| From: | Matt Sealey |
| Date: | 25 Oct 2000 at 00:59:04 |
| Subject: | Re: AmigaOS 3.9 screenshot |
Hello Nick
On 23-Oct-00, you wrote:
>> A screenshot of OS3.9 showing what appears to be Genesis (TCP/IP
>> stack) and MooVid,plus some other stuff....
>
> Was that OS3.9 or OS3.5? I upgraded to OS3.5 ages ago (couldn't live
> without it now) and I can't see any difference.
>
> I don't expect this new OS to be radically different but I would have hoped
> to see some of the well know patches (Birdie and Visual Prefs spring to
> mind) incorperated into the new OS. Maybe I am being blind here and this
> is a screen shot of a pure PPC based system running 100 times faster, but
> even a screen shot of my system looks better (and I don't have a PPC or
> graphics card yet).
When people ask for things like Birdie and VisualPrefs to be added into the
OS, it usually comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of how these
things work.
To summarise, you aren't going to get Birdie or VisualPrefs built into the
AmigaOS, not in the Classic line anyway. I seem to remember that the guy
who did Birdie is writing the new AmigaDE desktop, so you can guarantee
it'll be there - but only because he'll have built it in from the ground up.
For instance, Birdie patches the RectFill() and Draw() functions in graphics,
and when they're called from certain places by certain tasks, Birdie replaces
those calls with customised routines. This is bad karma, RectFill() and Draw()
are nothing specific to do with window drawing. VisualPrefs patches Text()
as well, IIRC. These are all graphics.library functions.
To work around it, you'd have to almost completely reimplement the foundations
of intuition.library - something which I'm sure they COULD do, but would
be something that was just too much effort for such a small update.
I suspect that OS3.9 will be a refresher update: some nice new features for
Workbench that make it nicer, a task launcher bar, movie player, that kind
of thing. Maybe they'll bundle in some decent apps, rewritten slightly to make
them more unique? If they do include Genesis, they're gonna have to include
MUI for instance - or rewrite the GUI for Reaction..
I'll be getting a copy anyway, providing it'll run on my 68k-only system.
Thanks
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