10.Jun.2000
Martin Baute
|
Report about presentation at the Neuss show
More pictures of the presentation.
In a "conference room" (built out of some plastic walls which were put up, one desk, and an
insufficient amount of chairs) Bill McEwen was talking about Amiga's future for nearly 45 minutes. There
was a couple to listen to. So, let's rewind the dictaphones, and put together what was most imortant....
After the beamer could be woken up by the fifth trying, with plenty of drive and humor McEwen payed up (&qout;
Wellcome to the Amiga sauna...."). From the start he cleared the roumor that Amiga would be in delay of payment
for Gateway. Amiga owes Gateway no money. More than that, Amiga isn't in dept at all.
Further he introduced Dean Brown (DKB) as Director of Hardware once more. Mr. Brown would be responsible for
creating referenz hardware for interessted third-party developers to look about. A game handheld device would
allready be finished, which was in use by Amiga internally to impress interessted parties with the features
of the new operating environment. Based on a StrongARM with 250 Mips, a port for a Sony Memory Stick, and
a coloured display this device might figure well - and it was finished after one week of development!
About the new Vice President of Engineering McEwen showed himself mysteryous. This man might not get introduced
bevore the 10th of Juli, cause he still is employed by another company - "one that is large, and is in
trouble, you know...", and with this words a gesture of tearing something apart....
Further on information about the performance characteristics of the Java[TM] Virtual Machine - which is, acording
to Mr. McEwen 22 times faster in handling multimedia content than any other JVM does (!)
McEwen set clear too, that he wouldn't ask the Amiga Community for patience. The fact, that this show is
happening, that the audience is pressing into this (admittedly too small) room would argument enough that
Amiga users are patient - over 5 years, allready. But he continues to set clear, that he and his associates are
working for the same number of month to fulfill those high expectations.
As a first evidence of success Mr. McEwen took Amiga's SDK to the show, which - as he stated emphatic - still
would be very incomplete, and would target experienced developers in main. The end-users will still have to
wait for a seizable product for some time. E.g. there still is no sound support, streaming support or 3D graphics support
included with the SDK, which will follow later (e.g. 3D support after about 3 month).
In the case of the critical theme of marketing McEwen admited, he still didn't employe a VP of Marketing -
he thinks first to develope a product that would worth a respective marketing would be more important,
than making generous announcements which can't get fulfilled with the best Amiga tradition.
Next he talked about the original plans to provide a deverloper's box by combining hard and software together.
Because of the Amiga user's negative replies to this, they made up their minds - which required a lot of
changes an additional programs (e.g. installer scripts). Now the software of the SDK was released; the HW/SW
developer's box would follow after about 2 weeks.
Amiga would target "Ubiquity in Computing": mobile phones, PDAs, multimedia processor servers,
a new desktop, a new game console, all of that with the same operating environment - something like that
would never have been there.
Applications with this would be fully scalable. After a developer has decided were to put his applications,
this one application could climb up the ",Food Chain" as high as it was wanted to. So, a game coded for
a handheld would even run on a multiprocessor server. But on the other hand an application writen for a server wouldn't
run on a mobile phone - or better to say - only very, very slow....
Processors allready supported by the operating environment would be PPC, M.core, X68, StrongARM, ARM, Sh/3,4,5, MIPS
and a number of other CPUs, which they can't name (at this time), cause they are under NDAs with the
manufacturers.
At the end Bill was talking about the JavaOne, a show that happend in San Francisco last week, and at which the
Tao Group had a booth. The same demonstration shown here at the Amiga show there was running on a Sega DreamCast,
on set-top-boxes, a StrongARM notebook, and a X86 computer. Only this was enough to magnetise the audience, and then
they would have taken out a mobile phone on which a Pole Position clone could run, in spite of the low performance
of 3,5 Mips. This would have been the same mobile phone which Scott McNeilly (Sun) had with him when he entered the stage
at the CES in January, &qout;I've tolled you that once we will have Java[TM] running on such a device, once a day" - just,
that it wasn't Sun's Java[TM] Virtual Machine running on that mobile phone....
And Linux wouldn't be the only operating system that would come into question as a host for the new Amiga. Other hosts
would be Windows, WindowsNT, Linux, WindowsCE, QNX, and OS/9 (a market leading OS from Microware for set-top boxes).
Host support for iTron, Epoc, VxWorks, and PalmOS would be in development, and close to be finished.
The cooperation between the Tao Group and Amiga Mr. McEwen illuminated in quite another way. It wasn't necessary that
they would use only Tao's products. In fact they would have access to 50 developers at the Tao Group to create things
needed by Amga.
Furthermore the BOOPSI libraries were portetd. This porting would be allready finished. They would now do testings and
optimizations. The new scripting language (SHEEP) would also be finished during the next month - the rights for ARexx
belong to a third-party manufacturer, and because of that they would develope another language.
The catchword renderware was spoken, too. The new operating environment would be prepared even for this.
.
And then Bill McEwen had a very special goody to offer: Once the single parts of the operating environment will be put together
there will be the AmigaOne - a new multimedia desktop, developed and designed by Amiga, even if manufactured by
thir-party manufacturers. McEwen didn't want to say more about that at that early stage, the way to go would still be
very long.
Since it is a few minutes after midnight, and tomorrow there will be another day of the show waiting I'll finish
for now. This was only the first half of the presentation. I'll report about the other half tomorrow....
...part two
McEwen continued on OEMs and ISVs - the latter being companies willing
to support Amiga, but unable to "take their eyes off" what they are
doing for a living right now. Eleven such ISVs had given their source
code to Amiga - free of charge, free to port.
Of course, the well-known partners of the Tao-Group were mentioned:
Sun, Sony, Motorola, JVC and others. McEwen recommended reading the
press release from the Tao site
(about the certification of their Java machine) - Amiga is in dealings
with all those companies mentioned.
Then, McEwen showed pictures of his former office, and of the new "Amiga
World Headquarter". Five other companies were located there, building
high-end electronics for other companies for demonstratiuon purposes -
with Amiga being able to use their equipment for free.
Then, Bill McEwen started demonstrating the new OS, hosted under Red Hat
Linux on a notebook. He stressed that there was no hardware acceleration
involved (which, as said before, will follow in August). It is difficult
to put into words, but we saw lightning-fast Java demos, some 2D games,
the well-known Boing demo, some free moving Boing balls you could grab
and shoot inot the air with the mouse, a unicode browser, 2D filters,
the transparent "Clock" window (where you could grab a ball through
the clock - everything running on top of Linux, without any flicker or
slow-down. Well, not true, I saw it flickering: when McEwen was
starting the OS a second time, in a different window, the first one froze
for a split-second, to continue as fast and fluently as before, while
McEwen started the same number of demos again in the second window.
The demo was very impressive given the early stage of development, the
pictures only grab a small portion of it.
McEwen was unable to elaborate on further plans, but recommended an article
in Byte magazine from 1994, linked from the Amiga homepage; some of these
things would redefine Distributed Computing completely.
Towards the end, McEwen answered some questions. I recorded the whole
presentation on tape, but some questions couldn't be heard over the
background noise, and some answers made no sense without the questions.
I transscribed what I could make sense of, and left out one or two
sentences I could not make sense of. As soon as I get my hands on the
right adapter cable, I will make a MP3 recording of the tape (which was
recorded with permission from Mr. McEwen).
F: What about the classic OS?
McEwen: We are using the pieces whereever it makes sense.
F: Will there be an emulation for it?
McEwen: We already have an emulator working. Testing is already done, we
are now optimizing it so it runs very very fast. You guys know Brian King? You
know where he works? He is a good man, Brian. He's helping us. So we're working to speed
it up right now, it's a little slow. So we are in the process of optimizing it.
McEwen: Before somebody asks, you're asking if I'm gonna porting it to PPC. No.
I'll tell you why. No matter who I've spoken with, R.J. Mical, Carl Sassenrath, Alan
Havemose, everyone of them has looked at this in the past. It's an 18-month to 24-month
process, and all of them agree it will only be 80% complete. Because I'd had to
re-engineer the AGA chipset, I'd have to re-engineer Agnus, Denise, all those things
are tied directly to the OS. In fact the hardest thing for Havemose in building the 3.1 were
all those bugs that were in those chips they have to account for. So right now it would be
too costly for us to make the moves necessary to capitalize on the market, we need to move forward.
It doesn't help me to be everywhere. It doesn't help me to build a scaleable operating system,
which is what we need to be to win.
Making just another system on a chip is not enough. We need to be able to go to Sony, go
to Panasonic, go to all those guys and say "pick your chip".
F: (Schlecht zu verstehen, Frage über die Hardware-Anforderungen des SDK, ob
es ein spezieller Prozessor sein muß.)
McEwen: The SDK, if you are able to run Red Hat Linux you should be fine.
We tested it on Red Hat and Corel. So you should be absolutely fine on that.
F: Will it also run on the Amiga?
McEwen: Not right now, no. We don't have anything on the 68000. We are hoping
to work with our other friends so when you got PPC, which we know Linux can run on
there, we can run on top of that. And we will be able to run native, on those, on the PPC
cards. That's one of our biggest problems right now, you've got commitments from
people delivering, and nothing is happening.
F: Do you plan to change the design of the interface?
McEwen: It is designed with the flexibility similar to today so you can make
it the way you want. There will be defaults, so an Amiga users might want to have
Workbench as their default, but for other consumers, they might to want it different.
You will have defaults with the flexibility to change it the way you want.
F: (nicht zu verstehen)
McEwen: If you are running Linux on a PPC card within an Amiga, alright? We
have not tested it yet, however the two manufacturers have tested it and said it can
run.
F: (nicht zu verstehen)
McEwen: Not with the first build, no. Part of it is a tools issue, the tools
needed to utilize it. We have two companies right now in the process of making an
IDE specifically for us, so that won't be required in the future. Everything is not
in here (SDK), we know that, and there are certaily things to change; however, we felt
it important enough to get people to understand writing for VP and some changes.
Chris Hinsley, who created this, as you know, is an Amiga gaming guy; and I think
you will find, as most have found as they began to play with this, it's extremly
similar, in many ways as we write today. So it will be a very wuick curve, but
there will be a curve. So we want it to get into peoples hands first, so they
can begin working with it, utilize it, begin writing some applications, you know.
Get familiar, so when we add the other components to it, you will be able to get
moving much quicker.
F: (schlecht zu verstehen, eine weitere Frage zur Kompatibilität mit
alten Anwendungen)
McEwen: In fact we already have an emulator that is working. It's not
in this build, since we are in optimization, yes. In fact we're also looking
into a hardware solution to do it.
F: Everything on the SDK is usable on an Amiga PPC?
McEwen: Nonono. What's on here is designed right now to work with
Red Hat on an x86 platform or on Corel, ok? When it's completed, and you have an
executive OS running, everything is fine, it can run. Again, we haven't
tested it yet, according to third parties it can run on a PowerPC accelerator
within an Amiga, as long as Linux is there. We haven't tested it yet, so I'm
not telling you yes it can. We want to test it first. We've got two machines
in the house we are doing it on.
F: (schlecht zu verstehen, eine Frage über die zu erwartende Verfügbarkeit
von Software für das neue System)
McEwen: We have 131 applications already dedicated.
F: Also games?
McEwen: Most of them are games. There is a very large Indian company who does a
lot of interactive games [...] they already commited to us and will be moving all
their games over to Amiga. They have 63 games themselves, all of them for multiuser
interactive gaming over the net.
F: (nicht zu verstehen)
McEwen: Oh, oh, the multiple screens? Yeah, that's fine. What you see
today from a visual perspective you still can get, ok? All the multiple layers,
etcetera, that's still here, that's ok. That's what you were asking, right?
Thank you!
There were presentations before this one. The first, at eleven, was missed
because I was still on my way to Neuss. The second one was so crowded I couldn't
get inside, but I managed to record some parts of his speech, enough to catch
up the fact that SUN will probably advertise the Amiga JDK to their
user base.
Report by: Martin Baute
All mentioned trademarkes are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective onwner.
[News message: 10. Jun. 2000, 23:00] [Comments: 0]
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10.Jun.2000
Czech Amiga News
|
1000 pounds for a game
Crystal Software and Electronics Ltd. is looking
for talented games devlopers for the Amiga sector and has initiated a contest to motivate
people that didn't think about game development before.
Whoever does send a finished game, or at least a demo, to CS&E by August 31st, 2000,
can win a contract as well as 1000 pounds advance payment. All other submissions accepted
by CS&E will recieve at least 100 pounds and a contract offer by the company.
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10.Jun.2000
Fun Time World
|
New version of CGXReport
The version of CGXReport released June 9th, 2000 now supports CyberGraphX 4.2 pre7
cards and envs.
Download: CGXReport41g.lzh
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10.Jun.2000
Fun Time World
|
HSMathLibs for MC68881/82 v44.41
On June 9th, 2000 CyberdyneSystems has
released version 44.41 of the HSMathLibs for the math co-processors MC68881/82. In
this version, all known bugs have been removed, and the Installer script reworked.
Download:
HSMathLibs_881-demo.lha (about 30 kB)
HSMathLibs_881-demo.lzx (about 20 kB)
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10.Jun.2000
Czech Amiga News
|
Seal Show on September 10th, 2000
On Sunday, September 10th 2000, the South
Essex Amiga Link User Group is hosting an own show in Basildon, Essex.
The show will be sponsored by Analogic Computers
who, like Amiga Inc., will provide prices for the contests taking place during the show.
Analogic, Eyetech, FORE-MATT Home Computing, Crystal Interactive Software (Gilbert Goodmate)
and others have already announced themselves as exhibitors.
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09.Jun.2000
Stefan Ossowski via eMail
|
Aminet 37 CD-ROM available in time for Neuss fair
The Aminet CD 37 - June 2000 - contains almost a gigabyte (unpacked) of
software in thousands of archives. Since Aminet CD 36, more than 500 MByte
of new stuff was added. As special highlight, the Aminet 37 CD features
the unlimited full version of the 3D ego shooter Zombie Massacre.
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09.Jun.2000
Stefan Popp via eMail
|
News from Escena
Escena writes:
Since the last announcements, several things have happened. Contrary to all
prophecies of doom, we are still sticking with the ambitious Brainstormer project.
Certain difficulties and situations sometimes demand a detour. We haven't
lost our aims from sight and follow them continously, even though often not with the
focus we would have loved to see.
You'll find the changes that were made during the course of development
here;
the current status here.
We will stay in touch and will give a few interim reports in this space
in future.
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09.Jun.2000
Elbox via eMail
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MEDIATOR PCI 1200 Busboard
On the "World of Alternatives" which starts tomorrow in Neuss, Germany, Elbox will
present at the booth of Vesalia the new MEDIATOR PCI 1200 Busboard.
Also the following Elbox products will be available for buying there:
Elbox Tower for A1200 and A4000, FastATA Controller, 16.6 MB/s with AllegroCDFS
for A1200 and for A4000, the Mroocheck PC-Mouse Interface, and the
4xEIDE'99 Interface with AllegroCDFS.
Return-Path: support@elbox.com.pl
Date: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 12:21:27 +0200
Organization: ELBOX COMPUTER
Subject: MEDIATOR PCI busboard for Amiga 1200
Elbox Computer is proud to announce the new exciting product:
MEDIATOR
PCI busboard for Amiga 1200
MEDIATOR features:
* PCI busboard for Amiga 1200 in: E-BOX (Winner Tower, Power Tower)
and Infinitiv tower cases
* 4 PCI slots - PCI 2.1 compatible
* Transfer rates between PCI cards up to 132 MB/s
* Transfer rates between A1200 motherboard and PCI
cards
up to two times faster than between A4000 and ZORRO III cards
* Ready to run with existing Amiga 68k and PPC accelerator cards
* Two available hardware versions:
for A1200T (MEDIATOR PCI 1200)
for A1200T with ZORRO IV busboard (MEDIATOR PCI ZIV)
PCI - Amiga bridge is a PCI 2.1 compliant implementation for
connecting PCI devices, thus allowing expansion of Amiga with
all kinds of industry standard hardware products.
Elbox Computer will also be offering some cost-effective PCI
add-on modules:
* Graphic cards based on processors:
S3 Virge 8MB
3dfx Voodoo 3 16MB
3dfx Voodoo 5 32MB
* MPEG-2 hardware decoder based on EM8400 processor
* Ethernet card 100Mb/s
* Sound card based on Yamaha 744 processor
* USB Controller
For the add-on modules, Elbox Computer will provide the necessary
software tools and drivers.
MEDIATOR PCI ZIV will be available from Power Computing
and Vesalia Computer beginning with mid-July 2000.
MEDIATOR PCI 1200 will be available beginning with August 2000.
Best regards,
Darek Smietana
***************************************************
Darek Smietana Sales Manager ELBOX COMPUTER
mailto:sales@elbox.com fax: +4812 6564981
***************************************************
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09.Jun.2000
Hynek Schlawack via eMail
|
New patches for slrn+
I finally got around for putting the newest patches into my Amiga port of
slrn+ and it is available for download as release 4 on my homepage.
This time I haven't put the sources into the main archive so that people
who have no interest in the sources have to download only about 500,000 bytes.
The sourcecodes can be found on my homepage, however.
[News message: 09. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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08.Jun.2000
|
Fair: Rolf Tingler brushes for you :-)
Maybe you already noticed by studying the hallmap
that airbrush booth besides the*AC#/amiga-news.de booth. We have convinced Rolf Tingler of the
Airbrush Paradise to show his airbrushing skills at a fair again after a long
time.
Rolf is known to many Amiga-users by his former appearences at fairs and he was the one who brought the
Amiga-design to the mobile phone housings.
At the fiar in Neuss he will, if you like, decorate your mouse with a nice airbrushed picture. The best you take your
Amiga mouse with you to the show for that. Also body tattoos, which will
disappear by itself after a while, are planned. The prices for that will be about DM 10,-.
At the fair you can take a close look at airbrushing and inform yourself about airbrushing, what airbrushing is,
and what you will need to do it yourself, how it is done, about what you have to take care for and what you better don't do.
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08.Jun.2000
AmiTrade Center
|
New beta from ATC
Download: ATC_beta_07062000.lha
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08.Jun.2000
AAAudio Page
|
Lame version 3.70 available
Download:
LAMEbin.lzx
LAMEdoc.lzx
LAMEsrc.lzx
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08.Jun.2000
Haage & Partner
|
AmigaWriter 2.10 Patch online
The first patch for AmigaWriter can be loaded from the H&P FTP-Server. The printer works much better with TurboPrint.
The 68K-Version sometimes put the cursor at the wrong place or even ended up in an endless loop.
Download: AmigaWriter - Patch2.10.lha - 551 kb
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08.Jun.2000
Kai Mache per eMail
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LinuxPPC CD
The new Linux-PPC CD from Amiga Zentrum Thüringen e.V. is finished right
in time for the fair and will be presented at the booth of Titan
Computer.
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08.Jun.2000
Amiga Fair
|
Fair news in short
The fair is soon to come and the news about the events spread. Enclose
the consised version. Follow the link of the headline to the "news" to
find more information.
- Events and list of activities loaded
- Youth hotels in Neuss and Düsseldorf are full
- Double rooms on privat available
[News message: 08. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jun.2000
Ali Goukassian via eMail
|
Convention Neuess: New Exhibition Map available
Because of recent changes, a new exhibition map is available.
[News message: 07. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jun.2000
Andreas Falkenhahn via eMail
|
CD32 Games Install Kit Bonus Programs published
At the AirSoft Website an archive is now available with Bonus Programs for
the CD32 Games Install Kit. These however are older versions and are
therefore quite useless.
[News message: 07. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jun.2000
Peter Glauser via eMail
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Anti-Trust Case: Judgement in Plaintext
Additional links on the Topic...
[News message: 07. Jun. 2000, 08:00] [Comments: 0]
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07.Jun.2000
Michael Burkhardt in ANF
|
Big Club event on Saturday
This is an open invitation to all Amigans that are unable to go to Neuss, to
come to our Open House on Saturday, June 10th. The Phoenix Computer Club
Hof e.V. is running an Open House from 10am to 10PM. There are many
highlights waiting to be discovered. Hof is in northern Bavaria and is easily
reached via the A9 Autobahn. A detailed route desription can be found at
thier website.
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07.Jun.2000
Hans-Joerg Frieden via eMail
|
The 10th of June is H2-Day!
The wait has come to an End. Hyperions first game, Heretic II will be
released at the convention in Neuss. Heretic II is a next generation
fantasy 3D game and is based on the popular games from ID software. Those
that are interested in Heretic II should definatly stop by the Titan stand.
That is where most of the developers will be.
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07.Jun.2000
|
Exhibition Flyer now in - Inexpensive travel arrangements
The Flyer for the Neuss exhibition is now in. The article concerning the
inexpensive travel arrangements especially caught our eye.
For 7 Marks to the Exhibition and back
As a train rider you have the least expensive option to come to the World of
Alternatives in Neuss. The Deutsche Bahn has a Weekend ticket for 35DM. With
this ticket you can travel all throughout Germany on regional trains without
a mileage limit. This ticket has the following restrictions:
It is valid from 12:00 AM to 3:00AM the following day on either Saturday or
Sunday. Up to 5 people can ride on on single ticket. This makes this the
cheapest way to get to the convention. More infos concerning this ticket at
Deutsche Bahn
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