http://forefronttechnologiesinc.com/

Maybe something interesting for Trevor

I find this quite interesting as they developed their own Radeon drivers for AmigaOS 4

Anyone knows what happend to the driver ? did it end up as the standard Radeon driver ?

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@Trewq

Forfront is Bill Toner or BillT with the hypnotoad avatar.

I always assumed the driver became the one included with OS4.

@Trewq

Forefront

#6

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@Trewq

Slow progress in reviving the company. I took over from Joshua a bit over a year ago. I have a couple ideas for products, should time allow to progress on them, but nothing worth mentioning at the moment.

The Forefront driver for Radeon is the ATIRadeon driver originally shipping with OS4 for AmigaOne machines. I haven't checked if it's on the OS4 Classic CD or not, but it originally was developed on classic machines, so I'd imagine is still capable of that. (We had to parse the old PCI Radeon BIOS ourselves, as we did not have x86 emulation assistance on Prometheus like the AmigaOnes did in uboot) Our driver has no relation to the RadeonHD driver from Hans, as I understand. And I've been told that no payment was ever received for putting our driver on OS4 CDs, which was a disappointment for me. I was not involved with negotiations there, and don't know all the details about that, only what the split of the per license fee would have been between Joshua, Forefront the company, and myself. Note that iI am perfectly willing to work with the OS people, this disappointment is not an obstacle to other opportunies that I'd like to pursue or participate in as I'm able to.

Joshua transferred the name, website, and logos to me. Nothing specifies the rights to that Radeon driver, and in the absence of anything explicitly stated about the driver code, I assume that he still owns rights to that. Someone had once a few years ago inquired to me about purchasing the rights, and I referred them to Joshua, but I never heard if anything happened or not. My own preference would have been to keep/uh ownership at Forefront, but it wasn't my decision to make, and no news made its way back to me, so I assume nothing happened there.

I do want to redesign the website, as it's currently in a form that I personally find difficult to work with, though I'm an old-school HTML only in a text editor kindof guy. At some point I may try to bribe the wife into having a look, as she does more web design sorts of things...

So anyway, Forefront is alive, but consider it kindof hibernating while we work out how to make ourselves useful again.

And at some point I replaced the Hypnotoad avatar with my little boy doing a glorious face-palm at me When he was one day old. :)

Last edited by billt on 01-Feb-2015 at 10:46 PM.
Last edited by billt on 01-Feb-2015 at 10:41 PM.
Last edited by billt on 01-Feb-2015 at 10:29 PM.

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@Trewq

Oh my, the number of puns we could do. "store front technologies" would possibly be the best.

But to summarize Bills summary, another window got click-to-front'ed

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Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@billt

I heard rumors that there are were more than one developer never be paid but it is the first official approvement I read of in public. Just wondering what contracts there were.

@OlafS25

I can't comment much on the contract as I never actually saw it, and it would be a legal matter between Joshua and whoever if he chose to pursue it, due to what is and is not explicitly stated in the ownership transfer to me. I should have an email somewhere under a mountain of dust about my own agreement with Joshua's Forefront, but that's all I would have written about anything.

But I got what I really wanted out of the original Radeon driver, the ability to use something better than a Voodoo card that was officially EOL gfx card from an already defunct company, at a time when it seemed everyone else was perfectly happy with Voodoo3. Oh, and one decent dinner courtesy of Joshua's Forefront was nice. A few bucks would have been a nice bonus, but at least I had something better than a Voodoo.

And I would Imagine that Hans's RadeonHD driver has by now far surpassed what was done in ours, and I look forward to getting an Amiga running again to try it out, and all those other cool things I haven't got to do for quite a while. We spent a couple years trying to move to a better area, so my stuff was packed and stored for a long time, and not yet unpacked and hooked up again. :/ I've been trying to make due with WinUAE PPC for the past few months, and was very happy to see that become a possibility. :)

Any projects I would proceed with at Forefront now would probably be selfishly motivated to get something that I want for myself, and hopefully others would find it interesting and useful and want to buy it too.

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@billt

Thank you for the indepth reply.

My graditute to Joshua and you,
Radeon user here and am very happy with the perfromance.

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So there exists a company entity which sole reason of existance was a gfx driver for OS4?
I find this hilarious :)

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@kolla

Quote:

So there exists a company entity which sole reason of existance was a gfx driver for OS4? I find this hilarious :)

That's not the case at all, so you can stop giggling. :p

Forefront existed before the Radeon driver project, and before my part in the company. At the time, Joshua was still interested in Amiga, and thought there was an opporunity in my madness, and so gave me a corporate email and allowed me to speak as an employee when I talked to ATI (long before becoming part of AMD), Nvidia, and other vendors that I contacted about chip documentation, NDAs and such things.

Forefront was actually the second name for Joshua's company, as when he went to convert to a Corporation, the original name of Progressive Data Systems was already taken in the Inc. form, and they ended up going with Forefront Technologies for their Inc. name. That was frustrating, as we were just getting somewhere with NDA paperworks, and had to have it all changed.

Pro Data Sys, and then Forefront after it, was a computer products sales place, similar to but on a much smaller scale than Newegg, and was also an AmigaOne reseller in USA back then, and was also had some stuff going on for QNX platform. I've done some XE USB and DMA fix operation s, uboot flash corrections and adding audio codec operations on behalf of Forefront as well. And of course there were other things that had nothing to do with PCs or Amigas, which I'm less familiar with myself (Smart Home type stuff), and some of which I think the others may still be working on under a different name. There have also been a few hardware projects unrelated to Radeon chips.

From the Amiga stuff point of view, it started out really only as a convenience to me from a college friend that he allowed me to look more business-legitimate than some crazy guy with a computer room at home, when asking bit companies about NDAs, at a time before well done programs like what AMD's Embedded Developer program is now or vendor support for open-source and things like that which would have made our driver endeavor and other intentions a lot easier to pursue.

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I'm really sorry to pay for OS4 x 2 then for nothing. Radeon here. Hope the Best and Please work together in the future. The Amiga can not advance if people just fight. (Like my little Amigagirls..)

Supporting. Results to be seen;)

Best Regards, PR.

@PR

?

I've already mentioned that I myself am not holding a grudge, I'm only a bit disappointed.

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