OS4 Dev Contest Update!

[Elwood]

Hello everyone,

First of all thanks for all your comments. They were all appreciated. As a result of your concerns, a few things have been changed in the contest. I hope you'll appreciate them and join.

First of all the prize has changed. Now you can choose to win either the hardware or the same amount in cash. So if you don't have a µA1, you can buy one and get refunded if you win the contest. But this option is reserved to brave coders only! :-D
Also if you already have an A1 you'll be interested by this second choice.

Also a Catweasel MK4 has been added to the prize. It is a contribution from our first Amiga dealer contributor. Thanks Soft3 for your support. I hope many will follow you. :-)

Many thanks to Darren and Benjamin to support this adventure and a special thank you to all Amiga.dk members, you are damn kewl! :-)

I know there are people that are preparing to participate in this contest. Maybe some of you are wondering what happens if you submit your project and other people submit a better one. In this case, no need to worry because you can update your project at any time. So if you feel you need to make your project look better, no problem just send me an email.

I would like to point out that your project can be made of several programs so you can submit a porting project. You can then work on several smaller utilities and submit the whole package.

Also note that if your program is GUI based you must use Reaction. But obviously if your project is build around a port of a new GUI toolkit to the Amiga platform, you can use it instead of Reaction.

Coders wonder why I created the "use newlib" rule. There are several reasons behind it. As an example, clib2 can't be used to create a thread aware program. Also newlib is a well supported project with hundreds of developer working on it. This makes it a project that is worth using instead of spending time working on an Amiga-only solution.
Enhancing clib2 would require time from Amiga developers that could spend it creating new programs for the platform. This would go against the idea behind this contest: creating new AmigaOS software.

Also I would like to say that many Amiga developers don't feel sad about this restriction. It's enough for me to think that I am right.

There are no more excuses to start coding!

Thanks.

[Elwood]

And of course the URL is still http://www.intuitionbase.com/DevContest/.

[Cymric]

Nice to see that the prize has been altered to be more logical and appropriate.

Not so nice to see that the glaring inconsistencies are still in the contest rules. And have in fact been made worse by the requirement that one use, from what I understand, a OS4-only runtime library. How that is going to help in attracting as many coders as possible is beyond me.

But then again, I am not the one organising the contest, so why bother worrying.

Added later: newlib is an open source initiative to create a new clib-like library, but now geared towards embedded systems. As such it is not OS4-only. But I haven't been able to locate a port for OS3, so that makes it OS4-only.

[Elwood]

What about porting it to OS3? It shouldn't be that hard.

[Cymric]

Ah. Witness the phrase 'shouldn't be that hard'. It is not fair to the OS3 programmer as he a) has to port the software first; b) hope there isn't anything too UNIXy deeply buried within the code---I noticed that newlib supports sbrk() which cannot be properly implemented on OS3 for example; c) hope that the implementation features are the same on OS4; d) do the work himself even though other contestants may be doing the same thing; and e) has to get newlib working in a similar way as it does on OS4. Which is a mite tricky, as newlib on OS4 seems to be a dynamic library, while my first impulse would be to code it as a linker library. Perhaps I am mistaken, I do not own OS4 nor its SDK. If I am right, the OS3 programmer has a complex job on his hands because he must also write his own startup code for the compiler. My, what fun.

All in all, the OS3 programmer has to jump through hoops in order to get the code working, and all that effort is essentially wasted since the goal is the development of OS4 programs, not OS3->OS4 glue code. Which makes me question the reason why on earth you would want to encourage OS3 developers in the first place: OS4 is not OS3. It's like developing OS3 software on the OS1 platform: doable, but masochistic at best. The fact that the winner can now choose between money or an A1 is a good change; the next change should be that you in fact do not recommend people developing on OS3 at all, or that you create a second category specifically targetting them. The prize would of course be smaller. It clears up the contest rules to a considerable degree, and levels the playing field.

I am very sorry to sound so critical about what at the core is a great idea; I just get the nagging feeling that the implications of the rules haven't been properly thought through, something which other people on this site noticed as well.

[Elwood]

Agreed. You are right except for the "rules have not been thought enough" idea.

You probably understood that it's not a contest for either AROS, OS3.x or MOS. And there was no other way to do such an OS4-only contest.
If I was a company, I could lend several boards to people and expect them to write code for me but I can't.

So let's try to see things differently now. What about buying either a PPC card for your Classic or buying an A1 and try to win 700 Euros?
You'll be able to use OS4 on this hardware and write the program.
I know OS4 for Classic is not yet available so the A1 is the only choice, at least for now.
In any case you could start to work now and then when OS4 is out, you could enter the contest.

Now the question is just to know if you want to make this investment, as buying an A1 can be seen as some kind of investment in order to reach the goal: winning the prize.