Editorial

If any sign was needed of the continuing strength and passion of the Amiga community then the AmigaOS4 European roadshow is it. Continually being ambushed by malevolent forces, Amiga Inc. has committed to saying nothing about AmigaOS4.0 until the product is on the desk in front of it, ready for shipping to hungry consumers.

However, those on the AmigaOS4.0 beta test list have been under no such obligation, apart from their NDA. Therefore, a group of testers, led by Jurgen Schober of Point Design, have decided that it was the right time to take "AmigaOS4.0 On Tour," to show off not just its feature set but to provide the golden bullet to finally kill off all the malignant rumors that insisted that AmigaOS4 was never going to happen, that Amiga Inc didn't care, that Amiga users should consider an alternative.

Of course those of you subscribed to CAM have been reading about the progress of AmigaOS4.0 for many months now, and in this issue you get an interesting and informative article by Colin Wenzel about his battles with DOS as he has fought to free it of its legacy BCPL genes and bring it into the future.

Progress over the last month has been phenomenal! From booting into Workbench on the CSPPC to being able to start up a session and send an email, all using AmigaOS4 components being run through the interpretive 68K emulator service and called by ExecSG on the PPC processor. That means graphics.library, Intuition, Workbench, Roadshow (TCP/IP), MUI, Picasso96 and the mail client. As Ben Hermans, Project Manager for AmigaOS4.0 says in his update, the AmigaOS4.0 feature list published at the beginning of the year is now complete.

Yes everything is 68K binary at the moment (except for ExecSG and the 68K emulator) but with a pure GCC compilable source base, we can now start moving it over to PPC native binaries; in essence taking the handcuffs and blindfold off of the driver.

It is the fact that we have reached this stage that inspired Jurgen and the others to come up with the idea of the AmigaOS roadshow. Not just inspiration either but an implementation as well. Contacting those dealers around Europe who wanted to participate, creating the website, arranging the schedule, designing and sourcing the merchandise.

We will of course keep you up-to-date with the roadshow, with reports from the venues in the next issue of CAM.

What this means is that in the Marathon of AmigaOS4, we have entered the stadium. Just 385 yards to go. The roadshow is the first part of the last lap around the track that will lead to the finishing tape, and the beginning of the tomorrow that many thought would never come.

AmigaOS4.0 is alive.