Zaragoza AmigaOS4 / MOS Show report
Date 17-Dec-2003 17:22:33
Topic: Events
| This Saturday 13 a MOS-OS4 show was done in Zaragoza, Spain.
This is the first report without photographs or videos, we hope to put them online really soon(tm)
Source: CUAZ
Read more for the English version:
On friday the 12nd Zurt, Crumb & Puppy did a recognition mission in the speech hall of San Valero to check that the projector, microphones and everything else was in order. By night Freemem and CMIS arrived and a little later Ami603 and Sandra, his girlfriend. We meet in order to have a dinner and to drink some beers, the Asturian expedition formed by DeQuevedo & LotoJet (The legend says that armed with a soldering iron and a pair of cables he made an ide controller for his A500) didn't arrive until the 3:00 a.m. loaded with a Pegasos, an Amiga 1200 and a pair of monitors.
And on Saturday the 13rd it was the great day! At last! At 9:30 a.m. we started to assembly our equipment. The demo collection Iolo selected for the Demoscene Introduction was shown by LotoJet, we talked a little and around ten o'clock the presentation started. Eduardo of San Valero started the activities giving a wellcome to the people who came and presented the people who was going to give the first talk. This introduction to the Amiga was done by Zurt and Lotojet and they explained the history of the Amiga to allow people who didn't know the platform to understand why AmigaOS4, MorphOS, Pegasos and AmigaOne have appeared. They commented the main features of AmigaOS (3.x) and they showed the differences between AmigaOS and other Operating Systems, and explained the way it works (internally and from the user point of view). The programming introduction wasn't carried out because it was totally impossible for Iolo to come to Zaragoza, but on the other hand all the presentation included information about programming for AmigaOS (or MOS) so programmers got an idea about the tools they would need and an overview about how stuff works.
The Pegasos/MorphOS presentation started around 11:00 a.m. and was carried out by DeQuevedo, Zurt y Crumb. As I'm one of the betatesters you will probably understand that I knew the current status of MOS so forgive me if my MOS presentation description isn't very detailed. Well, it's almost completed although it still lacks some components. I think that despiting the fact that in some moments we talked about technical information that may have bored to the public, in general most of people didn't fall sleep and they could show each part of MorphOS working (Of course, we also showed the motherboard, we talked about its features and Zurt gave us a course of OpenFirmWare and MUI). Finally we showed some applications working like Mplayer, Kaya, FXPaint, AmIRC, YAM, MakeCD... and some others, as we used the final board revision of Pegasos I with April2 and a G3/600 to show everything we hadn't any lock up (or at least I can't remember it and most of people didn't notice it). We end up the MOS Presentation with a WarpOS/Warp3D demo of the Encore group. I can't remeber if it was "Sulaco" or "By night", with the Voodoo3 it was really smooth, at 50fps in almost all scenes. Simultaneusly the people who came could test the boards and they took some photographs.
After the long MOS presentation we leaved the building to have lunch and drink some coffee. I enjoyed a lot talking directly with everybody. After the coffee we found some known faces like the Juan Carlos Marcos one (he had a well-known web of news some years ago), who had come with his wife and his child to see the AmigaOS4 presentation. Firstly Ami603 showed us MacOnLinux running MacOS X on his AmigaOne. I must say that I was impressed because I thought that without 3D acceleration it would run much slower... I was wrong, it was fast! Screen updating was fast (or at least very useable). These rumours may be true on a G3/600 but on a G4/933 it worked quite smoothly. We couldn't show it running on the Pegasos I because Debian didn't want to boot (we may have tried to reinstall but as we had to do a MOS presentation we thought that it was more important to have MOS working correctly). As the public wanted to see OS4 in action Ferry and Ami603 delighted us in a short time with the so waited presentation. The firmware included a GUI and seemed more or less intuitive, it was fast booting, supported catweasel... it looked good. I liked the presentation, it was quite fast but lots of answers came inmediately. Ferry and specially Ami603 replied every answer without problems. Everyone saw a pair of lockups when some 680x0 apps (Ibrowse2 specially) were running, we saw as tasks were killed nicely. In conclusion it seems quite finished in the level of components, but it neededto improve 680x0 compatibility and a native ppc graphics.library, this last point was noticeable when you did solid window resize but when you moved windows it seemed useable. We saw the Fractal example compiled for OS4 and ppc, it worked smoothly and was very fast. After they answered the questions Ami603 & Ferry told us that the current version was much more advanced than the one or more months old version the showed us, and they told us that the current version has L2 cache support, fast IDE drivers, JIT emu, a WOS launcher, Warp3D support, the grpahics.library is almost ppc now and compatibility and stability has improved a lot.
Due to that fact I would have prefered to see the latest version because the latest version would have caused a much better impression in the public. The pre-release will be here very soon, so I don't understand why it wasn't shown. Alan Redhouse couldn't come but he told us that with enough anticipation, Bill Buck told us that he was very interested but he was busy too so he couldn't come (He phoned me on Saturday but as my mobile phone was silent I didn't noticed it and I forgot to check out the lost phone calls... I'm sorry). I hope that in the next spanish presentations Genesi and Amiga Inc show us more support.
After the OS4 presentation the public tested the new computers (it's funny because I didn't test OS4... I had not time) the betatesters showed their machines, and me too. The A4000 version of OS4 was not shown due to lack of time to install it. It was nice to see people without amigas interested, and I liked to see so much Amiga-people together. We thought about new names for the next show as "Second alternative congress of new multimedia network technologies" to make it sound more trendy  we dismounted the machines around 8:30 p.m. because at 9 o'clock the alarms were activated and the dobermans would be free to bite us.
At night we were around 20 people to have dinner in "La Forja", a typicall restaurant, and at last I calmed down and breathed without stress because everything had finished well and the main problems had been addressed. And we enjoyed the big dinner! ;-D It was great to talk with everyone you meet on internet in the mail lists and the web forums, and also to those club members we hadn't meet in a long time... after that we visited a pair of pubs and slowly people started to leave us to go to sleep...
This presentation has been very interesting and have gave us enough experience to make something bigger and better next time. We'll probably make another presentation in the Euskal Party or the Campus Party, were lots of potential people may be interested in seeing the evolution of AmigaOS.
Best regards to everybody and we hope to put online a photo and video report show.
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