Amiga.org member SlimJim brings us this article about his experiences with the OS4 on tour event.
I left Lund early in the morning for the 330 km
km train-ride to Gothenburg and the AOS4 tour
event. The event was held at a different venue to the AmiGBG event; it was very close to the trainstation and much easier to reach (albeit too small for a full-fledged event).
At the event were two Amiga4000/060+PPC (233 MHz I think, not sure), one had a Vodoo 5 card, I think
the other had some kind of Vodoo too. One of these
machines was used primarily for demonstrations on
the projector screen and one was avaliable for the
visitors to play around with. There were also two AmigaOne machines there. Ole-Egil showed Debian and the Amiga1200-on-a-card he just got (I'm sure people will elaborate more on this, I only heard loose
comments about it). He also ran the game "Majesty"
under Linux. The other AOne machine was later
shown running MacOS X on MOL (Mac-On-Linux).
The speed seemed very decent to my untrained eye.
AOS4 was run primarily in 68k mode on the '060,
since at the moment running PPC native is actually
slower (about 33 MHz(?) '040 speeds). This is
due to the majority (there was a list but you'll have
to wait for screenshots since my memory is failing)
of OS components still being in 68k - and in the
native PPC version, these have to be emulated by a
emulator that is currently only working in an
interpreted mode. The 68k version can of course
run these modules at native '060 speed, but in this
case "AOS4" is really modules running on topp of
classic AOS3.9.
Running native in PPC on top of ExecSG was just a
reboot away though. Functionality and stability
seemed to good in native mode too (albeit
slower). When complete, all critical modules are
planned to have been recompiled to PPC, and the
to-be-implemented JIT compiler Petunia are to be
almost only concerned with running third-party 68k
applications at quoted speeds you can finds on the
Petunia website.
I sat down and played with AOS4. I tried it both
running on 68k and as native PPC. Having an
A4000/060 at home, I very much recognized the
speed of things when running the 68k version. That
is, mouse movement is swift, and you see something
happen immediately when clicking on buttons - this
is no different from classic AOS. That said, it IS still
running a 1280x1024 screen on a mere 50MHz '060:
Opaque moving of windows is causing a distinct
jerky motion. You have time to see icons appearing
when opening a new window etc. Running the
current PPC native version, this is even more
noticeable, due to the reasons given above. But it is
still relaively usable and it is not difficult to imagine
what harnessing the full power of the PPC will mean
to system speed.
I played around with different settings and
preferences and indeed you can change and play to
your heart's content. The new preferences system
reminds me of the MUI prefs - and is easy to
navigate. As always in AOS, having the possibility
to press th USE button to try stuff out is excellent
and dearly missed when having to use some "other"
operating systems. The only thing I found strange
was having separate prefs-editors for "Reaction"
and "GUI". I'm sure the underlying reason has to do
with conceptual differences between "Intuition" and
"Reaction", but splitting the prefs editors might
seem a little counter-intuitive for a newbie.
The somewhat brighter blue look seen in the later
AOS4 screenshots stand a good chance of being
part of the official look. A semi-offical poll was
conducted between the older, darker blue and the
present brighter one - and the brighter won out with
a devastating majority.
As for the overall feel: If you have used AOS before,
you'll feel right at home. This is AmigaOS after all -
there is really not so much more to say. :-)
Stability was good and I personally didn't manage
to cause any trouble; however some graphical
glitches were seen on the presentation
screen when loading some demos, also I saw the
system lock up once; I think that particular thing
had something to do with setting the prefs for the
USB (I think this was on the 68k version). All other
instances of trying to run problematic stuff I saw
didn't bring down the system but rather gave the
opportunity to ignore it, reboot or run a
debugger to check out the problem.
The presentations were held in the adjoining room. I
was impressed to find AOS4 promo-CD:s on each
chair. The credit for this has to go to the
ACG-Gotenburg people - extremely well done! As I
understood it, these CD:s will be used on other
events too from now on. At the show you
could also buy an assortment of "AOS4 on tour"
merchandice; I got myself a mug and a T-shirt.
Ben Hermans of Hyperion Entertainment held a
twenty-or-so minute scheduled presentation. It was
followed by a first long Q&A session. Ben is a
good public speaker and made a good impression,
I'd say. He is also interesting to talk to overall (not
many can discuss theorethical
astrophysics with me off the top of their head ... ;-))
Later, one of the beta-testers (whose name I've
forgotten, sorry) held an short go-through of
AOS4 features. It is of course difficult to
demonstrate nifty ExecSG features, so the
demonstration was nessecarily rather superficial
and focused on showing the preferences editor,
Media Toolbox etc. I must say that the
AmiDock was very impressive in real life. I can see
many clever programmers doing just as many clever
utilizations of the AmigaDock. Ben Hermans jumped
in at the end and it all turned into yet another
monster Q&A session. Plenty of knowledgeable
people in the crowd, I must say. Considering the
two video cameras recording every movement, this
two-part Q&A will no doubt be appearing
somewhere on the 'net shortly, so I won't (and can't)
write down the whole thing here.
I'm not sure how many people were there, but
somewhere in the region 80-100 is my guess. There
were both Norwegians and Danes there. Even
more impressive were some people having travelled
from the north of Sweden for this event. Overall, not
only was it interesting to look at and try out AOS4,
but it was also nice to meet Ben Hermans in
person as well as getting the opportunity to chat
eye-to-eye with some of the people "behind the
nicknames".
I must take this opportunity to thank the people of
ACG-Gotenburg taking upon them to
arrange this show, and thus bring the AOS4 tour to
Scandinavia. The venue was excellent and the
arrangements felt well-oiled and professional. Very
impressive. Thanks.
Overall, events such as this is very good for your
confidence in the platform. It's a huge difference to
hear people discuss things in real life as opposed
to reading text in fora. Thus I feel the event was
well worth the trip.
... And today I got news that my AmigaOne-XE/G4
has arrived at GGS Data. Life is good in Amiga land.
.
SlimJim
