PPCBoot by Hyperion is finished and handed out to existing (35-40 or so) betatesters - seen working for the first time on the event (I saw an ATI Radeon start screen among others...)
With this done, the rest of the developerboards (a couple of hundred) can now be shipped to developers. Allow some two weeks to make sure the betatesters don't find any obvious problems.
PPCboot apparantly contains some pretty nifty features by the Frieden brothers (but I leave that report to those there with better technical knowledge (and memory!) than me).
PPCBoot was made due to an outside (in the meaning 'outside Amiga market') contract, creating some nice revenue for Hyperion.
Apart from the boot process being cumbersome (since PPCBoot didn't exist), according to Alan no AOne hardware problems whatsoever have been reported by the betatesters since may this year.
Alan Redhouse presented the AOne XE with replacable CPU and gave some very interesting numbers (which I leave to him to put on the web - he didn't want us to quote him on those). This card looks very promising anyways.
Due to plenty of requests from Amigans, Eyetech have changed their minds and
will sell the AOne G3-SE before AOS4 is available - but as such including the licence to later get the OS (after all it wouldn't be an AOne without the OS and the ROM).
The G3-SE will hopefully ship before christmas, and the -XE slightly after christmas.
AOS4 for CyberstormPPC will come about around the same time, followed by the version for AOne probably after christmas (it should be noted that this was Alan's approximations - as I recall them - and not anything official from Hyperion).
AOS4 was presented by Gunne Steen of GGS-Data. He received a beta version from Hyperion for this particular presentation. It ran on his Cyberstorm PPC and he loaded modules on top of his OS3.9 installation, such as Intuition.library (giving new menus and configurability) and layers.library. He also showed some special effects modules like one that clipped all windows/pointers/graphics when they moved within an inch of the edge of the screen (perhaps not that useful, but interesting as an example of what's possible)
All windows can be iconified and placed on the WB desktop.
The Media Toolbox does indeed seem to be a very powerful program.
According to Stefan Burström, who was at the show, MUI will be included in OS4, but initially locked in a configuration that matches the look of Reaction. If you have a keyfile it will be changeable as usual of course.
Stefan Burström held a little (improvised) speech on IBrowse 2.3. This version is (as we knew) mainly a bugfix for everything that was wrong in 2.2 and is as such a vast improvement. However new features such as CSS will not be implemented until IBrowse 3.0, which is going to be PPC native. IB2.3 is free for registered users of 2.2.
There was plenty of people on the event. According to one of the people arranging the show, they calclulated some 200 amigans showing up for the few hours the event took place. There were people of every age, race, nationality and gender there, and generally a nice atmopsphere (albeit somewhat crowded..) Thanks to the enthusiasts arranging this, you did a darn good job!
These are pictures taken by Johan 'Graak' Forsbeg (first posted on ANN):
http://www.amigbg.com/aonegbg/img/Grak/index.htm
