The KickStart Amiga User Group and John Chandler are the first to write their show reports. Update: The Show Audio Files are now available.Visitors seem to have had a great time, some additional pictures can be found here: 1, 2, 3 and 4.
Show highlights:
1) The most remarkable news announced at the show was that Microsoft has become an AmigaDE software distributer. Amiga Anywhere Games Pocket Paks will start to be sold around the Thanksgiving holidays, through several resellers in the US and in England, including CompUSA and mmO2 in England.
Amiga will also make available Amiga SmartPhone Packs this upcoming Christmas. These will run with Sendo’s new Z100 smartphones as well as Orange’s new smartphones.
2) Final AmigaOne motherboards were being demonstrated, including demonstrations of ExecSG, the new PPC AmigaOS kernel. Among other features, Multitasking and Virtual Memory support were being demonstrated. Several other AmigaOS4 components were being demonstrated, running on classic hardware. A more integrated AmigaOS4 demonstration is planned for upcoming Saturday, 9 November at an Amiga show to be held in Ottawa, Canada.
With regard to performance, AmigaOS4 measures very good context switching times, only 4 microseconds on an entry level AmigaOne board (and 40 microseconds on classic Amiga Blizzard PPC accelator cards). For comparison, MacOS X has context switch times of 400 microseconds on similar specced hardware. Hans-Joerg Frieden also stated on ANN: “Roundtrip times wary with bus frequency and CPU. There’s a 6 us time for 100 FSB/450 Mhz 750CXe, 4 us for 133/600 Mhz.”
3) Thendic and bPlan had brought along many Pegasos systems running MorphOS. Alot of people were interested to try these new computers. Various visitors reported that boot-up speeds have even been reduced to only 2 seconds, but overall the system still suffers many instability issues. Here’s a nice show picture of an Apple Titanium PowerBook and MicroWave 😉 running MorphOS. A Pegasos focussed Amiga show is planned for the 16th of November in Poland.
Many interesting things are happening within the Amiga market. The main Amiga event this year will be big German Amiga Fair, which will take place on December 7th and 8th, 2002 at the Eurogress Aachen, Germany.
Here’s an interesting interview about one of the games to be included with the 2nd Amiga Anywhere games pack.
http://www.getboinged.org/gbnews.asp?A=194
2 more game packs are being prepared. Each pack contains 4 games and a thin software layer allows your PocketPC device to play the AmigaDE content on the card.
You might have seen Bill McEwen demonstrate AmigaDE content running on different devices, using the same card, at Amiga shows or in his demonstration for TechTV, but note that his Linux PDA shown (Zaurus) had already the Amiga Anywhere player pre-installed. So these first games paks only run on PocketPC devices, regardless if AmigaDE content is really platform independent itself.
http://www.aminet.net/pix/mpg/BillTechTV.mpg
PowerPC Amigas Rule! even the old ones with PowerPC604.
Now AmigaOS (or MorphOS=an AmigaOS compitible OS) will fly with the G4s 🙂
How does one get MorphOS on an iBook?
I can’t wait for osnews to get their hands on one of these for a throught review. I can’t wait to get more info and screenshots on the final product. One thing bothers me tho. Has anyone notice the there are lotsa fans inside the PegasOS tower?
Can anyone confirm this iBook MorphOS thing??
Can anyone confirm this iBook MorphOS thing??
Looks more like an Apple Titanium Powerbook to me.
Whatever.. my main concern isn’t if it’s an ibook or a powerbook, does it run morphos or is it just a mos background pic?
1) The most remarkable news announced at the show was that Microsoft has become an AmigaDE software distributer.
While it is not in nature for Microsoft to help a potential competitor, but Amiga DE and Amiga Anywhere can actually contribute to Pocket PC’s sales. Because they make 3D games incredibly fast for the amount of resources they use, and would fit perfectly on your iPaq.
So for Microsoft, this may contribute to more sales of PocketPCs.
It was just a MOS theme on the Apple, however it had its
intended purpose of generating a lot of hype that
MOS was available on Mac hardware.
( When it isn’t yet and probably won’t be for a lonnnng
time )
@ Ronald
Fans aren’t needed for these CPUs, using a heatsink is advisable (small one for G3s and a bigger ones for G4s), so that is normally one fan less as compared to ordinary PCs, the rest of needed fans is based on your choice of case design (good passive/active ventilation) and other additional hardware (graphic cards, harddrives, etc).
You can easily put an AmigaOne or Pegasos into any form factor ATX case. The Pegasos can even be used in microATX cases, but also offers one less 66 Mhz PCI slot compared to the AmigaOne.
> Looks more like an Apple Titanium Powerbook to me.
That is correct. However lower spec iBook support is said to be planned also. This has now been changed in my article.
@ Chris
There are many Thendic/bPlan employees reading OSNews, so we will hopefully see a clarification.
What the hell is that about?
I (as an main programmer of eFunzine.com – the company that is behind Pegasos fair in Poland) can promise a good review on Morphos/Pegasos. Pegasos motherboards should be in our office today. Then we’ll put a Morphos on it and make a review of it. Next, YDLinux + MacOnLinux. Also a fair raport is possible. Sadly, my english is rather poor (it’s enuff to read docs;-) and someone else should correct my translation of review.
There are many Thendic/bPlan employees reading OSNews, so we will hopefully see a clarification.
Correct 🙂
The laptop is a TiBook probably with a MorphOS background image. No Macs currently run MorphOS but older ones may do in the future.
MorphOS was however running on the Microwave (yes, really…)
@ Nicholas
Thank you for your clarification.
@ Chris
Hit the next link after viewing that “VideoMicrowave” picture and you will see the insides of this machine.