A-EON Technology is pleased to announce that it has purchased the source code and development rights for ImageFX and Cinemorph from Woodall Design LLC. As part of the sales agreement A-EON has also acquired exclusive rights to the latest ImageFX 4.5 Studio Edition for AmigaOS and MorphOS. This includes the updated ImageFX 4.5 Studio manual along with full rights to the ImageFX and Cinemorph trademarks together with a sublicense for the Cinematte trademarks.
Until I got my X1000 and could use AmiCygnix's GIMP, ImageFX was THE image tool for my pictures and maintenance of my website.
I look over my shoulder and there in our bookcase are Image FX manuals that I rescued from a box of Amiga stuff that a guy was getting rid of. Finally, I could read about all the neat things it could do... long before gimp was a phenom.
I remember S. Woodall saying that ImageFX was intricately woven into 68K asm code and he wasn't interested in trying to convert it to C code for porting to other systems.
I remember S. Woodall saying that ImageFX was intricately woven into 68K asm code and he wasn't interested in trying to convert it to C code for porting to other systems.
I do sometimes wonder whether Trevor D gets a programmer to look at the code before he buys it, as one or two times the program code was supposed to be a nightmare of assembler! I mean, if he's spending that much money, I'm sure he must do... But then I wonder whether the effort of rewriting large amounts of 68k assembler into C will actually be worth it.
I expect a number of the programs would benefit from small patches to the 68k code to make them run better on next generation AmigaOS's such as OS4.1 and MorphOS. So even if the code is rather a mess and hard to make a native port from its probably still worth having.
That's not to say that I would not like to see native ports were practical. Its just even my repetitively slow sam440ep is much faster than my old 060/PPC A1200 Tower, so classic 68k software under the built in 68k emulation on OS4.1 can be very usable as I am sure you know, as long as its stable.
Plus it would be nice to have things like support for using the mouse wheel and support for using fonts other than topaz at fixed size so we can take proper advantage of our nice high resolution modern displays
Sometimes I think far too much priority is given to trying to replace all 68k Amiga applications with native versions.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1 + Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board WinUae 2.3.2, OS 3.9, BB2, Catweasel MkIV Amiga 1200, BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI, mediatorSX, Voodoo3, pci lan
I expect a number of the programs would benefit from small patches to the 68k code to make them run better on next generation AmigaOS's such as OS4.1 and MorphOS. So even if the code is rather a mess and hard to make a native port from its probably still worth having.
That's a good point. For example, Art Effect 3 will occasionally crash at start-up, for no obvious reason.
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Plus it would be nice to have things like support for using the mouse wheel and support for using fonts other than topaz at fixed size so we can take proper advantage of our nice high resolution modern displays.
Those do sound like things it might be possible to add support for, without touching much of the (68k assembler) code.
Lets just hope A-EON are thinking the same way as it would be nice to see fix up releases of the software they have purchased available soon (some time this year, rather than years from now).
Then they can take the knowledge they have gained from patching the applications to help decide on what priority give to producing native versions on the applications based on both more realistic time scales for the native ports and likely benefits.
And we can all benefit from being able to purchase and run more stable versions of the existing software on OS4.1, MorphOS and even expanded 68k Amigas or 68k emulators while we wait for native versions becoming available there practical.
Sam440ep 667mhz 512megs OS4.1 + Minimig, 4MB RAM, ARM add-on board WinUae 2.3.2, OS 3.9, BB2, Catweasel MkIV Amiga 1200, BlizzardPPC 060/200 with SCSI, mediatorSX, Voodoo3, pci lan
@ChrisH: Use Arteffect4 instead. If you mean AE4, then go to the alinea computer download section und the support section (alinea-computer.de), then right side in the top download. Download the OS4 wizard.library and Arteffect4 does not crash on startup.
yes the wizard library is usefull to avoid crash but the probram (AE) has a lot of problems with gui refresh and drawing.. I was able to use it for quite a lot of time but then, for me, it is unusable... a pity..