There are a few pieces of information about this user group meeting held in Bad Bramstedt, near Hamburg, about 10 days ago over at MorphZone... I thought somebody might be interested here as well, so I'll repost my short report.

Let's see:
- on Saturday at 11:30 PM there was a MorphOS presentation (also known as "The Saturday Night Show") on the big screen where we were shown a few bits. First of all bigfoot demoed Return to Castle Wolfenstein on his Mac mini. The game is done and so is the installer (even though "Frank finds it confusing. But he doesn't like to have to press less than 10 buttons to get things done, so it's not going to change") and it will be released real soon now - as soon as Mark solves some problems with his server. Those attending the Amiga Meeting Nord, including yours truly, have received a PreRelease archive directly from bigfoot's hands, as you can notice in one of the pics I posted from the number of monitors displaying RtCW during Saturday night. Then we were shown the updated 3D drivers, reaching 140fps in Quake III running at 800x600 on an humble Mac mini. That's roughly 50% better than last year, that in turn was already 100% faster than what we have in the public version of MorphOS... Then we were shown MorphOS 3.0 (the development branch) on a PowerMac G5 2.7GHz. The port is still in the early phase, MorphOS doesn't control the software controlled fan, so it will stand still for the first 3 minutes (with the risk of a "thermal crash"), then it will realize it is not being software controlled at all and will start spinning at the maximum speed for the time being.
- After the presentation there was time for some questions. Here is what I gathered, feel free to correct me if I am wrong. MorphOS 2.7 is due really soon, hopefully by the end of the month. It is mainly a bugfix release for the PowerMac G4 issues. Good news is that finally the new graphics drivers are going to be released, and tentatively this is going to happen for MorphOS 2.8. In the meantime work is ongoing on drivers for R300 and R400 based Radeon cards (this includes 9600/9700/9800 and x800). Inside the PowerMac G5 a Radeon 9600 and an X800 were swapped during the 2 days. bigfoot and kiero would need to be motivated to work on an updated TinyGL (R300 and R400 could introduce Shaders and T&L, and thus OpenGL 2.1 compatibility). I guess that some third party coder abusing a bit more TinyGL might help here: I still find it kinda sad that most of the advanced 3D software was written/ported by the 2 themselves. And Fab of course (who is another team member, though). With notable exceptions of Blender and VGP2.
- About the releases for other Apple hardware: Frank basically told to enjoy what we have and kind of stressed that registrations on hardware currently supported is a good way to motivate the team to improve and extend the OS further while waiting forever for some still unreleased port is not going to help a lot. That said, he told the PowerBook G4 version basically ony lacks graphics acceleration support for R300 chipset and wireless support. The first one (both 2D for enhanced displays and 3D) is a must have, while the second is really a nice to have for a portable, but nobody is working on it right now and so a first PowerBook release might eventually happen even without the wireless supported. Frank used his PowerBook G4 as his only machine during the 2 days and it seemed stable and nice.
- Support for PCI SATA and SCSI boards is currently disabled on PowerMac G4s due to some problems, but will reappear some time in the future.
- People registering MorphOS 2.x at the show were given a personal CD with MorphOS+key in it in a special box. Those already registered could buy the limited edition box (a box with the QBox character and... "a box") and printed CD for 5 Euro. I got mine with signatures from the team members Frank and Mark...

In other news:
- There were various presentations. Carsten Siegner showed his Magical Ink vector graphics program that is shaping up very nicely. He also showed FireWire stack Helios developments and the usage of Bluethooth keyboard and mouse in MorphOS. Stefan 'Kronos' Kleinheinrich showed the new Ambient panels with true transparency support and with the possibility to create MUI classes similar to the .sbar modules (ScreenBar modules) to populate them.
- there were overall about 60 visitors and some 45 brought computers with them. There were mainly "NG" systems, about a dozen AmigaOS 4 machines and between 20 and 30 MorphOS machines. The event was very nice and I wich to thank the organizers. I had quite some nice time chatting with a few guys and in particular with Mark and Frank who had to bear me for a few hours and during dinner as well... But we had a few beers as well.

I've made a few photos:
image gallery at AmigaPage.it

A few videos if you still haven't seen them:
http://amition.de/bb.html
http://www.amiga-news.de/de/news/AN-2010-11-00025-DE.html

Kind regards,
Andrea

@guruman

Quote:

guruman wrote: a first PowerBook release might eventually happen even without the wireless supported. Andrea

This is actually good news. Because in older statements it was said that a release w/o wireless will not happen. Am waiting for powerbook support desperately.

_________________
My programs: via.bckrs.de
MorphOS user since V0.4 (2001)

@Zylesea

Indeed. Actually, it is still not confirmed 100%, but in my opinion it makes sense... There are also WiFi/Ethernet bridges in any case, even if proper support of the Airport would be a definite bonus.
I am not waiting the PowerBook G4 support desperately, this mini G4 @1.5GHz does its dirty work. And I do prefer to use what is available now instead of waiting forever for something that might not even apper at the end (I know that you already have enough MorphOS machines as well )! But I have to admit that a proper notebook with a 1.67GHz G4 and an R300 based gfx board with 128MB VRAM sounds pretty cool... It will be mine as soon as MorphOS is released on it!
I'd like to stress that I have been positively impressed on how nicely Frank's machine ran, despite of the lack of Enhanced Display and such: it was the machine he used all the time, always with MorphOS. He walked with it to get debug logs from MorphOS users at the meeting that were testing various PowerMacs and flashing various Radeons, and indeed it made sense to have a notebook for this purpose: he just got there and plugged an USB cable between the two machines, and there you go! Touchpad is there and most details already seemed fine.

As usual, time will tell.

Kind regards,
Andrea

@guruman

Thx for this report :)

_________________
Mac Mini G4 1.5 Ghz & MorphOS 3.x
Power Mac G5 dual 2.3 Ghz MorphOS 3.x
BlaBla Team Member -> http://blabla.ppa.pl
AmiParty Team Member -> http://chal.pl

@guruman

When I was at the Essen show this summer I also was positively impressed by the powerbook port and it was a good feeling to actually put my own hands on it and play around with it a bit. For me the highlight of the show. And my wait being desperate is probably exaggerated a bit. I have enough fun with my other maschine and am happy with the ease of moving around the Mac mini. I worked several times during the last 12 months in Freiburg (which is about 600 km away from my hometown) and was quite happy to have the opportunity to take my MorphOS system rather easily with me (I use trains and bicycle only, no car). And I actually use MorphOS there for serious work. But with a laptop this would be even more convenient and I could use the time on trains differently.

_________________
My programs: via.bckrs.de
MorphOS user since V0.4 (2001)