A-EON Technology acquires OctaMED

[OlafS3]

A-EON Technology Ltd is pleased to announce that it has concluded the purchase of the source code and exclusive rights to develop, publish and distribute MED, OctaMED and OctaMED SoundStudio for the AmigaOS and Amiga-inspired operating systems, including MorphOS, AROS and emulation from the current owner Ray Burt Frost. As part of the sale agreement A-EON has the exclusive right to use the MED, OctaMED and OctaMED SoundStudio in all product marketing, promotion and branding for AmigaOS and Next-Generation AmigaOS inspired versions including emulation.

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Gratulation

Why I am not surprised now :-)

[OlafS3]

You placed two possible viewpoints in a single post. Those are not the only possible viewpoints, but they do both assume that you know A-EON's "secret intentions."

Interestingly, I was considering adding "it appears that..." to the bit that you quoted, so congrats on nitpicking that one. However, I must point out that the very fact that they mention multiple platforms does require them to consider those as options. This "theory" doesn't require any assumed/imagined secret agenda or "evil intent."

Hans

I do not talk about "conspiracy" or similar. Trevor is primarly AmigaOS supporter so having the best solution for his favorite platform (and having another reason why people buy the hardware) is certainly main interest. 68k is supported because sales to AmigaOS users alone would not be enough for refinancing the development. We had the discussion regarding supporting AROS/MorphOS/AmigaOS already regarding QT5 port and there it was clear that AROS/MorphOS on one side and AmigaOS on the other are very different (and if I understand many comments that is even increasing) so it is difficult to support all. Another problem is who has the experience to do it for all camps? Most devs use and support only one platform. Another reason if you use specialities of one platform (and every platform has those) make it certainly not easier portable and I assume that the primary goal is to make full use of AmigaOS.

Even with 68k there are problems. Personal Paint 7.2 worked on Aros 68k, Personal Paint 7.3 not. It is not intentionally but I think the more it is targetting "AmigaOS" the less likely it works on other platforms.

[OlafS3]

@Olafs3

A-EON's core business is AmigaOS - this *very much* includes AmigaOS 3.x support and not just AmigaOS 4.x.  You will notice A-EON's committment to the Prisma project and several other software projects we are working on at the moment for Classic AmigaOS 3.x.  We are open to working with MorphOS et al and actively encourage development of our products on this platform.

PPaint 7.3 - we listened to your concerns regarding compatibility and released 7.3a- does this fix the problems for you?  PPaint development is ongoing and we hope to address the feedback we get from our customers and further refine/polish the software quality for both 68k and PPC.

As you can see, 68K market is a firm commitment, I have seen several posts elsewhere where others have not recognised the effort and work that A-EON is putting into 68k also.

We have a few announcements to make regarding where we are reusing technology software technologies from our NG work and back porting it to 68K for the purpose of advancing the 68K platform.  I hope to have some news about this soon.

I have talked about Aros 68k and general Aros/MorphOS compared to AmigaOS

[OlafS3]

i thought AROS 68K was OS3 binary-compatible, yes? isn't that the big selling-point there? so since A-EON are committed to OS3/68K, you should be fine.

@thread

regardless of whether or not the updated octamed is native to AROS/MOS, the fact that A-EON is committed to the classic 68K amigas should mean -- since those platforms have 68K compatibility at one level or another -- that users of AROS/MOS will be able to enjoy the updated software either way. can't people be happy that development is picking up again at all?

-- eliyahu

I can only state what I see... 7.2 worked, 7.3 not

in general it is already very compatible

[OlafS3]

I know that it is bought to sell the PPC hardware but from a economic view would it not make more sense to stay 68k and update/bugfix/improve what is there? For classic users it would be more interesting and it would still run on PPC hardware, at least in emulation, in best case even on petunia. If you want PPC native versions you have to invest lots of time (and thus money) to get it reworked and to replace asm parts, lots of work and no real new features and thus no reason to buy it.

[OlafS3]

of course not

there are very few experienced developers left and you certainly need a lot of work to get it compile and run natively on PPC. And then there are only few users willing to buy it. In my view it would be better to use what is there and not try to get it running native on PPC. It is propably easier to write it from scratch then trying to rework the old sources (propably banging hardware, using asm routines and so on)