amiga-news.de - AmiWest presentations from A-EON and Hyperion

21.Oct.2017

AmiWest presentations from A-EON and Hyperion
AmiWest 2017 is taking place in Sacramento (USA) this weekend. The first presentation was another joint effort of Trevor Dickinson (A-EON) and Steven Solie (Hyperion). For the first time in many years, the Hyperion representative did not make any announcements, he was simply there to answer a few questions from the audience at the end of the presentation.

The following is a summary of the topics discussed. Unfortunately, the live stream had a few problems and completely dropped out for two or three minutes during the Q&A session - it's unlikely but possible that we missed something noteworthy.

AmigaOne X5000

The computer is "selling well", even with AmigaOS not being "fully optimised" for the hardware yet. Asked about optimization, Solie explains that the SATA driver "just works, it's not optimised at all". An Ethernet driver is still missing aswell, after that the CopyMem routine would be an obvious target for optimizations. Solie can't say if these updates will be distributed as a complete ISO or separate downloads. Asked for a timeframe, he expects them to arrive "in months, not years". Support for the 2nd CPU core is not discussed. Dickinson points out that a X5000 running MorphOS 3.10 is present at the show.

Tabor

For the first time, a Tabor motherboard running AmigaOS 4 is on display at AmiWest. It's still missing audio and ethernet drivers, and the FPU emulation is still being worked on. As soon as these problems are solved, the machine could go on sale. Dickinson again mentions a price tag of 400 Euros, but points out it's not clear yet if the licence fee for AmigaOS will be included in that price.

A-EON will offer special builds of its software compiled to achieve maximum speed with Tabor's incompatible FPU. Hyperion will offer an SDK update that will enable external developers to release Tabor builds of their programs aswell.

A.L.I.C.E.

The Laptop running Windows and (emulated) AmigaOS 3/4 had already been presented at last year's AmiWest. It should have been on sale this year, but due to a supplier messing up, only very few (one?) machine made it to Sacremento. The unintentional one-year-delay was used to "implement a lot of new features", but the new features were not explained during the presentation. A.L.I.C.E.'s price will depend on the actual Laptop used - apparently, several different versions of the package will be offered.

Enhancer

A new release of A-EONs "Enhancer" bundle is in the works. Amongst other things, it will include a new version of the RadeonHD drivers, that support the entire RAM on a Radeon graphics card (as opposed to only two Gigabyte) and newer Radeon GPU models. More details can be found in the screenshots of Dickinson's slides included below.

LibreOffice

The LibreOffice port, which was said to have entered betatesting shortly before last year's AmiWest, was not mentioned at all during the presentation. As far as we could tell from observing IRC channels, it didn't come up during the part of the Q&A session where the live stream was dead.

AmigaOS 4

An update for the AmigaOS 4 SDK is in the works, it will be released "as soon as I finish the work". Steven Solie would appreciate some help with this: big parts of the SDK are Free Software or Public Domain, so any external developer could assist Solie in finishing the update.

Asked about a roadmap for Amiga 4 and the lack of updates, Solie points out that this was a new policy introduced by (then) new management - we assume he's referring to Costel Mincea, who joined Hyperion in 2015 as the third director. Solie thinks there "might another change be coming in that policy", he's feeling the "winds of change". According to him, the short-term roadmap is obvious: finish OS4 for Tabor, optimize the X5000 build.

PORTIA: DIY Laptop case for Tabor/Mini-ITX

Hans de Ruiter (RadeonHD, Warp 3D Nova) is working on a Laptop case for his Tabor motherboard. We couldn't make out the details due to audio issues - but it sounded like the plastic case, which is supposed to take any miniITX motherboard, will become a commercial product. Some very small pictures of PORTIA ("PORtable Tabor Incorporating AmigaOne") could be seen on one of Dickinson's slides during the presentation.

NoviaOS

Towards the end of his presentation, Dickinson clarifies a joke he made in his latest blog post: "NoviaOS" is simply AmigaOS. He was just having some fun and wanted to point out that AmigaOS will soon support more than two Gigabyte of GFX RAM (see above).

Screenshots of the slides

The following screenshots show all slides from Dickinson's presentation that were shown fullscreen during the (low resolution) live stream. A few more slides were only shown in the background of the video.

(cg)

[News message: 21. Oct. 2017, 21:21] [Comments: 0]
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