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Amiga Update (1995-02-16)
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// Amiga Update - News and Rumors //
\X/ (A Very Occasional Newsletter) \X/
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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.
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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!
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Brad Webb || (414) 544-3087 voice
ADSRS System Administration || (414) 544-3700 fax
General Electric Medical Systems || webb@malamute.med.ge.com
Information Management ||
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