Future of Picasso96 and AHI?

I'd like to know if anyone is able to shed some light on the
recent(?) death of the Picasso96 homepage. Formerly here

...to the whereabout of the original authors: Tobias Abt, Thomas Kneer

...to the overall future of Picasso96 and the AmigaOS4 gfx system
in later versions of the OS.

Also, if someone can give the information about AHI.

It's still being developed, yes, but wasn't there a new sound
system that should be written from scratch and implemented
in later OS versions?

Just curious, seeking noone in special, just wanna know.

So, if noone is breaching any NDA, could you please share?

TIA

@Raziel
Quote:

Bump...

Quote:

Looks like it's alive and kicking (here)

Jack

@thread

Two links good for AHI:
http://arp2.berlios.de/ahi
http://www.lysator.liu.se/ahi/
Article on the homepage change:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3206

I believe the reference above to a "new" audio system is for the "eXTream" sound system by Davy Wentzler.
Last statement on that:
Quote from DaveAE on June, 2006:
I have been working on a new sound system called eXtream that already has a multi-channel Envy24HT driver. However, this won't come for OS4 final, nor in a foreseeable time (at least not this year).

Village Tronic info available here:
http://www.villagetronic.com

Some links here:
http://www.villagetronic.com/amiga/index.html

Hope this helps.

#6

@Raziel

When new graphics and sound system get developed, they most likely going to provide a backwards compatibility API (wrapper), this way old program can benefit to some degree from new enchantments.

Some thing called Extreme Audio where to replace AHI, I think the idea where to implement an Audio system that where none blocking, maybe some thing that makes it easy to implement OpenAI or AHX on top off.

There is also been talks about 3d based graphics system, (currently OS4 system support, none blocking menus, none blocking window dragging and resizing.)

@number6
@LiveForit

Thaks to you

eXtream - yes, that's what it was called.

@Raziel
I have a simply crazy idea. Why not email the people and ask them directly? I know it is a pretty crazy idea but what the heck.

@Raziel

I don't know anything about the future of AHI or if eXtream is going to _replace_ AHI. I have been working on eXtream for quite some time which is indeed a new streaming system and especially an audio system. In the last couple of months, a select group of people have been testing the AHI-eXtream 'bridge', which provides backwards compatibility to applications using AHI. This comes in the form of an AHI driver which forwards the mixed AHI buffer to eXtream.

At the moment, although eXtream is working very nicely (multiple application non-blocking access, multi-channel output, plug-ins etc.), it's not in a releasable state nor is there an SDK. I first want to add two higher-level API's, namely a gaming API and a very simple API for things like desktop sounds or sounds in IRC progs etc.

But there is an additional problem that needs to be fixed in the OS: eXtream uses a priority 100 process instead of an interrupt to process audio (including effects etc.). However, due to Forbid() (ab)use in the OS (namely gfx/picasso) and applications, some stutter can occur that is not present with AHI. Although it's not my fault, people will say that AHI is better, so this has to be fixed as well at the OS level.

Currently, eXtream is also running as the audio processing heart of Audio Evolution 5 on Windows (without the driver part ofcourse). The source code can be compiled on all platforms (OS4, Windows, OSX and Linux), but only works as a full stand-alone system on OS4.

@ssolie

Gosh...you may be up to something there...

Lets see, i'll eMail Davey...

Whooaaaaa, THAT was fast

@DaveAE

Thanks for the enlightent Davey

...and of course, welcome to Amigans

Quote:
So, that would mean, back to the second part of my question

Picasso96?

@ssolie

I'd eMail those guys, too, but the mail adresses are dead

@Raziel

http://utilitybase.com/forum/index.ph ... &forum=2&topic=370&page=0

Quote:

@ZeroG

?(i.e. as soon as possible)?

NOW THAT?S INTERESTING

Maybe we are getting this thins in an booing bag update

@Raziel

What about P96? It's part of OS4.

And if/when it's replaced by something else is
apparently unclear right now as much as if we
really will see new OS4-hardware before
the end of march.

@Shadowolf


I don?t think these things affect one or the other, the developers has been working on different parts of the OS, they have different expertise.

Basically what is needed to port AmigaOS4 to new hardware is, new driver for the north / south chips drivers (PS2, USB, PCI, SERIAL bus support), then every thing else will work out of box provided there already exist drivers for soundcard, graphic card, and provided they don?t need to support yet an other bootloader.

New graphics system will work on all AmigaOS4 supported hardware the day you replace a few graphics related kickstart module in sys:kickstart/

@ZeroG

Oh boy, that's exactly what i was looking for, thanks a lot

@Shadowwolf

Of course and P96 is a great system, that's why i wanted to
know what happened to it, where is the site, where are the
original devs, has the source completely went over to Hyperion?

What is the future (now already been answered by the thread
@ZeroG pointed out)

That sort of things

@Raziel

Quote:

Is this really important?
I don't know the details between the original developers
and Hyperion but I also don't care much.

What I know is that the source was made available
to a handfull of developers by Hyperion so wherever
the original site went to it's save to assume
that P96 for OS4 is still in good hands.
(shameless self-promotion: "version rtg.library)

Quote:

Hmm, sort of, that was the plan in november 2005
and probably still is.
When/if it can be brought to life is something different
and to my believe also depends on if Hyperion
can finally start to generate some well owned
revenue out of OS4.

But as Hans-J?rg also pointed out in the thread back then,
you don't really need to explicically use P96 for most
things as graphics.library already has a lot to offer.
And if P96 patches it now or something else later
or an enhanced P96 should make no difference.

@Raziel

P96 which is in OS4 has been completely ported to PPC and it's gone through a lot of changes since the last 68k version of P96.

However, as with all other RTG systems, P96 sits on top of the original gfx subsystem of AmigaOS (graphics.library) patching some of its functions, and the 3D subsystem is also a seperate entity and the way these are interfaced is really awkward, which is because the original Amiga graphic subsystem was not being developed further when these 3rd party systems were made (Warp3D, P96), so they had do somehow hack these on top of the original AmigaOS graphic system, rather than these new functions being nicely integrated to provide a modern solution.

@COBRA

I can't find th thread here because the search function ignores words shorter than 5 characters, but the Friedens mentioned that the graphics subsystem was going to be replaced and that planning/designing the new API had begun. They also said that Warp3D has a huge overhead due to the reinitialization that has to happen every frame. This is caused by the fact that the 3D graphics system is totally separate from the 2D system.

I hope that they get plenty of time to work on this because we're not likely to see MESA + HW drivers (for newer cards) before this is done.

Hans

@Hans
@COBRA

Thank you very much

Old thread, i know. But anyone knows what happened with eXtream? Was there any serious attempt to replace it with ahi?

@Antique

Quote:

I think you mean replace AHI with eXtream.

No. Davy is gone.

#6