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Amiga's New SDK: A First Glance
Mike Bouma writes: "Recently it began raining news coverages about Amiga`s new OS in the mainstream press like CNN`s Digital Jam, The New York Times and Gamersdepot. The first impressions of the new SDK have been very positive. Lars Thomas Denstad has written a small article about his experiences with the new SDK so far."
The issue I was addressing wasn't so much hardware support as mindshare. Firstly, I agree that this is a Good Thing. Secondly, I am a fan of diversity... one person's "chaos" is usually everybody else's "choice". My lament, was that a certain operating system which shall remain nameless (oh hell, windows) managed to gain a massive mindshare in the mid-90's because the alternatives were underdeveloped. I recall with great clarity hearing over and over again in the mid-90's that Amiga was working on Wonderful Things in some secret European laboratory and that one day they would ride over the hill to save us from the... uh, evil wizard. Anyway, poor analogies aside, I must admit I feel a little disappointed. In '96 the options were: Mac (my choice... but near-bankrupt), BeOS (with two device drivers... and run by Gasse! ack!), NeXT (for less money than a BMW... and less software than Be), Linux (I admit I thought it was a science fair project... or a repackaged Xenix... how was I supposed to know?) or Winders. Really, I was waiting for Moses Amiga...
Now that it's here; the "Mac is Back" (nice hardware, my choice of colour), BeOS can be hooked up to a printer finally (and do all sorts of other fine things), NeXT is OS X (and if DP4 is in indicator, it is going to be, at the very least, a lot of fun) and Linux is, uh, well you know Linux.
Anyway, the white knight showed up only to find three other tin guys fighting the dragon... and the princess is already dead. That's all I had to say....
2 1337 4 u!
I remember seeing Taos in a magazine from years back, June 1994 to be exact. This whole text, is some mine, some quoted from Chris and mainly excerpts from the magazine. The magazine is called Edge, a UK videogaming magazine. I noticed the same raytraced picture was done using Taos, and there are numerous mentions of Taos systems.
..
.. they were always a favourite.
"This month Edge got a glimpse of the future, thanks to a demonstration of the Taos OS. In a nutshell, Taos enables programs coded on any machine to run on any other machine - in parallel, across any available processors in the system."
"Taos ie even more amazing when you realise that it is the product of one man's efforts, coding for his own benefit, rather than cumulative efforts of some corporate programming team"
The men denoted as the "Three Wise Men" were Chris Hinsley (inventor of Taos), Tim Moore and Francis Charig - directors of Taos Systems.
This operating system was targeted at the console industry, where Chris had the idea of producing an operating system that would manage games and aid code portability. The first step was a macro set which Chris constructed for the assemblers of all the platformers he was writing on. Rather than write in the native assembler language, he wrote in the macro language he defined; he then devised a translator which would take the binary equivalent of that macro set and translate it, on the fly, into the instructions of a particular machine.
The Taos kernel which is typically around 16K, is loaded into the processor at boot time. That kernel is specific to that particular processor. If the kernel finds it needs a translator tool, it brings in the translator as well. The application then gradually builds itself in memory: as a processor in the network needs to call functions it brings them in and binds the application.
All programs are compiled or assembled into VP code and are kept in this form on disk. The VP code is translated into the native code of the processor on which it is run only when it is needed. The translation occurs as the VP code is loaded from the disk, across the network, and into the memory of the target processor. (Note this implies distribued computing.)
However, this doesnt slow the system down: most processors can actually translate VP code into native code faster than VP code can be loaded from disk and sent across the network. And VP code is often more compact than native code; it takes up less disk space and is loaded faster.
For instance, if you had a console that booted from CDROM, a CD would be pressed so that the first thing it did would be to load up the appropriate version of Taos, place it in memory and set it running. Then it would load the game code, which would run the operating system. The operating system would then load the specific tools required for that game and execution of the game would begin.
Access to custom chips is taken care of automatically by Taos using a method called dynamic binding: individual chips are supported by VP libraries, which allow for a tool for that particular processor to be accessed by the system; the tools are bound in during runtime as they are needed. Dynamic binding also enables several processes to share tools, which is very memory efficient.
"This 'virtual processor' works like a 16-bit register RISC microprocessor, explains Chris" "But it isnt an emulated technology; it actually translates into native code and it's the native code which runs and al the translations take place during the load time of the
It is quite an effort to think of their feature list so many year ago
Hardware Independance / Load balancing / Heterogenous processing / Dynamic Binding / Multi-threading / Parallelism as well as support for MPEG / Postscript and real time polygon rendering.
In my opinion this guy is a genius, that relegates Linus to quite a mediocre status. I mean this OS is good by todays standard. I mean Linux is even now not brilliant at parallel processing and this OS can not only parallel process tasks but delegate them to entirely different chips.
To put it into perspective, at the start of 1994 only 7 million people in US had computers with CDROM drives.
I think he deserves a universal sympathy award for not patenting some of these concepts. Had these been patented you wonder whether technologies like Java and companies like Transmeta would still exist.
I hope Amiga does well
Naden
(member of www.it-guys.com)
Funtage Factor: Purple
Having looked at the article, I must say that I'm not terribly impressed with it. There are dozens of OSs (QNX, BeOS, RiscOS, etc.) that have anti-aliased text. Most OSs can do the alpha blending tricks without a hiccup. (Look at the BeOS samples for a really cool alpha blending demo) amd tje widget sets look exactly like they came out of Windows 98 (except the - + buttons which actually make sense! If this is going to be the nifty stuff in the "new" OS, then I'm not too impressed. However, what impresses me is the code/object stuff. I'm thinking, instead of a full blown OS, this would make a great addition as a Linux development environment a la GTK+.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The first one of you to post "the Amiga was good for its day but it should die in peace" - thus demonstrating that you haven't read the article and don't know we aren't talking about the "classic" Amiga anyway - will be beaned with an A500 power supply brick.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
a) There were girls present.
b) People took their shirts off and danced about.
I'll be damned if I'm going to consider this guy's opinion in technical matters!
--Joakim Ziegler
"The Amiga SDK implements a new GCC backend, that is; instead of having GCC output Intel- or Alpha-binaries, it outputs VP code. "
Since the GCC compiler is GPL'ed, doesn't that mean that the whole modified compiler is GPL'ed and consequencly open source?
Sadly, I think this is destined to be an "also ran" in the race sheet of history.
2 1337 4 u!
> No hard drive,
My A500 had a hard drive. In fact I had a SCSI hard drive first (a huge 52Mb!) before most of my PC owning friends had heard of SCSI.
> no networking
The had TCP/IP stacks. Not included as standard though. AmiTCP was a popular one which was based on the BSD stack and was stable and fast. These days, most people using Amigas use Miami. It's a modern TCP/IP stack most features anyone would want such as IP-NAT, automatic SOCKS (a la tsocks)
> , no security
Okay, you got me!
> no decent applications
I think some of the apps were/are good. The only remaining use I have for my amiga (my A4000) is on my LAN as a web client, using my Linux box as a proxy. I would say that no single browser available for the Amiga beats netscape on linux, but the variety available (three fairly good browsers: Voyager, IBrowse and AWeb) are pretty good, fast (thats not the browsers though - thats the Amiga's snappy GUI) and usually more stable than netscape so I often find myself using my amiga for a fair amount of web access.
I find it unfortunate that I find myself feeling like I have to make an excuse for still using my Amiga occasionally. It's a sorry state of affairs when others resort to spreading mis-information about things they don't understand or don't appreciate. Why can't we stick to up-to-date facts and let people make up their own minds instead?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
After reading over the article, I found that I'm a bit disappointed. First thing you might want to know is that the demos with alpha blending and font rendering are actually tao's elate demos. You can find more about the tao group at:
http://www.tao-group.com/2/tao/index.html
I've seen their environment running on top of QNX, last year. The alpha blending demos were impressive but it was *entirely* at the cost of memory usage. Basically, if you looked at the memory usage, you could compute the amount of double buffering they were using to achieve the effect. (Bear in mind that this is at the cost of hardware acceleration...from what I remember, Tao's Elate is sitting on top of a JavaVM called "intent".)
So basically, it's Java without Sun's APIs and without the support of any other large partner.
BUT they are looking at HAVi ('Home Audio Video Interoperability') and other emerging standards for what IBM and QNX call "Pervasive Devices".
So what I'd like to know is - What's the value-add from Amiga? The name? A higher level API...couldn't just the tao-group do that?