After lengthy rumours that where already somewhat already confirmed, the AmigaOS compatible operating system MorphOS have finally been ported and released to the MacMini PPC!
MorphOS 2.4 which were released this week is the latest version of MorphOS an OS created back in the late 90’ies when lack of direction in the Amiga world inspired some developers to take matter in their own hands and create a new Amiga-like, Amiga-compatible operating system running on PPC hardware.
Previous versions of MorphOS runs on the bplan Pegasos 1 and 2 PPC M-ATX motherboards (which are extremely neat and sano looking motherboards), the bplan Efika mini system and on the Phase 5 PPC cards on classic Amiga systems. Now Mac Mini has been added to the supported hardware which has a couple of positive side effects for all Amiga-fans around the world:
1. Cheaper next-gen Amiga-systems.
Any PPC Mac Mini will work with MorphOS 2.4, you can usually find a second hand Mac Mini G4 for around 150-200 euro second hand.
2. You do not need to buy MorphOS 2.4 if you want to try out a next-gen AmigaOS.
Sure 150 euro is quite a lot of money for an operating system, but if you are unsure the ISO is free to download so you can try it out on your PPC Mac mini, it will work for 20 minutes before slowing down, requiring a reboot.
3. The fastest PPC-based next-gen Amiga out there.
Mac mini (PPC) was released with up to 1.5 GHz CPU. It is the fastest PPC CPU ever to run a next generation AmigaOS.
The future?
Let us all hope Mac mini port of MorphOS will be a success and future versions of MorphOS will be able to run on MacBook, G4 towers and other PPC based Apple hardware!
Find out more about MorphOS on the official MorphOS site.
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