=========================================================================== // Amiga Update - News and Rumors // \X/ (A Very Occasional Newsletter) \X/ =========================================================================== 950216 Last week I mentioned some rumors about a compromise US/Bahamian court settlement. Here are some quotes form the "AmigaWorld" hotline on GEnie which deal with this situation. They're taken from the February 10 upload by Dan Sullivan, "AmigaWorld" editor. First, it was expected that yesterday, Feb 9th, lawyers for former Commodore executives Irving Gould and Medhi Ali would file papers with the Bahamian Supreme Court challenging the settlement the liquidators had reached with Commodore's creditors to have at least part of the case held before a U.S. bankruptcy court. This settlement would have cleared the way for the sale of the company to the highest bidder. Yesterday the Bahamian Court failed to convene because of an emergency leave requested by one of the judges. The court is set to reconvene in about two weeks to rule on the Gould/Ali objections. Another development, however, took place yesterday at the site of the cancelled proceedings. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that two additional groups appeared to join the bidding process. Escom AG, the German electronics distributor which was previously interested in Commodore and an unnamed American technology company being represented by someone called "Lewis-Ulysses" of Seattle. Incidentally, rumor has it that falling advertising revenue may force the end of "AmigaWorld" sometime this summer. ========================================================================== The following fascinating article appeared on the nets, taken from a French Amiga magazine interview. The magazine is "Amiga News", AN in the transcript. The translation to English leaves a bit to be desired but those of you working with HPs and HPUX may find this particularly interesting. The filename I downloaded this by was "madsci.txt". Maybe that should be taken as a warning about it's veracity? ------ AN: We were present last month at the Future Entertainment Show and were told that the HP-RISC was the chosen cpu for future Amiga development. CL: That's true. [...] AN: Who decided the choice of the CPU: the developement team or CBM? CL: It was CBM's decision. We spent a lot of time choosing the best CPU for our needs. Our decision was based on these factors: compatibilty with existing HP products because they've bought Apollo (graphic stations manufactured) and compatibilty with 68000 (there is a 68000 emulation mode in the PA-RISC). [...] AN: Is this emulation hardware ? CL: Both. In a lot of cases, the instructions' architecture is similar to the 68000 and there are also software emulation tricks, so that makes the porting easier. That doesn't guarantee the compatibility, it's not like the PPC, they (HP) didn't finish it (emulation) and I don't know if they will finish it, but it reduces considerably the time required to port softwares, there's a lot less of re-coding to do. [...] AN: So it will be quite easy to create a portable AmigaDOS for HP-RISC? CL: Exactly. It was one of the main reasons for the choice of HP's CPU. Other reasons were that we wanted great control over the implementation of our 3d work (RISC-3d). For eg., for the PPC, if you want to be an OEM [Original Equipement Manufacturer, in other words, a manufacturer who takes equipement (in this case a CPU) from another manufacturer to build a new equipement], you're given the heart of the PPC, that's a small square part of the chip and the rest in a L form to let you add your own hardware. That's how it goes, if you want to build a custom PPC chip. AN: But no PPC user has done it yet, they're all using it in the original form. CL: Yes, it was so with other chips. But we want to completely customize the chip to our needs. With the PA-RISC, countrary to the PPC, we are able to take the heart of the chip and directly add or remove parts or even add instructions, that's very important to us. We spent a lot of time on new instructions that give us fantastic 3d performances and we couldn't have done that on the PPC. With HP stuff you can. AN: So you are in the process of building a custom HP-RISC for the Amiga. CL: Yes, we're building it around a PA-150, the latest one. So it will give us quite fantastic performance. AN: How's going this work ? CL: We already got software emulation of the four parts of the chipset, they are working well so we're quite happy. AN: Will these four chips be a single chip later ? CL: Yes, we want to have essentialy in it: the sound part of the AAA as well as the graphic part of the RISC-3d and of course the CPU port. We still need a digital-analogic converter that will generate the colour table for the video, but these are standard pieces, so we won't have to design them. All this in a single chip. Another reason to have chosen the PA-RISC is that it permits you to have a multi-processors system. So we can have, for eg., a cheap single-chip processor system. But we could also have an ultimate system with our chip as a co-processor for the graphics and a PA-RISC doing all the non-graphical stuff. So you're doubling the performance of your system by having all the graphic stuff done by our chipset not by the PA-RISC. [...] AN: How much time will it take to finish the project ? CL: We've predicted 18 to 20 months since the beginning. When the buy-out will be finished and we will be told:"Go!" and financial backup will be there, it will take 18 months. It's the whole conception of the chip and the software support that has to be done. AN: It will depend on the financial backup, no ? CL: Of course, it will, but we don't need extraordinary backup, at least not much more than what we needed in the past. We can certainly do it in 18 months with reasonable backup. AN: Windows NT will running on it. CL: Yes, Windows NT works on PA-RISC and we won't do anything to prevent it (WinNT) from working on our system. AN: What will AmigaDOS look like on this machine ? CL: Our aim is to simply port AmigaDOS to the new chip. Exec, Graphic, Intution will be ported. Actually all AmigaDOS parts will be ported. Our aim is that Amiga be the system with the possibility to add Windows NT. It will be a system running three OS (including HP's own OS). AN: The new AmigaDOS won't be compatible to existing Amiga software. CL: That's true, you will have to recompile your programs for the new system. But thanks to the high compatibilty with the 68000 it shouldn't be an enormous task. It should be as easy as for Mac users converting their software to their PPC. AN: All this can be done if someone buys the Amiga ? CL: Sure. Providing that the managament will be more shrewd than those we had. In the past, Commodore often had brilliant products that never came to the market because of managers who were saying:"No, nobody won't buy it!". [...] AN: Mr Amor of CEI told on Portal last day that he wasn't quite sure on the choice of the RISC chip. He said Macs and PCs are heading to the PPC, but that there were discussions with HP. It looks as though as he is not quite sure on the idea of using an HP-RISC. CL: The truth is that he had very few contacts with the engineers. He just came 1 or 2 times. AN: You had more contacts with other teams ? CL: Yes. We had more contacts with people who are not anymore competing for the buyout. Samsung was one of them. AN: Amstrad ? CL: Yes, but it was a long time ago. AN: Philips ? CL: Yes. AN: They still got the possibility for a last offer ? CL: True. I think that now that engineers are gone and that the Christmas sales have been missed, CBM's value is now lower: old offers can be back. [...] AN: Have you got a preferred buyer ? CL: Well the most important thing is that the buyer has to be shrewd. I fear buyers who will have only a short-term profit in mind and also buyers who just want to destroy the Amiga. [...] AN: Are there serious buyers ? CL: Yes, sure. AN: Are CEI and C= UK included in the serious buyers circle ? CL: Yea... AN: You're not sure about that ? CL: It's hard to tell. I think that C= UK looks very shrewd and that is very important. [...] In short: It's important for them to have a cheap chipset version for multimedia stuff, video games ... Some of the old screenmodes will be present and new ones should be impressive: true colour modes, reduction of colour modes HAM look-alikes but a bit different, YUV modes (easy PhotoCD implementation) and 32bits modes (alpha channel) ... From what they've heard and seen from Sega's Saturn specs, it should not even come close to the new Amiga Chipset specs, the blitter has now internal instructions for texture-mapping, shading ... like the AGA it can completly control the rate of pixel->a lot of new screenmodes ... AN: One of Amiga's big problem is the lack of memory protection. Will this problem be solved ? CL: We wanted to get ride of this problem for quite a long time but inner characteristics of Exec prevented us from doing that. Now that we're porting our OS to a new chip, we won't hear from this problem anymore. [...] Exec won't be an easy port as it is coded in assembler, happily enough it is small with a very dense kernel. [...] AN: Amiga's developers will probably spend a lot of time learning to code the new machine ? CL: Actually, unless you want to hit the hardware, you don't have to worry much about it as we tried to keep the same philosophy as we had on our Amigas before. You should be able to run your software on the new system just by recompiling them. That's our aim. We've got lots of software of high quality today. AN: Last question: if this new Amiga will be out in two years time, what advantages will it have over Macs and PCs ? CL: I think that one of the most important points is that the machine will have exceptional graphical performances. As a dedicated 3D renderer system and in the video niche, it will be as competitive against other systems as the Amiga is today. In 18 to 20 months, when the PCs will have reached our level, we will already be in a generation ahead! ========================================================================== Brad Webb || (414) 544-3087 voice ADSRS System Administration || (414) 544-3700 fax General Electric Medical Systems || webb@malamute.med.ge.com Information Management || ==========================================================================