AmiWest news

AmiWest: Dickinson and Solie talk about A-EON's and Hyperion's current projects
This year's AmiWest is taking place in Sacramento (USA) this weekend. The first presentation was a joint effort of Trevor Dickinson (A-EON) and Steven Solie. The latter was introduced as the "AmigaOS team leader", which he confirmed by replying "for now, hehe". Actually, Solie had stopped describing himself as "Team leader" a while ago and only referred to himself as the team's spokesperson, while Costel Mincea was supposed to act as Hyperion's technical director.

Dickinson and Solie gave short talks about A-EON's and Hyperion's current projects and then answered questions from the audience. The following topics were discussed during the presentation:

AmigaOne X5000

Dickinson officially announced the X5000 going on sale. Solie confirms that the Release Candidate of AmigaOS 4 for the X5000 is currently being tested and will be shipped with the computer. The onboard network controller is not supported yet, a replacement network interface card will be delivered with complete systems though. According to Solie, Multicore support has been deferred so the team could concentrate on finishing the X5000 port, but will be the focus once the X5000 version is shipping.

The cheapest complete systems will ship for 1700 GBP, which would be about 1900 Euro (excluding taxes and postage). Dickinson states he brought two bare X5000 motherboards to the show, which can be bought by visitors for 1350 USD (about 1200 Euro).

Tabor

The Tabor motherboard is currently booting into Workbench. The developer assigned to it is working hard to get it to a state where the rest of the team can help with the porting. Dickinson says the target price for Tabor is "below 400 Euro", the boards will be sold at net cost. A-EON is hoping that the increased userbase will result in improved software sales, which is how Tabor is supposed to make them money.

AmigaOS 4

The OS team is also working on "AmigaOS 4.1 FE Update 1", a Release Candidate is curently being tested. Solie expects it to be released before the end of the year. Only one feature of the update is mentioned: extended memory is supposed to work properly now. While AmigaOS can still only adress two gigabytes of memory, up to four gigabytes are supported now and will be used by modules like the Ram Disk.

LibreOffice

The port of LibreOffice is said to be "usable" now, beta testing has just started. A copy of the office suite is apparently installed on one of the machines at the show, so that visitors can have a closer look.

Gutenprint

A-EON acquired Timothy 'Terminills' Deters' sources of his AROS port of Gutenprint, Tony Wyatt is working on adapting it to AmigaOS 4.

Amiga Enhancer

Work is ongoing on both a port to AmigaOS 3 and an update for the PPC version. Additionally, a cheaper version will be released that is not containing any of the parts that are not compatible with or useful on weaker machines - Warp 3D Nova is mentioned as an example.

A.l.i.c.e.

The laptop with preinstalled emulator environments will include officially licensed copies of both Amiga Forever and the Final Edition of AmigaOS 4.1. Additionally, a MUI license has been acquired from MUI's original author, Stefan Stuntz. Dickinson estimates that the cost of the entire package would be "a couple of hundred Euro" higher than that of the original laptop, due to all the software licenses. Assuming the laptop would cost 450 Euro, he thinks it might be possible to sell A.l.i.c.e. at 650 Euro.

Miscellaneous

Using amigadeveloper.com, A-EON is currently managing 50 projects with 22 paid developers working on them. The SVN repository has recieved 2885 commits so far. 900 customers registered for Amistore and purchased about 3000 items. Amistore is currently offering about 50 titles. (cg)