MorphOS Library - User contributions [en]

Games

2009-12-20T08:56:52Z

Daff:

[[File:VGP2HD_000.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Virtual Grand Prix 2 with HD textures]]One of the most notable games available for MorphOS is definitively ''Virtual Grand Prix 2'', published by Alassoft. It is a very realistic Formula 1 simulation (probably one of the most realistic for any platform), with nice 3D accelerated graphics, and the mandatory support for analog input devices, that in MorphOS is available thanks to the ''Poseidon'' USB stack and the new ''lowlevel.library''. The MorphOS version has been released shortly after the Mac and Windows ones, due to the Amiga roots of the main programmer Paolo Cattani. Notably, the MorphOS version is completely free. The game includes most of the true circuits, very nicely realised, and highly recognizable. Those not included can be found as additional packages created by users on the net. The game is quite fast and playable also on low end machines, including the 400MHz Efika with just 128MB of RAM. Moreover, the game was conceived with the maximum freedom to customize the graphics and this led to the creation of [http://www.siniscope.com/vgphd/home.html higher quality textures and more detailed circuits] that can be used in the MorphOS version as well. As a consequence this game is at the same time enjoyable on the lowest end machines and yet can be one of the most graphically advanced available on MorphOS.

[[File:WipeOut2097_001.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Wipeout 2097 running in a window]]Other commercial games available for MorphOS include all those released for classic Amiga computers with PowerPC CPUs. These include the ''Wipeout 2097'' port released by Digital Images and the ''Heretic 2'' port released by Hyperion Entertainment. The former was a very nice version of the famous game, that took the best from the PlayStation version (the most playable one) and the Windows version (the higher resolution graphics, for instance), making the Amiga conversion the best incarnation of them all. ''Wipeout 2097'' is a WarpUp executable, using the Amiga ''Warp3D'' software for graphic acceleration, but, as usual, MorphOS users have little to worry about, since the OS includes ''Goa3D'', a wrapper for the Amiga's Warp3D. ''Wipeout 2097'' runs transparently, both in full screen and in a window on the desktop, supports graphics and audio boards not supported by the classic Amigas, and can be played using USB controllers. It is of course faster than it ever was on any classic Amiga.

[[File:quake3_003.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Quake III on Ambient]]Many open source games have been ported to MorphOS, including several commercial games whose sources have been released, like id Software masterpieces ''Wolfenstein 3D'', ''Doom'', ''Doom II'', ''Quake'', ''Quake II'' and ''Quake III''. The ''Quake'' series supports 3D acceleration, and in particular in the case of the old first ''Quake'' episode, even the better looking versions ''Fodquake'', ''Fuhquake'', ''GLQuake'' and ''BlitzQuake'' have been ported. All the games run quite fast in high resolutions thanks to the 3D acceleration.

Speaking of first person shooters, also ''Cube'', ''AlephOne'' and the freeware game ''Warsow'' have been released. ''Warsow'' is probably graphically the most complex project ever ported to MorphOS (even though it is based on the old Quake II engine), and in fact might not run at a decent speed on a G3 CPU with Voodoo graphics. But it is also one mean to show that better hardware does not sit unused with MorphOS.

[[File:freespace2.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Icculus' Freespace 2]][[File:HomeWorld_000.jpg|200px|thumb|right|HomeWorld port]]Other open source projects ported include the icculus.org games ''Freespace 1'' and ''2'' (that of course need the original versions to be fully operational), and games like ''NeverBall/NeverPutt'' and the 3D pool game ''FooBillard''. ''Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe'', the open source reimplementation of Microprose's ''Transport Tycoon Deluxe'', is available, too. The MorphOS version (that, as well as all the other versions, needs the original game files to run) is synchronised with the official releases. This means that it is available directly from the project home page, since MorphOS support was inserted into the main source tree. ''Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe'' makes use of the ''PowerSDL.library'' to run. This library (whose special features are described in the section dedicated to [[MorphOS key applications]]) facilitated already the porting of dozens of free and open source SDL games to MorphOS. A recent addition to this list of ports is the space real strategy game called ''HomeWorld'', that is probably the first game requiring at least MorphOS 2.1. Also in this case the user needs the original PC version to be able to play this game on his MorphOS system. Other open source real time strategy games are available, notably ''Warzone 2100'', while fans of turn based strategic games have the chance to get some hours of fun with the famous ''Battle for Wesnoth''.

[[File:robinh_000.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Robin Hood]]In the past at least one commercial software house had been releasing specific ports for MorphOS, and that is RuneSoft (formerly known as Epic Interactive). They released ''Knights and Merchants'' and ''Robin Hood''. ''Knights and Merchants'' is a strategic game in the fashion of ''The Settlers'', just with much better graphics than the first release of that famous saga which started on the Amiga in 1993. ''Robin Hood'', on the other hand, is a strategic arcade game in ''Commandos'' style, originally released on PC by Spellbound. The graphics and audio are probably the best ever seen on MorphOS in a 2D game, and, even if a bit demanding, were carefully optimised to run smoothly even on a G3 Pegasos. RuneSoft had more games in the pipeline, and hopefully they will resume their support to MorphOS if they find again some viability in this market thanks to the broader hardware availability brought by the support of PPC Macintoshes. They always release demo versions of their conversions: therefore users can test the game, before voting with their wallets for more support.

[[File:scummvm_000.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Sam & Max Hit the Road on MorphOS, courtesy of ScummVM]]Of course, on MorphOS the user can entertain himself not just with more or less native executables: there are also many emulators and virtual machines. One of the best known is ''ScummVM'', the free reimplementation of the engine behind most Lucas Arts/Lucas Games adventures. The newest versions are also compatible with some games from other vendors (just like ''Beneath a Steel Sky'' or ''Broken Sword'' from Revolution) and luckily available for MorphOS, too. The nice thing about this is the possibility to run some of these adventures that were never published in an Amiga-like environment (Lucas Arts left the Amiga scene after ''Indiana Jones 4''). The engine works flawlessly and nicely, and these games, with their retro appearance, are always fun to play.

[[File:MAME_MorphOS004.jpg|200px|thumb|left|The arcade emulator MAME]][[File:FPSE_001.jpg|200px|thumb|right|PlayStation emulator FPSE]]The category of the "real" emulators includes ''Genesis Plus'' and ''SMS Plus'' for the Sega consoles, ''SNES 9x'' for the Super Nintendo (or Super Famicom) console, ''VICE'' for the VIC series of Commodore home computers, ''MAME'' for the arcade machines... All of these are quite good at their work and are not just fast ports, since, for instance, they all support overlay (in order to enable transparent real time resizing of the window) and USB joypads. A nice addition is ''FPSE'', the PlayStation emulator that supports even 3D graphic acceleration, enabling the possiblity to play games at video resolutions higher than the original.

Main Page

2009-12-20T08:50:34Z

Daff: /* MorphOS - The Lightning OS */

__NOTOC__

<div id="siteLogo" style="float: right;"> </div>

<div style="font-size:162%; border:none; margin:0; padding:.1em; color:#274572;">Welcome to the MorphOS Library,</div>
<div style="top:+0.2em; font-size:95%;">the wiki based library of MorphOS related documentation.</div>
<div id="articlecount" style="width:100%; text-align:left; font-size:85%;">[[Special:Statistics|{{NUMBEROFARTICLES}}]] articles in [[English language|English]]</div>

Do you have suggestions or would like to contribute? Please contact: <div id="message2library"></div>

'''Important notes to editors:''' [[Basic Guidelines]] - [[List of Wanted Articles]]

==MorphOS - The Lightning OS==

* [[What is MorphOS?]]
* [[Hardware Platforms]]
* [[Installation]]
* [[Characteristic features]]
* [[MorphOS integration]]
* [[MorphOS Development]]
* [[Developer tools]]
* [[3D graphics]]
* [[Games]]
* [[MorphOS key applications]]
* [[Platform expansion]]
* [[Who needs MorphOS?]]
* [[Conclusions]]
* [[Useful links]]
* [[F.A.Q.]]
* [[Historical notes]]
* [[Contributors]]

==Articles==
The core of the MorphOS Library can be found here. Along with the provided manuals, there are several documents designed to help users get the most out of their MorphOS powered computer.

* [[Fundamentals of MorphOS]]
* [[Dictionary of Terms]]
* [[Shell Commands|Shell: Commands]]
* [[Pattern matching|Shell: Pattern Matching]]
* [[Volume Names]]

==Tutorials==
Welcome to the Tutorials section of the MorphOS Library. In this aisle of the library you can find examples and step by step instructions to help get the most out of your MorphOS experience.

*[[Modifying the User-Startup file]]
*[[Dual-boot MorphOS and MacOS X on a Mac Mini G4]]

==Development==
In the development section of the MorphOS Library, you can find a collection of helpful articles and tutorials focused on MorphOS software development.

*[[In-depth: The New MorphOS Memory System]]

==Benchmarks, Reports & Reviews==
*[[jPV's MorphOS 2 Review]]

==Links==
The MorphOS Link Database is a collection of websites that are of interest to all current and potential future users of MorphOS. For easier navigation, we have separated the list of websites into multiple categories.

*[[Links#Community_Portals_.26_Forums|Community Portals]]
*[[Links#File_Repositories|File Repositories]]
*[[Links#Software|Software]]
*[[Links#Developers|Developers]]

==Work in Progress==
*[[ReTooled]]

Talk:MorphOS key applications

2009-12-16T15:04:09Z

Daff:

"AmigaAMP", not "AmiAMP". -- [[User:Krashan|Krashan]] 05:45, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Maybe my English knowledge is insufficient, but what does "picture [...] can be '''elaborated'''" mean? -- [[User:Krashan|Krashan]] 05:52, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

It will be more useful to rename this section "exclusive software" to "main programs" or " main software". With this, we can add Blender, MPlayer, OWB and others excellent software. [Daff]

MorphOS key applications

2009-12-16T14:59:45Z

Daff: add a point in the end of the Frying Pan paragraph

The reduced size of the OS and its simple structure (in relative terms) imply, among other things, that projects that require a team of programmers on other platforms often become modest one-man projects in MorphOS/Amiga environments. This slowdowns the development, but also gives excellent efficiency, simplicity, and compactness to the code. In this section a few excellent tools for MorphOS are mentioned, while in the next section you will find descriptions of the most important and powerful applications.

'''AmiNetRadio'''
[[File:ANR_morphos2x.jpg|200px|thumb|right|AmiNetRadio in action, with some gfx plugins and ShoutCast search support. Transparency courtesy of the commodity [http://morphzone.morphos-files.ppa.pl/find.php?find=lucy Lucy]]][http://www.amigazeux.net/anr/ ''ANR''] is an audio player. Born as a ShoutCast stream player, it has soon evolved into a fully featured and extremely modular player supporting many audio formats and graphical plugins. It is able to play RIFF WAVE, Ogg Vorbis, MPEG Audio, CDDA, AIFF, and ProTracker modules out of the box. However, an [http://www.amigazeux.net/anr/down.php SDK] documenting how to code additional players is available, and has lead to [http://www.amigazeux.net/anr/play.php third party support of MIDI, ScreamTracker, FastTracker as well as some more obscure formats] (including NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Mega Drive and Atari ST sound formats). This makes ''ANR'' one of the best suited candidates at substituting ''Ambient'' 's internal audio player when associated to the audio files by means of the mimetype configuration.

One thing worth mentioning is that ''ANR'' is actually an AmigaOS 3.x executable coded for Motorola's 680x0 range of CPUs. Emulation transparency and effectiveness in MorphOS are so good that most of the aforementioned players are compiled exclusively for MorphOS in native PowerPC code, and can be mixed without any need for the user to be careful. The same can be said for the video plugins: ''ANR'' is compatible with the API of ''AmiAMP'' (an old Amiga version of the well known WinAMP), and therefore it is possible to mix 68k and PowerPC plugins. A fact even more interesting is that it is possible to use plugins compiled for the old executable formats (PowerUp and WarpUp) introduced years ago for PowerPC accelerators on classic Amigas. Non-Amiga people should not worry: all that matters to them is that MorphOS is transparently compatible with all the weird kinds of executables the Amiga community has introduced in the past, as long as they were coded in a "system-friendly" manner. ''ANR'' itself makes use of some extensions of the AmigaOS 3.x APIs for better skinning capabilities, thus resulting a MorphOS program at all effects, while consisting of 68k code.

'''ShowGirls'''
[[File:showgirls_mos2x.jpg|200px|thumb|left|A list of tools ShowGirls provides, the interface of one of them, and the new album manager]]As the name says (and if for you it doesn't, it just means you are not geek enough), this is an image viewer. While the internal viewer of ''Ambient'' provides the required basic functions, ''ShowGirls'' does a lot more: its interface is usually divided in two parts, on one side there are the thumbnails (with support of the EXIF format in JPEG pictures, which means that it doesn't need to load a 3MB+ image just to show a 50x50 preview) and on the other side the selected image is displayed. The image can be viewed in full screen as well, can be zoomed in and out, and can be elaborated. ''ShowGirls'' in fact features some basic image manipulation tools for adjusting colours, changing image resolution, as well as smoothing and sharpening operators, noise reduction, glow and blur effects, and enables cropping, rotating, flipping, as well as batch conversions. It is possible to use also a 3D view (with 3D accelerated rendering), but that's mostly a nice toy option.

The program was originally born as a tool for digital cameras, and in fact it can perform all the needed operations on files on a mass storage device. And in conjunction with a USB camera working as mass storage device you will rarely need anything else. If your camera supports the PTP standard, though, you might need to look elsewhere.

Starting from the 2.0 release of MorphOS, ''ShowGirls'' is provided with the OS itself as a contribution to be found in the Application directory, but additional updates are still available separately in the [http://kiero.binaryriot.org/ programmer's site].

'''PTPDigCam'''
[[File:PTPDigCam_mos2x.jpg|200px|thumb|right|PTPDigCam downloading some pictures from a Canon digicam]]This is a nice native and original software (not based on libraries ported from Linux) that enables to download and delete pictures, videos and audio files from Canon, Nikon, Kodak, Sony cameras supporting the PTP standard. The latest versions let the user choose the images from their EXIF thumbnail as well, and the program is well written, with a nice and polished ''MUI'' interface. It is not the most complex program in the world, but it shows the spirit of the old Amiga community: most alternative OSs do not support the PTP standard and require the users to buy a card reader. As inexpensive as this add-on might be, it is always better to have a software supporting even this not so widely recognised standard. There is also an alternative, called ''SimpleCam'' and based on ''libPTP'' ported from the Linux environment, but with a ''MUI'' GUI. And for those who like to control remotely their digicam, there is also ''CanonToolBox'', based on ''libPTP'', too.

With the release of MorphOS 2.0, the USB stack ''Poseidon'' directly supports the PTP standard. It is therefore possible to access the contents of any digicam internal memory just like it was a mass storage USB device. Obviously, since ''Ambient'' supports image thumbnails, it is possible to have a scaled preview of the pictures to be downloaded. It is still possible to use a third party program like ''PTPDigCam'': the user just needs to unbind the device in the USB preferences, easily accessible from the ''System Preferences'' panel.

'''PowerSDL'''
[[File:chromium_004.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Chromium, one of the open source games requiring SDL and OpenGL]]This evocative name labels a software package, whose port allows to broaden, indirectly, the availability of software on MorphOS. ''Simple DirectMedia Layer'' (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library that provides an abstraction layer for graphics, sound, and input APIs over various platforms. SDL allows a developer to write computer games or multimedia applications that run on many operating systems, and makes a lot of ports possible. The MorphOS version has been greatly improved upon the original Amiga port, and it is now constituted by a number of shared libraries (which, incidentally, make possible to use them in closed source/non GPLed software) making full use of the MorphOS APIs.

'''Frying Pan'''
[[File:morphos_base_2.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Frying Pan, ShowGirls and AmiNetRadio on Ambient]]While many AmigaOS applications can still be run on MorphOS, including the popular CD-writer software ''MakeCD'', Commodore's demise preceded the introduction of DVDs. Thus ''Frying Pan'', a CD / DVD burning and mastering software, is filling this gap meanwhile. The application is shareware and available natively for MorphOS.

'''OS4Emu'''

This is an example of a software that broadens the working applications directly: it is a wrapper for the AmigaOS 4 APIs (which is very similar to the MorphOS one, given the common heritage) to the correspondent MorphOS functions. This means that by double clicking on the icon of an AmigaOS 4 executable (or typing its name in a CLI window) there is a good chance it will work. Notable examples include ''FPSE'', the Sony PlayStation emulator, that ironically, thanks to ''Poseidon'' (the USB stack included in MorphOS), even supports USB joypads. (This is enabled by a simple feature in ''Poseidon'', that associates keystrokes selected by the user to joypad buttons). Other working titles are ''SID4Amiga'' (a player for C64 music files), some scene demos, many shell commands and utilities, and much more. The compatibility is not total, but it is improving at every new release.