ANT Meeting 10/08/08

Quick report from ANT Meeting:

I arrived with Chris Y early at around 12:50. Considering myself and Chris? previous history of attending User Group Meetings and Amiga Shows, this was somewhat an achievement and bode well for the rest of the day! Turned out this was to be a good meeting!

We were greeted outside the venue by a Polish couple (sorry, I?m terrible with names) and we soon got talking about our Amiga experiences, models we have owned and the state of the Amiga market over the years in our respective countries. We were joined by Swisso soon afterwards who joined our conversations.

Soon after, Andy Costin turned up with the keys and we embarked upon setting up the hall and getting power and tables organised. Swisso had brought a job lot of games he wished to pass on to any Amigans who showed interest, and he also brought with him an AmigaOne that is in a poorly condition.

The ANT User Group has several A1200s and an A600 that have been donated by users and former members, I decided to see what condition these were in and started to try to power them up; I was immediately distracted though by Swisso?s poorly A1 and, seeing that this is a machine that is potentially developer-bound, I decided this would take precedence. As it turned out, Chris Y, Chris H and myself found that the machine powers up, but with no display ? we had no null modem cable to see whether we could get any Uboot output but we did observe that the graphics card fan, on the Radeon 9200 we substituted for the Voodoo 7000 we removed, would not power-up. This points to a dead AGP slot, but it could be more sinister and obviously needs some more specialist treatment than myself and the two Chris? could administer. Never the less, some progress was made. Need to try a PCI graphics card in the machine and try the null modem approach to see whether the machine can be successfully booted.

Across the room, Rigo was working on a micro A1 and was swapping from a troublesome OS4.0 install to an OS4.1 install. Next to that, there was an x86 Mac Mini ? these things are absolutely tiny but cool! Then, there was a D-Box A1200 PPC machine with B Vision ? the plan was to install OS4 Classic on this machine. At this point, Mikey C arrived, late and with bad jokes, its the Mikey we?ve come to know and love. Before Mikey C could steal my Microvitec monitor, Swisso and myself took the A1200s apart and checked for hard drives and upgrades. We found 1 A1200 with no extra memory, missing a floppy drive and no hard disk, 1 A1200 with a 4MB RAM expansion and unvalidated HD and a vanilla A1200 with a factory fitted Commodore 120MB hard disk. Finally, there was an A600HD, again with a knackered hard disk; some of these machines really need some serious TLC, might see what I can do on that front some other time. At this point, Mikey nicked my monitor to work with Andy Costin on the D-Box Classic install so my Classic Troubleshooting was over!

Back to the meeting, OS4.1 was installed on two machines, Mikey C had it running on his micro A1 ? apparently Mikey can outperform 10 beta-testers with his innate ability to crash, break and bring down programs and operating systems so as been running 4.1 to test it?s stability? apparently it?s quite good. I must admit, I didn?t play about with it that much, I noted the transparency of the Windows when they were dragged and the OS4.1 bootlogo during a soft reboot but that?s about all ? to be fair I didn?t use it enough to do it any form of justice or review so don?t expect an update on that from me, but perhaps one of the other guys can fill you in on their observations.

An exciting development, Chris Y demonstrated a web browser port from RiscOS he has undertaken, I believe called NetSurf. It?s still early days, but the imagery and the loading of pages were most impressive! You want to watch that Chris Y, he?s a real emerging talent!

While this was happening, the Polish lady was taking lots of photos and taking notes about the various demonstrations that were going on; we even had a group photo so expect a mugshot of all of us to be online at some point.

Much discussion was had, there?s a great photo of Andy and Mikey with a fire extinguisher held over the D-Box ?just in case? something got wired a little wrong!

We discussed the nature of MOTs on classic cars, Mikey?s waistline (sorry fella, you started it) and Weird Al ? look for him on youtube! Hell we even talked a bit about Amigas.

Anyways, a good meeting was had by all, some new faces were present and I sensed a lot of enthusiasm. I think if we ever do see new Amiga hardware that?s OS4 capable, there?s going to be a lot of interested people. I really can?t wait for those days. All in all, I counted about 14 attendees so it was a good turnout. Chris Y and I left about 4:50, I took with me a spare A1200 keyboard that was skip-bound. The rain began to come down again and the British Summer continued it's trait of never failing to amaze...still at least I nailed a Golf GTI on the way home which is always a plus!

Thanks to all who came along and made the meeting a success. Hope to see you all again. Oh and Andy, thanks again for the cake!

Rude!

Nice little report Rudei , i knew i should have come up for the meeting
Oh well will just have to wait to see if the 3 CAG meet takes place hopefully with a 4.1 demo
Chris Y s web browser sounds
Tell us more Chris!!

It wasn't my micro, but it was my HD with 4.1 on it

Simon

@Rigo

Apologies, I must admit it didn't look like yours

Rude!

@AJS

Mikey was going to post up some screenshots, but briefly:

Advantages
* Very fast (much faster than OWB - speed seems comparable to AWebOS4 and starts up in a couple of seconds, and that's without any compiler optimisations)
* Small footprint (executable is under 5MB when stripped, and memory usage is low - but I need to do some sort of quantitative measurement of that)
* Supports CSS
* Fully localisable
* Multiple windows

Disadvantages
* Core engine not as mature as (eg) OWB's, so some sites may render less correctly
* No Javascript

Also it looks like secure sites aren't going to work in the port until I can compile against an openssl lib which works (ie. when I get an SDK which allows me to link against sobjs without whinging)

There are other port issues but mostly related to it being a work-in-progress. Obviously the interface isn't anywhere near the functionality of iBrowse or AWeb yet either.

Chris

@Chris

Is this native now or is it running with Cygnix?

(I saw a screenshot of that)

If its running w/out Cygnix thats extremely cool... I smell a real competitor to OWB hehe, you wait for one and then two come along at once... :P

Alex.

@Rudei

The cake was indeed very nice.

@slcroucher

Was that your MacMini?

Rude!

@Rudei

Yes. It is the better of the two, faster and with a DVDrw drive. The machine dualboots OS X and Vista Business.

@slcroucher

Nice.

I have a 1.5GHZ PPC Mini... I call it "Moana"...



Alex.

@Rudei

nice report mate, thanks for the mention and thanks for your time and Chris Y for looking at the A1. It is indeed intended to go to a developer who doesn't yet have one. If only I can get the thing to fire up.
It was nice to see so many familiar faces after what must be a age since I last attended a monthly meet and it was also refreshing to see some new faces like our Polish friends Magdalena and her husband and also the quiet guy, sorry I am also c**p at remembering names. But welcome guests you are indeed. I have some photos of the day which I am happy to send to you e-mail attached but you will need to modify them before you upload to the site I think due to their size.

And here you may find the report with pictures (sorry, the text is in polish only) and presentation of AmigaOS 4.1 made by Michael Carillo (37 MB, MP4)

Thanks to Jacek and his wife Magda ;)

@mailman

One for the album

@Chris

Quote:

Push the lever! Push the lever! You know you want to.

Hans

@mailman

Cool pics & video... Mikey_C did a good job... shows off some of the cool things & gives people an idea of what 4.1 is/will be like...

E.g. Didn't know that the window was only transparent when dragging... hehe

Also older apps like AmigaAmp still run fine which is cool...

Also, Is the fact that MPlayer can now real-time resize a video down to cairo or just MPlayer being improved...?

Cheers, Alex.

@DBAlex

MPLAYER has been doing that since OS4.0

Is there anything on that report that mentions who that gorgeous guy in the blue t-shirt is?


Rude!

@Rudei

I dunno, but I don't half fancy him! - He's Gorgeous!




/me imagines Rudei running for the hills

/me has run to the hills, please delete his account

@DBAlex

Quote:

By default, the transparency is set to:

Active Window: 0%
Inactive Window: 15%
Dragged Window: 30%

These can be set to whatever the user wants in Prefs/GUI.

Simon