And now, i will bring back the topic of... the dongle !

Will Hyperion be silly enough to stick with this OS4 extensions in UBOOT, and then loosing the opportunity of selling OS4 to thousand of Asian who may buy this Linux' Teron Mini system ?

Or will these board be sold with the extension already included ???

@ Oxygenet

Quote:

Bad, bad news IMO.

Do you think the Amiga market alone would be big enough to sustain a healthy hardware market in the near future?

IMO for the long run higher volume hardware sales would be very important for the survival of the AmigaOne platform. More sales also means that development / testing costs could be better spread amongst a larger pool of customers and would also allow larger volume component deals to be made (thus being cheaper for the developer)! Also I believe that success of the PPCLinux platform with for instance the MicroA1 / Mini Teron may pave the way or just allow for interesting oppertunities with regard to AmigaOS4 as well. Would Alan Redhouse be presenting AmigaOS4 in China if LinuxPPC did not exist for the platform at all?

Of course, with companies being companies, shortages may result into price increases if the demand is high enough. But the opposite of having a shortage of demand may influence the price negatively as well and in such a case may not leave enough resources for proper support, future development and eventually the company may bankrupt and its products cease to be available.

@Coder

Yes yes yes.

I always thought that AmigaOS was only able to display characters from Euroland.

Does AmigaOS4 have unicode support?

Before I can even begin to get excited about this, perhaps someone could elaborate on the arrangement between Eyetech and Mai Logic.

My understanding was that Eyetech convinced Mai Logic to create a complete motherboard when they only intended to produce a chipset. I also heard that Mai thought that Eyetech was a little daft in their proposal to produce Amigas out of the board.

What has Eyetech got vested in these boards if they're not labelled Amigas? And would these boards be closer to the uA1-I or uA1-C boards? You mention dongle, is there something in the BIOS that needs to be changed to run AmigaOS or can these boards automatically run it? If it can't then there is a lot of wasted opportunity to get AmigaOS into the Asian market.

As this report was from Mai Logic, who is to say there weren't any Pegs at the event.
Also, where does Alan mention he was at the event? I would like to read that.

Why do Mai Logic deliberately leave Eyetech or Amiga off their press release? Are they partners or competition?

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."

@angrybit

I believe full unicode support is in/will be in OS4. However, there are a lot of issues, besides character rendering involved, and I have no clue what the current status is.

@BigBentheAussie
There are many types of partnerships in the businessworld. From Mai's standpoint Eyetech may appear no more than just as a board producer who happens to have full boards ready to go, or as a close partner in the sense that they work so closely that MIA virtually acts as Eyetech's front man.

Who knows? Seriously when you look at a lot of publically declared partnerships you are often just seeing joint PR and no real substance at all (look around the net partnership declarations are just a form of co-endorsements -- cheap publicity stunts).

Partnerships which are about actually getting things done and making money often are never seen publicaly. Having once worked in advertising I learnt one valubale lesson, fluff and bubble is for the public, what actually goes on is a different story all together.

I don't know, Eyetech could be treated like some hole in the wall manufacturer of no great concern, or the reverse -- who are making the teron boards at the moment besides Eyetech? I don't know the answer, there may be a couple of companies, but not many I suspect. It may have been Eyetech's board.

And sure you are right there may have been Pegasos/Genesi at the event also and the Chinese could be drowling over it, but I am pretty sure if they had been we would have heard about it by now.

On the brightside, who knows the show and tell may well have been A1s themselves, no reason for MIA or Eyetech to muddy the waters, what do the Chinese potential buyers care -- they want to see the PC and new bus architecture in action (there is a thought) I doubt they care for who did what to show it to them.

_________________
Greg Schofield, Perth Australia

@BigBentheAussie
Quote:

My understanding was that Eyetech convinced Mai Logic to create a complete motherboard when they only intended to produce a chipset. I also heard that Mai thought that Eyetech was a little daft in their proposal to produce Amigas out of the board.

I believe that MAI's Teron board design was available for some time before Eyetech tied up their deal with MAI. Remember, the AmigaOne project as it is now is a 'plan B'. The original plan was for a board that made use of custom logic, and when that design proved to be unworkable Eyetech had to go shopping for an off-the-shelf replacement.

Quote:

What has Eyetech got vested in these boards if they're not labelled Amigas?

As I understand it, no, they don't benefit directly as Eyetech just licenses the Teron design and buys Articia S chips. MAI is free to build and sell Terons without any involvement from Eyetech. However, it makes sense for the two companies to gain additional economies of scale by jointly ordering their boards in one big lump from the manufacturer. So if MAI lands a big order for TeronMinis it may indirectly help Eyetech by reducing the manufacturing costs of the MicroA1 C.

Lots of TeronMini sales also helps MAI's bottom line and provides more cash for R&D, which must be a good thing for all concerned, although I confess to being mystified as to how MAI's finances work. They must be getting cash from somewhere other than sales or they'd have gone down long before now. I suspect that selling Articia S chips in lots of a few hundred wouldn't even pay their electricity bill.

_________________
Who do you serve, and who do you trust? - Galen

@BigBentheAussie
HERE

@Oxigenet
Are you joking? :-O
See MikeB post...

_________________
ikir

"Does AmigaOS4 have unicode support?"

I bet something is planned.

This is from os.amiga.com:
" FT2Engine: new powerful font-engine

FT2Engine is an Amiga font engine that allows you to use "alien" font formats with each program that either uses diskfont.library or the bullet.library API.

Features:

* Supports PostScript Type1 and Type42, TrueType/OpenType (including TrueType collections, embedded bitmaps, and OpenType 1.3 with Unicode characters beyond 0xffff), PFR (Truedoc dynamic webfonts), BDF&PCF (X11 bitmap fonts) and Windows .fnt/.fon fonts.
* Global font, glyph and charmap cache with adjustable size.
* Support for embedded fonts (raw font from memory without .otag file).
* Includes font manager FT2Manager with localized MUI GUI that allows you to install, modify, rename and delete fonts, create bitmap fonts in different charsets, select encoding, adjust metrics, select between three types of hinting, view all Unicode3.2 chars, view any text (encoded in UTF- 7|8|16|32 or plain 8bit) with the selected font, kerning and charset. Has bubble help, selectable font smoothing etc.
* diskfont, asl and locale library now support:
o Font names with more than 30 characters
o Fonts and catalogs with different charsets
o Selection of the default system charset (e.g. ISO-8859-15 with Euro)
* Improved "bullet" API (font smoothing, bitmap font support etc) "

But what's the latest status? Do chinese characters already work, how about locales, etc?

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

Related info from AmigaWorld's "Ask Fleecy" Q&A sessions:

Quote:

Quote: The support for non-Latin fonts like for instance Arabic/Persian and Chinese/Japanese characters were not well documented for previous AmigaOS releases. How will such characters and languages be handled by future AmigaOS and AmigaDE releases? Fleecy: Not well documented is too optimistic :) It was documented that the Amiga character set is ECMA-94 Latin1 (thats ISO-8859-1), that the bullet.library API uses Unicode (16bit only), and it was defined a font attribute FPF_REVPATH for writing from right to left. There was no official statement from H&P how their special localizations for e.g. czech or russian would fit into this framework (in fact they did not). There was a statement that the Euro update is only an intermediate solution. OS4 bullet API was improved and allows 32bit Unicode now, 16bit are not enough since Unicode 3.2 (current is 4.0). OS4 diskfont.library now contains a character set database, it does know the MIME charset name of each font in the system, and the Unicode code point of each glyph. However the bitmap fonts handled by diskfont.library are still limited to 8bit charsets, so for Chinese/Japanese/Persian/Georgian etc you'll have to use bullet API. With the new diskfont API you can however ask for e.g. Times in ISO-8859-5 (cyrillic), -6 (arabic), -7 (greek), -8 (hebrew), -11 (thai) or -16 (eastern european latin with Euro) and it will create it on-the-fly from e.g. a truetype font. With OS4 locale.library the user is able to change the current system default charset on-the-fly by selecting a different language driver. The charset of each catalog file in the system is known, there exist charset conversion functions that ensure that e.g. for polish with ISO-8859-2 system default charset any polish catalog file will be displayed correct, it does not matter if its in ISO-8859-2, -16 or in the special ATO charset used in OS3.9 polish localization. Its also possible to use catalog files in UTF-8. Most text handling and output functions in OS4 are not able to write from right to left, so there still exist large problems with arabic/persian and hebrew, an application that reverses arabic and hebrew strings before output can at least display its GUI but for text input (cursor on the right after return) special applications would be needed. Summary: OS3.x language support was limited to western european latin languages, OS4.0 language support is limited to latin, cyrillic and greek (thai would eventually work if someone could fit thai glyphs into topaz/8 and topaz/9 default ROM fonts). OS4.0 font support is limited to any 8bit MIME charset in diskfont API (besides the right-to-left problem) and not limited in bullet API.

Back to the China topic
Maybe it's time for Amiga-related companies to learn from the real proffesionals how to advertise the SW and the HW

LOL Treke, where do you geezers find all these sites?!

_________________

@Bodie_CI5

What do you mean by "all these" ? AFAIK It's first I've posted

re

Treke

edit: Yup: "geezers", not geezer , Well I've found it in the mailbox today . A good one, I guess..

YAWN!


I see no evidence of Eyetech profitting from this, or getting us cheaper motherboards or anything at all.

In China, piracy reigns supreme, and cheap HW is a glut.

AmigaOnes HAVE to drop in price.

MAI will make some money, but like was said earlier, how the heck do they even stay in business with the LOW volume of AmigaOne sales??

Anyhow, make it cheaper, and I'll buy an ADDITIONAL XC board* to the XC I DESPERATELY want**!!!!!



AmigaOne! Pre-AOS4.0! * I'm THAT fanatic!!!!!!!!!!


** Even though I have a G4 XE @ 1000 MHz. I don't have space or budget for still another computer, so I'd put the extra XC motherboard in the closet. BTW, it has to be a 1.4 GHz or higher G4 with Altivec, to be worth getting.

@Hombre

Quote:

Will Hyperion be silly enough to stick with this OS4 extensions in UBOOT, and then loosing the opportunity of selling OS4 to thousand of Asian who may buy this Linux' Teron Mini system ?

China is not exactly reknowned for its adherence to copyright protection laws and selling dongle free AOnes in China may well spread the OS both far and near but I fear no one will profit from the effort.

In that case it would be just as effective to give it away to everyone then you would be sure that it ended up on every machine!

From a PR side of things it's probably a good move but I don't know how anyone would make money on it in the short term. I would guess (please anyone correct me if I'm wrong here) MorphOS has the edge there since they have no developement costs that have to be covered through sales.

For my part I'm gladly paying for all versions that I can get a hold of!

_________________
Fixed A1G4XE 7455 RX933PC with fried CPU
Sapphire Radeon 9100 128mb
ESI Juli@ 24bit 192kHz Envy24HT
Sil 680 Ultra Ata 133 E-ide
SeaGate Barracuda 120gb 8mb cache

@Treke:

and with this MS grew to the biggest software company out there? I can't believe it!

_________________
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 ...
Psion 5mx Pro - Psion NetBook - Apple iPhone - MacBook Pro

You have to think that at least government agencies will pay for the OS.
Anyway, it's not about who is the cheapest, its about who gets the most kickbacks.
C'mon, you think Halliburton was given Oil contracts in Iraq because it was the cheapest or the best?
Basically, you pay off or bribe some corrupt official in China and you'll wipe Windows off the map. Unfortunately, that's the way you have to do business in the global economy.
(sigh) You want to play to win don't you???

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."

@mbilla

Sure. Making fool from yourself is a way to success I hope they didin't copright it

@mbilla

"and with this MS grew to the biggest software company out there? I can't believe it!"

And suse is the next one to rule the (business) world.
http://www.suse.de/en/business/products/server/standard/slss_brochure.pdf
(see the front page of the brochure)

_________________
- KimmoK
// For freedom, for honor, for AMIGA
//
// Thing that I should find more time for: CC64 - 64bit Community Computer?

Woah!!! It just occurred to me.
What do these things look like?
They could be our new Amiga boxes.

_________________
Leo Nigro, CTO Commodore USA, LLC
Opinions expressed are my own and not those of C= USA.
Commodore/AMIGA "Beautiful, High-Performance, Home Computers for Creativity and Entertainment."