A review of the Pegasos computer system by Kelly Samel of Emerald Imaging: Date: May 2 2003 Website: http://browse.to/emerald Email: samel@telusplanet.net Relevant Links: MorphZone: http://www.morphzone.org MorphOS news: http://www.morphos-news.de Genesi: http://www.pegasosppc.com Phoenix: http://www.phinixi.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Foreword: This is my review of the Pegasos PPC (PowerPC) computer system and MorphOS operating system from Genesi. Pegasos and MorphOS form a new computer system that features an AmigaOS compatibility layer provided by the "ABox", in addition to it's own modern "Quark" micro kernel. Other OSes are available and OS development is encouraged for the platform by the inclusion of an "Open Firmware" system. It is being offered as an alternative option for many users of Amiga, Linux and other computer systems as well as a platform for set-top-boxes and other embedded uses. The Pegasos is based on a custom microATX motherboard with a PPC cpu. The OS has support for multiple CPUs, planned for the PegasosII system. The Pegasos ships with a G3 600Mhz and also supports G4 upgrade cards. Developer support is provided by the "Phoenix" group and they have an aim of bringing development efforts together into one place to form a cohesive source of information and assistance for developers that are interested in the Pegasos platform. (http://www.phinixi.com) I have been an Amiga user for more than 10 years and currently am part of a commercial/freeware/shareware development team called "Emerald Imaging". We have released our first commercial product for AmigaOS, an adventure game called "Aqua". (see http://browse.to/emerald) Getting Started: When we first recieved the Pegasos, I was looking forward to giving it a try. I really didn't know much about the Pegasos/MorphOS system but decided to try something new and realized the fact that it was becoming an important platform to support in the Amiga market and was gaining some interest in areas outside of this segment too. I had already purchased all of the hardware accessories to get the system up and running. Here is a description of the hardware I decided to use with the system: Standard ATX tower case 256MB PC133 SDRAM "Azenram brand" ATI Radeon8500LE AGP gfx card Maxtor 40GB IDE hard drive OptoWrite 16x12x40 CD Burner D-Link DSL-300G ADSL modem The first thing that really shocked me was the small size of the motherboard. When we received the package, I thought maybe they forgot the board. ;) It is one of the most compact and well built boards I have seen. The board came bundled with the following: Pegasos Motherboard with April2 and ArticiaS chipset IBM PPC 750 600Mhz cpu card ATX port backplane MorphOS v1.3 on CD SoftwareTycoon game The Feeble Files game Tales of Tamar game A piece of paper with information about the motherboard layout A Pegasos T-Shirt The installation of the board into the tower is straightforward for anyone that has installed ATX style motherboards before. Basically you just need to screw the motherboard onto the mounting bracket and replace the pop-out backplane with the one that matches the Pegasos's ports. (included) Then it's a matter of attaching all the leads like IDE, Power, sound etc. All of the information was clearly printed on the included diagram, so there wasn't too much guessing. Once the motherboard was installed I was a little concerned with the ram I had being un-registered. I turned it on and it started up fine. I was greeted by the "SmartFirmware" startup screen and a prompt appeared where commands can be entered. I typed the command to boot the MorphOS CD as it was written on the cd sleeve: "boot /pci/cd boot.img" After a few seconds the MorphOS logo appeared and then the Ambient desktop appeared. I wanted to check if the ram was recognized ok and found the "ExecuteCommand" function right where I expected it to be. After typing "Avail" it showed that indeed all 256MB was recognized by the system. I then tried looking at the "about" requestor and moving some windows etc. around and was impressed by the speed and smoothness of the refresh. It was time to install the OS. I found instructions on how to paritition the drive and install MorphOS in a readme file on the CD. It basically consists of setting up a small "FastFileSystem" partition to store boot images on and then making your other partitions as SFS (SmartFileSystem) or FFS. You then boot the CD again, format your partitions and copy the MorphOS CD to the partition you want it on. It is pretty straightforward if you are familiar with setting up an Amiga system with "HDToolBox", although now the partitioning tool is called "ScsiConfig". After this I tried booting the OS with this command: (can be set to auto-boot too) boot /pci/ide/disk@0,0:0 boot.img The system started up fine and was very quick booting. Since then I have installed numerous 68K, PowerUP, WarpOS and MorphOS native apps/games and the compatibility and speed is pretty amazing. The JIT 68K emulation hasn't been released to the public yet, but the speed of most 68K apps/games is more than acceptable. It's faster than my 68060 A4000 at everything and even beats out a 1Ghz Amithlon system at many things. The movement of the mouse pointer is particularly smooth and nicer than what you see on most other systems. Software: On the MorphOS CD you can find a full PPC version of "Voyager" and a fun game called "BirdieShoot". A new version of "MysticView" is included that is really a great picture viewer. Internet installation was fairly easy, I installed "MiamiDX" off of my other Amiga system and without even reconfiguring anything but the network device, it went online right away. For native MorphOS development tools I have found "VBCC" to be my favourite and "GCC" worked fine too, although "GCC" is a bit harder to install and configure. "TVPaint", "ImageFX" and "Cinema4D" are all running nicely and the "FXPaint" demo is promising too. The "MakeCD" demo works fine for CD burning. "Dopus4" is the best for file operations. The native MorphOS version of "FroggerNG" and "AMP" video player both function for playing video files. Our own game "Aqua" runs great on this system, except that it is too fast! An update will be released to bring it back to a more sane speed. ;) The bundled games are also a nice addition and give you something new to try on the system when you get it. The overall compatibility level is quite impressive, it ran nearly every RTG Amiga app and game I threw at it. Operating Systems: MorphOS multitasks wonderfully, you can play MP3s, use the internet and run many other programs and games simultaneously without much of a speed hit. The graphic interface is also skin-able which is a nice touch, since you can change the look of all the default gadgets, menus etc. to suit your own style. MorphOS features a handy screen and window "dropdown" menu on the depth gadget if you right-click, you can quickly switch between open screens and windows this way. You can also access many of the "icon" menu operations from a context sensitive pop-up menu if you right-click over an icon. At first I didn't like this, but have found it to be a quick way to access icon information. MUI being the included GUI system lets you configure many aspects of the system to suit your needs. Menus can be made transparent and the icon "selection effect" can be chosen. For example you can have the icons turn a darker shade when selected amongst several other effects like blur or negative. Many parts of the system support Alpha channels, so real transparent icons and mouse pointer are possible. Everything on the system moves in "solid" refresh by default, you can change this to the old "elastic band" style too. The solid refresh happens immediately and is so fast I can't imagine disabling it for any reason. You can also move windows outside of the edge of the display which is really a useful feature that is soon hard to due without. The performance of the hard drive is impressive, for instance copying the "doom2" wad file (15MB) takes less than a second, copying both Quake ".PAK" files (54MB) is completed in under 3 seconds. The system is fairly efficient too, I commonly have over 200MB free in the "ram disk" while operating the system, which makes downloading large files into ram and testing a breeze. The sound is handled by AHI and the output of the built in sound is of a high quality. Debian Linux was not included with the system but is available through FTP access. This isn't practical if you have a slower internet connection, but many people have access to a high speed line somewhere. I haven't had much success with Debian Linux though since my GFX card is too new for the "XFree86" that ships with Debian and I am not yet experienced enough with Linux to fix this. As soon as I solve this issue I will add some comments about how Linux and particularly "MacOnLinux" perform on this machine. I have heard several reports of it working successfuly with different gfx cards though and a FAQ is being put together to help others. An updated ISO image with the latest versions of XFree86 and other important components packed in is being put together too. These should both be available through http://www.morphzone.org when completed. Final Impressions: After initially being a little skeptical of this system I now hold it in high regard. I am using this as the main development computer and finding it to perform all of the functions I used my other systems for nicely. I must also mention that the support from the users, developers and Genesi has been very encouraging. The Phoenix group have provided a lot of useful information and help to all those that ask, through their private lists and on public forums. The MorphZone website has been a great resource for a new Pegasos user too and provides a place for community spirit to thrive. I can honestly say that this is a quality product that is quite commendable for the current state of the market and I am left with a positive impression of the system... Relevant Links: MorphZone: http://www.morphzone.org MorphOS news: http://www.morphos-news.de Genesi: http://www.pegasosppc.com Phoenix: http://www.phinixi.com Emerald Imaging: http://browse.to/emerald