

The AmigaOS API compatibility is still in place, we have a very powerful hardware under the OS in Amiga terms, and the authors, as they had to rewrite everything, they did it in a way to make it more modern and up to date than the original.

(The work is not completely finished. So there are areas where we'll find services drastically exceeding the previous OS capabilities, and areas where it offers what is expected in order to work, but little more. Since last november (if I'm correct) there were 3 updates, each with more and more advanced services.)

On the new HW the OS is blazingly fast. (Since the SmartFirmware starts the boot process of MorphOS it takes only 2 seconds to boot MorphOS with png background picture, and everything. (Smartfirmware itself spends more time with setting up the HW and booting, so the real boot time is slower.)

As the system was rewritten, it has awesome abilities: RGBA cursor, icons, icon effects (blur, tint, etc.), system level skinning capabilities, and we have to mention that the whole system builds upon MUI.

Of course, not only the graphic part is up to date: it has problems neither with my 80Gb HDD, nor woth the more than 10 Gb partition sizes, long filenames, the Radeon graphic board, the PS2 keyboard and mouse, and even AHI is fine on 16 bit and 44.1 KHz.

I don't want to go into details concerning it's services and lack of services: MorphOS never ceases to amaze me, I always find something I didn't know before. (I missed the list view, only to find out there is something like that - after voicing my disappointment on the hungarian Pegasos mailing list) So I won´t do that again.

It´s different from what we got used to. There are pretty much extras - depth gadgets both in case of the windows and screens (at screens even with a small picture) when clicked with the right mouse button provide a list of the open windows/screens, we can sort our icons by their name, we can set the effects for the icons, icon texts, what skins we´d like to use, on double clicks the windows pop to front, a double click on the Ambient screen pops up device list windows like in DirOpus, it has deficons like abilities, etc., yet there are many things missing, most of them are known issues and promised for next releases, just as box selection, I couldn´t find how to switch screens (Two paragraphs down and then I found it. That´s why I told I will not talk about these, as I´m pretty inexperienced ATM-Note), and there is a long wishlist of extras by beta2 users.

The Prefs consists of 3 Prefs programs: General Settings, where we can set the background, icon and such settings, we have something similar to the AmigaOS prefs dir, but in one application called System Settings (locale, time, screenmode, font, etc., even AHI and Debug can be found here) and finally we have a MUI like prefs, only slightly different than the original (we can set for new applications where to open: on Ambient, frontmost screen or predefined screen, wrx), so it will not be too hard to use.

Locale.

Ahi.

Screenmode.

Icon.

AmiTradeCenter. (No, it's not part of it, I dunno why I made this shot)

I could tell about many different things, but I think the screenshots tell everything. Another important note - just as Rachy, developer of Petunia can't sit still, the finnish developer of the MorphOS 68K emulators is always developing his emulations too. So the JIT one (Trance) is temporarily disabled in the current release.

The strange thing, I didn't noticed that there is no JIT emulation... I came from a BVisionPPC system with a 060/50 CPU, and found 1.2 very fast. It only came to my mind when someone asked about speed, and then I realized that the 1.2 I´m using has JIT disabled. The programs are actually much faster than on my previous system even with the static emulator (most probably at least partly because it's not the outdated IDE port of the 1200, the EDO ram and slow internal bandwidth which makes the job here)

COMPATIBILITY AND SOFTWARES

It's problematic in case of all new systems. Generally speaking, everything runs which is system friendly and independent from the A1200/A4000 specific hardware. Yet, as results show, the applications have much stronger ties to the classic architecture than one may think at first. (Let me only mention the example of MooVId, which is unable to give sound, as the Pegasos has no Paula, and MooVId has no AHI support)

Despite all this, as I'm getting more used to MorphOS and experimenting with the the applications, more and more started and run. The first day passed as rather frightening, I had little succes I confess. But a snoopdos and my old system correctly added/assigned beside the MorphOS one helped a lot, and performed miracles. (AWeb refused to start because my old FONTS dir was not in path and was not assigned, AmigaAMP only needed a Windows BMP datatype, and yes, there were harder cases. From other betatesters I know that UAE and IBrowse works, yet I had still no success with them.) I don't want to make a list of working/not working applications, as even when this article appears it'd be obsolete. Just to name a few: TVPaint, ImageFX, Voyager, Miami, Amirc, AmiTradeCenter, etc. run without problems.

Software support is most important today. What surprised me concerning the MorphOS, that development of softwares started way back in those times, when only the public betas were available for the BPPC/CPPC cards, with a 30 minutes timeout. As a result, we have plenty serious and silly programs as well.

There is native CED, Voyager, Frogger, Mysticview, Quake and the additional surprise, as it these were made without any hype in complete silence, the three games: (to this day, of course): the Alien Nations, the Knights&Merchants and Birdie Shoot, which, as a result of pretty nice marketing comes free with all Pegasos systrems.

Birdie Shoot.

Knights & Merchants demo.

In addition, AmigaOS API is not a coincidence - with that our machine becomes a bit special, but rather fast Amiga, and there will be the huge software base, which one can use. (Those that work, of course)

In addition to the 68K emulator, the MorphOS contains many wrappers: wrapper for WarpOS, PowerUP and Warp3D (for which at the moment Radeon support is not yet finished) Practically speaking, if something was written system friendly and hardware independent then it will run, regardless that it was 68K or a program for either PowerPC kernel.

The same goes for the icons. MorphOS provides something I have dreamt of for a long time - I can use the original 4 color, the 8 color MagicWB, the 16 color FantasticWB, the 256 color NewIcons and GlowIcons I have next to the RGBA png icons of MorphOS. One of the screenshots contains a surprise: yes, those are MacOSX icons in a MorphOS window... (I have changed the default drawer (or may we call it folder?) to a MacOSX folder in an instant) Honestly speaking, these are not from OSX, I downloaded them from a KDE support site.

Yes, it is yes... OSX icons in a MorphOS window.

OVERVIEW

What one may expect? It's something like you want to upgrade from a 040/40 AGA system to a 060/50 BVisionPPC. You will have to make many compromises, but in overall the advantages will overcome of all the shortcomings.

Very fast, very nice, but we must not forget that it's still AmigaOS API compatible, so no, in it's current form it's not more stable than the original. (to be precise, some programs are more stabile, but it's compensated by the less stable ones, because of the hardware differences)

It's impossible to make something fitting everyone's taste - you got to get used to it, but before all to try it out, before one decides for or against the system. And yes, there will be the AmigaONE/OS4, of which we still cannot know how it will look like or perform, but it's promised to be an upgraded AmigaOS as well.

But I'd like point out something important, which may got faint due to all the time we were waiting - it's a brand new machine with a brand new operating system, which didn't happen in our community for a long-long time...

Personal opinion? Originally I planned to keep my BVPPC machine, purchase an other monitor for it, keyboard, mouse, and I planned to use that as well next to the Pegasos. When I decided so I had a million reasons - now, as I type this article in my CED, and after 5 days playing around with the machine, and as I was able to form it to my personal taste... Almost all has gone...

In closing, what else could I say:

New Shell process 6
Ram Disk:> version
MorphOS 1.2, Ambient 1.17, Kickstart 50.27

Emeric SH