Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 06:04:39 +0200
From: ELBOX press@elbox.com

Organization: ELBOX COMPUTER
Subject: Elbox dispels rumours on MEDIATOR PCI

ELBOX COMPUTER
04 September 2000

The breakthrough product developed by us: the MEDIATOR PCI,
has caused many changes in the Amiga world. Changes for better,
one has to admit.

People who cannot approach this excellent product with honour
and respect due to its design, spread rumours, which give false
information to Amiga users.

In order to make this situation clear and show our respect to
all those dedicated users of Amiga computers, we feel obliged
to clarify the information.

Below you find our answers to such rumours:

1. *** MEDIATOR PCI 1200 can only have access to 8 MB address
   area, so the latest Voodoo III cards with 32-64 MB address
   area could not be used. ***

   Answer: Not true.
   Elbox MEDIATOR PCI 1200 enables access to the entire 4 GB
   PCI Memory Space and to all the required I/O space.
   Execution of access to the full memory area in PCI (4 GB)
   through the 8 MB Amiga memory window is done with MEDIATOR's
   hardware on the basis of the MEDIATOR offset registers.

2. *** Designing MEDIATOR PCI 1200 in such a way that
   it works with all the existing turbo cards for Amiga 1200
   (i.e. within the 8 MB address window) will result
   in modern graphics cards major crippling in the transfer rate
   between the processor and graphics card. ***

   Answer: Not true.
   Data exchange between the processor and graphics cards
   within the 8 MB address window does not affect transfer rate.

   E.g.: Writing to a graphics card of 32 MB of data within
   the 8 MB address window means execution of just 3 additional
   writing operations for over 8,000,000 writing operations.
   In practice, transmission over 8 MB of data to a PCI graphics
   card is very rare, as majority of modern PCI graphics cards
   memory is allocated for storing textures.
   Current data exchange is thus executed within the one 8 MB
   window, anyway.

3. *** PCI graphics cards themselves are now increasingly hard
   to obtain and will be obsolete in a few months time. ***

   Answer: Not true.
   Many new graphic chipsets are and will be produced in both
   the PCI standard and the AGP Intel standard.
   This is clear, as PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)
   is an industry standard independent of the processor platform
   by definition. Graphic cards in this standard may work
   equally well in PC, Mac or Amiga computers.

4.  *** Elbox will produce a PCI/AGP busboard to be directly
    connected to the expansion connector on the BlizzardPPC.
    It will come equipped with 3xPCI slots, 1xAGP slot and a
    socket for SDRAM. ***

    Answer:
    Who came up with this one?
    Preparing such a busboard, connected directly to the
    BlizzardPPC card in the place of the BVisionPPC card,
    would require redesigning the BlizzardPPC card.

    Replacing one PCI slot with an AGP slot in the busboard
    for A1200 does not result in any major benefits.

    Instead of SDRAM memory in the busboard, we will offer
    a far better solution, to which MEDIATOR PCI 1200 is
    totally ready, of which we will write more in one of our
    coming announcements.

Best regards,
Mariusz Wloczysiak
ELBOX COMPUTER, Press Department

• Q: Read today that you do not want to write datatypes for the MorphOS. It is a pity.
• A: Maybe I produce something different for MorphOS.
  
  
• Q: I hope that you do not have the intention to turn away from the amiga.
• A: I am still using my Amiga. At the moment.
  
  
• Q: You wrote that there are nearly no registrations for your datatypes at the moment. I know why. [...] If there would be an easy way to register I really would like to do it and use the DT. But for doing this I will never apply for a credit card or waste my time by clicking through english pages. [...] The easiest way would be a money transfer.
• A: Money transfer is available since, I do not know when. It is explained in the documentation.

• Q: All together I want to praise you for your products and I hope you are developing them. Versions for Windows (under development), Linux, maybe Amie (if it will be released some day) and maybe as a PPC-plugin for AWeb & Co would be greate.
• A: I will not port anyone of my programs to Amie in the near future. Windows is in a early alpha-stage and Linux is interesting too. There won't be PPC-plugins [refer to akMPEG] but it is possible to integrate them in the actual version.

• Bugfix: There was a bug when closing the screen.
• New: "File watch" has been added to the menu.
• New: The release-date of the xvs-library is shown in the about-window.
• Change: "CPU speed..." has been removed because this feature contained too many bugs and is not very important.

1. Andreas Kleinert has not enough time, because he is busy with other - non free time- projects.
2. The akDatatypes support many platforms at the moment but the SAS/C-Source-Tree needs some changes to become crosscompatible with gcc (or vbcc), because SAS/C is not available for MorphOS and also isn't the best choice for the PPClib any longer.
3. To involve other programmers in the developement, e.g. by CVS and the opening of the sources to a closed group of people, could help but surely the interest is way too low.
4. The Warp-datatypes were already ported to MorphOS and are free.
5. At the moment there are no more registration-request for the akDatatypes. This is another clear sign.

• Aside from the traditional StormC Code Generator now also gcc can be used as Code Generator. gcc will replace the old Code Generator for all future versions. Though it is internally gcc, you can use project files and all that like usual.
• For PPC a new port of gcc for WarpOS is used. This is the first gcc-WarpUP which actually runs fully in PowerOpen, and does not switch "on-the-fly" between PowerOpen and System V.
• StormC 4 runs on 68k and PPC machines, and produces output for 68k and for WarpUP machines.
• The "StormC-gcc" can link together with Linkerlibs and object files from the "old" StormC and it directly produces Amiga Executables (no elf2exe2 needed anymore !!!).
• It supports all features of StormC which gcc did not support up to now (including MixedBinary and easy creation of Shared Libraries)
• It is possible to compile through the network, so that with 4 Amigas, compilation is 4x faster. (Currently only Envoy-Network, but TCP/IP planned)
• CVS Support integrated
• Major enhancements in the editor and the help-system
• A tool to keep track of open bugs/todo-stuff was added
• First gcc-implementation which simply installs using an Installer-Script :)