Amiga Inc AGA patents?

[freqmax]

New driver architecture = incompatible with classic m68k hardware and AmigaOS (ROM).

The last I read on AROS-68k in UAE was that it got stuck on serial or parallell port initialization with a black screen.

How can graphics.library/HID be designed for VGA when classic Amiga in many cases were fully dependent on PAL/NTSC ..?

[psxphill]

The last I read on AROS-68k in UAE was that it got stuck on serial or parallell port initialization with a black screen.

There are a lot of posts online of people running aros68k in uae in 2012.
 

How can graphics.library/HID be designed for VGA when classic Amiga in many cases were fully dependent on PAL/NTSC ..?

I'm referring to the AROS implementation of graphics.library, HID is the AROS device interface. By designed for VGA, I mean an actual VGA card sitting in a PC and not the 60hz/31khz video output that it produces.

[bloodline]

There are a lot of posts online of people running aros68k in uae in 2012.

Yeah, it's quite usable now... I was running the early alphas put out by Toni and Jason even earlier than that.

I'm referring to the AROS implementation of graphics.library, HID is the AROS device interface. By designed for VGA, I mean an actual VGA card sitting in a PC and not the 60hz/31khz video output that it produces.

Yeah, the AROS 68k Amiga Graphics Chipset drivers lack any optimisation, so it is slow at the moment without a gfx card.

But most games only need AmigaOS/AROS to boot and configure the machine making AROS 68k rather useful for running games

Toni includes an AROS Kickstart ROM with WinUAE as a fallback option for people without an original Kickstart ROM image!

[psxphill]

But most games only need AmigaOS/AROS to boot and configure the machine making AROS 68k rather useful for running games

I think it's a bit of a waste if AROS is just used for that though.

[bloodline]

I think it's a bit of a waste if AROS is just used for that though.

I agree, and if you have a gfx card (or when AROS gets a decent AGA driver), then it's the way to go over the original AmigaOS IMO.

[freqmax]

There are a lot of posts online of people running aros68k in uae in 2012.

If you mean MS-Windows WinUAE..

I'm referring to the AROS implementation of graphics.library, HID is the AROS device interface. By designed for VGA, I mean an actual VGA card sitting in a PC and not the 60hz/31khz video output that it produces.

You must mean AROS on x86 or so.

[psxphill]

If you mean MS-Windows WinUAE..

And supposedly on AROS x86 uae.
 

You must mean AROS on x86 or so.

AROS on any platform uses the same graphics.library that wasn't designed to be fast on OCS/ECS/AGA.

[freqmax]

Two patents remaining in the USA:
Filed-date, Patent-no, Description
1996-09-30 6,484,189 Methods and apparatus for a multimedia authoring and presentation system
1995-01-17 5,574,843 Methods and apparatus providing for a presentation system for multimedia applications

But patent 5,574,843 should not be valid anymore? it has a priority date of 1991-04-26 and it's filed on 1995-01-17 which is 5 months before the change in duration length. That state "For applications filed before June 8, 1995, the term is either 17 years from the issue date or 20 years from the earliest claimed domestic priority date, whichever is longer." The issue date is 1996-11-12.

So it should have expired no later than end of november 2013 ..?

Patent 5,574,843 seems to be about a system to create and present interactive multimedia presentations and coursework. Patent 6,484,189 seems to be about the same stuff. It even looks like a dupe. So the Amiga system itself should now be in the clear and the only remaining patent encumbering would possible be 6,484,189. That should leave projects like Minimig and FPGA Replay completely in the clear?

Link to European search, which seems to be missing patent fulltext:
https://register.epo.org/smartSearch?lng=en

[SamuraiCrow]

The last ones applied to the AmigaVision multimedia authoring system.  They're not needed for AGA.

[OlafS3]

At least AROS-m68k is not good enough for the UAE emulator for Unix. But I read that it should work on FPGA Replay.

What emulator are you talking about? It works with FS-UAE.

[OlafS3]

The last time I heard the major problem was speed, graphics.library/HID were designed around a fast processor and vga and not 68000 and ocs/ecs/aga.
 
I'm hoping that a new driver architecture will be created at some point that solves that.

from Aros Shortlog (Toni Wilen)

"Partially revert r45687, since m68k-amiga blitter support was added, all planar bitmaps have to be in chip ram."

[wawrzon]

toni has fixed and improved the planar hidd greatly in the last few days. there are remaining glitches especially with drawline, but ocassional and hard to track down to a simple reproducable testcase. also i guess would be great to add fast cpu blitting in the fashion of fblit to the setpatch for faster cpus (the fallback routines are slow according to toni), as aros is anyway aimed at those. the bitmaps might then be removed back to fastram conserving the chip for immediate screen display.