Ralph Schmidt is the MorphOS Project founder. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elena Novaretti: Firstly, let's speak a bit about You. I'd like to know when did you begin working with Amiga and what the first contributions you gave to the Amiga community
Ralph Schmidt: I bought an A1000 May 1986. Difficult to answer about my first contribution. As Shareware I released Barfly the early 90ies which contained some quite sophisticated debugger. My first commercial project was a rewrite of the Hurricane 2800(Some crappy 28Mhz 68030 accelerator i bought 90) firmware which i offered IM(its german distributor). That was also my ticket into the commercial amiga developer scene as i met Thomas "Don" Rudloff there. Thomas was a founder of Phase5 which was the development spin of from Advanced Systems & Software.
Elena Novaretti: Which are the most meaningful memories you keep about the time you were working for Phase5 ?
Ralph Schmidt: Difficult to answer...we had a lot ups and downs. Mhhh..let's say the Fastlane as it was the first big project there, the Cyberstorm Mk1 because it was really exciting at that time to work with the brand new 68060 which only a few people had the priviledge to touch in 1994. Another up was when i convinced Frank Mariak and Thomas Sontowski (Domino,Picasso2 sw) to come over to Phase5 and develop a new *real* Zorro3 gfxcard, the CyberVision 64. That was the time we invented CyberGraphX with 24bit support in the OS, did the 24bit picture.datatype. And basicly the final episode and my best *work experience* was the CyberStormPPC last development phase where we worked the whole summer like mad with a sick workload. Too bad all this sweat we put into the card lead to such desaster afterwards with H&P.
Elena Novaretti: When talking about Phase5's bankruptcy, many people obviously believe the more and more reduced Amiga market being the main cause. Do You think there was some other ground or false step behind that ?
Ralph Schmidt: There were several factors. You must understand that Phase5 always worked on *razor's edge* about its prices. It had no reserves(money was always put into new parts for productions) and that requireda continued capital flow to sell these parts(dead capital). When the H&P war begun it confused the market and a lot people hadn't bought a ppc card because of the situation while P5 had a lot parts in stock and the development investment was really huge for these products. Another significant blow was the WOA 98 Amiga Inc. announcement that the PPC is not their cpu choice anymore...even less buyers.
The Mac market also couldn't compensate anymore...
Elena Novaretti: Well, now let's speak about MorphOS ;) When did exactly your great project start and why ?
Ralph Schmidt: I played around with kernel design during 1998 while i still did some PowerUP maintainance for Phase5. That was some concept stuff for future Phase5 HW projects. Then easter 1999 Frank made the suggestion to make an emulation for Phase5's G3/G4 PPC card project and we revived our older technologywe worked on in the PowerUP project. I added the necessary Amiga support to Quark in 14 days and we could continue with Emulation1. 2 months later I completed Emulation2 (about 10MB of source) in a 4 weeks hurry which is basicly still the base today until we release our JIT.
Elena Novaretti: Years ago, when the first PowerPC cards for the Amiga came to the market, the biggest worry and hexitation from users or potential customers was due to the lack of PPC applications. Why a valid and important project like MorphOS hasn't been prepared some years earlier ? What did you have to wait for to start it once for all ?
Ralph Schmidt: There wasn't the time, vision, experience and technology in 1996/97. Though i worked on a C Exec/Emulation for PowerPC in 1996 Phase5 decided that it couldn't be finished in time or wouldn't be fast enough for the HW, so the portability ppc.library client/server modell was developed. You can't just say..let's design a PPC AmigaOS and then start. It needs a lot thinking about how to implement things, then you need the driver,emulation and so on technology. It's difficult to overlook the amount of work which such project needs and that would demotivate most programmers as you need a lot breath.
Elena Novaretti: The next days, in Cologne, will take place the official demonstration of BPlan's Pegasos motherboard. At the latest Pianeta Amiga italian fair edition, indeed, a sort of semi-functional Pegasos system with a curious MorphOs 0.4 and a badly set-up, old, OS 3.1 running on it has been presented to the public.
Ralph Schmidt: It's a development system and wasn't really meant for showing any visual candy. It was mainly meant for Titan showing their apps and show people it's real and that it works. It wasn't meant to show the system's HW and SW strengths. For the near future people shouldn't expect any extensions to the MorphOS UI anyway.
Elena Novaretti: Unfortunately that sounded as a complete fiasco and contributed in spreading further some kind of doubt and discouragement; not really for me, rather for many users still quite reluctant on this solution.
Ralph Schmidt: I've actually heard the opposite.
Elena Novaretti: What about the cause of this unsuccesful demonstration ?
Ralph Schmidt: Really..i heard the opposite from the people which showed it and from italian people which talked with me on irc/mail.
Elena Novaretti: Is it possible to predict any date for the next MorphOS beta release ? If not, can you anticipate which emprovements and/or corrections will be included in the next release over the actual 0.3 ?
Ralph Schmidt: We have no date set at the moment as we have a few quirks to fix and we're also working on some new key parts. People surely can expect a more stable system, more native OS modules, new drivers, grex support, VM and maybe some "surprises":-)
Elena Novaretti: I can imagine the MorphOS version running on Pegasos is somehow different from the one running on our actual PPC Amigas. Or am I wrong ?
Ralph Schmidt: Mhh..not that much. The Pegasos has a different Quark and Module build.
Elena Novaretti: Now allow me a legitimate question: what warranties we users will have about the availability of software drivers for the most popular and important PC cards and/or expansions ?
Ralph Schmidt: That really depends on available docs and resources.
Elena Novaretti: Surely You understand that software makes market and allows an OS to survive. Does MorphOs Team have any plan or idea for assuring MorphOS the availability of professional and powerful third-party software packages in the future ?
Ralph Schmidt: Well..I think it's an experiment. Nobody today can gurantee that there's a real commercial future for this market but we'll try the best which is possible for us. I'm sure Titan has some nice projects with the Papyrus Office package port and MotionStudio. EPIC has some interesting game licences. We've also some good work relationship with the Pro Audio Station developer.
Elena Novaretti: Can you speculate about an hypothetical release date for a final, commercial release of MorphOS ? If so, any approximate idea of its final cost ?
Ralph Schmidt: Our goal is to have it ready for the Pegasos release which will be Q1 but we will also still continue to support PowerUP users. The target price is around 100$ but this depends a lot on the licences we need from 3rd parties(MUI(full), TCP/IP, Internet, and so on)
Elena Novaretti: As a Pegasos peculiarity it stands out the power of fitting up to TWO PowerPCs G4. To what extent will MorphOS Kernel benefit from a dual PPC system ? Will be needed to compile the software in some special way ?
Ralph Schmidt: The final board has only 1 slot but there will be powerpc cpu cards with 1 and 2 cpus...maybe also a 4. The Quark kernel itself was designed with SMP in mind, but the A-Box isn't so nobody should expect miracles here.
Elena Novaretti: Many people would like MorphOS running on Power Mac hardware. Is it a so unrealistic idea ? Why ?
Ralph Schmidt: It's not unrealistic but we focus on the Pegasos for now which will also give us a lot remaining drivers like USB/Firewire we need for an Apple port. I wouldn't expect any Apple port before end 1992, because a stable A-Box and then own System SW have the most priority.
Elena Novaretti: What kind of parthnership, if any, does exist exactly between MorphOS and BPlan ?
Ralph Schmidt: I'm also a founder of BPlan. We always had the idea for an own PowerPC Motherboard.
Elena Novaretti: It is rumoured about some unclear legal trouble with AmigaINC. Is there something true here ? I hope not, obviously...
Ralph Schmidt: I see no case here but these people are so afraid that they throw around with unfounded allegations.
Elena Novaretti: Now a straightforward question: what are exactly your relationships with Aros Team ? Some chance to see in the near future Aros and MorphOS teams to work together ?
Ralph Schmidt: We have a work relationship with AROS where we can use the modules we need and then debug it. All the improvement we add will be put back into AROS control
Elena Novaretti: To end up: what do You think about the actual AmigaInc projects and tactics ?
Ralph Schmidt: I don't really care anymore for AmigaInc projects or tactics..there are more important things in life. What I care about is that people realize that we'll have the best HW and OS solution. That only the product quality counts and not a name which you can't buy but must earn with quality work.
Elena Novaretti: Thank You for the time you spent for me and for BitPlane readers!
Ralph Schmidt: No problem :)