Harlan Carrol says he thinks
AI should use the old "Amiga Again" advertisement that Commodore already used
for the A2000 a long time ago. It would be
ironic if they redid it to reflect the modern Amiga.
In reply to accusations by Amiga Review who said they closed due to AF and CU not printing their addvertisements, Andrew Korn of CU Amiga Magazine replies that this was not the real reason. Besides that, a full professional magazine does not get advertising in their rivals, although a fanzine does. Apparently the decision to not carry advertisements was not very easy, but in the end the word came from above. On a different subject, he mentions that over the last couple of years, readership of Amiga magazines gas dropped 22-28% every 6 months.
The Amiga port of WordPerfect was paid by Commodore, who had to pay a large number of copies in advance. WordPerfect didn't invest any money on their own in the port, and when they noticed that the product was too bad (buggy) and not sold enough (too expensive) they didn't have any regrets leaving the Amiga platform; not without stating they did it because of piracy (a weak argument, according to Dr. Peter Kittel).
Odd H. Sandvik questions Phase5's schedule for the Phase5 A\Box, given the delays that an accelerator causes.Imagine how long it will take them to release an entire computer, when they cannot make a simple accellerator come through. By this estimate, I would say the A\Box is 5 years away...
A really strange bug report comes from Fabrice. He noticed that several programs run slower on his 060 than his 030+882. Even stranger is the fact that WinUAE on a Pentium will do floating point calculations faster than his real 060-Amiga...
I guess it's high time somebody comes around and tells the real story, says Olaf Barthel, otherwise next minute we are going to see postings connecting the mysterious delays [of Phase5's PowerUp] to the Cheops pyramid, recent UFO activity over Washington and [..] sightings of Elvis.
Philipp Boerker points out that all Motorola chips are manufactured using one single process and are only assigned a MHz rating after passing the respective tests. The changing quality during manufacturing may be an explanation why some 060s get extremely hot while others don't. If there where no flaws during manufacturing, the chip may be overclocked by up to 100%, but there is no way to find out the quality of the manufacturing of a 060 and therefore it is not suggested to overclock the chips.
Fabian Jimenez points out that Jeff Schindler is the Manager of R&D; Petro is the Manager of Amiga International. They do not control Amiga International, both answer to Joseph Burke, VP of Market Development for Gateway 2000.
Andy Finkel says current AI advertisements may exist to reassure the existing community that something is still happening (advertising increases the amount of customer satisfaction) and to keep the magazines afloat.
Christian Bauer clarifies that the Doom-comparison between ShapeShifter (running Doom) and the Amiga (running Gloom and Nemac IV) was won by ShapeShifter. Apparently only the Mac Doom could be run in 640x480 (on a 060 with CyberVision), whereas the Amiga games where not very fun to play.
Jim Drew says the reason why Fusion doesn't work on QuikPak 060 cards is their 68040.library eulation. ANYTHING that attempts to use the FPU is going to have a problem, and the MacOS uses floating point for everything.
According to Darren Eveland, Phase5 will ship the 604 + 060 cards [for big-box Amigas] in the first week of September.
Lothar Lekat says that, according to Michael Sistig, webmaster at Phase5, the release of the Blizzard603e abd 603e+ has been delayed until late September.
Angela Schmidt, co-writer of MakeCD, says several mails to support@phase5.de have remained unanswered. The mails were about problems with Philips CD burners [and P5 SCSI controllers] and an answer would have meant they could better support customers using MakeCD with Philips CD burners. Angela says Phase5 refuse to give any support, apart from a hint at a meeting in Trier that didn't help and guesses that Phase5's support prefer to work together with the authors of BurnIt.
Harlan Carrol says he thinks
AI should use the old "Amiga Again" advertisement that Commodore already used
for the A2000 a long time ago. It would be
ironic if they redid it to reflect the modern Amiga.
Dave Haynie says in 1991 he was developing a new overall system architecture for the Amiga, code-named "Acutiator". It was a highly modular architecture, with each piece indepently replacable, a CPU-independent motherboard and a new inter-module bus called AMI bus (Amiga Modular Interconnect). The AMI bus was supposed to be small (few pins), fast (100 MB/s) and auto-configuring. In 1992 PCI was announced, which was basically better in every area than the AMI bus, but in addition it was also backed by half the industry. By the fall of '93, Commodore was too broke to spend much money on AAA or Hombre. The PIOS One is basically what happens when you try to build an Acutiator type system entirely from off-the-shelf parts.
Speeding up the character/game and adding running/jumping to onEscapee are more important than a version for ECS/gfx cards, says Kristian Phillips.
Kristian Phillips of SAdENESS Software says the first version of onEscapee won't support CyberGfx, as it uses some AGA features that gfx cards wouldn't be able to handle. A free update for CyberGfx will be available after release though.
Dr. Peter Kittel says the last report by Olaf Barthel said 80% of Kickstart were written in assemler. Porting to PPC would probably cost Gateway a few (one-digit) million dollars.
"Bo" of AmiCom Technologies says he has a contact at Amiga, Inc. in Dakota Dunes, SD. who told him that AI will be making an announcement regarding their R&D plans within the next few days.
Siegfried Otto says investing in a PowerUp board is not very worthwile as there is no software available for it. Besides that, AI could officially declare the Digital Alpha as the new Amiga processor one week after the PowerUp release, making the PowerUp virtually obsolete. The only possibility for PowerUp to become a standard is AI including them in their machines, along with an official Kickstart 4.0 supporting it.
Siegfried Otto says that hotline staff at Phase5 may not be very motivated because monthly wages are sometimes delayed and there is no support from the management, for example when there are problems with P5 hardware. He doesn't give names, but says that he used to and still has good contact to the P5 hotline staff. Apparently a few people at P5 have confirmed the above-mentioned statements.
Angus Manwaring says that CU Amiga magazine has a story about Guildhall Leisure who convinced Electronics Boutique and HMV to try stocking some Amiga CD titles (Civilisation, F1, Theme Park, BlitzBasic and more).
Oliver B. Warzecha points out that the domain-status of aminet.org is on hold, which may mean that somebody has not (yet?) paid for it. Of course this does not necessarily mean that Aminet is broke.
Jason Compton replies to an earlier post by George Noel [see below, 16-Aug-97] and says that Jeff Schindler is General Manager of Amiga, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Gateway 2000 which is charged with, among other things, Amiga R&D; and adds that George is wrong saying Jeff is only "temporary". Besides that, he also points out that Gateway will/would also able to properly carry out an Amiga strategy without officially endorsing the ICOA or any other organisation.
Troy Silvey says that Microsoft will definately sell Blue Ribbon software (Bars&Pipes etc.) but points out that there may be talks between Microsoft, Petro T. and Jeff S. to bring back the program to the Amiga.
Mathew Ignash explains that Next Generation's statement [see below], saying that Gateway never had plans to sell any Amigas, may indeed be true. Gateway never said it would sell Amigas, their subsidary, Amiga International, does that.
Vince Hiannini reports that www.nationalamiga.com mentions that Gateway has recently hired Amiga programmers and hardware designers and established them in a whole new building.
Timothy Rue forwards what seems like a Czech posting that includes an English message from the ICOA Transitional Steering Committee. The message says it is not an official release, but confirms a lot of the recent rumours about Gateway. The TSC has been in contact with Jeff Schindler; the TSC was invited to Gateway2000 for a meeting; Gateway has been in contact with OEMs wishing to leverage current and future Amiga technology - apparently some very big names in consumer electronics industry; Jeff will do R&D while Petro will do marketing; GW have already hired support and admin stuff but no techs yet; they have rented a separate building to house the Amiga employees; they want to make money on the Amiga and invest in any area that can bring a profit; Jason Compton is going up for a separate meeting. Timothy Rue then forwards a mail apparently written by Carl Sassenrath to Petr Krenzelok that says it is an email message directly from REBOL. [although this could be a fake, invented by Timothy]
A parody on Timothy Rue's VIC concept comes from Myron Sothcott. His concept is called VAC, the Virtual All-purpose Command. A magic command, "DOIT" will do whatever you can imagine. Myron's concept is already finished, except that the hardware needs to be developed (because he is no hardware guy) and the software needs still to be written (because he is no software guy). The VAC is freeware, all he wants is every computer user everywhere to kneel with forehead to floor at the very mention of his name!!!.
Apparently, the first versions of onEscapee will come without graphic card support. Reasons given is that the game will not benefit from it in the slightest, as it is in 320x256, and totally 2D. Nevertheless, support for graphic cards will be available on Aminet later - amongst others to support big box non-AGA Amigas with gfx cards.
Darren forwards a part of Next Generation's (a forward looking video game magazine) Q&A on their website:
Q: Is Gateway still going to sell Amigas?
A: Gateway has never had plans to sell Amigas in the US despite its purchase of the former computer superpower some months ago. Instead Gateway was interested in securing the rights to much of the technology behind the Amiga as well as continuing to service the sizable European userbase with new software. Announcements regarding new hardware even in Europe have never been made by Gateway.
George Noël reports that the September issue of Amazing Computing/Amiga includes a "Powered By Amiga" / "The Boing is Back!" advertising campaign by Amiga International; and adds that Micronik and Index are also advertising directly for their new Amiga clones.
Harry Adams says he left the Amiga to buy a PC and was in for a shock. He says he was suddenly able to complete far more work in a day than ever before. Yet, telling this to the Amiga community was not a good idea. I wanted to tell them that it was really easy to switch over and not an arduous task [..] for commiting such heresy I was given very short shrift and a lot of abuse. He adds that those who have to change platforms should not be put off, as the Amiga gives you a good grounding for modern PC's.
George Noël says recent rumours of Gateway talks are no big news. As far as we know so far, Gateway 2000 still hasn't officially endorsed ICOA and the Gateway representative looking after R&D so far is only temporary until Petro hires a new one. Besides that, the ICOA's attitude of talking directly to Gateway instead of Amiga International reminds him of small children trying to solve a problem with a friend by running to their mom.
Steven J. Saunders says that there are rumours that. beside the $150 Million payment, there is a very big sum involved in the deal. This adds to the suspicions that there is more to this than MS simply investing in Apple to ward off Anti-Trust.
Andreas Magerl of "APC&TCP-Computerclub" thinks that no matter how many faxes, emails or letters you write to Phase5 as software company, they are never answered. Due to this, APC&TCP have cancelled all developments for PowerUp.
Kevin Little says thinks the days of a GUI are numbered, and that we'll be using voice CLI's again. The need to stare at a display while physically manipulating some device that moves some small sprite across that display in order to get a computer to do something useful is a drag.
David Myers says he heard from a friend, who enquired about LightWave 5.5 for the Amiga, that NewTek don't say "no" but say "not yet".
From Gordon Proudler comes a definition of Windoze95:
Jonathan Hollin (TheLair!) forwards an anonymous mail he received:
ICOA's "Temporary Steering Commitee" has been talking to Gateway 2000's new head of R&D, Jeff Schindler (see G2K's web-site) about the Amiga and ICOA's vision for a new machine. My source (who gives the impression of being an insider within the ICOA) informs me that they (the TSC) found Mr. Schindler to be "VERY open to ideas and suggestions".Jeff Schindler has a prior association with the Commodore of old - straight out of school, he sold VIC and C64's [..] for around 4 years, before becoming a hardware engineer. He is notable in that he headed the "Destination" project, Gateway's most innovative project to date.
"Razor" says there is rumoured to be a HUGE annoncement by Gateway regarding the Amiga VERY SOON!
Rev. Ronny Bangsund says he just discovered that Gateway 2000 are talking Amiga with Jeff Schindler, the guy who made their Destination box, a huge, expensive thing with peecee hardware and a TV in it. All Jeff has had to do with CBM-type products, is selling Vics and C64s before becoming an engineer.
Here are the complete contents of yet another rumour article:
I have recieved a "rumor" from a "reliable source" that GW are seeking ways to make money on the Amiga and are willing to put $$$ into any area they believe can turn a profit. This could be Kiosk, settop box, desktop OS, anything. This all the info I have at this time and would consider it "reliable rumor" so please ignore the man behind the curtain.
Apparently Holger posted on the Miami-Announce ML that Miami 3.0 would be available in GadTools, MUI and BGUI versions.
In reply to a post saying that the switch between PPC and 68k on the PowerUp takes 0.1 seconds, Ralph Schmidt says this is wrong. This depends on how you do it; 0.1 seconds is not the "general switchtime" which is very low; this can be optimised; this assumption is based upon a 603E prototype still based on a CyberStorm2.
Andreas Kleinert says AROS [the AmigaOS replacement project] is already 50 percent done, most of the rest currently in work.
You can't move CHIP RAM to a (faster) accelerator board, because Chip RAM is controlled by Agnus or Alice, respectively, and they can't go faster. And so you also would have to put these chips on the accelerator board, and, and, and...
According to Dr. Peter Kittel, the hardware engineering department at Commodore was about 100 people, software engineering was smaller most of the time (at one time after 1.3 even down to two people IIRC).
Mathias Ortman says that Juergen Schober wrote a very interesting Intuition replacement for UAE that will allow Amiga apps to open their windows directly on the host's desktop. Stefan Stuntz is apparently willing to provide an Intel-native version of muimaster.library. Mathias ends his post with the sarcastic note that we may soon be living in a world where the PC happens to be the fastest MUI platform.
George Noel says the Amiga had always been known for its games so it is wise to get that category back as it will hopefully lead to the Amiga being popular in homes again. The Amiga needs siome big company names, but that isn't going to happen unless AI or Gateway 2000 subsidize a company to port their software.
In a thread about availability of cracked files in ADF format for UAE, Even Sandvik Underlid says he's seen such a site in Norway as well. He says this sets a very bad example and that some big pirates could be scared if Amiga magazines wrote about AI busting other sites.
In a rather normal MUI vs. xxx discussion, Mikael Berglund mentions that he's looking forward to Miami 3.0 with a separate GUI. Later Daniel Lundberg is quoted saying that Miami 3.0 will be available with a GadTools GUI.
Wolf Dietrich of Phase5 says there will be a concrete decision on which kernel to use in the A\Box OS in next two or three months. There will be A\Box-OS betas for the PowerUp, but those are only intended for developers. There will be a mahor status-update on their website by the end of month. The Caipirinha-Subset gfx card won't be available in this year and will probably be a lot more expensive than a CV-PPC. Therefore it may be interesting for A\Box developers, but only to a smaller extent for normal users just wanting fast graphics. Apparently Phase5 disagree with Haage&Partner's method of developing their compiler, as H&P are rather doing it in a quick&dirty way whereas Phase5 want to have everything modular and future-proof (ie. by a new message system etc.)
Paul Burkey reports that he's writing his upcoming game, Foundation, in BlitzBasic, with all time critical routines being in Assembler. After Foundation is released, he will be working both on a new project and a PPC port (which implies converting Blitz code to C). I don't think the language makes that much difference to the speed of the game. The only speed problems that exist are those of playing the game in hires screens on AGA...
Tim is trying to be sarcastic and writes an article presenting an imaginary Flame Tim Fan Club. One valid point that he makes, however, is that many people seem to flame others just as a way to release all the anger and frustration that their beloved Amiga has caused.
Paul Copsey says he suspects the diminishing number of Amiga users is probably at least an equal, if not greater killer of the Amiga market than piracy. Piracy isn't good, but a strong market can live with it.
In a discussion between Timothy Rue and George Noel can be found what seems the origin of the many discussions and controversies about Tim's posts. Tim seems to think that his own postings and web site inspired the ICOA movement, but feels that now he doesn't get enough credit. George Noel says it is false that Tim was an inspiration and besides that Tim's ideas were meant to be "Freeware" too, so that he wouldn't have got more than recognition for coming up with the idea anyway. George suggests that Tim should, instead of constantly complaining, get something done and come back when his own initiative is ready.
John Bittner forwards what he thinks may be old news. He says he noticed that ads for LightWave 3D 5.5 now appearing list Windows 95/NT, DEC Alpha, PowerMac, SGI and Sun as platforms; Amiga being absent from that list.
Stuart Caie posts a list of what Shareware to register (and not to register). Number 1 in the "what to register" category goes to Shareware with no restrictions or just one instant requester, followed by Stable Shareware you've been using for years without complaint. Shareware you should not register includes Shareware with a [Register] button or [Register|Cancel] requester and Shareware that locks your machine or crashes it on a regular basis.
Greg forwards a text he originally send to Jason Compton for inclusion in Amiga Report, but that was refused. It is a text about the Australian Amiga Gathering, which Greg thinks was nothing more than a "Junk Sale" ("Computer Sale"). He says that $10 entrance fee are too much for this and thinks that the "If you BUY something in here, you'll get your money back!" offered to him smells like "Used Car Salesman".
Didier Duchet says that according to Infogreffe, France Festival Distribution is in bankruptcy since 27 june 97 and is therefore not allow to perform any commercial activity.
Yann-Erick Proy forwards a text by Bruce Lepper (AmigaNews) that answers some accusations of FFD (see below) against Duchet. FFD say that Duchet will always fax in his adverts to magazines "last-minute" so that he has an advantage over competitors. Bruce Lepper now says this is not true and points out that Mr Duchets written advertisements always arrive very soon.
In reply to a post by Peter Fregon saying that France Festival
Distribution is not allowed to distribute PCTask any longer
because of piracy, FFD reply that such messages on the Internet are
not legal at all, because there still is a legal written
and signed agreement between Quasar and FFD, which contains severak
explicit rupture' cases, but Quasar apparently never
used any of these against FFS; not even by signed registered letter.
They say that the piracy rumour is not true and was only started
by Duchet who would like to take this market for France since several years.
[I don't fully understand this whole thread as I've only
been following it recently. I would appreciate if somebody
with more knowledge about the FFD/Duchet controversy could mail
me a summary.]
Wilfried Schott says he doesn't understand why so many honest people fear programs with built-in anti-cracker mechanisms. He never heard that any honest user was 'attacked' by such a mechanism. Much more worrying is that software such as IBrowse can ruin a whole partition by crashing at decoding a defect image.
Mathias Ortman posts some replies to a pro-Phase5 article where he admits that Wolf Dietrich of Phase5 is more competent than he is; he says that PowerUp could get along faster - no wonder seeing a board working is hard; adds that it surely is a good decision to base the A\OS on MkLinux; says there are alternatives to PowerUp and the A\Box; replies that the A\Box concept is not worth anything, as a HTML is not very credible; admits that a 68060/PPC board is not easy to build but pretty useless; asserts that a standard PC is cheaper and can run Linux as nicely; and finally says that UAE is aimed at future use more than at current use - current PC's are still too slow. He ends on the words that hardware may go, but software (through emulation) will stay forever.
George Noel reports that Amazing Computing quotes Petro T. saying he thinks the next OS revision will simply be a bundling of stuff like Executive, KingCon, MUI, NewIcons etc. with the standard 3.1 OS. Petro was calling this "revision" 4.0.
Jack Andrews thinks that Gateway doesn't believe in Amiga Evolution, only "Amiga intellectual property sales".
According to Stephen Marriott of HiSoft Systems, IBrowse 2.0 should be ready by the end of summer.
John Bittner reports that the latest John Dvorak column in PC Magazine has a theory that Intel helped Gateway not to be bought out by Compaq (who Intel don't like). This entails that Gateway may have got price incentatives on Intel CPU's. Another point is that Intel is known to be considering Intel branded PC's. John notices that this certainly raises new possibilities about Gateway's reasons for purchasing Amiga.
Jason Compton says he called Lotus Pacific and they felt rather differently about the situation, than Gateway 2000 who didn't return his call. He adds that it is unfortunate that the terms and details of the Gateway deal were not disclosed since we outsiders can't look through the materials and make our own conclusions.
According to Collin Ward, MUI uses co-operative multitasking. Whenever it processes input.device related calls, there can't be a switch to another process, the system locks up until input.device is released (by MUI). Collin thinks this is a fundamental design problem that needs to be addressed; as a mouse pointer locking up in IBrowse when a jpeg is loaded is a PC/Windows 3.1 type behaviour.
Bill Hoggett says that a tax writeoff would be the only remotely plausible reason for Gateway wanting AI to fail. However, this makes little sense.
In a rather article, Olaf Barthel answers a lot of questions why and how he's programming, maintaining and using his gtlayout.library even though it has grown large, is uglier than MUI and is only used by a few programs. 'Term' was the origin of the idea to program a GUI library for his own use; he didn't want to maintain everything by hand anymore (as this was time-consuming and error-prone). He adds that he will probably not program for MUI since MUI doesn't satisfy his needs.
Phase5 have laboratory equipment worth 0,5 million DEM (± 300,000 USD), with 200 channel logic analyser, 16 channel 2 GHz logicscope, more logic analysers and scopes, EMV-measurement devices, at least 10 test computers, about 40 standard hardware products for compatibility tests, lots of laboratory material (that alone worth the purchase price of a car). They are developing on a Sparc- and UltraSparc workstation network, with chip design tools for VHDL high level synthesis, simulation and verification for PLD's, FPGA's and ASIC's, with InCurcuit-programmable logic, and more. Their A\Box development plan includes another investition of a 7-digit number (of DEM). Phase5 have created 20 employment opportunities in the past few years.
According to Index Information, they have started to ship pre-production Access units and they have the first firm production order from the first company to receive one. Once again, Mick Tinker points out that this is not a retail product, but rather a new full blown licensed "Powered by Amiga" motherboard. He adds that Gateway have changed the manager within GW for AI, as well as changing their strategy.
Last updated 31-Aug-1997, 16:25 by Christian Kemp (ckemp@vo.lu). All documents and pictures used on these pages are ©1997 Christian Kemp. Usage on other sites requires a written permission.