AmigaOS4 Update
by Hyperion-Entertainment

Lots of things are happening, and here is some of the news we would like to share with you. The biggest news, which you have probably heard or read elsewhere, is that AmigaOS 4 is now running, natively, on the AmigaOne hardware. That includes support for G3 and G4 CPU's, Level 2 cache, and a PIO-Mode IDE driver. Currently, a DMA-Capable IDE/ATAPI driver is in the works.

Our main focus at the moment is getting the graphics system completely ported to PowerPC. This work is underway and I expect that the migration will be done by the time you read the next OS 4 Update. The AmigaOne version currently runs an unmodified version of the Picasso96 RTG software.

The RAMLIB process (the OS component that usually loads shared libraries and devices from disk) has also been updated. Initialization of modules is now done in a separate process, preventing the system from becoming unstable when a badly-written disk module crashes. Instead, the Grim Reaper will now inform the user of what happened, and the opener will be signaled that the opening failed, allowing for a clean exit.

On the audio front, I'm glad to say that we now have a fully PowerPC native AHI and SoundBlaster Live! support running on the A1, which makes playing games like Quake or Duke Nukem 3D a much more enjoyable experience.

In addition, the workbench/icon system has seen a major overhaul. Besides being able to use an individual color palette per icon, redraw and dragging on true-color screens (15 bits and above) is now handled by specialized code. The result is vastly improved loading times of workbench drawers - much faster than what you might have seen on the Benelux Amiga Show and videos.

A few additional pieces of functionality have been added to the kernel. For instance, it is now possible to find out which task allocated a piece of memory.

Finally, there have been a lot of new PPC-native modules like Roadshow, with support for the onboard 3Com Ethernet controller, an almost completely PowerPC-based Reaction system, and so many smaller modules that I can't really mention them all.

Oh, and did I mention we now have Warp3D running on the AmigaOne, too? Well, now I did.

See you next month for another update.