January-February
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1. its Been a a While Amiga Genesi At CES 2003 January February 2003 inside CES Everythingfor You MorphOS Features Impesions from CES CES Everything for You By Brant Coghlan The annual Consumer Electronics Show CES is a consumer s dream come true With 1 25 million square feet of exhibit soace and over 100 000 attendees CES replaces Comdex as the biggest trade show in Las Vegas The show covers all manner of consumer electronics including stereos TV s computers and automotive electronics Walking the show floor you come across blinking lights loud sounds cool technology and great inventions The 2003 CES held January 9 12 had plenty of these lt seemed that half the booths were selling something that had flashing lights Blinking cell phone face plates were everywhere Even car tires had blinking lights thanks to TireFly www tirefly com Their light screws onto your tire s valve stem and turns on when you drive Most of the flashing lights for cars were part of their sound systems Car audio was a significant portion of the audio systems on display at CES The north hall rocked with the sounds of ultra powerful car speaker systems With all the flashing lights chrome and tinted glass it was hard to see the flat panel TV screens that were installed in nearly every car AMICUE Saturday Coffee SIG Every Saturday Sirius Radio www siriuS com was holding live concerts at their booth and bro2. SetEnv SAVE S option to permanently save variable in ENVARC Support for un x style script execution Unlimited buffer lengths command line variable expansion quote expansion no fixed limits Configurable WShell compatibility features Fully configurable menus toolbar and key shortcuts On the fly MorphOS gt un x path transformation if needed Configurable tab completion for commands files dirs Review buffer with scrollbar like KingCON Powerful Multi pages mode Several shells can run in the same window console Graphical button to switch between them or create new ones Shell can be detached and reattached to another console Filesystems FastFileSystemll fully compatible to FastFileSystem SmartFilesystem Other filesystems like PFS3 run emulated Lowlevel Graphical tools for FFS and SFS Salvage Fix in place for damaged volumes etc CDDrive CDROM filesystem ISO9660 Multisession Rockridge Joliet CyberGraphX RTG compatibility Ability to use old CyberGraphX v4 drivers on PowerUP hardware Intuition user interface Fully skin able GUI using different bitmap for each element Shipped with several skins Opaque Window moving Window Iconification Off screen Windows screennotify library etc Ambient Powerful MorphOS Desktop MUI based Fully asynchronous multi threaded design you are never blocked Does not require icon library Built in original icons support Built
3. may be the most beautiful hotel in Las Vegas What s that Stevie Winwood song Back in the high life again all the doors that closed one time will open up again We ll drink and dance with one hand free let the world back into me back in the high life again Okay enough of that lets get back to the really relevant stuff Felix Schwarz of lOSpirit was very effective in demonstrating his products particularly fxPaint This is a really great program swear did not know how great this was am somewhere back in DPaint IV land but that is Cro Magnon Man and fxPaint is Homo Superior You can paint and do all these well effects It is really nice and has a lot of features was asked if it was a PhotoShop knockoff but no way This loads much faster and is more responsive Samuel Rydh of MacOnLinux org was there showing off his product What can say about this It does what it is supposed to do tried PowerPoint and other Office applications guess you can run almost all Mac stuff on the Pegasos if you run MacOnLinux You have to get a legal copy of MacOS on there of course Maybe you get this from a dead Macintosh don t really know There was also a Pegasos running a straight Debian distribution with KDE desktop Enough said Now said that was around all this stuff for two days and didn t witness any crashes or glitches That is totally true But was not stress testing all this stuff am not Tom s Hardware or PC Mag
4. optional Recursive Memory Management Distributed computing No access to Kernel structures Clean design with an elegant API HAL The Hardware Abstraction Layer Makes MorphOS hardware independent through the following points Determines the CPU types the number of CPUs and clock speed scans the ABox Zorro I O ports for Zorro ll and Zorro lll cards and configures them Finds local hardware CVisionPPC SymbiosPPC PCI bus Creates a resource map for the Quark microkernel Starts the kernel resource Q Box Exception Server Master Clan Server Address Server Config Server using the resource map built by the HAL CPUTime Server A Box ABox is a multithreaded application running as a Quark process with its own memory space lt contains a PowerPC native heavily extended reimplementation of the OS known from your Commodore A500 A1000 A1500 A2000 A3000 A3500 A3500T A4000 and A4000T systems A BOX Components Static 680x0 emulator lt emulates 680x0 instructions All 68881 and 68882 opcodes are supported too The most used FPU instructions are replaced with emulation opcodes easier to decode Some unused features are not emulated All in all the emulator is twice as fast as one without these special methods Trance Just In Time 68k compiler JIT Trance translates 68k program code to native PPC code Translated code is kept in memory so when running same code again translated code can be run directly
5. several optimizations are performed during the translation This allows to get incredible performances never achieved with other current JIT technology implementations Multiple 68k instructions are combined to single PPC instruction non needed parts of code are removed Etc Typically 68k applications running with JIT get least 50 of native PPC speed and up to 75 For example the native PPC rc5 decoder dnetc_ppc bench rc5 does 755kkeys sec and emulated 68k version dnetc_68k bench rc5 does 542kkeys sec csppc 604e 233 Even the slowest BlizzardPPC 603e is able to run 68k applications faster than any existing 68060 Condition code flow analysis which allows us to remove expensive CCR calculations when not needed Transput bound and Compute bound tasks are handled differently Compute bound tasks run in fully translated mode Trance is called from the task context to translate next sequence of code then execution jumps to that translated code Transput bound tasks spend most of their time waiting for user input or some other signal It s important that when signal a arrives code execution starts immediately without having to wait for code to get translated first So if translated code is not available the code is run using normal static emulation These emulated functions are profiled to see which are used most often then those functions are translated later when the system is idle The ma
6. Jump Screen menu function to quickly move your application to another screen Improved mouse movements in virtual groups New menu system Configurable and can be embedded in windows Support for wheel mice Now uses video memory whenever possible to improve performance Large speedups and optimizations everywhere MagicASL Nice MUI Requesters 3D Graphics Support Rave3D Low level 3D Graphic Drivers v1 6 implementation Rave is a low level 3D driver API Its design has been discussed and defined by major key graphic companies like ATI The MorphOsS version is implementing most of it and is adding some extensions like automatic and transparent double buffering ZBuffer access It is completely integrated with the 2D drivers system Features of the Driver API Vertex array Global states Multi Texturing Fogging OpenGL blending modes Antialiasing Compressed textures Trilinear texture filtering Mipmapping Texture memory access Textures can be bound on a screen bitmap Deep Z buffering greater or equal to 24bits per pixel Scaled draw context Fully extensible via tags including the addition of functions Complete blackbox design Hardware Drivers 3dfx Voodoo3 Avenger SIS 6326 3DLabs T Permedia2 and 2v CVisionPPC Permedia2 BVisionPPC Permedia2 Jungli Highlevel 3D Graphics Library compatible with the OpenGL 1 4 API Goa Full Warp3D emulation P
7. adcasting to their satellite radio listeners The service is not yet offered in Canada but a 1 30 3 30 Haps Hungry House 159 St Stoney Plain Rd Alberta Amiga is a publication of AMICUE the Amiga Computer Users of Edmonton Alberta Amiga is published monthly to inform and support the Amiga Community in Northern Alberta AMICUE meets on the third Thursday of each month at Arch Bishop Jordan High School 2021 Brentwood Blvd Sherwood Park Yearly Membership fees of 20 00 After Meeting Get Together Boston Pizza Sherwood Park m Con nd Asha s Sunday Chats Every Sunday evening in most places a few Amigans and former Amigans hoping for the best gather to chat and share information on a wide range of topics Subjects will range from the Amiga of course to books TV and movies to whether or not aliens have visited our planet Come join us on the IRC The network is ExodusNet The new servers are irc superhosts net irc midnightrose org irc codemain com The channel is team Amiga The time s are each Sunday evening 9 000mEST 11 00pmEST 2 00am Monday to 4 00am Monday GMT For those who can use Java chat point your browsers at www reefer org chat4 html or http www reefer org chat html put my cam up Sundays so that you can see me as we chat If you re using an Amiga get WebVision Aminet or if that s down email me and I ll send you the latest version I ve got It can live on the same scr
8. azine running expansive trials okay Don t buy ten have a crash and then say Daniel Miller told me they never crash Read lots of informed opinions and research stuff then make a purchasing decision Games Birdie Shoot is so hilarious and fun It has these great high resolution graphics You shoot funny looking birds but it is not really violent because there is no blood or explosion or anything They just fall down or nose dive to the ground We joked that you are merely tranquilizing them carpal tunnel syndrome Keybowl www keybowl com offers relief with their OrbiTouch keyless keyboard The best of the inventions shown at CES will affect our lives Curved thin film display screens and organic light emitting diodes OLED on display at Toshiba s booth will affect how future devices are designed A glimpse at the future diversity of uses of wireless technology was given by a futuristic juggling and musical performance by the Flying Karamazov Brothers at Craig Barrett s Intel CEO Keynote address The demonstration courtesy of MIT s Center for Bits and Atoms had juggling clubs changing colour based on their wireless connections and music being performed by gestures tracked by wireless sensors In the immediate future the KidSmart smoke detector from Smart Safety Systems www kidsmartdetector com will save lives In case of a fire the detector will play your own recorded a message giving your children explicit instruction
9. een MUI as AmIRC and is easy to use and setup You can also see the cam on the Web using a browser The cam address is www ashafx com cam There s always a picture up but it s only live on Sunday nights We also love playing with sounds You can grab all or some of the sounds we are playing by going to http enja org We have a nice group of friendly folks sharing information help and humor as we wend our way through the Great Amiga Oddessy Hope to see you there Please repost this anywhere you find Amigans online Asha asha ashafx com http www ashatfx com conversation with the company founder offered hope A few miles away the high end audio people were showing their wears at the Alexis Park Hotel These are for audiophiles that can hear beyond CD quality sound 16 bits at 44 1 kHz and prefer vacuum tubes to digital components to achieve the perfect sound quality This reminds me of an old Steve Martin comedy routine Googlephonics When these people get together with their computer cousins they bring vacuum tubes back to computers You can now get PC motherboards with vacuum tubes for their audio subsystems Computers at CES ranged from ultra fast gaming PC s to jewellery sized devices The slickest 3 6 Gigahertz P4 boxes were sporting three flat panel monitors for full immersion gaming For the home several companies were sharing their vision of what the digitally enabled home will look l
10. egasos specific software SmartFirmware Industrial OpenFirmware IEEE 1275 1994 implementation Forth engine interpreter Support for PCI AGP cards using Forth BootRom Support for PCI AGP cards using x86 BIOS through a x86 emulator Support for standard RDB and MBR partition table styles Support for FFS SFS AFS PFS PFS2 PFS3 filesystems The Operating System can boot from anywhere Complete control over Boot device hard drive cdrom network etc Autoboot functionality Input device keyboard serial terminal etc Display resolution etc Operating Systems supported on Pegasos MorphOS Linux Debian SUSE MacOS9 and MacOS X via Linux MacOnLinux Hardware we currently support Pegasos G3 and G4 DCE Phase5 CyberstormPPC PowerPC 604e DCE Phased BlizzardPPC PowerPC 603e PCI Bus boards DCE GRex4000 DCE GRex1200 Matay Prometheus Matay is currently working on it with us Graphic boards 2D ATI Radeon 9000 Pro RV250 ATI Radeon 8500LE R200 ATI Radeon 7500 RV200 ATI Radeon 7200 R100 ATI Radeon 7OOOVE RV100 3dfx Voodood 5500 VSA 100 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 VSA 100 3dfx Voodoo3 3500 Avenger 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 Avenger 3dfx Voodoo 2000 Avenger SIS 305 SIS 300 SIS 6326 3DLabs TI Permedia2 3DLabs TI Permedia2v DCE Phase5 CVisionPPC DCE Phased BVisionPPC Visionary modern support for TV Video cards Visionary is a remote control program with a skinab
11. facturers were also expanding their line of hard disk based MP3 devices and introducing hand held photo and video players was a little surprised that the devices followed closely the features pioneered by Archos and fine tuned in the Apple iPod We will have to wait for future devices to offer wireless connectivity which think is the real enabling technology for these devices SPOT is an interesting new type of wireless device coming this fall from Microsoft SPOT devices display news sports and weather information pulled from FM radio signals Initially SPOT technology will power watches but expect to see other devices by the end of the year For a monthly fee you can have your Outlook appointments and even email forwarded to your SPOT watch It may turn out that SPOT is a dog but it offers a glimpse at what our wireless future can offer and also shows that Microsoft can innovate For those looking for cool technology CES had plenty to offer sony was showing their AIBO robotic dogs and an experimental humanoid robot SDR 4X At just over half a meter high SDR 4X looks like a toy but it can walk dance see and hear Evolution Robotics www evolution com was also showing off a kit to turn your laptop into a robot and a complete wheeled robot ER2 for entertainment and robotic development Refinement Canada www technosonic com was displaying hobby robot kits from Robo Block www roboblock com Infrared Imaging premiered their Nig
12. htMax viewer which they claim uses a new form of night vision technology The Lightoook Company www litebook com from Medicine Hat Alberta was showing their device to treat jet lag and seasonally affected dissorder using light For those suffering from cont on page 10 MorphOS Features at a glance Native PowerPC Operating System Supports Pegasos and Amigas fitted with PowerUP cards Runs Native PPC and Amiga OS RTG Applications 68K JIT compiler runs applications at up to 75 of native PPC speed Hardware 3D support 3dfx 3DLabs SiS more to mnofi ie Animation SIG _ New Ambient Desktop with 32 bit colour support Fully Skinnable user interface MUI Object Orientated GUI Toolkit Media Player Frogger i Multi threaded Image viewer MysticView SOL Meetin gs Web browser Voyager FIT PDF viewer APDF Last Friday Supports an extensive range of Printers TurboPrint V7 TCP IP Stack for networking of Each M ont h Built in Software Development Kit Contact Gord Raboud 449 6657 AHI Audio USB Support Multiple 64 bit File systems supported including FFS2 amp SFS Core OS Quark State of the Art micro kernel designed for High Super Usermode switch speed Low interrupt latency IntThread and Int PCode abstraction Memory protection Symmetrical multi processing SMP Task Thread and Clan Chief model Resource tracking Asynchronous message system Virtual memory
13. ike Expect a central storage device for all your media content that is shared wirelessly with all the electronics in your home Microsoft was showing their Smart Display technology Right idea but wrong implementation Notebooks were small and powerful but tablets and smaller devices had the spotlight Handheld PDA s had a strong presence Palm hada disappointing showing but PalmOS based devices were easy to find Sony s new NZ90 Color CLIE was the most interesting among them The NZ90 has a builtin 2 Megapixel camera MPEG 4 video record and playback ability voice recorder and MP3 player Bluetooth is built in and Wi Fi 802 116 is an option Colour PocketPC based devices are coming down in price lead by Dell s Axim Sharp was aggressively showing their Zaurus PDA the device that at one point was going to run Amiga DE now called Amiga anywhere The Zaurus running Linux creates a rich multimedia environment for a PDA Some key wireless software is already available for the Zaurus and sharp is looking for more developers Standing on the sidelines not caring which PDA wins out Rhinoskin was showing their cases for all handhelds Many devices on display were smaller than the handhelds Every variety of MP3 players was shown Perhaps the best of the bunch was the ultra light weight feature packed iRiver players www iriveramerica com Bantam www bantamusa com also had some interesting designs for MP3 devices Several manu
14. in newicon support Built in OS 3 5 Glowicon support New true colour PNG 32bits icon format with alpha channel support for transparency Fast icon caching system File notification True colour rendering no pen allocations Support for deficons 64 bit arithmetic to handle big storage devices Localized ARexx port optional Built in disk formatting Visual effects transparency blurring colour imposing alpha channels Built in wostart library New Preferences System Highly flexible shared class system Possible to embed in MUI applications All system preferences can be edited in a single MUI tool Or run as a standalone component AHI v6 The Standard Audio Library AmiTCP v5 TCP IP protocol stack Friendlier logging system with global filter etc Cache for name server replies sana ll 2 0 support with DMA buffers extension Full PPPoE support for Cable and ADSL Full BOOTP support Packet filtering Access control for server programs Automatic BOOTP configuration utility Standard network tools ping traceroute resolve finger netstat etc Telnet client RSH client Fully controllable through ARexx User Manual InstallerNG A lot of new useful functions and tooltypes Plug in system to use other GUI toolkits MUI etc MUI Object Oriented GUI Toolkit Adjustable bubble help sizes and look and floating bubble mode Separate preferences for MUI settings and external MCCs Speeds up start up time
15. in point of this arrangement is not to add any delays or latency to the system PowerPC Compatibility Libraries ppc library PowerUP compatibility layer AMICUE Contact Larry Bolch 484 9879 WOSEmu WarpUP compatibility layer Exec Mixed mode allowing 68k and PPC code running in the same task No exception and no task switch to go from one mode to the other one Task memory pool Better multithreading support systemV ABI support using fou registers for system functions is possible New functions to get and set tasks states stack oriority New functions for better memory handling New hook and query functions to internal exec lists graphics library RTG New functions for alpha blending Special visual effects used by Ambient True colour Extended draw primitives diskfont library Anti aliased fonts in development Freel ype2 Vector fonts library Supports Type0 Type1 Type42 TrueType and OpenType fonts Anti aliasing support Datatypes Datatypes are a means of allowing programs to handle different data formats without having to directly support them themselves Currently supported JFIF JPEG PNG IFF ILBM BMP GIF PCX PBM Icons Text Binary Shell and Console Improved resident commands If New switch NOREQ S hides possible requesters IF EXISTS foobar NOREQ Path Support for multi assign ADD REMOVE Resident DEFER S program is made resident when first used
16. inux all the usual Genesi suspects and a bunch of other people were there Bill Buck is almost always on the man can talk and he was trying to bring over some new programming talent to the Genesi team He could write a self help book with comments like you ve got to accelerate your ambition Thierry and swapped travel stories advised him that Alaska was very beautiful and he talked about his year in America he liked it but had to go back Damien McKenna and Nate Downes and their wives were on hand These are the guys we are depending on to help make things happen in the USA They are long time Amigans and now they on board with the revolution like all of us The international makeup of the Genesi team was evident with French Swedes Danes Drunkards Germans and Americans on hand Just kidding about the Drunkards ahaha stole that from Bogie in Casablanca All the Europeans speak very good English Felix Schwarz has a great vocabulary but have to say that Mark Olsen bigfoot soeaks the best English because he keeps it simple How much longer do have to work need a lot of sleep What time is it I m really hungry Bigfoot could pass for an American They didn t have any beer but the champagne was awesome and guess the wine was The young people seemed to be playing by the rules and drinking sodas and water The food was great The view was terrific we observed the Bellagio from our high perch The Bellagio
17. le GUI Sound drivers Pegasos onboard AC97 sound chip Sigmatel STAC 9766 Terratec 128iPClI ESS Solo 1 Terratec 512i digital FM801 Vivanco FM801 Network drivers Realtek RTL8201 10 100MBit Phyceiver like found on the Pegasos Realtek RTL8139C 10 100MBit Realtek RTL8029AS 10MBit Village Tronic Ariadne2 10MBit IndividualComputing XSurf 10MBit PCMCIA CNet NICs A1200 PCMCIA slot only SCSI Symbios 89x current models Symbios 810 815 825 875 Symbios 710 770 Symbios 770 SCSI like found on CyberstormPPC and BlizzardPPC DKB A4091 Commodore A4000T on board SCSI IDE Pegasos onboard IDE ATA100 controler VIA8231 Commodore A1200 A4000 internal controler generic PCI cards Poseidon Complete USB protocol stack See below for details Next AMICUE Meeting March 20th 2003 7 00 Arch Bishop Jordon High School Sherwood Park Impressions from CES 2003 in Las Vegas Daniel Miller posted some more information about CES 2003 in Las Vegas Bill and Raquel hosted a reception at Bally s on Friday night wasn t sure wanted to go until found out that reception meant party at their hotel room ended up going of course as did about 35 people and everybody seemed to have a good time Several of Bill and Raquel s friends were there Multiple Genesi lawyers were there The Pegasos USA web team was there David Green of Phoenix Developer Consortium Felix Schwarz of lOSpirit Samuel Rydh of MacOnL
18. s in how to get out alive The Amiga s voice synthesis and audio playback was used in the early research that eventually led to this product The Amiga had another presence at CES but I didn t realise it at the time stopped by the Genesi booth to see the OS and PowerPC hardware they were showing off didn t make the connection with MorphOS and the Amiga so my interest was rather shallow To the casual observer it appeared to be another OS for a media serving box They will have a tough fight with current Linux based solutions and Microsofts upcoming Home Media Center As always the Amiga is an underdog Perhaps CES 2004 will feature more Amiga technology based on Amiga anywhere Time will tell Visit the AMICUE Web Site at http www amicue org Bigger But Late January and February Newsletter has been combined because of a delay in getting our CES report from Brant our report who was at CES from page 4 because they are sick and in need of treatment If you are not averse to violence Quake seemed to be running very well 1 or 2 don t know they were both on there Software Tycoon and Feeble Files were on there too but did not try them Okay am sick of writing and used up all my notes If there are any MorphOS news junkies out there we should have some other comments and pictures at amiga news de toward the end of the week so look there at that time
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