@SpaceDruid

Quote:

Amiga Inc don't pay Hyperions salaries, Hyperion pays it's own salaries. If Hyperion can't afford to because it failed to secure enough funds in the origional contract to cover the workload

The contract was never about securing funds for Hyperion. The reason why Hyperion were given the contract for OS4 was because Amiga Inc couldn't afford to/didn't want to spend a single penny on producing OS4.

I do agree that Hyperion should have got a more favourable contract made though.

@SpaceDruid

Quote:

This is irrelevant. Hyperion signed a contract agreeing to do the work in a timely fashion. They failed to live up to the contract. Why should ANY company have to pay it's contractors more money for being late?.

Hyperion signed a contract which gave them the right to recoup their costs, and potentially make a profit, by having the sole right to market all versions of OS4, ie from 4.0 to.4.99999999 etc. AInc have presented a warped view of the facts, by presenting only those arguments (surprise, surprise) which support there actions of cancelling the said contract.
The lack of available, licensed hardware, is not Hyperions fault, neither is trying to use the 'down' time to enhance the marketable end product, from which they and AInc would make a profit.
We shall all know more when the full tale is told not just the current publiclly available one

_________________
Peter Swallow.
A1XEG3-800 [IBM 750FX PowerPC], running OS4.1FE, using ac97 onboard sound.

"There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."

@Swoop

The problem according to many is the following: Hyperion signed a bill of sale in 2003, handing the OS over to Itec. Amiga Inc. will argue that had they been displeased they would not have done so.

_________________

@Swoop

Quote:

Swoop wrote: Hyperion signed a contract which gave them the right to recoup their costs, and potentially make a profit......

Which is offcourse pure nonsense !

Hyperion signed a contract which gave them the right to market OS4 under the terms of said contract (doh).

If they found that contract to be based on false assumptions they should have checked that beforehand, or atleast made sure they were covered by new contracts by the time they pressed ahead.

Last edited by Kronos on 12-May-2007 at 02:19 PM.

_________________
- We don't need good ideas, we haven't run out on bad ones yet
- blame Canada

@Rob & Swoop

Quote:

I do agree that Hyperion should have got a more favourable contract made though.

Which is the point I make. It was Hyperion management's failing to get a "fair price" not Amiga Incs. People seem ever so keen to put all the blame at Amigas feet for something they had no part in.

A deal was struck, Amiga paid a set amount (and additional bonus funds later) and Hyperion agreed on this. There is no point in afterwards claiming it was unfair.

_________________
"Anyone with a modicum of reasonableness may realize that it is like comparing the ride in the world to descend the stairs to catch the milk in the house."

Google Translate

@SpaceDruid

As late as 21 November 2006 Amiga Inc's lawyers concede that the terms of the buyback have not been meet and send and addition $8,850.00 to Hyperion.

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

BIG Question:

Can the buyback be done before OS4.0 is completed ?
Does a buyback concede the OS4.0 is completed ?
What is the risk of buying something that is not completed ?

Last edited by Spectre660 on 12-May-2007 at 05:35 PM.
Last edited by Spectre660 on 12-May-2007 at 05:33 PM.

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

@Spectre660

Quote:

Spectre660 wrote: @SpaceDruid As late as 21 November 2006 Amiga Inc's lawyers concede that the terms of the buyback have not been meet and send and addition $8,850.00 to Hyperion.

Which is why I said "(and additional bonus funds later)".

_________________
"Anyone with a modicum of reasonableness may realize that it is like comparing the ride in the world to descend the stairs to catch the milk in the house."

Google Translate

@SpaceDruid

Also the Arctic Agreement had "Tens of thousands of Dollars" being paid to Hyperion without having an amount or method to calculate this amount in the agreement . I find this one a bit strange

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

Title: Amiga's Grand Plans Revealed


November 11, 2002
Amiga's Grand Plans Revealed
By Jim Louderback


With stories about the new Amiga shipping spreading across the web, including
here on ExtremeTech , I thought it would be worthwhile to sit down and talk
about these, and other developments with Bill McEwen, the CEO and President
of Amiga, Inc.

McEwen is a long-time computer industry veteran, but his past stretches
beyond the PC industry. In the nineties, Bill ran sales and marketing at
database vendor GenSoft, and then worked at ConnectSoft, ending up as
business unit director for Internet related applications. ConnectSoft
produced the popular product Email Connection, one of the first cross-vendor
email clients, and Kid-Mail Connection - a version designed for children.

His varied background even includes driving trucks, and he's famous for some
of his promotional escapades, including unleashing a flock of parachuting
Elvis impersonators at the Comdex trade show, and a bubble-gum scented
air-freshener in the shape of the Kid-Mail character.


McEwen has been involved with Amiga for around five years, since the time it
was acquired by Gateway Computers in 1997. Bill led the team that purchased
Amiga from Gateway in December of 1999, and has been leading the charge to
bring Amiga back ever since.

ET: So what's going on with the Amiga One, and who is EyeTech?

Bill McEwen: EyeTech is one of the larger computer resellers in England, and
they licensed the right to take the project over. The Amiga One is our spec,
our design, but they built it.

ET: Is it shipping?

Bill McEwen: I guess it is now, but only with Linux on it. It has been
shipping in limited quantities

ET: So what's the status of the next version of the Amiga OS?

Bill McEwen: OS4 is the next version of the Amiga OS, it's a total rewrite of
the operating system. It's brand new from the ground up, rewritten for the
PPC hardware. And it's bloody fast. It's currently in beta testing at 20
external sites, and it's just about ready to go - in three more weeks. The
components are ready, we just have to plug them together and go.

ET: Did you just throw everything out and start over?

Bill McEwen: Well, major portions of the code are still being used. We took
those pieces that were hard wired to the custom chipsets, and worked through
those issues to make sure we could take advantage of the special capabilities
of the Power PC chip.


ET: So is this still Amiga?

Bill McEwen: This truly is the Amiga operating system. It has a lot of strong
multimedia features, all the old Amiga applications run on it -- even the old
64k stuff. You've got over 40,000 Amiga applications that will run on the
machine without any changes

ET: So if someone buys an AmigaOne now, with Linux on it, why would they
switch to OS4 when it ships?

Bill McEwen: I don't know if people will move from Linux to Amiga, But you
have Amiga people - 7 million Amigas were sold worldwide -- who also run
Linux. The stuff that Amiga is good at, embracing the user, flexibility,
customizability, all those things aren't there in Linux. That box runs Linux
right now, but they are in the process of configuring Amiga OS4 so that it
will run dual boot.

ET: But why switch? Aren't the applications all really old?

Bill McEwen: They're all not as old as you think, some of the newer apps do
image manipulation, and some are for video editing

ET: Lets talk about video editing. Is that where the new Amiga will shine?

Bill McEwen: I think for the US, yes, video editing will be it. In the UK it
will be different. There it will be more for general business. Amigas are
still used at Nasa, Disney, Warner Brothers, and these machines are ten to
fifteen years old too. They keep popping up, like at BritRail. In each area,
we're finding a lot of interest from users that want to replace the old
hardware with the new hardware. Hundreds of thousands of Amiga folks still
use their old computer to surf the web and play games. For them, it is their
home computer.

ET: Like Dick Van Dyke (laughing)

Bill McEwen: Yeah, he's a big fan.

ET: So how much will AmigaOS cost?

Bill McEwen: We're trying to work out some deals to get the pricing so that
its a tangible alternative to people on PowerPC. We're hoping we'll see other
vendors with PowerPC boxes too.

ET: Will it cost more than boxed Linux distros?

Bill McEwen: No.


ET: Wasn't your vision for Amiga that it should be cross platform? Why does
the desktop version only run on a custom, modified PowerPC system?

Bill McEwen: The idea is that we can run on any piece of hardware, we
architected it that way. First we'll get it running on Power PC, then go from
there and expand to other chipsets.

ET: What about Intel?

Bill McEwen: Well we really like some of the new XScale stuff, it's neat and
you can really crank those things up. We're really impressed by that.

ET: What about Pentium 4?

Bill McEwen: Not with OS4, but it will with our next version, OS5 due out
within 12 months from when OS4 ships. We'll merge the code-bases and go
cross-platform.

ET: What's the status of Amiga OS on other platforms today?

Bill McEwen: We're shipping today on PocketPC and the PocketPC phone edition.
You can head right on over to our website and buy an entertainment or
software pack that downloads right to those devices.

ET: How does it work?

Bill McEwen: Basically you are loading our OS onto those devices. It's more
of a player - our Amiga Anywhere content engine. We basically created a
binary portable platform. The exact same OS that runs on the smart phone runs
on the pocket PC, the same user interface scales from one to the other. You
can take our stuff loaded on an SD card, plug it into your phone, play a few
games and then BOOM, plug it into a pocket PC, play the same games with the
same executable and everything. Not only that, you can take it out and then
plug into a Mira web tablet, and BOOM. It runs the same apps. We're the only
company that Microsoft lets take over the whole screen of the device.

ET: Will those applications also run on the desktop?

Bill McEwen: No, we've broken the company into 2 divisions; one is focused on
the Amiga OS desktop, application software, etc. The second is the mobile
group, and they work on software for smart phones for the Symbian OS, for
Nokia, even java. The target audience is different. The Amiga stuff is
designed for the Amiga community, the 7 million systems sold. The mobile
stuff is targeted for mass consumer, and current handset manufacturers.

ET: But those apps won't run on the desktop version?

Bill McEwen: not until OS5.

ET: After our news story, we had a pretty strong posting on our website. Our
member said that Amiga OS "will apply some form of hardware-license
mechanism, a dongle to his hardware."

Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

ET: And that if you want AmigaOS, "you're not allowed to buy it. You have to
buy a new Teron board."

Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

ET: and that "Amiga Inc. has nothing to do with AmigaOS"

Bill McEwen: That's untrue.

ET: Stop up to our message boards and set the record straight!

Bill McEwen: OK, I will

ET: Lets move on. Where will Amiga be in the future?

Bill McEwen: You'll always have the desktop, because there are places for it.
The other side of the coin is mobile, and there you'll have tablet, phone,
PDA. We've had interesting queries from brazil and China to use your OS for
something we've never thought of. The whole operating system is less than
three megabytes, so it's interesting where it might end up. That's not its
intended target, but hey, I'm a capitalist.

ET: Including Intel-based processors?

Bill McEwen: Including Intel. Like I said, we really like the ARM, the XScale
stuff, but in two years we don't know. IBM might have some chip in the
backroom that none of us know about that'll replace everything.

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

Title: Amiga Source



Interview : Fleecy Moss, CTO Amiga Inc.
Date Conducted : November 13th, 2002

General
1-How long have you been involved with the Amiga?
Since I bought an A1200 in Scotland back in 1993.

2-How long have you been the CTO/VP of Amiga Inc?
Since Bill, Randy and I bought Amiga from Gateway back in January 2000.

3-Where do you see yourself in 1 year? 5 Years? 10 years from now?
In one year, I want to go to an Amiga show or even better, an Industry show
and see lots of new Amigas, lots of new software and lots of proud, smiling
faces (and more importantly - new faces) all saying they are Amigans.

In five years, I want to see the Amiga Environment all over the planet, with
Amiga a successful company and Amigans very pleased with their universal
digital presence, wherever they are in the world.

In ten years, yikes, I just hope Amiga is still a success and the world
hasn't blown itself up.

4-Where do you see the Amiga in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years from now?
If the digital revolution plays itself out the way we expect it to, then
Amiga should come to be one of the primary players in the industry, firstly
with the DE (pushing content onto all the second generation mobile devices)
and then with OS5 as we finally have the universal solution that we hoped for
in 2000.

5-Do you use an Amiga? At work? Home?
I lent my A4000 to a friend in the US and he still has it. I have UAE on my
PC and the kids play on my A1200 030. I don't use it much for work anymore as
most of my work is DE and OS5 design but I still play Cannon Fodder on it and
use Photogenics. I have my A1 on order and can't wait to start using it and
the new apps on OS4, especially Audio Evolution.

General Amiga
6-Sorry to ask but I feel the need to cover the rumors of "death and
destruction" right off the bat. Is Amiga "Shutdown", "Near death" or "Going
out of business"?
We have had some tough times over the last 12 months, as have most companies
based in the US, and especially in the Pacific NorthWest but no, we have
never been shut down, near death or going out of business. We all have stout
Amigan hearts and it'll require a stake through the heart of every Amiga
employee before that ever happens. In fact, the last three months have been
non stop, and for me, I've been working 12 hrs a day UK time and then getting
calls all evening/night from Dean, Bill, Kevin and the gang in Snoqualmie. In
fact, as the MS deal grows and matures, it's getting even worse and we are
going to have to start hiring new people just for that part of the business.

7-Why the lack of an updated website?
Don't know - I'm not part of the web group. We have made a decision just to
get on with the work we need to do, which means getting the product out the
door for the DE partners and finishing and shipping our pride and joy,
AmigaOS4.0. We are working on a new website just for OS4 but that won't be
live for a few weeks.

8-What's the status of the coupon/ tee-shirt deal?
Don't know. It's not my area.

9-What was/is the final tally of the "I am Amiga" club?
Don't know. It's not my area.

10-How many people work for Amiga? In Snoqualmie? (New location) Contracted
out?
We have about 30 people working for the company at the moment, ten or so in
Snoqualmie and the rest spread out around the world. We are more interested
in having the best people we can get, rather than making them sit in traffic
jams trying to get to an office. I know some of our players would rather this
weren't the case, in particular Jonas Gustavsson, our media lead in Sweden
who is up all night working with Jarno van der Linden, our 2D genius in New
Zealand. In fact, if it wasn't for the Internet, we probably wouldn't have
been able to get as far as we have done.

11-Can you comment on the status of the "legal proceedings on
companies/personnel using unauthorized intellectual property" that was
mentioned about at Amiwest2002?
It is on going. On the advice of our legal team we are still adding evidence
to the portfolios and waiting for certain trigger conditions in one
particular case.

12-It was announced that Amiga has split into two sections? Why the split?
Whose in charge of each section? Does "failure" in one directly effect the
other?
We split into two for many reasons. It was confusing our investors, our
partners and also we didn't want to advertise we were developing a desktop OS
to a very big new partner who wouldn't be too happy about that. It also
means, as you correctly point out that both can be separately accountable
revenue stream sets. No one is 'in charge' of each section - it is more of a
functional reorganisation aimed at marketing and strategy. We don't want two
separate architectural units because of the requirements of OS5.

Software
13-With Hyperion developing OS4.0, what Amiga's take on the current status on
OS4.0? Are you still pleased? Is it on schedule? Still on track for OS5.0?
We are very pleased with the progress of OS4, particularly because we have
been able to add elements planned for future releases. This has really
reflected itself in ExecSG which has some very advanced features in it that
we weren't planning on implementing until OS5. Yes it is much later than we
wanted it to be but we haven't rushed it, we have done what needed to be done
and the product that comes out will be a great foundation for the future. We
are very confident that the long wait is almost over for Amigans.

As for OS5, it's schedule is more open ended and because of its inter
relationship with OS4, there is still a lot of architectural tweaking going
on. For now we are concentrating on the near future and AmigaOS4.

14-What's the status of AmigaDE? What happened with the updates with the
Graphics/Sound?
The AmigaDE is progressing nicely. We have 2D, 3D, Audio, Database,
Interface, Scaling, Transformation, Storage, Distribution and a nicely
growing set of quality apps from the developers. Our issue has been finding
the resources to get that built into an SDK to release it to the general
public. However, the SDA developers have had full access to all of these
resources for over a year now and are busy using those tools to create their
next set of apps, which are just getting better and better. Once we get the
first MS releases out, we will then take a breath and throw some resources
into getting the new SDK out.

15-Any Status on Amithlon (or it's new name)? Are you still in contact with
Bernie?
Absolutely. We are very keen to get Bernie's new product out the door and are
doing all we can. Unfortunately, the hold up now is due to actions from other
parties and it looks like it will have to end in court.

Hardware
16-What's Amiga's final word on the current AmigaOne hardware? (Are you
pleased?)
As a first step absolutely. There's not many people who wouldn't be happy
with an 800 mhz G4, especially with something like the AmigaOS4.0 screaming
on it. However, I will emphasize that this is a first step. What strikes me
as absurd is all the people screaming on about custom chips. If they knew
anything about HW architectural issues they'd know that the chips themselves
aren't the problem anymore. I'm not going to say much more, but don't be
surprised if something special appears in the future

17-We have all seen the demonstrations of the A1 hardware. We know its real
and the final build is locked in but have you seen/used a beta copy of OS4.0
on it?
Not on the A1 no - we still have some drivers to write that are peculiar to
that board, and which are necessary because unlike the CSPPC version which
has access to the AA amiga hardware, the A1 has no such access.

Partners
18-What is Amiga's relationship with Hyperion?
They are a very close partner.

19-What's Amiga's relationship with Eyetech? (Just a distributor?)
They were the first company to sign up to be an Amiga solution provider.

20-Is there ANY good news on the Thendic front? Would Amiga be willing to
"work" with them? (For example extend the hand of good will in licensing?)
The AmigaOS has a clearly defined licencing policy and anyone is free to sign
up to it. In a recent posting by Bill Buck on www.amiga.org he said that
Thendic had no interest in seeing AmigaOS4 on the Pegasos as that is not
their business. If Thendic won't get a licence then all the set up cost for
the licence will have to be born by a distributor, and given the small size
of the market, this seems prohibitive. Given that the Pegasos shares most of
the same components, and that there is little creativity available in putting
together a PPC AGP/PCI machine, there would be little difficulty in having it
run but we have limited resources and can only apply them to companies that
actually want to be partners rather than those who have their own agendas and
products.

21-With Sendo "Dropping" the Z100 is Amiga going to try and provide content
for the Series 60 Platform?
Amiga Anyware is a hardware agnostic total content solution. In fact Sendo
has proven the value of the AmigaDE better than any marketing promotion. We
already have a prototype AACE player running on Symbian and it will be
brought to commercial completion in the near future.

22-Are there anymore partners to be announced?
Yes. MS has opened a lot of doors for us, both expected and unexpected but
there are many non MS opportunites presenting themselves. In fact, just the
MS announcement has galvanised many of the non MS companies we were talking
to into pushing the DE much further up their agenda.

In Closing
23-What can the Amiga community do "right now" to show their support?
Keep on being Amigans. Support their dealers, their user groups, their
website, their magazines - celebrate their membership of the community. The
long wait is almost over and we can soon start moving forwards again.

24-Any final words? This is your chance to reach hundreds/thousands of fellow
Amiga users.
We are sorry it has taken so long but we will very soon be able to offer you
new hardware and your favourite AmigaOS, providing the fastest, most stable
Amiga experience ever. This is the start of the next stage in the Amiga story
and we couldn't have got here without all of you. Thanks.

25-Any exclusive information you want to share with us?
Not if I don't want to be sacked

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

[Ben Hermans, Hyperion - this is NOT word for word, but almost]

I'd like to thank everyone for showing up here and ..
well still numerous amount of people here, so..
thanks everybody, unfortunately not as many people as last year,
I wasn't really here last year, but that's what they say to me.

Anyway so, just a short presentation on OS4, what does it stand for?
where are we now, and so forth..
And as you already heard, unfortunately the organizers has forbidden me for
answering questions until, what is it? 5pm?
OK, so.. don't kill me :) , it's not my fault.

ok, first slide.. or whatever it is..

ok, so this is.. these are the design goals of OS4, I mean why are we doing what
we are doing? Just to remind everybody, the idea is to take the existing 68k-based
OS and move it over to PPC.
Obviously we need more performance, so the 68k family really has to be written off.
We also need to untie the operating system from the chipsets, currently the AmigaOS
is heavily tied to the Amiga proprietary chipsets and well,these are no longer being
produced and completely outdated, so we can't really keep relying on them.

Another important goal of OS4 is to introduce modern functionality. The operating system
wasn't really updated in a serious way since 1994. We had OS3.5 and 3.9 which were nice
efforts, but they didn't really address any fundamental questions and as a result,
we're more or less stuck with the same functionality that we had way back in the times
of 3.1 and the Commodore 4000 and so forth. And finally, an important goal is to prepare
the AmigaOS as a host operating system for the AmigaDE. Some of you might have mixed
feelings about AmigaDE, but you'll agree that it is a bit silly to call something
Amiga-whatever and not have it run on Amiga and only on windows and linux, so..
plus, it brings in a bunch of nice games, and a java engine, which I think is a nice
benefit. Ok, next slide.

I'll walk you through the features of OS4. If you've been reading the amiga website,
you'll probably know most of them, but I'll immediately give a status update on each
feature as we go. So the most important part is Exec Second Generation. The Exec kernel
is the heart of the AmigaOS system. It's what would make the AmigaOS special to us, the
responsiveness, the flexibility and so forth. This is all result of the kernel, or to
some extent at least. We've completely rewritten the kernel in C, it was originally
coded in 68k assembly, so it couldn't really be used on the PPC. Currently it stands at
42.000 lines of code, four thousand of which are PPC assembly.. but these are located
in the Hardware Abstraction Layer. Now we've not only rewritten the kernel entirely,
we've also introduced alot of new functionality to inject modern funtionality I was
talking about before. First of all, there's the Hardware Abstraction Layer. We want to be
able to take the operating system and move it to a new PPC platform with relative ease.
We've been able to port the kernel from the Cyberstorm PPC, that we were using as
development platform to the AmigaOne in just five days, thanks to the HAL. You can see
the results out there in the exhibition hall where you can see ExecSG running natively
and booting on the AmigaOne hardware.

Second point is, we've introduced virtual memory and single virtual address space to
allow us to use virtual memory, I mean, lots of people are saying "wow, virtual memory,
why do we need it? We've got tons of memory that we can stick into the AmigaOne" and so
forth. First of all, the first remark is on the CSPPC only have 128 megabytes, secondly
however much memory you put into the system, and money, because memory can be expensive,
eventually you'll run out.. and you haven't found an application yet that can't run out
of memory if it really chooses to. So virtual memory is a *must* and it must not be
hacked into the system in some kind of VMM like way that we have currently - it has to be
integrated at the deepest level.

We've also introduced optional memory protection to prevent us some crashing frequently,
well, we can atleast try, so :)
We've also made alot of changes with respect to the.. how memory is being handled and
allocated. The current system we have currently in the amiga is a bit outdated and rather
slow, especially with deallocation. Thomas Frieden has introduced a flexible scheme to
handle memory which also allows to enlarge stacks on the fly which basically
stack-underrun, or application running out of stack space are responsible for between
30 to 50$ of the crashes of AmigaOS.. or atleast of the applications which usually means
AmigaOS is coming with it, so.. this is an important step.

We're also preparing for isolated address spaces - we can't really implement it just now,
because it will break alot of applications not playing by the rules.

So these are the features of [the] new kernel, I'm not going to list them all,
you can read them yourself. This is, let's say.. 99% finished.
It's been a major undertaking to get it to the state that it is now.
But I can happily say, unless you can see in the exhibition hall, the kernel is completely
up and running on two different platforms and we're very satisfied with the results
we're getting. Just to quote a couple of numbers, the message signalling time stands at
four microseconds on a 600MHz G3. Currently on the Cyberstorm PPC that stands at fourty
microseconds. And when you compare that to OS9 and OSX, Macintosh operating system,
respectively fourty microseconds and four hundred microseconds..

The switching between supervisor and usermode takes around a hundred nano seconds. Again,
on this 600MHz G3. Basically, I know, I may realize that these numbers doesn't mean a
whole lot to some of you atleast, but it means that we're very close to a real time
operating system, or as close as we've ever gotten to it, so you will be enjoying the
full responsiveness of the system as you've been enjoying it up to now and alot more.
So actually we, with these numbers, we even beat QNX, so.. just a little tease there.

Anyway, next slide..

OK, so this is the Just-In-Time emulator for backwards compatibility of 68k existing
applications. Basically, what does a JIT do? It takes the existing 68k code and translates
it on the fly dynamically into PPC code which is subsequently executed. We're very
satisfied with the performance we've been able to get out of our JIT emulator. You can see
the benchmarks for yourself. Basically, even on the really low end BlizzardPPC,
the 603/160, you get about the same performance as a 060/50MHz.. varying, you know,
obviously benchmarks vary from one situation to another and they're highly misleading from
time to time. These are more or less accurate ideas what you are getting. Even on a BPPC
you're gonna get alot more speed than you're getting on your current 040/25 and if you got
an 060/50, you're not losing anything. If you got a CSPPC you're actually gaining from
the speed that is gained even on your current hardware - so that's actually something
we're quite pleased with.

Now, what this means for the AmigaOne obviously is this is an infinitely more superior
architecture, especially the memory interface, the CPU and so forth, that you'll be able
to run existing 68k applications at factors five, ten, twenty.. of the speed that your
current 060/50 is running it, depending ofcourse of the speed of the PPC CPU used.
That in itself is already a significant bonus. Obviously, the idea is to move as much code
over to PPC for OS4 natively, cause nothing beats real code being compiled for it, but
there's some stuff that's never gonna be migrated because the author is no longer
available, the source code has been lost, and so forth. So we need a solid base to
execute our existing applications at a decent speed.

Maestro? [Change of slides]

Ok, this is a whole bunch of features, I'm just gonna walk you over it.. Well, the PPC
native tcp/ip stack, Roadshow by Olaf Barthel, it's really a jewel to use, the fastest
on the platfom. It comes with AmiSSL 2.0 which is a secure socket layer implementation.
It's got all kinds of fancy things like DHCP and so forth. It's the best and well, most
all-round stack and also the fastest on the platform, it beats even MiamiDX and that's
already in itself quite an achievement. There's still a bit of work on it, in terms of the
frontends, meaning the dialer. The actual underlying technology is completely implemented.
We're just polishing up the dialer a bit, so.. you can access all the functionality
already available.

OK, the fast file system 2 for PPC.. nothing new there, that's a well known fact already.
We've reimplemented the fast file system for backwards compatibility reasons mostly.
It's completely outdated in terms of design and performance, but you'll want to be able
to read your existing amiga partitions and migrate over to a different file system. SFS
will be included in a PPC native form for people who have been enjoying that up to now.
For the future we're looking into a new, more robust filesystem based to some extent from
[a file system] the linux or BSD world. The PPC native CD file system, nothing
spectacular there, you say? Well it's got packet writing on the one hand, and for more
advanced CD rewriters, it's also got Mount Rainier support. Now I understand that these
terms might not mean a whole lot to you - let me explain: Packet writing is the ability
to use your CD rewriter as a hard disk, basically a floppy. So instead of having to burn
a CD in one go, you can just drag files to it and copy it like you were doing it on the
normal hard disk. Packet writing is the inferior standard, it's not really a standard, but
inferior implementation. That's why Philips came up with a new standard, brand new
standard called Mount Rainier, and it basically allows you to optimally use a CD rewriter
as a storage medium, and use it as you were using any hard disk. This ofcouse gives you
alot of oppurtonities - share files, make backups on the fly without having to resort to
a specialized tool all the time.

Ok, the recovery and salvage tools. What are those? They're basically a suite of tools
designed to recover partitions, recover lost files, both for FFS2 and SFS. So when you
lose something, you know, inevitably, something IS going to go wrong at one point or
another - use this thing and you got a good chance of actually getting back your
information. Btw, you should -always- backup your hard disk, but -no one- ever does that
anyway, so.. that's why it's there.. :)

We've got the PPC native CD-Backup tool, why is this required, what can you do with it?
It's a simple tool that allows you to transfer files to a CD and exchange it with
windows and Mac users. Let's face it, floppies are no longer sufficient to exchange data
between two platforms.. I mean, let's face it, 1.4MB is nothing anymore, so you need
something that can cater fo your needs. A blank CD is, what is that.. I have to
calculate in pounds now, I was going to say something in euro, but I'll get lynched here
probably [laughter] well that's slightly less than a pound, so it's an ideal choice to
simply burn your files and exchange it with windows and mac users and vice versa.

The PPC native RTG system, everyone knows what that is, just using RTG fo graphics boards.
We will be supplying support for Permedia2, Voodoo3, Permedia3, which.. well, Chris
Morris probably gonna kill me now, but if you go over there after this presentation you
can see Picasso96 version3 running on a Permedia3 - it's an evolution of the Permedia2.
It's actually still used in workstations, usually in combination with a specialized
OpenGL chip. We're also gonna have Radeion drivers and a fair deal more. You might have
noticed that on the AmigaOne we're actually using an Nvidia card. This doesn't mean we're
gonna support Nvidia, unfortunately Nvidia doesn't give out information on its chipsets
to anybody. We've tried and we haven't entirely given up yet, but we don't think it's
very likely. What we have implemented there in the BIOS, or the firmware, of the AmigaOne
is a specialized x86 emulatora which basically takes the initialization code of the
graphics board and translates it to PPC and executes it. As a result, we get a VGA
display, you stick in a voodoo3, nvidia card, radeon.. in your AmigaOne, and you
immediately get a display when you turn it on. Thanks to Hans-Joerg Frieden for doing
that.

Ok that's.. next one! [new slide]

Ok, this is layers.library in PPC. A very specialized library and what we've done is
completely rewritten in C and optimized it and also we're now allowing - it's an option
so don't kill me - you're now allowed to move windows off sceen, if you feel the need.
You're not forced to. I get emails either way, threating me with execution if I don't
implement this feature, and other people say if you DO implement it I will be seriously
####ed off! - so we made it optional.

Ok, Warp3D - everybody knows Warp3D and the Frieden Brothers who did it. It's the 3D API
for the amiga, we're gonna completely rewrite it to support modern graphics boards like
the Radeon line - the voodoo3's a really good card but it's no longer up to date and it's
no longer being made anyway, so.. we're bringing that in aswell.

OpenGL 1.3, another 3D API, cross platform, Macintosh uses, windows uses it.
Allows for easy portability of OpenGL. Like Quake2 for instance and a great tool for
people that do not want to learn Warp3D or have code base in OpenGL to migrate it to the
amiga.

The RTA system, retargetable audio, based on AHI. Allows you to use soundcards from the
PC world.. including the Sound Blaster Live!.. we do have already since quite some time
Sound Blaster Live! drivers by Martin Blom himself, and they're working quite nicely.
It's really a well well rounded cards. Ofcourse, we have to be realistic, we're not gonna
be able to support every pleas of PCI hardware that's out there.. there's a number of
graphics boards from manufacturers that you probably never heard of before. We cannot
support them all, we're gonna select a few really good pieces and support those in favor
of supporting a whole bunch poorly, we're gonna support a few very well.

The PPC native gui system, Intuition and ReAction. Those of you that are on the internet
will have seen that we've done alot of work on intuition and actually I'm pleased to say
that its 99% finished. We'll be releasing new sceenshots soon, probably in a week or so,
maybe two weeks. I'm getting myself some leeway here, otherwise angry emails.. :)

anyway, so we'll put some screenshots on the internet which shows you what we've been
doing. Most of the time, we're using existing hacks like Visual Prefs, Full Palette,
Birdie and so forth, we're moving them into Intuition and at the same time we're
improving them or bringing new graphics [so much output system graphics? can't hear].
I know some of you have been apalled at the colorscheme of the screenshots so far,
but please be advised this it N O T the final look, and this is just a developer showing
off what he did to Intuition in terms of functionality. Massimo Tantignone
actually admitted it to me that, well, he's not really the greatest in terms of chosing
colorschemes, but you can do it all yourself if you really want to. We're really quite
close to a fully skinnable GUI system. We're not quite there but we're really close.
Tje Intuition functionality is really outstanding. We have to balance though between
breaking existing application and new functionality. I mean, we can also come up with
an Mac Os look-alike and then break 50% of the applications. I think alot of you will be
very upset if we try to do something like that. We're probably already breaking quite a
few applications that are hitting the hardware and so forth, and we're trying to insulate
us from further complaint - not that I'm trying to insinuate that amiga users complain
all the time but ;))

Anyway, let's pick it up a bit..
PPC native shell, which is the 3.9 shell from VincED from Thomas Richter.
The AmiDock, actually that's quite interesting. The AmiDock was included with 3.9. Now,
forget everything you saw in 3.9's amidock, the thing has been completely rewritten from
scratch and sports all kinds of functionality including subdocks, the ability to work
together with something called application.library. A new concept which allows
applications to register themselves with the system, so they can be represented in the
dock as a sort of taskbar, but you can issue command to the applications, say iconify,
uniconify, quit and so forth. It's a way for the system to keep track of the applications.
It's really an amazing piece of software. I believe an older version including most of
the stuff you'll seen behind me is available for demonstration over at Chris Morris there
at the left. He said that so far, no one has asked him about OS4, Probably because he hit
the sign somewhere or something, in favor of QuakeII or whatever.. anyway, if you want,
you can check this out, most of it is already there.

Ok, next [slide]

We're almost there, folks.
This is a winzip type thing, you know which allows you to extract and archive files quite
easily and user friendly. Scsi drivers for the people having the Cyberstorm cards and also
for other members of the SCSI scripts family.
AmigaInput allows you to control, as a programmer, multiple input devices like joysticks,
digital joysticks, mices, usb mice and so forth from a single place, particular for game
programmers it's quite handy, and well, we have something [to do] with games, you know
that :)

The USB stack.. self explanatory..
PPC Native Datatypes from countryman Oliver Roberts, probably the best on the market,
no, make that -definately- the best on the market. He's recompiling them for OS4 and,
well, they fly!
The HDTollBox, you saw screenshots of that on the amiga website, it's the most advanced
hard disk and partitioning tool ever made on the amiga. Some people complain that there's
too much functionality in it, well then - switch to Beginner mode :)
Sorry about that, but it's better to have a little bit more than too little!

Support for three types of open type fonts [?]
We have an absolute maniac in the OS4 development team, be the name of Dettlaff Workner
and he's doing stuff with fonts that I didn't even know was possible! Especially in
terms of supporting different languages, ofcourse for an english speaking audience, this
is not particularly important but there's people from Turkey, from Norway, I'm insulting
a bunch of people here.. people from Pagan[Software?] over there, and the french speaking people,
but anyway, so locale support is extremely important expecially for the german market
with the different signs and so forth and we're rewritten a whole bunch of libraries to
suppot it. Graphics, Locale, DiskFont.. probably missing a few. We licensed a bunch of
fonts from Agfa, the people also making the windows fonts. Basically they're metrically
compatible with what we have now, what windows has. They look quite alot better than what
we have now, TrueType fonts.. and it comes with a rather advanced font manager, but don't
ask me to explain these things, I never knew there was so many ISO standards for fonts,
really.

The web browser.. a very popular item. IBrowse 2.3, which is a bug fixed 2.2 with a much,
much improved JavaScript support. A common complaint on the amiga is that alot of pages
will not be displayed correctly or the browser chokes on java script and I can honestly
say that this is most complete java script support for the amiga up to date.

[ring-ring]
oh, that's my mobile.. sorry about that.. another Hyperion programmer calling me..

MUI PPC, everybody knows mui, the alternative gui system for the amiga, quite widely used.
Quite liked by some and hated by others, IBrowse uses it and alot of other applications
also uses it so we decided it's wise to offer it as an backwards compatibility option.
What we're doing though is we're.. Intuition and ReAction are basically being integrated
into one single UI system, and that is the preffered way to go, but there are still alot
of applic[ring-ring] ..sigh, I really have to turn it off now, he's very persistent! :)
Some of you actually know Steffen Hauser, he did the Quake port and probably wants to hear
what people has to say about it or something.

Ok, next slide.. I'm turning off my phone in the meanwhile.

Well, reading and printing of PDF files.
I mean, everybody has been frustrated already, you get this acrobat file, whatever file
from somebody with a macintosh or windows PC and it's very nice.. and what do you do with
it, then? Well, nothing really, cause you can't really open it! So, we incorporated that
and especially the printing part is rather important, because you want to be able not only
to read it, but also you want to be able to print it. and that's the whole point,
Portable Document Format.. I mean, a document on a screen is not really that portable,
really!

Dos.Library, for the specialist among you, we've retired BCPL[?]!! Tripos is now
officially -dead-! Well if nobody knows what it is, well, all the better! It's really
messy so we got rid of that. It's probably one of the most horrific legacy stuff that was
in the amigaos. Actually BCPL is a predecessor of C! That gives you idea how old this
thing was. We've completely written in C, and a few programs might break - tough luck :)

The PPC Native movie player based on Action MooVID - call it whatever you want to.
With DivX and mpeg4 support amongst others - the list of codecs was so long we ran out of
SCALA place, but basically, it's very fast. Even on a BlizzardPPC WarpOS already, it's
very impressive in terms of speed. Now there's alot of contenders out there Frogger etc,
I'm not knocking them or saying they're worse or anything, but this is a very competent
piece of software.

PPC Native devices.. like timer.device, scsi.device and so forth. We need to have those
because they're all written in 68k assembly. When we are moving over to the AmigaOne one
of the major issues is, we need to reimplement them, cause the hardware these devices are
banging is no longer there.

Generic PCI library... Have you ever wondered why it's neccesary to have three different
PCI libraries? Well, it's not really neccesary, so we're gonna get rid of that, I hope.

This is a new item on the list, the PPC native Installer replacement. Everybody loves the
Commodore Installer, except for the people who wrote scripts for it. It's actually quite
a bit of messy code. We hooked up with the people from InstallerNG and they're currently
reworking it for us to be included in OS4.

This is a list of features that we so far has selected, nothing new here. I mean, we've
been working on this for more than a year now, no, not more than a year.. well, almost a
year now.. so now you all wanna know "When is it all gonna be finished?" Well I don't
know really - just kidding :)

[next there's some talk to the guy changing slides.. irrelevant]

Ok, the development delays. A favourite question.. WHY are there development delays?
Well, originally we said "ok, we're gonna do something like feb/mar 2002" - it's now
november! I'm not particularly ashamed, really, but people are still ####ed off at me.
We completely threw out the original plan, the original plan was to have some kind of
Amiga-In-a-Box.. a bit like Amithlon or a competetive product to OS4, which shall go
unnamed :)
We wanted to make sure that we.. that even the old applications were aware of the new
kernel and could potentially, not saying that they always will do so - exploit the new
functions of the kernel - also the idea was to use WarpOS and Haage & Partner 68k emulator
to produce something like AmigaXL or Amithlon. We soon realized it wasn't very
technologically satisfying and the Frieden brothers decided they were going o ditch this
plan. Ofcourse, as soon as we did the the timeframe also went out the window...
But we tried to make up for it, for the delays, by putting alot of stuff into 4.0 which
was originally for [you to] see in 4.2, actually some of the stuff was planned for 4.5.
We hope this more or less makes up for it, otherwise, well.. sorry guys..

And then ofcourse, the.. some of you might know this, but we've actually written the
firmware for the AmigaOne Teron CX/PX boards, sold by MAI.. firmware being the BIOS piece
of software that initializes the north/southbridge.. IDE controller, PS/2 keyboard, USB
and so forth. Actually I must say that we're quite impressed by the work we've done so
far. :) We've adapted PPC Boot for the AmigaOne and it boots from floppy, from IDE, from
CD-Rom, over a network.. and all this functionality can be exploited also by, basically
OS4. Some of this stuff you can see there [exhibition hall]. Initially we had a problem
cause the hardware was thinking it was gonna boot from a serial line, and ofcourse, the
one thing we didn't bring with us was a serial line, so we had floppies, CDs, harddrives
but no serial lines. Luckily we were able to fix that.. this introduced a small delay
whilst we were taking care of it. The upside to this is that we now know the AmigaOne
hardware intimately. This will allow us to untie the operating system from the chipsets
in a much more timely fashion because we already know the IDE controller, we know the
southbridge, we know the USB and so forth.. we know the memory controller which is
basically a northbridge, so now we can move on alot faster.

What is left to do.. a burning question, especially for us. When I look at the list,
luckily it is going down every day. I hope this is not the last one? Ok, the development
status : about 90% of the OS components are now finished and the remaining 10% will be
finished during the next few weeks. Most of these components that are finished and also
some of the unfinished ones are already undergoing testing, external testing by people
since, I think, late september. It's about 23 that has been testing these modules.
I recently got an email from someone saying "I've been running the new modules from OS4 on
my Amithlon system" - apparantly that works.. we're not supposed to advertise it, but it
occasionally works, not all the time. He said to me that it ran better with the OS4
patches and in a more stable manner than OS3.9. But we're not going to do an Amithlon
version. Otherwise we'd be walking into -that- dispute and we don't want to do that.

The kernel already runs and boots on the AmigaOne as you can see over there. What is now
the work that, main work that needs to be done is the 68k emulation integration.
unfortunately we were gonna plan a demonstration here of a full system running on a CSPPC
with emulator integrated and so forth. We didn't quite make it. I think it's probably a
question of 2-3 days, that's how it goes, really - we're nearly there.

This will allow us to have a full system booting up on a CSPPC, later also on the AmigaOne
and at that point, when the rest of the OS, the 10% of the OS is finished, we can declare
the OS finished and well.. I think I'm gonna get really drunk then :)

Ok, for the AmigaOne version, we need to do the rewrite of all the hardware banging
devices and OS modules for the AmigaOne. Let's put everything into perspective, what most
people do not realize is that alot of the chipset banging is actually going on in the old
Exec. And as you know, we've rewritten the old Exec, with a HAL (Hardware Abstraction
Layer) and the rest of it runs ontop of this HAL, so.. we already have it running on the
AmigaOne so that's a major milestone in terms of migrating the classic AmigaOS over to the
AmigaOne. Actually, 5 days.. did I already say that? We're particularly proud of that :)

And then there's ofcourse all these devices, printer.device, serial.device, well printer
device is not banging the hardware, it's using paralell and serial, but this type of
device needs to be rewritten cause they directly address the current amiga hardware.
This is not so much of a problem as I've said before, the firmware has allowed us to gain
a deep insight of the amiga hardware. We hope this ia a fairly trivial matter. There's
ofcourse other issues, graphics.library will be replaced by P96 version 3. It's probably
gonna be some other place, we know for instance in the new intuition there's some kind of
check for the mouse buttons that get pressed.. we need to test this, ofcourse to see that
all the chipset dependencies are gone, but we don't foresee any major calamities - that's
with a big disclaimer, though :)

We actually haven't done it yet, but we're fairly confident. I mean, after a year, you're
allowed to be confident.

[closure, explanation that the questions will be asked and answered at 5pm]



[Hacked in with original VI on Solaris by Andreas Loong, 12th of Nov, 2002.]

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

@stew

Actually I haven't read this whole thread (and some others with the same sort of theme), but in another thread I pointed out that payments regarding the buyback of OS4 were always supposed to be done after making up the balance between AI and Hyperion.

Has anyone seen this balance?

In my book this means that any payment done by AI, would not automatically be considered a payment for the buyback. And IMO this is one of the reasons why AI agreed so "easily" to pay more. At least in the AI documentation I couldn't find any reason why they paid more.

And I also pointed out AI hasn't delivered the proof of all the payments. Doesn't mean they didn't happen, but missing proof looks very bad when you prepare a case in court.

Again, when I missed something in one of the other threads, my apologies.

Quote:

NomadOfNorad wrote: @Tigger Tigger, you are assuming that Amiga Inc have provided ALL of the relevant information, and have given it with 100% accuracy and 100% honesty.

Not at all, as the guy that built that giant timeline of how/when and where everything happened (that everyone is always crossposting) , I know they havent provide all relevant information, I just know that in all there previous cases AI has never been caught in a lie in there deposition, and I dont think any of the documents here contain any such offence.

Quote:

Second, we have not yet seen the material Hyperion will be sending to the court. It could include something that changes everything. Like, say there WAS another contract, signed later, that completely nullified the earlier contact and gave Hyperion permanent ownership of OS4.

The problem with that theory is that on April 24, 2003 we have a bill of sale between Itec and Hyperion, signed by Itec and Hyperion for the OS under the rules of the 2001 contract. That means the 2001 contract was till in force, (ie no new contract between those two) and that mean that when the money was delivered AI had paid for the OS.

Quote:

In any event, looking through the legal documents, I keep seeing things stated by Amiga that make me shake my head, and even cringe, because it looks like they are overstating their claims and overplaying their hand... They are being heavyhanded and hamfisted.

They bought the OS back over 4 years ago and it hasnt been delivered. They cancelled the contract in December and Hyperion is still using there IP and Trademarks, those are pretty big sticks the Belgian boys have given them.

Quote:

And I am quite certain there are details we don't yet have that will likely change everything.... or at least swing things very much in a different direction.

People thought Hyperion and AI were going to pull magic rabbits out of there hat during the thendic trial as well and that didnt happen either.
-Tig

_________________
We played the first thing that came to our heads, it just happened to be the best song in the world.

Quote:

So you have no additional argument stating "why you think this has something to do with the case AInc-Hyperion."?

It has to do with Hyperion violating AI's trademarks, I havent shifted the focus at all.

Quote:

(BTW, its clearly written in the Motion, that AmigaOne MoBos are no AmigaOnes. So perhaps you should sell yours as Terons without AmigaOS, just to be on the save side )

No actually its not, you keep saying that, since I read English better then you and have much more experience with US contracts then you, I'm going to go with what it really means. Print out Exhibit I, print out Paragraph 22. Tell me what in Paragraph 22 isnt a rebuttal for something in Exhibit I, case closed..

Quote:

Which is no fact, but what has to be proven by this court case or not. Right?

No, the license has been cancelled per the contract, Hyperion needs to prove in court that it was not properly cancelled, not the other way around as you seem to be implying.
-Tig

_________________
We played the first thing that came to our heads, it just happened to be the best song in the world.

@Spectre660

Quote:

Spectre660 wrote: @SpaceDruid As late as 21 November 2006 Amiga Inc's lawyers concede that the terms of the buyback have not been meet and send and addition $8,850.00 to Hyperion.

Actually the didnt at all, they in fact said they disagreed that they owed any more money, but were sending the additional $8,850 to close the issue. They paid more then 25K even before the final 8,850 in November.
-Tig

_________________
We played the first thing that came to our heads, it just happened to be the best song in the world.

@Spectre660

Quote:

Spectre660 wrote: BIG Question: Can the buyback be done before OS4.0 is completed ?

Absolutely, it says so in the contract from 2001.

Quote:

Does a buyback concede the OS4.0 is completed ?

No, again see the contract from 2001.

Quote:

What is the risk of buying something that is not completed ?

That is will never be completed.
-Tig

_________________
We played the first thing that came to our heads, it just happened to be the best song in the world.

Last edited by Spectre660 on 14-May-2007 at 02:06 AM.

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

[Transcriber's note: What follows is not word for word what Alan said. Some
references to other parties have been edited and Alan has proof-read and
expanded parts of the text to aid understanding without the support of the
visuals. All edits are my responsibility - tony wyatt 15/nov/2002.]

Alan Redhouse:

What I really wanted to do was tell you a bit more about the stuff you
probably haven't picked up on the web. And also give you a chance to talk
to me, ask me questions and for me to inform you about some of the basic
stuff which really hasn't been relevant to spell out during the process of
the AmigaOne development.

Some of you will have guessed some of this stuff, some of you won't but I
thought it was time to come clean, as it were, and say what has actually
been going on. So, the sort of things that I have put down [to talk
about], and what seem to me to be to be interesting topics that people
have emailed me about, are:

"What the hell's been happening for the last two years",

"This relationship with Mai, what's it all about, don't they just build
the boards and you sell them?".

"What's all this about special firmware and this dongle code?"

And then one of my own. I think there's been quite a lot of nonsense
talked about the interaction of choice and competition in this sort of
market and I'd really just like to share with you some of the thoughts
from my perspective on this and how I think everyone can get value for
money, not necessarily by bashing the hell out of people who are supplying
it.

And finally the AmigaOne availability options. Many of you will know, just
before setting off [for the show], we managed to get a typo-ridden
statement up on the web, in which hopefully a few of the corrections have
been made by now.


Okay, History Of The World, Part 1. What happened, how did we get
involved?

In September 2000, Fleecy [Moss] came over - he doesn't live very far from
where we are based. We had a few beers and a chat and the AmigaOne seemed a
good idea and [we discussed] what could we do, would we like to help and all
the rest of it. So, in principle, I said yes, we'd like to help but
clearly we need to put some things down on paper as to what needs doing,
who is going to do it etc. Then a few days later Bill [McEwen] announced
it at the Australia show - dare I say like a typical American marketeer.
We didn't actually get the details of the development contract with Escena
sorted out until December (2000), and that obviously involved detailed
negotiations, legal agreements, etc. That was signed in December, so
nothing started until December 2000.

What did start in December is that we started paying, and early in 2001
there was some progress [on the hardware design] but it was quite slow.
OS4 at that time was due to be done by H&P [Haage and Partner] and I can't
comment on details about the contract between H&P and Amiga, but I think
it's fairly well known now that their mutual suspicion goes back quite a
long way - probably from this point.

The upshot was that nothing happened on OS4 but we were still
putting money into the [hardware] project without seeing any sign of
return, because without OS4 there was no AmigaOne. [Without any progress on
OS4] we weren't prepared to put any more money in, and told Escena to stop
actively working on it. And then I persuaded Ben Hermans [Hyperion] to
join me in going into some fairly lengthy negotiations with Amiga Inc, to
get OS4 produced. I wanted them [Amiga Inc] to be realistic that they
weren't going to afford to pay for OS4, and that unless we could find a
formula where we could get it developed between ourselves and Hyperion,
such that it would really be delivered, the AmigaOne would be dead. And as
those of you with long memories will remember, we ultimately found a way
through and that agreement was signed here last year [2001].

So that was Phase 1, a complete waste of a year and a fair bit of money.

Part two, is a lot more encouraging. [On the OS4 front] Hyperion made
contracts with the developers, but the first stumbling block was that H&P
wouldn't play ball with them either, wouldn't release the OS3.5 or 3.9
sources.

And [on the AmigaOne front] Escena finally admitted defeat on their own
northbridge design. So, in order to look for a way around that, I started
negotiations with MAI, who had produced their own PPC version of the
northbridge chip (that's the thing which basically handles the memory, the
CPU, the PCI bus, etc). Theirs was the only northbridge, apart from
Apple's proprietary ones, which was available to support AGP. IBM also
do one that supports PCI only, but we thought that was not the way to go
for the desktop market.

I went over to the States a few times to talk to MAI, and we formed a
partnership agreement. At the end of the day, this is an agreement between
two companies and two individuals who believe they can get more out of working
together than they can working alone. And that has actually worked well for
both us and MAI this year. The result was that we took a licence, not just
for their northbridge, but for the whole Teron board design, and we terminated
our contract with Escena. And that's where the story really starts.

So, as many of you will remember, in March this year [2002] I made a big thing
about saying that the developer boards were on order, etc. They actually
were on order and the money was placed for them. The initial boards were
shipped with some firmware (that's the bit that on the motherboard and
makes sure all the bits are working, initialises the graphics cards and
all the other bits you actually need to install an operating system where
there's none there) called SofteX firmware, which was closed-source, and
should have worked, but in fact didn't.

In fact it didn't work with some of the enhancements, for example, the
UDMA-100 chipset which we had specified for the board. In the meantime, in
fact before we even started talking to them, MAI had also decided that
they needed source code for the firmware which was going to be on their
boards, so that they could offer that as source code to their [set top box
customers'] developers. They had already let a PPCBoot porting contract
with an American software house. Their [MAI's] customers/developers are
the people who MAI expected to buy many hundreds of thousands of these
chips for incorporation in set-top-boxes, etc. They [MAI] were never into
the desktop market, they had built a few boards [to the Teron design]
solely for those developers. But in the end their [PPCBoot] contractors in
America actually did hardly anything.

I wasn't prepared to let any more boards out until we had the right
firmware in place (that is the firmware that was actually going to run on
the end-user boards), because otherwise there's no point in shipping them
to our developers, for developing and testing out things that are not
going to be shipped to the users. So again, as part of the partnership
agreement, MAI's Chairman and I had some lengthy discussions - and I
eventually persuaded Hyperion that it would be in all our interests to let
MAI pay them [Hyperion] (instead of the American company) to adapt
PPCBoot. I have to say hats off to those Frieden brothers who did an
excellent job, something that this American company (big company, lots of
engineers), didn't manage to do in six months. They did it in a month, and
they did it in a way which was a lot more flexible than had ever been
envisaged before. [From a start date of the end of July] we had the first
working release of PPCBoot right at the end of August. That's a terrific
achievement.

Of course, it's all plain sailing from then on, isn't it? No, you just get
going and something else comes and kicks you in the teeth. The Articia
chipset - the northbridge - had always been designed for set-top boxes and
embedded systems - things which aren't really going to move huge amounts
of data around. We discovered (I have to say independently the boys from
bPlan discovered), that when you start moving large amounts of data
between different PCI busmasters using that chipset, it hangs. And that is
a fault with that chipset. MAI had not known that fault because it had
never been tested in that environment. And every board on sale now and
that is out there has that fault, without exception. All our developers'
boards have that fault, all the set-top boxes have that fault, and any
other desktop systems have that fault. And that means there's a very good
chance that the system will hang when you're moving a lot of data out
between two different PCI devices. But that's been fixed, and I have today
on our stand, the first two boards with that fix on, and that is why
nobody's seen the rest of the developer boards and that's why we were only
just able yesterday to announce that the user boards will be available.

In the next production run [of the Articia], probably mid next year, it
will no longer be a fix, but it will be incorporated into the next mask
revision of the Articia chipset. But at about $200,000 [for] a mask
revision, it's not something that MAI are going to do immediately or that
we're going to wait for. Because the majority of applications for these
chips don't face this problem, it's only the relatively few boards in
global terms that bPlan and us are shipping that have that problem. It
will happen when the rest of the stocks of chips are sold. I'm not
prepared to put up a hundred grand [UKP] (or even fifty grand if we share
it with bPlan) to get that mask done early, and in any event it would
delay us a few months. So all AmigaOnes will ship with this completely
acceptable hardware fix for the foreseeable future.

So, a little bit more about the partnership: MAI are an eight-year-old
start-up ­ eight-year-old in the sense that they have been working on
their [Articia] chip design for eight years. Start-up in the sense that
they haven't really sold very many, so they're still right at the early
stage of their program. And they have sample volumes out there, volumes
that are working well but not in mass production in the set-top-box
market. They expect huge volume breakthroughs to come very shortly, and
I'm sure you'll read about them in the press.

So we're their [MAI's] biggest customer for chips, and I think Thendic are
close, I'll say a close equal and be generous, OK?

MAI also commissioned the Teron PX boards, not for sale, but for internal
use, as pure development boards in sample quantities, both for themselves
and for those [developers] of the companies that they wished to sell their
Articia chipset to in the set-top box/embedded market. They only had a few
tens, maybe even low hundreds made. That's why they were costing $4000 on
the website, that's the real cost of the boards. I do emphasise that we
are really right at the beginning of the Articia chipset lifecycle. There
are some developments which are not yet implemented but are down the
track, which will give it higher graphics speed and all the rest of it.
This is a chip which is about to go into mass production but hasn't done
yet.

What does [the partnership agreement] give?

Well, it gives us the exclusive rights to the Teron based designs in the
Amiga and Linux markets

It dramatically reduces the cost to MAI's [customer's set top box]
developers in buying boards, because they can buy one from us for the four
or five hundred pounds mark, instead of the [previous] $4000. And that is
very important, because whilst MAI are very interested in getting their
chipsets out and evaluated by as many developers as possible, they can't
afford to give $4000 boards away, maybe ten at a time, to each of their
potential customers.

It gives us a state of the art design at the lowest cost, a lot lower than
going out there and engineering it from scratch, and much less than the
cost we would have paid Escena for a design we now know is fundamentally
flawed.

It gives MAI a royalty on each AmigaOne board sold (or each board sold for Linux
that we sell), so that helps amortise their costs and helps with funding
the commissioning of new board designs. We have been talking to them about
some quite exciting prospects which may take the Amiga back to the
all-in-one compact design where it was a few years ago.

And as far as we and Amiga (and Hyperion) are concerned, that close
relationship also opens up the possibility of using OS4 in set-top boxes
and embedded systems. OS4 would be very good for that, with its near real-time
code and all the rest of it, so there could be licence fees flowing both ways.
And also a lot of opportunities for people who have got some skills in
developing under OS4 on the AmigaOne to get into the real commercial
marketplace at real commercial rates... (wish I could program!).

Okay, so next a little bit about the AmigaOne firmware. One of the big
advantages of PPCBoot is that it's open source. And that means that
Hyperion can amend it, to make it a lot nearer how the Amiga operating
system works. For example, it's possible to boot the AmigaOne, both Linux and
the Amiga OS, from the rigid disk block, the RDB, just like the Amiga
does, as well as from USB, serial and all the other things. In a stroke of
genius, (Ben [Hermans of Hyperion] may have told you this earlier), the Frieden
brothers actually grafted on an X-86 emulator to execute the BIOSs on any
cards which actually need to be initialised. PC cards generally speaking
(video cards obviously), have a piece of code on board which needs to be
executed right at the beginning, and that's the thing that puts the logos
up on your PC screen when you boot, before the operating system starts
booting. So this code will allow any card that goes in there (any graphics
card, and any other card that requires initialisation to boot), to
initialise itself. And you have to do that, otherwise you've got no means
of installing an operating system. If you like, PPCBoot is the mini
operating system which allows other operating systems to be installed.
That's very important, because it means that you can use PC-standard
hardware with PC BIOSs on board (not special PPC-native execution code or
open firmware execution code). It also means that you don't have to cater
for that exclusively within the drivers that you write in the operating
system, so in other words, it would be *possible* not to have this at all,
and install the operating system blind, loading some code first to try to
initialise the cards but that would be too cumbersome for words.

[The adoption of PPCBoot] means also that the process of these graphics
cards' initialisation is also able to be monitored [via the serial
interface for example] and understood, which makes it a lot easier (with
their OS4 hats on), [for Hyperion] to graft that code into OS4. So
although ostensibly it's taken some time out of the schedule, it's also
added a huge amount of value into the OS4 process.

I know on ANN and other lists, my friend Seehund and other people have
said quite a lot of things about the dongle code, but to me it's a very
simple issue. The dongle code is there so that Hyperion get their rewards
for every copy of Amiga OS run. That's important because that's how
they've done their sums. If they'd done their sums assuming some level of
piracy (or just a percentage takeup), it would have been either
unaffordable or never done. So that's my contribution, if you like, in
saying that I will try to protect Hyperions revenue stream against piracy.
We will sell boards to the Linux market, but they will not run Amiga OS4.
Of course, someone may pirate the dongle code and all the rest of it, but
to be quite frank, for the small difference in price, it's not going to be
worth the effort. And if it's done on a mass scale it'll be easy to spot.
Nothing more than that, the AmigaOne will run any other OS for which it is
licensed. Bill Buck told me in France they'd had Morph OS running on it, I
think it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek thing, I think they've had MorphOS
running on the Teron CX developer board with SofteX that they'd bought
from MAI some time ago but, you know, there may be some potential there if
they want to do it, that's fine. Their licence copy protection scheme is
up to them [if they want to prevent MorphOS piracy]

Another thing which we touched on, as you know, is "we won't pirate OS4,
but we think the dongle infringes our civil liberties" attitude. In other
words, "it removes the ability [for us as potential users] to exercise our
judgement not to pirate OS4". I think that's ####. Others have quoted
the example of MorphOS, but I think MorphOS is just as tied to the
hardware as we are. The other interesting misunderstanding is that (for
anyone who understands the principle by which OS4 is written), OS4 has to be
specifically tied to the hardware implementation on every type of board on
which it runs. We use a different Southbridge chip, and various other
things which are different from Pegasos, you cannot take the CD that will
be supplied with an AmigaOne, and stick it on a Pegasos machine or on a
CyberStorm, and expect it to boot. They [the OS versions] have to be
specifically done to match the hardware platform. The only reason the
dongle code is there is to stop people from going around buying Linux boards,
and pirating OS4 to use it on those.

Okay, so that's that. A couple of things which I'd like to add, my sort of
payback, I guess, is some stuff on competition.

Now, everyone remembers the good old days of the Amiga market. Five million
systems sold, lots of users, even five years ago, tons of users.
Now it's a very small base but a lot of people still think [that] the more
hardware competition you've got, the cheaper prices will be. Not true.
If you're talking about a huge volume market, a few hundred thousands boards
or whatever, of course it does, because the more people that come in, the more
economies of production kick in and the lower unit price margins can be.
But we're talking now, essentially, certainly at this stage, about a closed
market.

So if there are ten thousand potential purchasers and I'm the only supplier,
my unit board cost will - for example - be about two thirds' [what it would
cost me to make] a run of half that number of boards. If that ten thousand
[boards] is shared between two [manufacturers], then the total cost of each
board to me, and therefore to you, will be more, by - in this example - 50%.
If we divide that even further it just becomes untenable, and people drop out.
In fact, Fleecy will tell you that I said if there's any more than two people
involved in this Amiga marketplace I wouldn't play ball because I couldn't
make the sums add up. So competition is not necessarily best for price with
these products; what you're really getting is a low volume bespoke board at
approaching volume quantity prices. And that's really because we've been
very careful about how we've done the deals and Hyperion have been very
careful about the way they've spent their money, and how they've
incentivised their developers.

Right, this [Amigaone pricing and availability] is quite probably old hat
by now, but it was quite new when I wrote it yesterday. There are three
models, designed, debugged and production-ready. Two models in production
before Christmas, that's the SE model (the entry-level one with the
soldered-on CPU) and the XE G4. And this is the reason why it's a
last-minute posting, we've only this week got the confirmation of the deal
through from Motorola and that makes that sort of price possible. And I
think the general reaction from the comments I've seen is that it's below
people's expectations of price and above performance level expectations. I
hope it is, I'm sure it's going to be an excellent product. In fact I know
it's going to be an excellent one because I've tried it.

The other thing we have to do, and I'm very keen on doing, is making sure
that we build into these things adequate margins for the dealers, to
survive, and support, and advertise, and market, little by little, not big
splashes, not television advertising. To be able to attend shows for
example, they have to make money and they have to make that out of the
margin on the boards.

It includes the licence fees that we pay to Amiga Inc. and to MAI.

It includes a two-year warranty, which we have to hold at our expense
because it just isn't practical to ship volumes of boards backwards and
forwards to the far East to get little fixes done.

And it includes an adequate return for us because you know, my time, my
people's time is money, and we've spent a huge amount of time on this and
quite a lot of money. Of course we've tried to be very careful in how we
do things and do good deals, but you know, my bank manager also expects a
return on the money we have to put up front for board production (in fact
he expects a whole lot more, actually, but that's his problem).

So, what are you waiting for?

That's all I'm going to say, not whizzy-bangy, but hopefully it's cleared
a few issues and maybe raised a few more, so I'm very happy to take
questions.

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card

"AmigaOS 4.0 Developer Pre-release" CD announced for early 2004





Leuven, Belgium. - December 25, 2003

Hyperion Entertainment and the OS 4.0 development team are pleased to announce that OS4 development has now sufficiently advanced for a comprehensive Developer Pre-release of Amiga OS 4.0 to be distributed to all current AmigaOne owners shortly after the New Year.

In view of the fact that quite a few of you reminded us that you do not have broadband internet access, the original idea to offer an initial version of OS 4.0 for download was abandoned in favor of an "easy to install", self-contained distribution on CD.

Whilst this will obviously entail more cost to Hyperion and require more time for duplication and distribution, the upside is that we will be able to provide developers with everything they need to start developing for OS 4.0.

The developer material will include sample source-code, an initial version of the AmigaOS 4.0 SDK as well as native OS 4.0 compilers (GCC 2.95.3, GCC 3.4 and VBCC) and cross-compilers for various platforms (Linux x86/PCC, Mac OS X etc.).

The Developer Pre-release will require an upgrade of the AmigaOne firmware which was bumped from U-Boot 0.1.1 to U-Boot 1.0 and which is currently undergoing final testing.

Further details will be announced shortly.

Hyperion Entertainment and the OS 4 development team would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support and patience.

The fact that you are still here, 10 years after the demise of Commodore, has been a tremendous encouragement to us during these 2 years of laborious development.

Make no mistake: your patience will finally be rewarded with the fastest and most powerful incarnation of AmigaOS ever.

Merry X-mas and a prosperous 2004 to all of you!

_________________
Sam460ex : Radeon Rx550 Single slot Video Card : SIL3112 SATA card