News about AmigaNG
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News about AmigaNG
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At the Amiga Fair AmiWest in Sacramento, California, AMIGA's CEO Bill McEwen announced several bits of news:
The AmigaOne, made by Escena (and distributed by Eyetech), is said to be ready for shipment in quarter 4, 2001. The date aimed at is the 1st of November, but as we all know, fixed dates must not be taken for sure. Recently they work on the CPU cards.
Version 4.0 of the Amiga Operating System, which will run only on the AmigaOne, is also to be distributed on November 1st. Several items already are completed, for instance the new file-system, the new TCP/IP stack and the 3D drivers for the Voodoo 3. More items are being worked on, among them the RTG system and the drivers for Matrox G450 and G550.
The development presently proceeds on several Amiga 3000s and 4000s in connection with CyberstormPPC cards, and the PCI bus board Prometheus from Matay and StormC V4.
A surprise even for AMIGA (they had learned about it only shortly in advance of the fair) was the availability of a new Amiga emulator for x86 systems with the code name "Amithlon". The program was developed by Harald Frank (VMC) and Bernd Meyer (author of thr UAE JIT compiler) based upon UAE JIT. A minimal Linux system, offering the drivers for the hardware, is used to start off the emulation of the 68k AmigaOS. Linux is not seen in any way by the user, so that there is the feeling of the AmigaOS directly running on the x86 architecture, and because of this it will be distributed with the name "Amiga x86", starting in the 4th quarter of 2001.
According to statements by the developers it will be possible with Amithlon to write x86 native routines and programs for the AmigaOS. The speed with recent x86 processors easily outruns a 68060 processor (even without native programs). This speed will be achieved by abandoning the emulation of several custom chips, for instance the AGA chip set, which means that only programs that are not dependent on those chips will run. At the moment there is also no sound emulation. Another restriction will be that at the most AmigaOS 3.9 will be supported, but not AmigaOS 4.x, because that will run on PPC but not on 68k processors. No plans exist to port this AmigaOS to x86.
Likewise in quarter 4, 2001, the AmigaDE 1.0 will be released, which world-wide more the 30 programmers are working on and more than 300 developers are creating content for. Sharp will obtain a licence for the Zaurus for a package with five games (moniker "Series Zero").
Corresponding press releases:
[http://www.amiga.com/corporate/080101-amiwest.shtml]
Inofficial FAQ about Amithlon:
[http://byron.csse.monash.edu.au/amithlon.html]
Oliver Tacke <oliver@aakt.de>
