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MorphOS
Amiga-compatible computer operating system

MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like operating system designed for Power and PowerPC based computers. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop.

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's Mac 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.

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History

The project began in 1999, based on the Quark microkernel.2 The earliest versions of MorphOS ran only via PPC accelerator cards on the Amiga computers, and required portions of AmigaOS to fully function.3 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.45 Thendic-France had financial problems and folded; however, the collaboration continued under the new banner of "Genesi".67 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.8

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,9 the Ambient desktop interface was released under GPL1011 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.12

Characteristics and versions

Developed for PowerPC CPUs from Freescale and IBM, it also supports the original AmigaOS Motorola 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.1314

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.15 Current (since 2.0) release of MorphOS supports the Efika.

Software

See also: List of MorphOS bundled applications

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

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.

Other

Ambient

Ambient is the built-in MUI-based desktop environment for MorphOS,16 the development was started in 2001 by David Gerber. Its main goals were that it should be fully asynchronous, simple and fast.17 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.

  • support for ARexx scripting language
  • default icon library for hundreds of fileformats
  • fully asynchronous, multi-threaded design
  • fast asynchronous file I/O functions and file notifications
  • support for PNG and other Amiga icon formats
  • built-in icon, workbench and wbstart libraries
  • 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.18

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 iconsMagicWBNewIconsGlowIconsGlowIcons32DT IconsPNGDualPNGSVG
Colours4825625616M16M16M16M16M
Alpha blendingNoNoNoNoYesYesYesYesNot sure
Icon size——36×4046×4646×46128×128128×128128×128128×128
Second state imageYesYesYesYesYesNoNoYesNo
Embedded metadataYesYesYesYesYesNoYesYesNot sure

Development status

In 2005, David Gerber released Ambient source code under GPL19 and it is now developed by the Ambient development team.

Supported hardware

Amiga

Apple

Genesi/bPlan GmbH

ACube

A-Eon Technology

Version history

Release history of 0.x/1.x series

VersionRelease dateNotes
0.1August 1, 2000Amiga
0.2October 17, 2000Amiga
0.4February 14, 20013rd Release21
0.5May 1, 2001Amiga
0.8August 2001Amiga, Pegasos I
0.92002beta22
1.014 October 2002Pegasos I
1.1December 13, 2002Pegasos I
1.2February 9, 2003Pegasos I
1.3March 27, 2003Pegasos I
1.4August 7, 2003Pegasos I
1.4.4March 28, 2005Pegasos I/II
1.4.5April 30, 2005Pegasos I/II
1.4.5August 25, 2005Amiga23

Release history of 2.x/3.x series

VersionRelease dateNotes
2.0June 30, 2008Added 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 framework24
2.1September 6, 2008Support for the Efika's audio25
2.2December 20, 2008TrueCrypt-compatible disk encryption suite26
2.3August 6, 2009Origyn Web Browser as the default browser, read only HFS+ file system support27
2.4October 12, 2009Added support for Mac mini G4; write support for Mac HFS disks, new charsets.library to provide better multilingual application support28
2.5June 4, 2010Added support for eMac G4; drivers for SiI3x1x based 2-port Serial ATA PCI cards29
2.6October 10, 2010Added support for Power Mac G4; 2D drivers for Rage 128 Pro graphics cards; Released at precisely 10.10.10 10:1030
2.7December 2, 2010Improving support for Power Mac G4 platforms31
3.0June 8, 2012Added support for PowerBook G4; performance improvements32
3.1July 8, 2012Bug-fix release33
3.2May 27, 2013Added 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 performance34
3.3September 18, 2013Fixes support for some iBook G4 models35
3.4December 14, 2013Improved R300 3D and G5 video playback performance, support for non-native display resolutions on various PowerBook models36
3.5February 15, 2014Support for PowerMac7,2 Power Mac G5 models37
3.6June 27, 2014Broadcom Wi-Fi support, AMD R400 support, SMBFS file system, VNC server and a Synergy client38
3.7August 3, 2014Bug-fix release39
3.8May 15, 2015Support for Sam 460 series of mainboards; basic drivers for Radeon HD series graphics cards, 4K displays in native resolution40
3.9June 19, 2015Bug-fix release41
3.10March 25, 2018Extended 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 improvements42
3.11July 6, 2018Bug-fix release43
3.12October 2, 2019Dual 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 Counting44
3.13February 7, 2020Bug-fix release45
3.14October 4, 2020Kernel 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 application46
3.15December 31, 2020Bug-fix release47
3.16March 9, 2022Added notification system and email client Iris,48 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 fixes49
3.17May 1, 2022Bug-fix release50
3.18May 13, 2023New 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.51
3.19Jan 18, 2025Bug-fix release52

MorphOS 2 includes a native TCP/IP stack ("Netstack") and a Web browser, Sputnik or Origyn Web Browser.53 Sputnik was begun under a user community bounty system54 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.

See also

  • Free and open-source software portal
  • Amiga portal

References

  1. By (2023-02-28). "MorphOS: A Modern Operating System For PowerPC". Hackaday. Retrieved 2024-12-05. https://hackaday.com/2023/02/27/morphos-a-modern-operating-system-for-powerpc/ ↩

  2. "Nový projekt OS: MorphOS". Amiga Review (in Czech). No. 52. Atlantida Publishing. January 2000. p. 7. ISSN 1211-1465. /wiki/ISSN_(identifier) ↩

  3. "MorphOS? What's that, then?". Amiga Active. No. 10. Pinprint Publishing. July 2000. pp. 14–17. ISSN 1467-3533. /wiki/ISSN_(identifier) ↩

  4. Schröder, Carsten (July 2002). "Pegasos-Verfügbarkeit steht möglicherweise kurz bevor". Amiga Future (in German). No. 37. APC&TCP. pp. 4–5. ↩

  5. Dvorak, John C. (2004-04-06). "Inside Track". PC Magazine. Vol. 23, no. 6. Ziff Davis. p. 53. ISSN 0888-8507. /wiki/ISSN_(identifier) ↩

  6. "MorphOS Update & Pegasos" (PDF). Total Amiga. No. 14. South Essex Amiga Link. Spring 2003. p. 8. http://www.totalamiga.org/pdf/totalamiga_14.pdf ↩

  7. "bplan and Thendic merge to GENESI (update)". Amiga-News.de. November 22, 2002. Retrieved December 29, 2016. http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2002-11-00192-EN.html ↩

  8. "Weitere Bilder von der CES 2003" (in German). Amiga-News.de. February 4, 2003. Retrieved December 29, 2016. http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2003-02-00028-DE.html ↩

  9. "Unklarheiten bezüglich der Veröffentlichung von MorphOS 1.5 für den Pegasos" (in German). Amiga-News.de. November 15, 2004. Retrieved December 29, 2016. http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2004-11-00063-DE.html ↩

  10. "Ambient source code under GPL released". Amiga-News.de. January 22, 2005. Retrieved December 29, 2016. http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2005-01-00122-EN.html ↩

  11. Gerber, David (2005-01-22). "Ambient, the MorphOS desktop, becomes free". OSNews. Retrieved 2024-05-30. https://www.osnews.com/story/9476/ambient-the-morphos-desktop-becomes-free/ ↩

  12. Haynes, Chris (March 21, 2007). "Scalos: The Amiga Desktop Replacement". Archived from the original on 2018-09-22. Retrieved 2007-03-21. https://web.archive.org/web/20180922220139/http://scalos.noname.fr/ ↩

  13. Piru (February 23, 2006). "Announcements: Updated MorphOS for PowerUP Users". Amiga.org. Archived from the original on 2007-03-14. Retrieved 2007-03-21. https://web.archive.org/web/20070314010244/http://www.amiga.org/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6671 ↩

  14. Holwerda, Thom (August 24, 2005). "MorphOS 1.4.5 Released for Classic Amiga". OSNews. Retrieved 2007-03-21. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=11668 ↩

  15. Holwerda, Thom (October 17, 2006). "MorphOS 1.5 Running on Efika to Be Shown". OSNews. Retrieved 2007-03-21. http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=16209 ↩

  16. http://morphos.de/files/src/3.11//ambient.tar.bz2 Source code of MorphOS 3.11 http://morphos.de/files/src/3.11//ambient.tar.bz2 ↩

  17. Linux: o guia definitivo (in Brazilian Portuguese). jideon francisco marques. 2023-09-08. https://books.google.com/books?id=bhPWEAAAQBAJ ↩

  18. "MorphOS: The Lightning OS". 2006-11-22. Archived from the original on 2011-07-25. Retrieved 2010-09-04. https://web.archive.org/web/20110725135841/http://www.powerdeveloper.org/morphos-article.php ↩

  19. "Ambient". Retrieved 2008-11-21. http://zapek.com/?page_id=18 ↩

  20. Frank Mariak (December 25, 2013). "MorphOS on Apple G4 Cube?". Archived from the original on December 27, 2013. Retrieved 2013-12-25. https://web.archive.org/web/20131227012147/http://www.morphzone.info/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?forum=11&topic_id=6835&post_id=107647&showonepost=1 ↩

  21. "New MorphOS 0.4 Release". ann.lu. February 15, 2001. Archived from the original on March 8, 2016. Retrieved 2016-11-22. Alt URL https://web.archive.org/web/20160308162834/http://anna.amigazeux.org/detail.php?category=news&file=0982207755.msg ↩

  22. MorphOS 0.9 video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atZRdevOTn0 ↩

  23. "MorphOS Change Log". morphos-team.net. June 6, 2006. Retrieved 2016-11-22. http://powerup.morphos-team.net/changelog.html ↩

  24. MorphOS 2.0 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.0 ↩

  25. MorphOS 2.1 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.1 ↩

  26. MorphOS 2.2 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.2 ↩

  27. MorphOS 2.3 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.3 ↩

  28. MorphOS 2.4 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.4 ↩

  29. MorphOS 2.5 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.5 ↩

  30. MorphOS 2.6 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.6 ↩

  31. MorphOS 2.7 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/2.7 ↩

  32. MorphOS 3.0 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.0 ↩

  33. MorphOS 3.1 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.1 ↩

  34. MorphOS 3.2 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.2 ↩

  35. MorphOS 3.3 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.3 ↩

  36. MorphOS 3.4 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.4 ↩

  37. MorphOS 3.5 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.5 ↩

  38. MorphOS 3.6 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.6 ↩

  39. MorphOS 3.7 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.7 ↩

  40. MorphOS 3.8 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.8 ↩

  41. MorphOS 3.9 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.9 ↩

  42. MorphOS 3.10 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.10 ↩

  43. MorphOS 3.11 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.11 ↩

  44. MorphOS 3.12 release notes https://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.12 ↩

  45. MorphOS 3.13 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.13 ↩

  46. MorphOS 3.14 release notes https://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.14 ↩

  47. MorphOS 3.15 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.15 ↩

  48. Iris IMAP client https://iris-morphos.com ↩

  49. MorphOS 3.16 release notes https://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.16 ↩

  50. MorphOS 3.17 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.17 ↩

  51. MorphOS 3.18 release notes https://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.18 ↩

  52. MorphOS 3.19 release notes http://morphos-team.net/releasenotes/3.19 ↩

  53. "MorphOS 2.0". Archived from the original on July 20, 2012. Retrieved 2010-06-19. https://archive.today/20120720044010/http://www.amigamccc.org/journal/0809eric.htm ↩

  54. "Morph Bounties". MorphZone. Archived from the original on 2007-03-06. Retrieved 2007-03-12. https://web.archive.org/web/20070306150915/http://www.morphzone.org/modules/bounty/ ↩