AmiWest News

I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in hearing/dicussing new developments announced at AmiWest, rather than the s##tstorm around AW.net ownership that appears to have drowned everything else out...

So, what interesting news has been announced?

I know of:
- Amiga OS 4.1 Final Update to be released before the end of 2014
- Sam460cr - a Cost Reduced (CR) version of the Sam460ex
- New RadeonHD driver with composited video - the A1-X1000 can now play 1080p video (combination of updated driver, video players, etc.)**
- Radiance bundle: New Radeon HD Driver, New Personal Paint 7.3, Sketchblock Lite with Fractals, Videos, Artwork, Mplayer, Dvplayer, Workbench Candi, icons, etc.

EDIT: BTW, Workbench Candi = fully animated Workbench backdrops done using compositing. They look great, and the animation is smooth.

Anything else?

Hans

@Hans

+1

@Hans
About the Radiance Bundle :

What about the people, like me, that bought th driver and the fractals for sketchblock ?

BTW, "composited video" is our variation of textured video, which I mentioned multiple times as being the replacement for overlay. Overlay which is restricted to displaying video in up to one or two windows. Composited video, on the other hand, allows YUV video frames to be rendered, scaled, rotated, warped, alpha-blended, etc., anywhere. So, not only does it speed up video playback, it frees us from the restrictions of overlay (unlimited video anywhere on-screen), and could be used for more too (e.g., cross-fades & other video effects).

Trevor demonstrated 1080p video playback using this new feature.

All of this should be welcome news for all those people who were begging for overlay/textured-video (actually, just better video playback).

Hans

@RIBDEVIL

Quote:

You'll have to ask A-EON about the bundle. They may offer the individual items separately, but you'll have to check with them.

Hans

@Hans
OK
Thanks Hans.
And good work with the Radeon Driver.

@Hans

this is very good news, can't wait to get my hands on AOS.Final.

looking forward to use new radeon drivers, do we still have
to install it manually, since doing a fresh install i must change back the gfx card. is this sorted out

@Hans
Looking forwards to 4.1 final :)

@thread

don't forget the news that A-EON has acquired the rights to octamed soundstudio and plan a native AOS4 version. that's a nice bit of news right there.

-- eliyahu

Would love to know more about :
-New Intuition features
-New Workbench features
-Much improved DOS
-New unified graphics library with RTG support which allows for (current and future) very substantial general and platform specific performance optimizations e.g. through the use of on-chip DMA engines (present on recently released hardware going back to the Sam440)
-Native GDB Debugger AmigaOS4
-What are the updates done at wiki.amigaos.net
-What are the new supported GFX board

Kamelito

@Kamelito

I can only comment on a few of the items that you list:
Quote:
Basically, RTG support is now built in to the graphics.library, so it's no longer a patch. Developers no longer need the Picasso96API.library for certain "RTG-only" features.

As for DMA, the following leaked info is already published knowledge:
http://www.hdrlab.org.nz/benchmark/gf ... 2d/OS/AmigaOS/Result/1460
http://www.hdrlab.org.nz/benchmark/gf ... 2d/OS/AmigaOS/Result/1470
Yes, that's DMA on the A1-X1000 copying to VRAM at ~1400 GiB/s, and the read speed varies by graphics card speed.

Quote:
I can only say that I'm very much looking forward to this. While I can't use this for debugging graphics drivers, it will be great to be able to debug applications without riddling it with temporary print statements.

Quote:
I missed that bit, but I can give you the list:
- Radeon R5 230/235/235X (IMPORTANT: Radeon R5 240 is *NOT* supported)
- Radeon R7 250X/265/270/270X (IMPORTANT: Radeon R7 240/250/260/260X are *NOT* supported)
- Radeon R9 270/270X/280/280X (IMPORTANT: Radeon R9 285/290/290X/295X2 are *NOT* supported)

These are some of the latest card series (AMD ditched "HD" from their naming scheme). The cards listed above are fully supported by the driver.

NOTE: Only a few have been tested so far. I'll be adding them to the compatibility list on my website later.

Hans


EDIT: Updated the compatibility list with more warnings about unsupported cards.

@Hans
Why is not the r9 290(x) not supported?
You have done a great job on os4.

@Kamelito

Quote:

One is the display of thumbnails in WB windows.

@Antique

Quote:
The R9 290(x) has a Sea Islands GPU, and that series isn't supported yet.

BTW, credit for improving video playback should also go to LiveForIt and Cobra for updating mplayer & DvPlayer with composited video support. Steven also did some work on the graphics.library for improving YUV bitmap support.

Hans

@eliyahu

Yes, the Octamed news was interesting. I always liked Octamed.


@all

In case people missed the announcement, AmigaOS 4.1 Final Update will also come with the long awaited new tabbed shell with history. Having used for a while, I can say that it's great. The image thumbnail Workbench feature that Chris mentioned is also nice.

Epsilon's blog has some good pictures and tid-bits from the show.

Hans

Well I can make some comments on the graphics.lib improvements.

Steven and I started out mergin Picasso96 into Graphics, and Hans worked on DMA improvement for his ReadonHD driver.

More than 150 diffrent revision went into creating this.

When Picasso96 got loaded it did patch a large number of diffrent function of libraries in gfx, layers, intuition.

one of the first jobs we did was to remove each patch one but one.. simple each function of P96 should be merged into each library.. this was very time consuming.

Also Steven created new Functions in Graphics so you now don't need to open Picasso96 to use HiColor/TrueColor function... you simple use Graphics from now on.. so now you only need to open Grahics.lib and forget about CyberGrahicX or Picasso96.

Picasso96 also creates cybergrahics.lib at startup... now I have been working on changing cgx to call gfx.lib directly so we can move cgx into libs: and make it an external libray that only should be used for compatible reasons, as it would be a little faster calling gfx.lib directly.

A lot of time simply went into updating graphics to a more modern RTG System. While there maybe is not much new stuff in there, but this really helps simplfy the hole graphics system for the future. We now have the hole gfx system in one place making maintenance a lot easyer.

Regards
René

IIRC, a Xorro board was also announced; a serial logger based on Lyle's work.

Can anyone remember anything else? I'm sure that there was more.

Hans

Regarding 1080p playback, this doesn't mean anything. You can play a 1080p MPG file i suppose but I highly doubt you'll be able to decode a 1080p h264 file that easy (I hope to be proved wrong of course ).

Anyway, thanks for all the work you've put so far in updating our RTG system.

And will this also benefit to Radeon 92xx systems (enhanced speed for example) ?

@Hans

Thank you for your work and thanks to everyone who added to AmigaOS4.1 Final, really looking forward to it

I think it's important to also mention Mason' s work...

- New high-color standard icons
- A bunch of new backdrops

and probably being worked on an updated AISS (i don't know that, though)

@rwo

Nice work by you too. Seems like there will be quite some classic sales also.

Keep it up.