Tao release Free intent ADK with Digital Magazine

Mike Bouma writes: "A special release of the intent Application Development Kit for Windows and Linux is included on the cover CD of the current issue of digital magazine. Intent is the core technology used in the AmigaDE and is also the standard programming and the platform independent content environment chosen by the Open Contents Platform Association (OCPA) for digital consumer devices. Consumer Electronic Giants including Hitachi, Sony, Kyocera, PSION, Nokia, NEC, Motorola, Grundig, JVC, Fujitsu, Sharp, Epson, Intel, Pioneer, Metrowerks, Sega, Bandai and Capcom are supporting the platform. A full new release of the AmigaDE Software Development Kit will become available for general developers later this year. Software developed for intent works with the AmigaDE platform as well. Recently a partnership between Amiga and Nokia was revealed and finally here are some links to recent interviews with AmigaDE software developers."

Comments

AmigaOS 4.0 coming...

[Snowfox]

AmigaOS 4.0 is coming. While I doubt the Amiga could ever even begin to approach mainstream use, the pure PPC/G3/G4 target, OpenGL, and other mature OS features which 4.0 will bring to the table make it quite viable again. It's even fair to say it's a step up on BeOS.

I wonder if we could make enough noise to get an amiga.slashdot.org, with boing ball, nifty color scheme, and all Amiga articles front-paged, much as the apple.slashdot.org have.

Does any one remember the AMD 29000?

[Max Hyre]

Now there was a chip the TAO VM could scream on. It had 128 (!) registers (real, on-chip, full-speed, directly-addressable registers), of which 64 were local, organized as a circular queue, but accessed as the top of stack. Sounds like pretty close to an ``unbounded register set'' to me.

<reminisce mode>

Want to call a function? Stash your arguments in registers, and bang!, you're there. Of course, when you got to the edges (few used, or most used), you had to ``fill'' or ``spill'' from RAM (or cache), but it was all but invisible to the programmer. They had separate instruction and data memory (``Harvard'' architecture), so you could access both simultaneously.

IMHO as a programmer (not architect), the only shortcoming was their condition-code setup. There was no CC register---you did a comparison, and stashed the result in whatever register was handy, branching later on testing that reg. true or false. They missed a bet---they should have stashed a full set of conditions in the register, so you could compare once, then test as many conditions as your little heart desired, instead of: compare LT, jp T, compare EQ, jp F, ..., do: compare, jp LT, jp EQ, .... Ah, well...

AMD introduced it as a general-computing chip, for high-end Unix boxes, workstations, &c. Unfortunately, they did it just as the IBM PC juggernaut was coming up to speed, and the x86 flood swept it away. AMD tried to convert it into an embedded-system chip (which is where I met it), but like so many others (88000 [Honeywell?], 32000 [National?]), they faded away. AMD officially dropped support for it a few years ago. Damn, that was one sweet chip.

(Of course, the Harvard architecture was fit to give HW engineers apoplexy, but that wasn't my problem. :-) If this interests you, just do a Google search on "AMD 29000". I'm not the only one still carrying the torch for it. So many of those 32-bit efforts were funcionally superior to what's left today.

</reminisce mode>