AmiWest Show Report

Bill McEwen, President and CEO of Amiga Inc., made a number of exciting announcements at the AmiWest show in Sacramento, California. The AmiWest show is organized by the Sacramento Amiga Computer Club and is one of the largest Amiga shows on the West Coast.

The following products were announced for release by Q4, 2001.

AmigaOne PPC Computer
AmigaOS 4.0 PPC Operating System
Amiga x86 (x86 Amiga emulator)
AmigaDE 1.0 and Series Zero Game Pack

AmigaOne PPC Computer

The AmigaOne PPC computer, being built by Eyetech in the UK, is based on Zico specs published by Amiga Inc. Amiga Inc.'s flagship next generation desktop continues to advance towards the first real new hardware for the Amiga community in over 6 years. Excitement is mounting at both the Amiga office and around the world as Amigans realize that the long wait will soon be over. All partners in the AmigaOne and AmigaOS4.0 project have been working hard to meet deadlines as the project moves into its final stages.

Bill also announced that the two week slip in schedule for the Eyetech AmigaOne which had appeared in June had now been pulled back to just one week. The new Rev B boards are functioning well, with live PCI and AGP slots and work is now focused on bringing the board and the CPU cards together. The first week of August will see full system boards delivered to the AmigaOS4 team for preparations to move AmigaOS4.0 from the test bed machines.

For more details regarding the AmigaOne, see http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/ or http://www.amiga.com/products/one/.

AmigaOS 4.0 PPC Operating System

The AmigaOS 4.0 project is being managed by Amiga Inc. in partnership with both Haage-Partner (H&P) who are porting the main portions of the new PPC OS and Hyperion Software who are doing 3D and Mesa for the new PPC Operating System.

AmigaOS 4.0, which will only run on the Eyetech AmigaOne, is moving forward nicely. With the help of Amiga partners such as Matay, much of the development work has used a combination of A3/4000s, Matay Prometheus PCI bridge boards, Cyberstorm PPC Accelerators and H&P's StormC v4.

This has allowed the project to move forwards without having to wait for an actual AmigaOne board to become available. Consequently, the new file system and the core of the TCP/IP stack were completed over two weeks ago. The PPC 68K emulator is being fine-tuned and the new Amiga PCI library is being profiled against the Eyetech AmigaOne live PCI slots. The RTG system is being enhanced, with a full PPC implementation of the extended and most used functions, to allow for stunning 2D and 3D performance. In addition, the Voodoo 3 drivers have been completed and the G450 drivers are under development, to be followed by drivers for the new Matrox G550.

While the porting of the 68K elements of the AmigaOS will continue through AmigaOS4.2 and AmigaOS4.5, the first set of libraries ported to PPC will ensure that AmigaOS offers impressive increases in stability, functionality and speed.

Once the test bed to AmigaOne migration has been completed, Amiga will provide screenshots and benchmarks of the new system. These reports are aimed at demonstrating the superiority of the AmigaOne and will give the community an early look at the features of the product. In addition, Eyetech has commissioned some very impressive case designs that will give the AmigaOne the looks to go along with its brains.

Amiga x86

Amiga was able to demonstrate a prototype of an x86 emulator for 68K for the AmigaOS3.x series. This product, codenamed Amithlon, provides only RTG compatibility and is being targeted at providing a first step from x86 towards the AmigaOne. Amithlon is self-booting from CD on almost any x86 laptop or PC desktop. It is able to run most RTG programs at speeds beyond that of a standard Amiga 060 cpu. Several developers at the AmiWest show tried their applications on Amithlon and commented that they had never seen such fast run times before on a 68060 Amiga computer. Amithlon is being written by Harald Frank and Bernie Meyer.

Many Amigans who left when Commodore went bankrupt have been looking for a way to run their favorite Amiga applications on newer hardware. The purpose of the emulator is to allow x86 PC owners to experience the benefits of running the AmigaOS and applications without having to make a potentially risky purchase of an entire machine. Marketing and community will then slowly draw these people towards the superiority of an AmigaOne with a full native OS running on it, along with the latest applications. Amithlon is not a port of the AmigaOS and there are currently no plans to see the AmigaOS ported to x86.

More details of the Amithlon including feature lists and release dates will be published shortly.

AmigaDE 1.0 and Series Zero Game Pack

AmigaDE 1.0 (based on Elate/Intent by Tao Group) is being programmed by more than 30 programmers worldwide under the management of Amiga Inc. There are over 3000 developers currently signed up to produce content for various digital devices from cell phones, PDA’s, handhelds, and even desktop computers running AmigaDE 1.0. Amiga also announced the first set of games that is being released under the moniker “Series Zero” to Sharp for use on the Zaurus handheld devices. The 5 games that are being released as part of the Series Zero Game Pack are:

Batty by Titan Computers	Boxikon by e.p.i.c. interactive gmbh	Convex by Zeoneo	Linea by Titan Computers	Solitaire by John Harris