![]() ![]() ![]() |
»For nearly 45 minutes Bill McEwen spoke about the future of Amiga in an oppressively hot "conference room" (which was some assembled plastic walls, a desk and not enough chairs). There was a lot to hear, so rewind the tape and make it short...
After the video-projector woke up on try number 5, Bill McEwen started with motivation and humour ("Welcome to the Amiga sauna..."). First he dealt with the rumour that Amiga could have fallen into default on their payments to Gateway. And better, Amiga would not have any liability.
He reintroduced Dean Brown (DKB) as "Director of Hardware". Mr. Brown will be responsible for the reference hardware, which will be a guide for third parties. Already complete is a handheld games computer, which Amiga will use internally to impress interested people from the consumer electronics field with the abilities of the new operating system. Based on a 250 Mips Strongarm, a connector for a Sony Memory Stick, and a colour display, the device was completed after one week of development!
Mr. McEwen was quite secretive about the new "Vice President of Engineering" who might be announced on July 10, because he still works for another company - "one that is large and in trouble, you know..." - as he made a gesture of ripping a piece of paper...
Turning to the Tao Java-VM, he said it was 22 times faster at processing multimedia contents than any other JVM (!).
He was not going to ask the community for patience. The fact that the show took place and that this (small) room was crowded with people showed that Amiga users were patient - and had been for about five years. But, he said, he and his colleagues had only been working for that number of months to meet the high expectations built up over the years.
As the first evidence of success McEwen brought SDKs (software developer kits) with him. He mentioned explicitly that they were still incomplete and would mostly be useful for experienced developers. Other users will have to wait some time for the final complete product. The kits are missing support for sound, streaming or 3D graphics, but these are on the way (3D support in approx. 2 months).
On the always critical point of marketing Mr. McEwen said a "VP of Marketing" has not been hired - he thinks that it is more important to first develop a product which would be worth a marketing, instead of following Amiga tradition and making big promises which can't be kept.
Plans to offer a developer box as a combination of hardware and software had been scrapped because of the negative reaction of Amiga users, though this had meant lots of changes and additional programs (e.g. installation scripts) were necessary. The SDK was now on sale and the HW/SW developer box would follow in approx. 2 weeks.
"Ubiquity in Computing" is the Amiga goal: mobile phones, PDAs, multiprocessor servers, the new desktop machines and the new game consoles; all of them running with the same operating system, something which has not been done before.
Applications will be fully scalable. After the developer decides what to run his application on, that application can climb the "Food Chain" as high as it likes. A game written for the handheld would also run on a multiprocessor system. On the other hand, an application written to run on a server would not run on a mobile phone - or at best very, very slowly...
The processors supported by the operating system would be PPC, M.core, X86, StrongARM, ARM, SH/3,4,5, MIPS as well as a number of other processors which could not be revealed, because they were under non-disclosure agreements with their manufacturers.
After that Bill spoke about the JavaOne show held in San Francisco, USA, the previous week where Tao Group had a booth. The same demos that we were about to be shown at the Neuss show were run in San Fran on a Sega Dreamcast, set-top-boxes, a StrongARM notebook and an x86. This alone would have been enough to pull a crowd, but there was also a mobile phone on which you could play a Pole Position clone - on just 3.5 MIPS. This would have to be the same mobile phone Scott McNeilly (SUN) showed on stage at the CES in January ... "I told them, that one day we would have Java on devices like this one" ... except it was not Sun's Java-VM which ran on the mobile phone...
Linux was not the only operating system which could host the new Amiga - others include Windows, WindowsNT, Linux, WindowsCE, QNX and OS/9 (an OS from Microware, which is the market leader on set-top-boxes). Host support for iTron, Epox, VxWorks and PalmOS was under development and not far from being completed.
The cooperation with Tao Group was touched on by Mr. McEwen. It was not just the use of Tao products, but the access to 50 developers from Tao Group to make things Amiga needed.
A port of the BOOPSI libraries has been completed, but needs more tests and optimizations. A new script language (SHEEP) would also be completed in a few months. The rights to ARexx are held by a third party, so Amiga had to develop a new language. The word "Renderware" was also mentioned. The OS would be prepared for that.
Dann hatte Bill McEwen ein ganz besonderes Bonbon: Wenn die einzelnen Teile des Betriebssystems zusammengefunden haben, wird es den AmigaOne geben - einen neuen Multimedia-Desktop, entwickelt und designed by Amiga, wenn auch von Drittherstellern produziert. Mehr wollte McEwen so frueh noch nicht sagen, der Weg dahin sei noch weit.
Then, a very special bonbon: If the all the parts of the operating system fall into place look out for the AmigaOne - a new multimedia desktop computer, developed and designed by Amiga, but produced by third parties. Mr. McEwen did not want to say more at this early stage because there was still a long way to go.
Bill moved on to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers - third party companies, who create and build new Amiga hardware) and ISVs (independent software vendors - companies that want to support the new Amiga, but who are too busy with their own business). Mr. McEwen said eleven ISVs had given source code to the developers at Amiga, because those companies were not (yet) ready to use their own developers for an Amiga project.
Of course, the already known partners of Tao Group were named: Sun, Sony, Motorola, JVC and others. Mr. McEwen recommended we read the last press release on Tao's website (about the certification of Tao's Java-VM) and especially the comments of the other people. Amiga would be negotiating with each of these companies. We saw pictures of Mr McEwen's old office and pictures of the new "Amiga Headquarters". There are five other companies, which mostly produce high-end electronics for demonstration and allow Amiga free use of their property.
At last we got to see what the new operating system could do, running demos on a notebook - without hardware acceleration, that is supposed to follow in August - hosted on Red Hat Linux. It is difficult to put into words, but what we saw were fast-as-light Java demos, a few 2D games, the well-known Boing demo, freely (but mouse controllable) flying Boing balls, a browser with unicode ability, 2D filters, a transparent "Clock" window (a clock, which could be moved on the screen while you could see the Boing ball through it... All this was hosted on Linux but there was no stuttering, whatever was going on.
No, that's not correct. I saw it stutter once. Mr. McEwen started the operating system a second time in another window, and the animation in the first window stopped for a fraction of a second before continuing smoothly - while Mr. McEwen ran the same number of demos in the second Elate window.
Overall the demo was very impressive, considering the early stage of development. The photos can only show this partially.
Mr. McEwen was not able or did not want to talk about further plans, but he
referred to an article from Byte Magazine in 1994, on
At the end Mr. McEwen took questions from the audience.
Q: What will happen to the Classic OS?
McEwen: We use parts of it, wherever it makes sense.
Q: Will there be an emulation?
McEwen: We already have an executable emulator. The testing is done and now we are optimizing it for speed. You know Brian King? You know where he works? He is a good man. He helps us. Well, we are working on it to make it faster, it is a bit slow. We are just in the phase of optimizing. (Remark of the Author: Brian King is the programmer of WinUAE.)
McEwen: Before you ask: am I going to port [the classic OS] to the PPC. No, I won't. And I'll tell you why: No matter who I talked to - R.J. Mical, Carl Sassenrath, Allan Havemose - every one of them has had a look at this in the past. All of them agree it would take about 18 to 24 months, and then would only be 80% complete. Because the AGA chipset would have to be redeveloped - Agnus, Denise and all these things are directly linked to the OS. Actually this was the biggest problem for Havemose when building 3.1. All the bugs of these chips had to be taken care of. So, to do the necessary job would be too expensive to make a profit in our market. We have to move forward, we can't be everywhere, do everything. A port would not help me to build a scalable operating system, and that is what we need for success. Just being another system on another chip is not enough. We must be able to go to Sony, to Panasonic, to anyone, and tell them "we can use your chip".
Q: (Hardly understandable. Question about hardware requirements of the SDK, if it has to be a special processor)
McEwen: The SDK...if you can run Red Hat Linux, everything should be fine. We tested it using Red Hat and Corel.
Q: Will it also run on the Amiga?
McEwen: No, not at the moment. We have nothing for the 68000. We hope to be able to cooperate with our friends, so if you have a PPC which can, as you know, run Linux, you can run it on top. And we will run native on the PPC boards. This is one of our biggest problems. You got promises and nothing happens.
Q: Do you plan to alter the design of the interface?
McEwen: It was designed to have a flexibility like the one you saw today, so you can set it up as you like. There will be various presets - an Amiga user might like to use a Workbench preset, but other customers might like it a different way. You can of course customise the presets.
Q: (not audible)
McEwen: If you run Linux on a PPC board on an Amiga, right? We haven't tried it, yet, but both manufacturers did and they say it would run.
Q: (not audible)
McEwen: No, not with the first build. A part of the problem is the tools. The tools you need to use it. Currently, there are two companies working on it to build an IDE especially for us, so this will not be necessary in the future. Not everything is included (in the SDK) and we know that. Most likely some things are going to change. But we think it is important that people learn to write software in VP and some other changes. Chris Hinslwy, who developed all of this, is someone from the Amiga games scene, as you know. And I think, that like most of the others who played with it, you might find that there are many similarities to today's programming style. So there will be a quick learning curve, but there will be one. We want to get the people who work with it to start programming some applications. So they get used to it, so that when the other parts are added they are able to react more quickly.
Q: (Hard to understand. Another question regarding compatibility with old applications)
McEwen: Indeed, we have an executable emulator. It is not in this build, yet, because we are optimizing it. Actually we are also looking for a hardware solution for it.
Q: Can all of the SDK be used on an Amiga PPC?
McEwen: No, no, no. What's in here, has been made to run with Red Hat or Corel on a x86 platform, O.K.? If it is complete, and you have an executable OS running, everything is alright, it will run. Again, we haven't tested it yet. According to some third party manufacturers it can run on a PowerPC accelerator on an Amiga, as long as there is Linux present. We haven't tried it, so I won't say "Yes, it's possible.". First, we want to test it. We have machines here we are going to test it on.
Q: (Hard to understand. A question on the expected availability of software for the new system)
McEwen: We already have promises for 131 applications.
Q: Also for games?
McEwen: Most of it is games. There is a very large, Indian company, which makes a lot of interactive games [...]. They already made promises and they are going to bring their games to the Amiga. They have 63 games, all of them interactive multiuser games using the net.
Q: (not audible)
McEwen: Oh, oh, the multiple screens? Yes, they are alright. What you see today, from a visual point of view, you can have in the future, O.K.? All these multiple layers, etc. All of this is in it.
Thank you, very much!
Before this presentation there were two other ones. During the first one at 11 o'clock, I still was on the Autobahn. For the second presentation the room was overcrowded, but I was able to have my tape recorder at the desk, just to get the news that Sun is going to promote the Amiga SDK to their own developers as choice for a Java environment.
Martin Baute <solar@baud.de>«