Hello everybody,
and welcome back to another video. Now, in today's episode,
we're going to be taking a look at MorphOS, which is a pretty interesting
and unique operating system because it serves a very
niche market in the modern day. This is an OS that is still
actively maintained and developed that's designed for certain
PowerPC-based machines, and its roots lie in AmigaOS. In fact, MorphOS is considered to
be an AmigaOS-like operating system, and AmigaOS is kind of a
whole 'nother can of worms that would probably be saved
to go down in a separate video. But what you need to know is that
MorphOS was originally designed for certain Amiga computers that
had an accelerator card installed, which contained a
PowerPC processor. Now, when you think of PowerPC,
there's a good chance you think of Macs, because Apple used the architecture
in their machines beginning in the 1990s and lasting until the Intel
transition in the mid-2000s. So, you probably won't find it surprising
that MorphOS was eventually made to be installed on
PowerPC Macs as well. In fact, out of the 11 computers
listed as officially compatible with MorphOS on the website,
7 of them are Macs. And we've got one of
those computers right here, of course it's my
Power Mac G4 Cube, that I actually last
powered on in 2021 when we installed
Ubuntu Linux on this thing. So, we are going to pop in the
MorphOS installation disc right here. And we're just going to reboot the
system and begin the installation process. And yes, we are going to
overwrite the existing Ubuntu install and just do a clean install of
MorphOS and see what it has to offer. This is actually going to be
my first time taking a look at this. I have not explored
this off-camera, so this is going to be a new
experience for me as well. But from what I've looked at,
this operating system looks pretty cool, because it's kind
of its own thing. In fact, the OS states that this is a
mostly proprietary operating system, though it does have a few
open source components. But it is a commercial
operating system. This is not free,
you do have to pay for it. I believe a license
costs around 79 euros. However, there is a free 30-minute
trial period that you can utilize, and it's actually how
you have to install the OS. And there we go,
the monitor is lying to us. It says it cannot
display this video mode, but it is displaying the video. Uh, but...
so that's kind of funny. But, uh, yeah. Oh, it's definitely
on a super high resolution here. Um, that's why it's...
oh my gosh, this is quite... Yeah, this is because of
the capture card that I've got, the VGA signal split between
that and the monitor here. So, uh, yeah,
we definitely need to change that somehow. Can we go... Okay, is there a way to
change the resolution, like, without going through the
setup and waiting for it to install? Okay, English,
American key map, okay. Actually,
I believe this is a live CD, so, yeah,
we can just hit "Browse CD" here. And yeah,
these are the contents of the CD, so we should be able to go... Uh, if I can find where the settings are,
that would be super nice. Oh, here, "Settings," "System." Okay, here we go, here we go. "Screens," um,
we want to edit this. There we go,
that's a lot better. Oh, my gosh, I can actually,
like, see what's on the screen everything was
so tiny before. But yeah, so, you know,
if you just wanted to, like, try out MorphOS a little bit
and get a feel for what it is, you could just kind
of explore it here. But we're, of course,
going to go through with the installation, although now I've
closed out of the... I've closed out
of the installer. So, let's...
We've got to find where that is. This is off to a wonderful start,
isn't it? Jeez. You would think they would have,
like, a big install icon on the desktop or just not let you
close out of the installer, because I literally don't...
Like, where do we have to go? Applications, maybe? Ummmmmm... No, no, no, no, no. Where is the
freaking installer at? Tools? There it is, installer. That's not the same thing. Maybe iWizard, is this it? Like, "i" for install? Nope, that's not it. "WB Startup." Is it "First Flight"? There it is, there it is. Okay. All right, so,
let's go to this installation. Oh, okay, this is... Okay, so, it was iWizard. This... I just closed out of it, because it wasn't that
initial window that we got. So, it is iWizard in there. Okay, great. iWizard allows you to
pre-configure various system settings, set up network accesses,
partition disks, blah, blah, blah. If you were running MorphOS,
like a prior version, you could go with the
update option down here. Of course, that's grayed out for us,
because we don't have one. So,
we're going to go "New Installation," "US," "English," that's fine. Okay, so,
we could have just gone through the wizard, and it would give us the
option to change our resolution and display settings as well. So,
we didn't really have to do any of that that I just went through, and then made everything
more complicated. Okay. Yes, date and time,
that's correct. And, yeah,
we'll go the American key map. Mouse speed,
we'll leave it kind of at the default. Oh,
we got some different options here. I do like this red one. Yeah,
we're going to go with that, though that looks to
be the default anyways. So, all right, next. I do have an Ethernet
cable plugged into this thing, so, it's recognizing that here,
which is great. We're just going to go
with the automatic option, because it does recommend that if you're installing it for the first time,
which I am. One thing of note is
there's no progress bar or any sort of
indication as to like how long it's going to take or where it's at in
the copying process. It does have a thing down here of how many files
that it's copied over and how many
kilobytes worth of files that it's copied over, but, you know,
it doesn't tell you the total, so, we don't know exactly
what that's going to be. And, would you look at that? It did not take long at all, like not even a
minute or two went by since I last spoke to you guys. So, yeah, we'll say okay, and I guess we
just got to restart. So, we'll close out of this,
we'll eject the CD, and we'll just go to, let's see, how do we restart? Shut down, reboot, there we go. So, there's the boot screen. Pretty simple, nice looking. It also has, oh no,
it reset the resolution again. Oh my gosh. [Bleep] What on earth is it doing now? Look at this,
it's like the entire screen like put up into a corner. Oh, geez, okay,
so let's go to utilities. Let's go to, or no,
settings, system, and we'll have to
modify this again. Okay, that's a lot better. So, here we are,
here is MorphOS in all of its glory. And like I said,
I have not used this before, I've not explored this before. This is kind of
one of those videos where I just wanted
to go into it blindly just to kind of experience
this for the first time. One thing that is rather
interesting and kind of odd is the way this menu
bar works up here. So, you have to right
click to get these options, and then you get kind of
like you have in MacOS where you've got
like the menu bar and all the options up there. It's not up here permanently, but like this is not a
button that you can click. This is not either. You have to right click and then,
yeah, then you can go here, My MorphOS, there's a little file
browser we were just in. We can go into system and maybe browse the
file structure a little bit here. We've got a readme file, which is probably gonna
be important to read. It tells you the
supported graphics cards, other supported cards, booting, how to make sure
it boots properly, installation process,
how to upgrade, how to report bugs. You got a quick FAQ here. And it does come with a
decent amount of programs. Like you saw earlier when
we were booting off the live CD, there's a lot of tools in here. We go back into utilities. We've got a bunch
of stuff in here. Let's open up
maybe the clock here. This is like a
little bit of a widget that just appears on the desktop and you can kind
of drag it around. Whatever the active
application is will show up here. So Ambient Screen is the
name of the overarching GUI. It's actually just
referred to as Ambient. But yeah,
when I click on the clock here, you see that it
changes to clock 52.0. I guess this is the
50 second iteration of the clock application. Let's go to about MorphOS, kind of read the
about info here. So this is version 3.17, the latest version as
of me filming this video. And that's the other
thing too about MorphOS is this is a way,
if you have an old PowerPC Mac, that for whatever reason you
need to use in the modern day, this is an operating system
that could do that for you. And it might be worth paying
the 79 euros or whatever it is if you have an
actual use for it. Yeah, what I was saying earlier about you having to
download this demo version to even register it, there's no registration
thing on the website. You have to download
the ISO file for MorphOS, which I know I've been saying
that this is a demo version, but this is regular MorphOS. This is the full experience. There's nothing like
that won't run or anything. It's just that there
is a time limitation, kind of a built-in time bomb that when you use it for,
I believe, 30 minutes with it being unregistered, it'll come up with a message that says you have to
register it to continue using it. And you do that by going through the registration utility here. And you click on next, and it says right here, software's initially time
limited up to two hours per boot. Okay, so maybe it's two hours. I thought it was 30 minutes. But yeah,
so it says you must register. And this is kind of the downside and a very important
thing to note. When you purchase MorphOS, it will create a unique key file that is bound to this
particular machine that I've got it installed on. So you can't just transfer
it to another computer. And the way it works
is you would fill out your registration form here. It would ask you for
your email address. And then it would
send you an email, I believe with a PayPal link, where you would
pay for the license. And then it
generates that key file and ties it to this
specific computer. So that is something
to keep in mind if you do end up
purchasing MorphOS. But you can try it out for free for that 30 minute or
maybe two hour period, as it says here. Up to, well,
it says up to two hours per boot. Maybe less depending on version. Okay, but let's go ahead and just kind of explore
around this a little bit. We'll see what programs we have. We'll go to the My MorphOS
icon here on the desktop. And let's go into system. And there is a web browser
that's included in here. I forget the exact name, but I think it might
be under utilities here. Oh, it's probably under applications. I think Iris,
I think this is the mail client. Yeah,
I can tell from the "@" sign there. So there is an email client. I believe it's Wayfarer. This is it. This is the browser. So we'll open this up here. We get that same
kind of splash screen, which we still have
for the email client here in the background. So let's hope one
of these starts up. Oh, there we go. Okay, the browser. Oh, it's probably like doing some first setup
type stuff here. Looks like it's
got a few TTF files that's loading up or
copying somewhere. Okay, and that's something
that I'm figuring out here. You have to double
click on a window when you want it to become
the window that's on top. So like if I click once on this, it will make it the
active window. You see the title
bar changes here, but I have to double click on it to bring it to the very front. I guess while it's doing that, let's maybe browse
the drive a little bit more. Let's see what else we got. So we'll go to the system here. Let's go back to
those applications. Yeah, you've got a VNC server. You've got,
looks like a PDF program, VPDF. Yeah, so a little PDF reader. You've got, yeah,
some VNC stuff, LCD monitor test, remote shell, Iris, which is the mail
client that we're loading up. There's a benchmark utility, or DiskSpeed and
GfxSpeed as well. And I got to say,
this file browser is pretty nice. The way it gives you, you know, your like directory
breakdown here. You can easily jump back to the root of, you know, just My MorphOS,
but it doesn't get rid of the path that you were just in. So like I can go
back to GFX speed. It's only when I
go to a different, oh,
and there's the email client. It finally started up. Look at that. So yeah, this thing,
this is like a modern email client. I mean, 'cause this whole OS, it's still maintained and
developed to this day. So, oh, there's actually,
it looks like that. There's an update to Iris. We'll just skip it for now. So yeah,
you could sign in with Google, you know,
right from your Gmail account. So it looks like you
don't have to configure like mailbox
settings and all that. Although I'm sure you
could if you wanted to. At least I would hope. Oh, and here's Wayfarer. Okay,
so Wayfarer 4.8 is now available. It looks like the
network is working. It's loading the MorphOS page. Let's go ahead and
download this new version. I wonder how
updates are handled. It looks like it made
this full screen. We can kind of
restore that there and maybe resize a little bit. We'll just get out
of the mail client. But yeah, back to what I was
saying with the file browser. It's nice because it shows
you your entire file path until you change,
like I was just in GfxSpeed. If I go into DiskSpeed,
then this will change. This layer, or this tier of
the directory that we're in. It's like same thing
if I'm in applications and I go back up the
system and I go to classes, that will now change. That is really, really nice. You've also got some buttons
up here for forward and back. You've got what I
believe is like an info thing. And I guess they
call folders drawers 'cause that's what it,
yeah, "Docs Drawer" and "Applications Drawer." Yeah,
so I guess that's what they're referring to folders as. And something
else that I'm noticing is you cannot drag
windows like off the screen. It is contained to the screen, which could honestly
get kind of annoying if you're running it a little
bit of a lower resolution. You want to just like move
this window out of the way and have something else
kind of like overlap on top of it. But you can just
resize the window and then be able
to move it around. And we'll go ahead and make it. I think this is, yeah,
this is making it full screen. And it does take over
the menu bar as well. It completely just overlaps it. So let's go ahead and let's
try to go to YouTube on here. Now watching YouTube videos, we'll go to my YouTube channel. Watching YouTube videos on here is going to be limited
by the hardware itself. Oh yeah,
the browser has kind of frozen up here. Lovely, lovely, lovely, lovely. Oh, there we go. We got the search bar. But yeah, I mean, to be honest, like watching YouTube videos is something you're probably
not gonna be doing on MorphOS. But what I did read
is that apparently you can use the
built-in media player and just like stream
YouTube videos directly to it. And the playback is much better. Of course,
it does depend on what hardware, like, you know,
everything would be much better on like a G5,
like a Power Mac G5, as opposed to a G4 Cube here. Oh, it finally responded to me clicking the back
button earlier. Let's go to maybe Google. Let's go to a bit of an
easier website here. (keyboard clicking) So there's Google. Oh, so it does. Okay, so it's not like a, I wonder what this
browser is based on. Okay,
it is a WebKit based browser. Copyright 2020 to 2022. In fact, this is kind of
reminding me of the Safari logo. Perhaps that's why
they went with it. But you can see here, like this is not the
modern Google homepage. Well,
it doesn't display the mobile results page. So that's something. Let's try to go to my Twitter. Oh, it's doing something. It's definitely slow,
but it's chugging along. Maybe it'll get there. Let's see. Oh, there we go. So it does look like it has
loaded the mobile page. And by loaded,
I mean, almost loaded. It's definitely
lagging along here, but it did technically
display the page. I actually wonder what the,
if we go to the, I think there is like a,
yeah, system monitor here where we can view the
current CPU and memory load. I kind of wonder what
this is looking like here. Let's resize this window. Oh yeah,
the CPU load is like super high there. Oh yeah,
it spikes up immediately. So yeah, the CPU is definitely
having some trouble here. Memory usage is
pretty good though. We're hovering around 20% there. But yeah,
CPU load is like maxing out. So yeah, maybe you don't
really want to browse the web and go to modern
websites on this thing. I mean, there's plenty of other operating systems and computers that
you can do that on. You're going to have a
much better experience, but I just like to, you know, kind of just mess around
with stuff, honestly, and just kind of
experiment with things, see what works and what doesn't. Oh, and look at that Wayfarer crashed as we were trying to close it. All right,
we'll just ignore that for now. But yeah,
so nice little system monitor utility here. We'll maybe
resize that a little bit and have it down
here at the bottom. Let's actually
look at the games. We've got Diamonds, which I wonder if it's going to
be like Bejeweled or something. Oh, we got to beat Albert
Einstein's high score. All right. So I'm sure we've all
played games like this before, but actually I wonder
what if we open this up here and we go to About. Let's see,
Puzzle with lots of shiny gems. And so there's
the developers of it. It's got a bunch of
translations as well. Got a few other games here. Pixel Cross,
I wonder what this is. It opens up in a- too
small of a window. Warning,
this game might be addictive. All right,
we'll start the tutorial. Welcome to Pixel
Cross tutorial mode. The following pages will
demonstrate how to play this game. Blah, blah, blah,
use next to continue. Okay. Small thinking game. It's a combination
of a crossword puzzle without words and Sudoku
using pictures instead of numbers. The main task is to uncover
pixel graphics without make- oh, and there's the timeout. Look at that. Right as we were
getting into Pixel Cross. So technically we can
still use the system, but it says it will
slow down soon. And it does mention,
I was kind of wondering about if it would reset
when you reboot the system. It does mention that in the, like let's go back
to My MorphOS here and we go to System and
what was it, Utilities. And it was the activation...
or the Reg Tool here. Up to two hours per boot. And that was
definitely not two hours. It was like 30 minutes. Oh, this is the license from 2008. Look at that. So maybe it used to be two hours and then they've
like lowered it. Or maybe it does actually
vary depending on what version of the OS that you're running. Yeah, it'll just slow the system down, I guess to the point
where it's not usable. So it says, you know,
it like gives you time if you were working on something,
which is nice. It does let you know, say,
hey, if you're, you know, if you're doing something,
save your work and, you know, buy a license 'cause
this is not free software. But yeah,
I think getting this message is a pretty good stopping point. So yeah,
I hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did,
be sure to give it a thumbs up, get subscribed,
all that good stuff. I will have this link down below if you guys wanna go
check out the website and maybe download a copy or perhaps even purchase
a license for yourself. But as always, I want to
thank you all so much for watching and I will see you
in the next video. (outro music)