SciTech and Hyperion enter strategic partnership

[Rogue]

SciTech Software Inc. and Hyperion Entertainment VOF are pleased to announce they have enterered into a strategic partnership which will see SciTech's SNAP(tm) technology integrated into AmigaOS 4.x which is currently under development by Hyperion for PPC based systems.


SciTech SNAP, SciTech's leading edge graphics device support, allows for the rapid development and deployment of embedded solutions across
multiple platforms and currently already supports well over 170 different graphics chipsets including all the latest offerings from industry leaders ATI, nVidia and Matrox.

A full list of supported chipsets can be found here:

http://www.scitechsoft.com/chiplist/os2chiplist.html

"We are very excited about SNAP as it offers us out of the box support for a huge and ever growing number of graphics cards and effectively allows us to redirect resources away from device driver development and cut down on time to market", said Ben Hermans, managing partner of Hyperion. "We are convinced that prospective customers of AmigaOS 4.x will appreciate the high-performance, low footprint graphics card technology that SciTech has developed over many years."

"SciTech shares in the vision of the Amiga platform and is excited to play a key roll in the further development of the original multi-media OS." said, Andrew Bloo, Director of Marketing, SciTech Software Inc. "By adopting SciTech SNAP Graphics as the core graphics architecture for the Amiga OS, Amiga can now offer a level of performance and compatibility equal to that of any mainstream OS".

SciTech and Hyperion are set to broaden their cooperation to encompass 3D graphics support and support for other PPC based operating systems.

About SciTech Software Inc.

SciTech Software Inc. is a leading developer of next generation multi-OS device driver development tools for embedded, industrial and enterprise systems. SciTech Flagship product, SciTech SNAP Graphics,
is a robust display driver solution, with full 2D acceleration on more than 180 graphic chipsets. SciTech SNAP Technology enables hardware
manufactures to cut costs, speed time to market and reduce long-term support issues. Additionally SciTech SNAP provides hardware venders with the ability to explore the emerging embedded markets through a powerful, OS agnostic device driver abstraction layer. Enterprise customers benefit from the SciTech SNAP technology through the unified chip drivers, which allow IT managers to roll out a single display driver across an entire enterprise, drastically reducing associated test matrices and long-term support costs. SciTech also provides leading edge development tools for the embedded and industrial markets. These tools allow developers to quickly add support for new and or emerging OS'es and with the SciTech SNAP architecture instantly gain access to more than180 supported graphic chip sets.  Founded in 1994, SciTech Software Inc. is a privately held company, backed by the original investment of its founders and the ongoing sales of its leading edge solutions. SciTech Corporate offices are located in Chico, California.

For more information; please visit: http://www.scitechsoft.com.

About Hyperion Entertainment VOF

Hyperion Entertainment is a privately held Belgian-German company, founded in March of 1999.  The company specialises in 3D graphics and the conversion of top-quality entertainment software from Windows to niche-platforms including Amiga, Linux (x86,PPC) and MacOS (OS 9/X).  Hyperion Entertainment has undertaken contract-work in the field of 3D graphics for companies such as Monolith (www.lith.com) and has developed a mature, fast, small foot-print technology to bring 3D graphics to low power digital devices such as PDA's and STB's.

Hyperion is currently working on AmigaOS 4.0, a vastly enhanced PPC native incarnation of the groundbreaking OS introduced by Commodore in
1985.

[Rogue]

Joanna, what part of "os-agnostic" didn't you understand.

Next thing you are telling me is that XFree86 is x86 too, right?

No, it doesn't slow things down. Stop making these things up  :-)

[Rogue]

Personnally, I stay in the reality with my concrete Pegasos/MorphOS  

You are free to do so, but as you said, this is "personally". I wonder, though, why you need to post this here. The only reason I can think of is that you are trolling.

Get this into your head: This doesn't concern you. You are a MOS/Pegasos user, so why do you feel the urge to comment..?

Oh yes, slandering. That's what folks like you do best.

For you Pegasos might be real. So is AmigaOS for the beta testers. For the general public, both are invisible.

[Rogue]

It's funny to see the reactions of some MorphOS zealots.

You see, we speculated on the comments we'd get. I was pretty sure that some folks would be downright "normal" again (if you know what I mean), but then, I thought that in general this is good news.

Of course, something is always wrong. I expected to hear "but I only need one graphics card in my Amiga, not 180", and "My xxx is doing fine here", and got them both in the first twenty or so comments on Amiga-news.de.

I was completely taken by surprise that someone (on amiga-news.de too) claimed that "amigaos would become more like Linux now" and that suddenly "a Linux-Virus would run on AmigaOS too".  Just goes to show that human imagination knows no frontiers  :-D

[Rogue]

JoannaK wrote:
Hyperion is extremely small company. It's no secret. With limited manpower and resources. How many of you keep on making OS4 and how many start working on these new and exiting extra drivers (including 3D extensions)?  

If there hadn't been SciTech and SNAP, we wouldn't be doing the 3D stuff but also the 2D stuff. As you will clearly admit, neither the 2D nor the 3D drivers write themselves, and now at least half of that burden (the 2D part) has been taken away from us. I would like to hear how this makes up for a delay... I'd rather call this a speedup, because the 3D drivers would have been done by us anyway...

But I still would like you being more honest about these delays and schedules.

You are an engineer yourself. You should know that engineering work is highly unpredictable. Sometimes you can't really estimate how long something is going to take. Sometimes you overestimate, and can make more progress in a day that you have done in two weeks before. A schedule is only really lost once the day it was scheduled for arrives.

I am honest, as far as I can tell. If I say I expect things to be finished at this date, I do expect them to be finished at that date.

Keeping people waiting forever ain't polite, especially when it's done couple months at a time.

"Polite", yes... Politeness is something that is completely lost in this "community". You should see the remarks I need to read. Fact  is, we're working on the tightest budget possible, under the most uncomfortable conditions. I get daily reminders from people waiting for OS 4. I'm sorry, but I don't really have time for being polite. Every time you want to make a public statement, you need to collect data, have people write something up, make a document about it (and have to listen to people compain about the font afterwards).

[Rogue]

@Joanna

From previous information I have been left into assumption you allready have enough 2D drivers coming up with this ForeFront deal and older P96.

There can never be enough driver support. Older P96 and ForeFront's drivers wouldn't have included things like GeForce and the latest Radeons (at least not for now), and also no Matrox support yet. While the usual selection needs to be done in respect to the 3D drivers (GeForce is still highly unlikely), chances are that someone with no gaming/3D interest and a GeForce will still want to use that on his AmigaOne...

Normally I had preferred you to implement and test only few key systems

One of the strongs points of SciTech SNAP is that is *is* a tested, proven system. There is no need to go through a prolonged testing of each and every driver, since those drivers that we will get are already known to work, and any issues discovered and fixed on other systems will carry over to the Amiga. Besides, their list is constantly expanding, something that we would have a hard time keeping up, if at all.

You are not cause (nor legitimite target) to most of it but unfortunately you are now in position where people are looking you and expecting you to sort it sort it all out.  

Unfortunately, once you are targeted, it doesn't matter that you are a legitimte target. I must say that Amiga.org is one of the civilized places. Believe it or not by german sites are usually the worst.

And OS4 what it is at this point, and as long as this state keeps on A-one ain't anything I would consider interesting.

For me it is the center of my computing universe.