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Archive 01/2004


21.Jan.2004
Amiga.org (forum)


Nueron: Amiga-inspired computer project based on Coldfire
Stephen Smith of Austex Software has presented at Amiga.org his Amiga-inspired project Nueron/NuOS, a Coldfire computer with its own operating system:

I have been working on an alternative computer project for a few years now and would like to find people who may be interested in helping further the project.

The project involves hardware based on Motorola ColdFire processors (Nueron) and a new (free) operating system inspired by AmigaOS (NuOS).

I have developed a prototype (Nueron1200) which is what I wanted an Amiga-like tablet computer device to be (basically a large PDA). Details and pictures can be found at the Austex Software website: Nueron 1200 prototype.

I am currently finishing off a ColdFire accelerator module for the Nueron1200 (dual processors) and an updated graphics module (unlike most laptops, the graphics hardware can be upgraded).

The project is also known as the gecko computer project with a (currently very small) yahoo group here: geckocomputerproject.

I had chosen gecko because they are "small, efficient and crap all over windows..."

Work has been slow since this was originally a part-time project, however I am now doing board design, firmware and operating system full time (no matter what anybody says). I am looking at producing developer boards in either microATX or miniITX format (I need a vote on this) to be available in Q2 2004. Board cost is a sensitive issue which also needs to be dealt with (I'd need expressions of interest for build quantity etc...).

I have been developing free software tools, such as assembler, linker, maker and a beta C compiler for both AmigaOS and PC (yeeeww). I am still using my Amiga4000/CSPPC for development purposes (I also have an Amiga500, 2xAmiga1200, Amiga3000, another Amiga4000 with non-working CSPPC). I am a long time Amiga user/programmer and also co-wrote an Amiga game (Uropa2, published by Vulcan) which comes under the Austex Software banner.

Recently, I have been trying to finish documentation for such things as NuOS overview, API documents in html (devbook) and various technical manuals etc... However these things take time (especially if you are the only person doing them).

If you are interested or have any questions, then please let me know.

Regards,
Stephen Smith
Austex Software (snx)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 20:25] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
Nintendo


Nintendo: Portable system with double screen to be released in 2004
"Mystery" Product to Launch Later This Year

REDMOND, Wash., Jan 20, 2004 -- An unprecedented approach to video game play-- holding two separate game screens in the palm of your hand-- hits the scene later this year when Nintendo introduces a new portable game system, code-named Nintendo DS.

From information made available today, players can look forward to being able to manage their game progress from two different perspectives, enhancing both the speed and strategy of the challenge. For example in a soccer game, users can view the whole game on one screen while simultaneously focusing on an individual soccer player's tackle or goal on the other screen.

Players will no longer be forced to interrupt game play to shift perspective, such as moving from a wide shot to a close up, or alternating between a character's ongoing battle and a map of the environment. Nintendo DS makes it possible to perform the tasks in real time by simply glancing from one screen to the other.

Today's announcement is but a glimpse of the additional features and benefits that will be shown in full at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles in May. Once fully revealed, players will see innovative advances in game interaction.

"We have developed Nintendo DS based upon a completely different concept from existing game devices in order to provide players with a unique entertainment experience for the 21st century," explains Satoru Iwata, Nintendo president.

Nintendo DS features two separate 3-inch TFT LCD display panels, separate processors, and semiconductor memory of up to 1 Gigabit. It's scheduled to launch worldwide before the end of 2004.

In addition to Nintendo-developed software, the company is in discussions with third-party game developers around the world.

Nintendo DS will be marketed separately from the company's existing Nintendo Game Boy Advance portable system and Nintendo GameCube home console.

Stay tuned to Nintendo.com for more details on the Nintendo DS system as they are announced. (nba) (Translation: ub)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 16:06] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
Rainer Benda (ANF)


C&ZV Rainer Benda: Webshop opened
As Rainer Benda told us he opened a webshop at www.rbenda.de. The offered goods do not only include Amiga and Commodore 8 bit products as well as other PC parts and also Gamepark-32, Nintendo Gameboy, Nintendo Gamecube and Sony Playstation products. (snx) (Translation: ub)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 15:29] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
ANN (Website)


Picture viewer: MiniShowPicture V1.5 released
The program MiniShowPicture by Pawel "Stefkos" Stefanski has now been released in version 1.5 * for MorphOS and Amiga 68k.

It's a simple picture viewer which is MUI based and uses datatypes. The functions include Drag&Drop, Scaling and keyboard support.

New with V1.5 is a full screen mode. The picture calculating routines were sped up also. The settings are saved now within the ENV directory.

(* = If a Polish message appears during a download attempt it tells that the server is stressed with more than five users currently and more are not allowed at the same time.) (snx) (Translation: ub)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 15:20] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
Patric Klöter (ANF)


Commodore/Amiga-Website redesigned completely
Patric Klöter wrties: Welcome to the new version of the Commodore/Amiga fan page. I decided to change the name to Commodore Amiga Information Source, or abreviated CAIS which should remind a bit to the old Commodore department CATS, Commodore Amiga Technical Support.

After nearly three years I lately did it and reworked the site completely including an abandonation of the unliked turquoise. It's newly written from scratch.

New is the navigation window at the top, a chapter about "Non Commodore Computer" (has to follow), a tutorial and a sitemap which allows to navigate to all subpages easily.

A forum and a guest book are available also. Some things are renamed and moved to other locations. The focus of the page is still information and this will be improved in future

The page uses Javascript now intensively which might be a problem with several Amiga browsers but it's always possible to navigate via the sitemap.

Credits: During creation of the page I met several nice people and I would like to use the opportunity to thank them here for their support and help. Some of them I would like to mention by name: My "AMIGA-Freunde Pfalz" friends, Rainer Benda, Dave Haynie, Roland Löffler, Petro Tyschtschenko, Stefan Zelany and Bo Zimmerman.

Have fun with surfing at CAIS!
- Patric Klöter (snx) (Translation: ub)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 14:09] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
ANF


Motorola: Saleswin nearly tripled
Within the last quarter of 2003 the American mobile and semiconductor producer Motorola has nearly tripled its saleswin. Compared to the 174 million dollars within the according time year before the company earned 489 million dollars (388 million Euros) within the fourth quarter 2003. (snx) (Translation: ub)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 14:01] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
MorphOS-News.de (website)


MorphOS: Patch for WipeOut 2097 released
Mark Olsen has created a patch to make the game Wipeout 2097 run better on the Pegasos. The patch (2 KB) eliminates the chipmem access by WipeOut 2097, making it now possible to play all levels at full speed. (snx)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 10:05] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
ANN (website)


Update: YamHTMLyam 1.9b
YamHTMLyam is an ARexx script for displaying HTML e-mails and pictures received by YAM using a browser. Meanwhile version 1.9b (28 KB) of the script is available. (snx)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 09:46] [Comments: 0]
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21.Jan.2004
z5 (ANF)


Amiga Demoscene Archive: Party lists added
A new feature was added on Amiga Demoscene Archive: party result lists (from the productions that are on A.D.A). Grouped by year and position and included are the votes received at party (where available). With every new production that we add, the party result lists will grow more complete. (snx)

[News message: 21. Jan. 2004, 08:08] [Comments: 0]
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20.Jan.2004
Golem (Website)


Golem: inofficial follow of the adventures of Zak McKracken
How Golem reported, there is an inofficial follow by fans on PC of the adventure classic Zak McKracken by Lucas Arts.

Zak McKracken 2: Between Time and Space could be downloaded as a 23 MB demo for Windows computers. The game still hold the classical points and clicks, also the 2D graphic. But there should be some 3D graphics and partsequences integrated. The game plays in the year 2009 on two planets with different timezones.

The developers are searching for new workers especially for graphician. A day for publishing for the finished game wasn't told yet. (snx) (Translation: gf)

[News message: 20. Jan. 2004, 19:09] [Comments: 0]
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20.Jan.2004
(ANF)


Wired: Amiga still voted in Vaporware-Top 10
Now the Amiga gets a questionable honour, he placed in the top ten of Vaporware. They are voted by the Wired-readers and they vote for products which are pronounced for a very long time, but not published until today. AmigaOS4 defensed the 9th rank for the year 2003.
9. Amiga OS 4.0 (Amiga)

Perhaps not accidential Amiga defensed the rank of 2002 Vaporware-awards because of the long promised Amiga machines of the next generation. The hardware was there but not the operating system.
(snx) (Translation: gf)

[News message: 20. Jan. 2004, 18:45] [Comments: 0]
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20.Jan.2004
MorphOS-News.de (website)


Genesi listed in the Motorola Alliance Directory
Genesi S.à.r.l. is now listed in the Motorola Alliance Directory.

As MorphOS-News.de reports, Motorola would have begun an investigation under the agreement reached late last week into the use of the Pegasos primarily focused on the server and consumer electronics market. Furthermore Motorola would have begun to develop a joint marketing plan to promote and sell the Pegasos with Genesi.

Being a member of the "Motorola Design Alliance" program gives companies a chance, among other, to do Co-branding with Motorola on new products, the ability to purchase development tools at a significant discount and the ability to participate with Motorola in key industry trade shows and conferences. (snx)

[News message: 20. Jan. 2004, 00:44] [Comments: 0]
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20.Jan.2004
AmigaWorld (ANF)


Fortnightly Q&A's with Fleecy Moss - episode 26
The English online magazine AmigaWorld has published episode 26 of the regular questions and answers session with Fleecy Moss, CTO at AMIGA, Inc. (Update 2012-03-15, cg: as the original document is no longer available, the following content was moved into our database):

1) rayt: Is it still planned to release the CyberstormPPC version of OS4 before the Aone version or will they be released at the same time now?

Fleecy: Whichever one is done first will be released first. The CSPPC version was a long way ahead of the AmigaOne version but in recent months that has ceased to be the case and the AmigaOne may even now be ahead of the CSPPC version. We still aren't ready to give a release date for either but once one is released, a majority of the spare resources will go into bringing the other to release.

2) Hondo_DK: Could you perhaps tell us about the changed plans with 4.1,4.2, etc. ??? and maybe give us a new timeline for these versions.

Fleecy: Such things are always going to be subject to change, as they have already. Just generating the final requirements set is hard enough but trying to add a timeline to it is virtually impossible. We hope to have AmigaOS4.1 out within 12 months of AmigaOS4.0 but that could change depending upon a number of things.

As we move forwards, the feature set for each successive release will obviously build upon the other but will be a combination of;
  1. fixes from the last version.
  2. enhancements to AG1 code that will remain.
  3. introduction of AG2 services, such as visual, audio, 3D and such.
  4. introduction of the digital living essentials services.
  5. Introduction of a formal development environment for developers.

The Digital Living Essentials project is dedicated to bringing core user activities to the AmigaOS, so that we can provide an acceptable alternative to other competitors. For example a world class browser, an email client, a media player etc.

3) MycoMedical: I was reading up on Intent, and they have recently comeout with a new version. If I buy the SDK now, am I entitled to the upgrade or should I wait untill the SDK is updated before I invest?

Fleecy: The recently released ADK from Tao is based upon Intent 1.4, the same version that we are using in the construction of the new SDK. If you buy the SDK now then yes, you will receive an upgrade - remind me if anyone causes you any trouble over it.

4) Santa: How does the AG2 services based approach relate to WebServices? Are they comparable technologically?

Fleecy: A service is simply a description of a set of logically related operations. A service provider implements a service for a particular resource. These exist within an abstract domain that allows for the resources and the services to be distributed and dynamically advertised, discovered and queried. As such they are a key part of the development architecture and environment for the future.

As for WebServices? Do you have anything particular in mind? Email me if you need a better answer.

5) mjohnson: How extensive has the beta-testing been for the filesystem/diskvalidator and the Partition Wizard? (If you don't mind, throw me all the gory details! I.e. how badly crashed disks have been successfully rescued, how thoroughly have your attempts at finding bugs been executed?)

Fleecy: These information comes from various members of the development and beta groups so may be a little bit disjointed, but you did ask for the gory details.

"OK, the gory details on the file system (maybe Jörg could comment on the data recovery practice) include in about two serious 'incidents' over a period of two years which required the use of a disk structure repair program (no, not Partition Wizard, which wasn't handy at the time the fix needed to be made). Apart from this the file system has run remarkably robust and stable for all the time. The 'period of two years' refers to the time the author of the file system would use it on the busiest partition of his Amiga, namely the one which holds the e-mail client and the web browsers. The author has been using the file system for almost as long on all his other partitions, including those which hold the Amiga operating system source code and private development projects. The new file system was written to be paranoid about the data it manages and it tries to minimize the impact of data structure changes on the disk: if, for whatever reason, the system should crash or hang before all the necessary data has been written, then the contents of the disk should still be in a consistent state. In many cases not even a revalidation is necessary."

"Partition Wizard has 2 data recovery functions:
  • 'Repair' checks all FastFileSystem meta-data blocks, and in case of OFS the data blocks as well, of the partition and removes all files/directories/links which have errors. The result is always a error free partition. It does not attempt to restore partial files/directories, that's where some of the other tools can fail and even destroy more as they repair. Repair makes sure not to modify any data which could help the 'Salvage' function.
  • 'Salvage' doesn't fix the errors on the partition itself but scans the whole partition, rebuilds the filesystem structures and copies the rescued files/directories to another partition. That way more data can be recovered, for example it's impossible in a fix-in-place repair to find out which file is the correct one for "block used twice" errors for all possible cases, when copying the files to another partitition instead both (or even more) files can be restored. Of course only one of them will be correct, but the correct one is always rescued which is not the case in a fix-in-place repair.

Additionally to FastFileSystem2 (all 8 modes) Salvage supports SmartFileSystem as well."

"You could add to the answer as well that you can recover lost partitions (due to a lost RDB). It worked very well for me :)

PW generates a list of found partitions the user can use with Media Toolbox to recreate the partitions. PW has undelete, unformat, etc. as well,"

6) koan: As this series continues, will you put together a work-in-progress List of AG2 "specifications" as you have described them on the AI homepage? Or does such a document exist and I have missed it?

Fleecy: Once AmigaOS4.0 is out the door, then I will put up more documentation relating to AG2. The first four AG2 projects that will commence will cover visual services, audio services, ROSE (Resources and Services Environment) and Persistence (Data storage and organisation). The Interactive Environment will start but obviously cannot be implemented until the visual services are complete. As a result there may be a project which builds a new or updated Workbench/Intuition as a fill in.

Be assured that as soon as we have something to show off we will but the last three years has seen the community make itself perfectly clear. Show us when its ready.

7) JCC: Would XML preferences be an example of an OS4 feature that is a stepping stone toward the final destination (the concept sounds great since it makes system configuration very accessible)?

Fleecy: For me it is clear that XML preferences are the way to go as
  • the programming interface is way more fail/crash-proof compared to the currently available binary accessed formats (true also for the current IFF/iffparse.library as the chunks themself do contain proprietary encoding, too).
  • the application developer doesn't need to reinvent the wheel for storing preferences over and over again.
  • one commonly used preferences format will help to wipe away all proprietary used .ini/.iff/.bin/.cfg etc. file formats.
  • the XML format is human-readable and even -editable (it is even very easy to write an editor for it like Apples PropertyListEditor, something that is planned.)
  • the textual representation of data within XML doesn't has any endianness-dependency [this makes it easier to exchange data between platforms (if it should be needed)].
  • the human-readability makes it easy to verify what (probably personal and confidential) information is stored within a references file (impossible in case of a binary encoded scrambled] prefs file).
  • the hype-factor should not be accepted. XML really is as important as people claim and is not another overhyped technology.

Perhaps these arguments don't convince some people but you just need to look at Mac OS X and see how successful the application of a common XML preferences format can be. The implementation within application.library is an attempt to bring some of these benefits to AmigaOS4.0.

8) VidarL: What's happening with the Safe-C programming language you talked about a long time ago?

Fleecy: It is still a key part of the AmigaOS5.0 plan but it has been absorbed into another project that has yet to be announced.

9) GregS: I heard that Alan demonstrated an MS box running as a client within Linux on an A1 (I could have misread this). Is such a facility (alond with Mac emulation, and linux within Amiga) planed for the future OS4-5?

Fleecy: I played with Windows running on MoL on the AmigaOne at the Micromart show and it was very impressive. We have no plans ourselves to provide other platform emulation or hosting within AmigaOS4.0 but I'm sure some third party will find interest in that area.

10) Toaks: What happened to the new games from "KALIKO" and "ZEONEO" , any news on them? will they appear on DE soon ? and whats the general info atm (why its been so slow this year)

Fleecy: These games are still in development or test due to the authors being busy with their day jobs. Kaliko's new Brainteaser is a very promising looking game which my wife adores and which is, as far as I can tell, almost finished.

Zeoneo I know have just completed beta testing their Crossword Evolution product for both PocketPC and Windows desktop. Their amazing new game, Invasion, has been in beta test for a few weeks now and is one of the best space invaders/galaxians/Zalaga games I have ever played.

It has been a slow year for many reasons - lack of resources, the time it has taken to get the latest Intent update, prospective customers umming and arring, Microsoft warning OEMs away from card based solutions until they fixed the problems we found, waiting for PocketPC2003 to become dominant and waiting for the Smartphone product to become more stable.

We do intend to have new products ready in the first quarter of 2004.

(Copyright © 2004 Amigaworld.net. All rights reserved.
Originally available at http://amigaworld.net/modules/fleecymoss/index.php?cat_id=27
You may freely redistribute this article, providing that a URL is provided to the original source,
and the copyright notices remain intact)
(nba) (Translation: gf)

[News message: 20. Jan. 2004, 00:00] [Comments: 0]
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19.Jan.2004
Raquel Velasco & Bill Buck (E-Mail)


Thendic-France will be closed
Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck announced today that Thendic-France would be closed in February.

Due to the difficulties associated with the bankruptcy of Pretory SA, Thendic-France will be closed. The original intention was to convey Thendic-France and/or it assets directly to Genesi to allow for an uninterrupted transition of services and coordination. This did not happen and will no longer be possible.

Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck will seek to arrive at an agreement with the proper authorities to close out the Thendic-France in a manner that reflects the original intent of the shareholders of Pretory and the Board of Directors/Management of Pretory as well as all valid legal obligations.

Thendic-France will continue to operate until the closing and will do whatever possible to properly conclude the operation. (snx)

[News message: 19. Jan. 2004, 19:50] [Comments: 1 - 21. Jan. 2004, 22:18]
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19.Jan.2004
#amigazeux


MorphOS: dnetc v2.9007.488 (prerelease) available
The distributed.net client (short: dnetc) allows to take part in distributet.net projects. Current version is capable of working on 2 ongoing projects: The brute-force decryption of a RC5-72 message, and the search for Optimal Golomb Rulers (OGR). Both are long-term projects that will go on for some time. Because the RC5-72 contest has a finite number of keys to test, however, the OGR contest is selected as the default.

The MorphOS release comes with a nice MUI GUI (screenshot) and with AltiVec support (cores only activate under MorphOS 1.5). The archive can be downloaded under the title link.

Please note, it's a Prerelease, but this version is not time restricted and will generally become release-worthy in at minimum 4 days if no significant bugs will be found. (cr)

[News message: 19. Jan. 2004, 12:16] [Comments: 0]
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