15 years ago today, on Nov 5th 2002, Airsoft Softwair, the hardest working men in code business, released version 1.0 of Hollywood. Back then it was advertised as a "multimedia authoring system" comprising over 150 functions and it was only available for 68k Amigas. It immediately attracted the attention of lots of creative people from all around the world and thanks to the fantastic support of its community Hollywood has grown into a real swiss army knife for all different kinds of purposes. Who would have guessed 15 years ago that Hollywood would evolve into such a beast of a software that runs on over a dozen of different platforms and has lots of plugins that enhance its capabilities even further?
To celebrate Hollywood's 15th anniversary, Airsoft Softwair proudly presents a brand-new version of Malibu, the plugin that enables Hollywood to run Scala scripts. First released in June 2003, Malibu was the first Hollywood plugin and the one that started it all. As a special gift to the Hollywood community for its fantastic support over the last 15 years Airsoft Softwair has decided to make Malibu freely available for everybody. Previous versions were sold commercially but now Malibu is a Hollywood plugin that is provided completely free of charge like all other Hollywood plugins.
Malibu 1.4 is a major update that introduces support for Linux and Mac OS and for 64-bit architectures. It also contains various bug fixes and enhancements like the ability to export Scala scripts as Hollywood scripts. Malibu emulates nearly the whole Scala command set and supports all Scala versions from 1.0 up to Scala InfoChannel 500 which was the last Amiga version of Scala. Emulation is done by the El Capitan microkernel which tries to achieve the best performance possible on the system used. With Malibu it is now possible to run those Scala presentations without the actual classic Amiga hardware. Because the whole emulation runs on top of Hollywood's multimedia application layer you can run Scala presentations on every platform supported by Hollywood. In many cases the quality of the pictures that Malibu displays is much better than the original Scala quality because Scala often had to remap many pictures with very different colors to a 8-bit display which resulted in a massive loss of color information. With Malibu, however, all graphics are shown in true colour.
Scala is a program which helped the Amiga to become a real multimedia wonder. There were no products for a long long time that could beat an Amiga with Scala. Therefore Scala was widely used in all different production fields, from movies and television to big shows. Everyone who has worked with Scala knows what powers it has. But this power is only possible because Scala is very hard-coded to the Amiga's custom chips which leads to the problem that it does not run on modern Amiga systems or other platforms. For many years all sorts of users complained that there was no Scala that runs RTG compatible. This time is over now. Malibu revives Scala in a completely system-friendly way.
Malibu is available free of charge and can be downloaded from the official Hollywood portal at http://www.hollywood-mal.com/ Versions for AmigaOS 3, AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS (x86), Windows (x86,x64), Mac OS X (ppc, x86, x64) and Linux (ppc, arm, x86, x64) are provided.
This release was brought to you by Airsoft Softwair - the hardest working men in code business.
Here's to the next 15 years!
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