Hi.

For those who haven't listened to it yet, I've done a quick transcript of Ben Hermans speech/Q&A from Amiga Alpe Adria. You can find it here asDivX video and here as mp3 audio

This cetainly isn't word for word. I've summarised and paraphased, and also moved some things around to aid clarity (oh, and I've missed out all the bits in Italian )


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Ben Hermans (and Andrea Vallinotto) at Amiga Alpe Adria
- A quick and dirty transcript
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[AOS4pre CD] This is the biggest step in Amiga history for many years, a PPC native Amiga operating system brought into 21st century. Alot of work. You've had wait a long time, but after 31 Months its out now, and everyone buying A1 now will get this CD. The CD contains a full developer SDK to start developing for OS4. Software that will work on final release of OS4.0.

I'd hoped today to announce the first OS4dev update but unfortunately there have been some technical issues, with how to distibute this via our website. But you will be able to register, and download updates at our website.

[Whats in the first update?]
-new A1IDE.device (current PIO 0 mode very slow). Dont know if UDMA enabled in this first update. Heavy testing, some interaction issues with sound drivers, occasional glitch playing sounds.
-new Amidock
-new kernal with Altivec support, dynamic power management (allows shutdown of certain parts of cpu if overheating, or to reduce power requirement)
-new Ibrowse
-P96 PPC native
-new GIF datatype with LZW compression enabled (patents expired)
-new ELF.library, Dos.library, native shell commands
-updated PPC native Radeon driver - much improved

Ben:Andrea tells me its a lot faster

[Other upgrades?]
New version Roadshow maybe. What we're aiming for every 2 months to release upgrades, that introduce new functionallity (for instance PPC native P96), without going into too small incremental updates.
Also next few months release new version UBoot firmware (shown here v1.1.1) Andreas working alot on that. Its faster, Pio4 booting enabled, fixes in X86 bios emulator for graphics cards, support hard disks bigger than 128Gb [LBA48?]

HJF working hard on Radeon 3D drivers, dont know when finish but good progress.

An SDK update with gcc3.4 is coming.

Release subsequent updates release thru website. Users don't have to wait another, say 6 months for substantial new functionality. Regular updates improve functionallity so final release date not such a holy grial for users. We are very eager to get it finished and out door asap, after 32 months very hard work.


[Developer support?]
Working with alot of developers. Working with current developers to migrate their existing codebases from OS31-39. There is a OS4 mailing list with a lot of existing developers, (eg authors of Pagestream, Candy Factory etc), and talking other developers to get their titles moved to OS4.

Hyperion will do OS4 versions of own titles.

For developers outside Amiga community alot of persueding will be necessary. Getting Windows, Mac, Linux developers to port stuff will be very hard. Will need to initially licence and port ourselves in some cases. Important initially to build application base this way.

[SDK]
Quality of SDK is beyond what where previous 3.5 or 3.9 NDKs, for first time it is professional SDK with GDB debugging, compilers, cross-compilers etc. New updates to grim reaper much more detail info. Its never been easier to develop for the platform.

Andreas: Compiling on A1 is different world to before. Debugging much easier.

Hyperion has from doing lot of work in Linux, Win, MacOS etc, been exposed to very professional dev enviroments, documentation, header files, autodocs etc. We're trying to bring to same quality of support for our developers, the same standards, and to make easy for developers who have left the platform to be comfortable to compile their apps for AOS.


[Italian developers]
Andrea did Mediatoolbox, alot of work of UBoot, and now working on the SNAP port, Massimo T did all intutition work. Work closely with Eleanor [name?], and we have (PNG) PowerIcons nicely intergrated (much more so than PowerIcons on OS35), although its not offically supported.


[Change of ownership?]
Kmos onwership wont change anything with OS4 or A1. AmigaOS4 is separate.
Obviously if a new owner comes in to buy rights to AOS they have reason, to come in buy just this thing its because they have very clear idea in mind. Can't tell you under NDA. They will push AmigaOS into new markets that you wont associate Amiga with before, and some may or may not be under name Amiga, I cannot say. But KMOS have plans for AmigaOS which are a departure to what Amiga has been associated last few years.

[Marketing and advertising?]
Market very small, enthusiasts, 10-15K, initailly existing userbase, then target past owners and UAE emulators users. Theres alot of interest from people who remember amiga, would like to come back, but until recently all they could get motherbord from 1994 era. Maybe also people for who a Mini_ITX board would be cool.

Andrea: It is for you all to let the world know too.

There are also markets where name 'Amiga' is important. Set-top boxes, Kiosk systems currently using old legacy Amiga hardware.


[PPC]
PPC going to be very important. The 970 (G5) recaputered imaginations of the world. Alot of interest in PowerPC right now. All next-gen consoles will be PPC based, Nintendo Revolution, XBox2, even Sony PS3 cell processor is based on IBM PPC.

IBM investing a lot in this. Chinese market, power consumption, very important. They calculated if current WindowsPC userbases go up to 300 million (out of several billion people), they would need to build another 2 or 3 nuclear powerplants just to run those PCs. Savings from power comsumption of 7-8 watts represents enormous savings when its multiplied across millions of people. IBM is going after this market - we can also go after to some extent, along with Mai, IBM.

A lot of development of PPC, even at the low end. PPC 405 [440?] from IBM, which could go into handheld devices, mobile phones, pdas, tablet devices . Wide range development of PPC technology. Anywhere PPC goes AOS can follow even the slowest PPC, could run well, AOS was designed for performance of 68000. We can go anywhere PPC goes from lowest upto most powerful.



Its out there to see. Buy new A1 or visit A1 owning friends and you will see. It will now only become faster more stable, more efficient. Alot of work has already gone on in last 3 months. Betatesters will already know the difference, whats on that CD and whats now available. Some of this will be in the update. you will be surprised at improvement.

@Rebel

Thanks for the transcript.


sounds promising, hopefully the updates will come soon

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Site admins are people too..pooff!

@Rebel

Thanks! very interesting reading!

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ikir

Thank you, it's always very nice having transcripts, and this one is very appreciated.. some stuff there that I didn't know about.. *s*

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If I started a site about cow dung, and someone wanted to discuss dog poo, I wouldn't give a ####.

@Rebel

Thanks Very interesting.

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Sam440ep-flex 800MHz 1GB RAM R9250 128MB SB Live!

@Rebel

Thanks for that transcript.

Its all sounding rather .....


BONZER

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I dont suffer from Insanity - I enjoy it

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Cool

@Rebel

Kudos!

Really interesting read, indeed. Sounds very promising.

It will be very interesting to read the reports from the forthcoming AmiWest show, I must say. And equally interesting to download the imminent(?) upgrade.


While I don't really think this qualifies for a dancing 'nana (they'll have to show us the goods first ), I know there are plenty of people out there who seem to find an AmigaWorld-BAF-dancing-banana-post the most annoying thing in the world. So, just for them, here are two:






Btw, I think "Eleanor" should read "Elena Novaretti" if I haven't misinterpreted that paragraph.

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A1G4XE, OS4-pre

@Rebel

Good work

Looking even more forward to the announcement by Gary Hare.

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@Rebel
Great. can't wait to get this upgrade

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A computerworld without MS products and Windows!
Connect your Amigas ...
...The Red ONE-A1XE G4 - A3000T- A3000 - A4000 - A2500- A1000 - A600 - CDTV - CD32...
and your PDAs and laptops ...
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@Rebel

Quote:

HJF working hard on Radeon 3D drivers, dont know when finish but good progress.

Cool! Can you imagine new OS4 gfx demos running on a modern graphics card?? Nice!

And this is something the Friedens are quite experienced with if I remember right... excellent news.

Btw thanks for typing up the transcript for us Rebel.

@Rebel

Thanks for the transcript...

These transcripts are very well appreciated from all those non-english amigans (or little understander of spoken english, like me ) that have some difficulty to try to understand what is said in those (sometime very little clear) mp3/videos...

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AmigaOS, the last hope...

@Rebel

Mmmm, Altivec support.
Time to kick some ass in the RC5 contest and hopefully faster MP3 encoding.

@jahc

Quote:

Cool! Can you imagine new OS4 gfx demos running on a modern graphics card?? Nice!

Hmm...what I would like to know is how many BPS (Bounces Per Second) I would get with the classic bouncing boing ball demo...

Kay

@Rebel

Thanks for the transcript very helpful to us who have dialup connections. two things i noticed were: 1. no usb mentioned here for os4 in the first update
2. no serial.device mentioned for the first update.
be good to know where those items stand.

painter

@Rebel

Excellent news. A shame this couldn?t actually be posted to the Hyperion/KMOS site to give some structure to things - but I'm just nitpicking.

Major respect is due to Hyperion for getting this far. The task that lies ahead of them is still massive and I hope that progress is swift and focused.

Maybe it was a bit of a mistake mentioning the update is 'imminent'. It would have been better to wait until it was ready as there is a danger that slippage could upset people again.

Overall I am impressed at the rate of development but that release date whilst not the 'holy grail' for existing users is indeed just that for the rest of us and for Amiga/KMOS new markets. Sounds suspiciously like set-top-box stuff to me but anything that generates revenue and users is useful.

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Sam