Report on OS4 demonstration at ANT & SEAL meetings
By Mick Sutton

Why Now?

With the number of Amiga OS 4 On Tour shows happening across Europe in the last few months, many UK users were feeling left out with no AmigaOS 4 demonstration near them. Because none of the UK user groups (who have organized shows in the past) had an OS 4 beta-tester as a member, setting up a UK demo has been a problem.

So now that I have had my Amiga One-XE G4 for a few months and with the announcement of OS 4 running on the new PPC hardware, and an invitation to join the beta testing team I finally had the prerequisites to demonstrate the new OS. With some excellent help from OS 4 developers and testers I was able to get the OS up and running on my machine.

I wanted to get the first demonstration off the ground as soon as possible so rather than organizing an Amiga OS 4 On Tour event we decided to start with demonstrations at local usergroup meetings. The first meeting in the calendar was Amiga North Thames who meet in Enfield, North London.

Myself and SEAL members Robert Williams, Elliott Bird and Dave Kennedy turned up early to set things up, this went quickly as I had already had a trial run. Things were nearly scuppered by the lack of a power extension lead but ANT's Michael Carrillo (Mikey_C) came to the rescue at the last minute!

At this event I had my AmigaOne loading the OS4 kernel image from a laptop PC via TFTP over an Ethernet connection. A terminal emulator on the PC was also used to display debug output from the AmigaOne's serial port. The kernel image can be considered a bit like the Kickstart ROMs on a classic Amiga. Once the kernel image was loaded at the beginning of the boot process the AmigaOne was able to run stand-alone, loading the operating system files from its hard disk.

I began the demonstration by explaining the state of OS4 as it was installed on my A1. I was keen to emphasize that it was an alpha development version meaning that bugs do exist and some software can crash it. As has been mentioned on the news sites the graphics system did not represent the final version being Picasso 96 running under 68K emulation with minimal work done to get it working on the AmigaOne. The other limitation was that the Petunia JIT emulator was not available to me so all 68K programs were running under the, slower, interpreted emulation.

Turning on the AmigaOne system showed some u-boot output on the monitor and then loaded the kernel image from the laptop, at this point output was switched to the terminal on the laptop and the AmigaOne screen was blank until the Workbench screen appeared. The initial OS 4 screen looked much like any Amiga Workbench but with a subtle gradient on the title bar and a new-look AmiDock with semitransparent background along the bottom of the screen.

I started off by opening some Workbench windows to show the new look of the window borders, gadgets are in the classic AmigaOS layout but have a new look and the window borders are filled with attractive subtle gradients. The whole look is lighter and more modern than the OS3.x color scheme. Opening Workbench windows, even those with many icons such as Prefs, are pretty fast and responsive (an improvement from the first showings of OS 4 on AmigaOne). Another innovation is the antialiased font support that is implemented in such a way that most existing applications also get antialiased text in their interfaces. The new features of AmiDock were shown next including pop-up sub-docks and active "dockies" such as a clock icon that shows the time.

Robert Williams (editor of Total Amiga magazine) then took over to show OS 4's RoadShow TCP/IP stack and how some particularly disgusting color effects could be achieved with the new GUI preferences (which controls the look of Reaction programs and Intuition). RoadShow is loaded on start-up when a network interface has been configured so there is no need for the user to start the TCP/IP stack. I have been able to connect my AmigaOne to the Internet via a broadband router using the 3com Ethernet controller built into the AmigaOne motherboard.

The demo then moved on to classic Amiga applications that I had copied over from my A1200 system. Some applications crashed as they exited, this is a known problem and is being worked on. I demonstrated the following applications:

Photogenics 5 - Paul Nolan's paint/image processing package worked well and was run on its own public screen. I estimate the speed to be similar to an '040 classic Amiga (bear in mind this is without JIT 68K emulator and with the OS in an alpha state) and was certainly very usable.

Final Writer 5 - This word processor runs without problems and, because it uses a custom GUI, looked just as it would using my classic Amiga.

Amiga Writer - Another word processor that works well on OS4.

PhotoAlbum - The picture cataloguing utility runs well and is a good example of a program with a standard GadTools interface which was cleanly given the new-look OS4 interface.

SnoopDos - I'm sure all Amigans will be glad to hear that this essential troubleshooting tool works well on OS4 and, like PhotoAlbum, its gadgets are given the new look.

IBrowse - This web browser was loaded to show the user interface but as we weren't on-line at the demo no web pages could be shown.

SimpleMail - My favorite e-mail program ran with no problems and messages could be viewed.

MUI - SimpleMail and IBrowse showed MUI applications working under OS 4, I also demonstrated the version of MUI included which is release 3.9. This includes some enhancements over 3.8, the current version on OS3.x, including a simplified preferences program, more configurable bubble help and additional window titlebar icons.

After the applications demo, it was time to have some fun with an OS 4 PPC native version of Quake I. I launched the game from the command line (hadn't set up an icon for it at that point) and lit loaded quickly. Running in 640x480 with software rendering the game looks very impressive, running fast and smooth. A later test with the timedemo command showed that over 30FPS was being achieved.

After I did the formal demonstration I invited members of the audience to come and try the AmigaOne for themselves. Most remarked that the system worked well and smoothly even at this early stage. There were several crashes and reboots needed but that is to be expected at this early stage (for the AmigaOne version).

It was great to be able to finally demonstrate AmigaOS 4 in the UK and with a number of shows and demonstrations planned in the UK before Christmas, visitors will be able to see the system progress. If you didn't make the ANT show then why not come along to:

Sunday 30th November 2003 - Micromart Show, Birmingham UK
Saturday 13th December 2003 - AmigaOS 4 On Tour, Bath UK (full show with dealers and announcements).

Since the ANT meeting I have been able to setup my AmigaOne to boot from an OS4 kernel image located on the AmigaOne hard disk and was able to do without the Windows laptop that had been required for network boot.

After I had finished the demonstration and was packing my system away, the door opened and in wandered several people saying "are we too late for the OS4 demonstration?", and as I was just so pleased to be able to show people the current status. I gave them their own little show! Now there's dedication!