A recently posted story has detailed plans that Amiga Inc. have decided to incorporated a SCSI driver into the next release of AmigaOS
- AOS 4.

The chip they are looking to support at the moment is the NCR SCSI scripts chip, the same one used on the recent Phase 5 boards. An internal document describing their reasons for this was posted to the
AmigaOne mailing list.

Hyperion have recently published details on the status of their eagerly anticipated Warp 3D drivers for the Voodoo cards.

As stated before, only the Voodoo 3 series will be supported by these drivers, but the Frieden brothers have been hard at work converting their code over to use the FIFO features of the Voodoo card, resulting in a very fast frame rate up until a resoultion of 1024*768 - at which point the bus becomes saturated with data and slow down occurs.

The good news is games already released like Heretic 2 can already make use of the driver, and are improved due to it. Better still, the new driver improves the display of the game over the Permedia version, due to blending modes not supported in the older card. An example can be found here.

Currently the Prometheus version is on line to be completed first due to there being a small problem to overcome with hopw the G-Rex operates. The G-Rex driver will be completed then, followed later in the year by the Mediator driver.

According to the latest news from AmigActive, the AmigaOne hardware designed by Eyetech is well on target to meet its August completion dates. In fact some parts are ahead of schedule, which can only be good news for Amiga owners fed up with watching announced products fall by the wayside (Boxer anybody)

Not only is the AmigaOne well under way, but in a recent announcement by Alan Redhouse (MD of Eyetech), to stop rumours to the contrary, then A1 will be able to run all existing and future WarpOS programs. This is good news for the gamers out there looking to get ahold of the A1 on its release - and good news too for those awaiting the release of Sin - the FPS ported from the PC by Hyperion software. This game was due to be released for PPC amigas, but due to the AI routines being so computational, the game was held back until suitable hardware
could run it - this hardware being the A1 board.

More recently though, Amiga International have announced the new version of the AmigaDE will be available in the next few weeks, along with the new AmigaOS V4.0 and also the A1200 A1 PPC board.

Amiga are offering a special deal for the next week. In this you can get:
A pre release AmigaDE 1.1
The Amiga SDK
A year of free updates
Sample games and applications

And your choice of either:
A Discount on the AmigaOne 1200/PPC
or
AmigaOS 4.0 and 4.2 free

Things are definitely beginning to look up for the Amigans of the
world.

Well, just when the Amiga users were wondering just when were they ever going to see a PCI card in their machine, when Elbox announced the Mediator for the 1200,with Zorro versions for the 3000/4000 to be announced at a later date. This news was swiftly followed up by an announcement from Eyetech who were rapidly designing their own implementation for the expansion slot on the BPPC and Cyberstorm PPC cards - the Predator (which due to a collaboration with DCE is also sold as the more commonly banded name of G-Rex).

Now, the latest in the line up of the PCI card expansion comes from a well established Polish company - Matay. Whilst the Elbox Mediator was until recently only made for the 1200, the Matay card is specifically aimed for all machines with a suitable Zorro 3 slot. Like the other two companies, the Matay card offers 4 PCI slots. It will also be shipping
with drivers for the Voodoo 2000-5000 cards, though not all will have 3d support - since the documentation to date is not available. For 3d drivers, only the Voodoo 3 cards are supported (via Warp3D). These drivers have the official backing of Hyperion, who have been developing the Warp2d/3d drivers for the Voodoo cards now for the G-Rex boards too. Also, Matay have secured the official backing from the P96 development team, and so fully supported P96 drivers will be made for their board too, providing a good solid RTG environment for prospective Prometheus owners.

They will also have drivers for several network cards and several
other PCI card types. Unfortunately, the SB Live! 1024 driver will not be included on the distribution CD due to it being incomplete at the time of shipping - but it will become available from their website as soon as it has been tested. They also have in development drivers for PCI TV Cards. Also, like their rivals Elbox,
they have plans for a G3 accelerator PCI card which
will take over the system and provide 68K emulation. Only time will
tell if it sees the light of day, but it is certainly more
good news for those users looking for a powerful upgrade.

So now Amiga owners have a real choice of peripherals to add....its just a matter of deciding which companies solution you want to take up.

Matay can be found at http://www.matay.pl

The MorphOS team got this question on the MorphOS mailinglist:
"Why not sell a key to unlock the 2 hours timeout (like Voyager) in the next beta ?"


This is their answer:
"That would require us to build up the business side now, deliver support and general contract obligations while we need the time for development. I'm no fan of selling "obvious" beta software...that only creates problems.
There are also other things going on which may change things....like Amiga Inc.'s repeated threats to sue us lately and play power games. How we react on these issues may also change the status of MorphOS."

- Ralph Schimdt Taken from MorphOS mailing-list


I ask... Have Amiga inc. gone mad and are trying to kill classic Amiga?
I can't see the big treath in WarpOS against AmigaDE.

With the advent of the new G-Rex and Mediator add ons, the world of the PCI GFX card has been opened up to us humble Amiga Users.

Eyetech and DCE have teamed together on their respective G-Rex and Predator PCI add-ons since their two boards were very similar in spec and design, so by joining forces they have pooled their resources to produce working modelsfaster than they could have separately.

The Mediator now has its Voodoo 3 drivers released, though it's still being worked on, and isn't optimised yet. Their Voodoo driver uses a custom P96 API to be compliant with the P96 software RTG suite.

The G-Rex on the other hand has opted to use CGX drivers. At the moment, the G-Rex has CGX drivers for all the VooDoo range of Cards (V3 /2000 + 3000, V4/4500 and V5/5500). So any Voodoo PCI card can be used. However, using the 3D capabilities of the card is a little more difficult. Since Voodoo don't release the cards documentation for Voodoo 4 and 5, at the moment the only Warp3D driver being developed is for the Voodoo 3 cards. Although not the best of the cards on offer, it does provide a marked improvement over the Permedia 2 currently housed in many PPC Amigas.

Should Voodoo release their documentation, then we may yet see 3D drivers being written for these cards providing us with the best 3D gaming experience yet! But the only other problem here is the processor. The current PPC isn't fast enough to saturate a Voodoo 3 with data, so until we get faster processors, a Voodoo 4/5 wouldn't offer us much more benefit over the older Voodoo 3 cards.

So....roll on the AmigaOne and the G4 add-ons (or indeed the SharkPPC/Mediator combo) Although at the time of writing, only the G-Rex is having a Warp3D driver developed for it - leaving Mediator owners a little in the dark.