This is a brief report from Pianeta Amiga (December
12, 2004 - Rome - Italy). We returned home just a few hours after the show and
wanted to fulfil the need for news by curious people. Actually there was not
that much to be seen, apart from a lot of MorphOS related news. This was also
caused by the fact that the location for this year's show (a Luxury Hotel in
Rome), while very nice and easily reachable, was definitely smaller than the
usual exposition center in Empoli, and therefore only few
AmigaOne's and Pegasos were on show.
Please note that this report mainly concerns the PegasosII/MorphOS pair. We
think that extensive reports concerning the AmigaOne/AmigaOS4 world should be
written by people more involved than us. Suffice it to say that there was a
number of µA1-C boards, that AmigaOS4 was running on many computers, and that
there was some new software available, including native FreeSpace,
native DukeNukem, the new Warp3D and its prefs,
Petunia (with the 68k version of fxPaint) and native
MooVid and DVPlayer. Plus the DMA enabled drivers for SIL
based controllers. Anyway, let us repeat that for extended comments about
these subjects you'll definitely find more about it somewhere else, reported
by people more expert than us about AmigaOne/AmigaOS4.
Enrico Vidale (Virtual Works) and Massimiliano
Tretene (Soft3) had plenty of miscellaneous software and hardware for
sale at their booths, as well as Joachim Thomas that offered
many copies of the last numbers of Bitplane, the last Italian printed
review dedicated to Amiga and Amiga-like computers. There were also some
computers running BeOS (in various flavours).
I also saw Michele Battilana (Cloanto) and Claudio Marro
Filosa (organizer of Pianeta Amiga). Other people, you probably know
of, were (in sparse order): Alfonso "Alfie" Ranieri (CManager,
MUI-ARexx suite, amrss), Elena "&" Novaretti (the fairy
of fractals), Pasquale Alfuso (Aminet-Italy maintainer),
Raffaele "Raf_MegaByte" Irlanda (reporter of several news on ANN
and a few on MorphZone).
And now, at last, let me describe what happened at
the booth that was the most interesting for many of us, the Pegasos-Italia
booth by Michele "Miky060" Magliocca. Michele came with his own
ultra-modded PegasosII-G4, a few pre-assembled PegasosII computers for sale,
and miscellaneous hardware. He received substantial hardware support by
Mario Sanzullo, who came from Naples with his own PegasosII-G4,
and later by one of us (Andrea "Guruman" Maniero) who came from
Padova with one of his Pegasos computers.
Actually, despite many people not believing,
"Guruman"'s Pegasos was a humble Pegasos1-April2 with Voodoo 3 -
you can't get any lower with the Pegasos nowadays. Many people wanted to test
themselves the solid windows movement while playing movies or music to hear
the audio bug, with no luck. Sadly, in fact, there are some bad (and false)
myths that were spread quite a lot of time ago, and are difficult to erase.
Anyway, a first person test most of the times will do. Oh, and as for MOS
being a crashy OS, "Guruman"'s Pegasos1 ran for 5 hours without
a single crash - and it did run quite a lot of software, games (all the WUP
ones from, ehrm, Hyperion), demos, and emulators. Also a couple of digicams
were plugged in, and their photos were processed with ShowGirls
(amazing little program, really a wonderful job by "Kiero", and
everybody agreed), and so on...
Let us return to "Miky060"'s performances. Honestly, at
Pegasos-Italia there was probably more to be seen than one could - you would
have had to be there all the time. We know that you want information about
MorphOS 1.5, but we have no specific news about it. Michele received several
interesting software components that can be extracted from the advanced
MorphOS 1.5 environment and can run in the current 1.4.3 environment. The new
2D/3D drivers for Voodoo 3/4/5 and the new tinygl.library were of
course the most visible because they allowed many games to run in the
old environment. The most impressive games were certainly
FooBilliard, an advanced 3D billiard emulation with variable
perspective and very fine graphics, and native QuakeII for MorphOS.
The graphics of QuakeII is excellent, especially lighting (again, an
amazing work from "Kiero" and "BigFoot"). One of
us ("DoctorMorbius_FP") has Hyperion version of QuakeII
for classic Amiga with PPC processor board, but it is definitively inferior in
terms of graphics quality. QuakeII was extraordinarily fast even in
high resolutions (1024x768). When "Miky060" ran the demo at
maximum speed, it was so accelerated (without graphic losses) that the entire
action lasted only a few seconds!
The world premičre of Virtual Grand Prix
2 for MorphOS was so impressive that most people concentrated around the
booth to see it. Note that with an humble Voodoo3 on the PegasosII-G4 the
arcade part of the game run without much hassle in 1024x768 at the maximum
detail level. The car simulation mode (which is extremely sophisticated, as
you probably know) was also available, but it will be unplayable until
Paolo Cattani implements controls via USB devices. Well, let us
simply say that he made an exceptional work here!
People was also very attracted by FreeSpace2, and there was also
Hexen2, but there won't be many pictures, because it's very dark!
Besides games, our interest obviously concentrated on Papyrus Office.
This is a very promising and interesting program. Its context sensitive Help
and extended Preferences guarantee ease of use as well as high flexibility and
customisation, and all the functions available through menus and gadgets
clarify that this is an ambitious and powerful program. However there are a
number of residual bugs that prevented us to use it at its full power. But
there is no doubt that, when they will be eliminated and the official sale
will start, this program will set the new standard for word processing (and
more) in the Amiga-like word. Wordworth, FinalWriter and
AmigaWriter will be forgotten, and only PageStream 5 (which
however covers another market segment: DeskTop Publishing) will survive...
Long live to Papyrus, and happy/fast debugging to its programmers.
On the serious side, there was also MOSTitler, a new-gen
videotitler, with 3D capabilities (it imports LightWave 3D 7.x
objects, for instance) and quite a lot of options (way too much to be explored
in the few minutes it was run, to leave space to the other softwares, but it
got quite some deserved attention nevertheless). We'll see more when it gets
released.
Very little remains to say concerning the event, except for a few meditations
about a subject that we consider very important, i.e. the quality of
some people we meet at the show, who kindly exchanged their ideas with us.
People who attended the show can be partitioned in the following classes.
Crazy guys that still hope in the resurrection of Amiga-like computers in a
form or the other (at least in a niche market). Don't be offended by this
crude description: it covers almost everyone in our community and in the
AmigaOne community, and we are the first of them all...
People that left the Amiga world much time ago and came to the show for
curiosity, just to see what this world is today. All of them wondered when
they saw machines like the Pegasos and the AmigaOne (they did not expect to
find new computers).
A group of persons like the above-mentioned ones, who, however, were much
more informed and came to see the Pegasos and the AmigaOne just because they
were bored by MicroSoft, Intel, and AMD, and needed something different, both
in terms of software and hardware.
Members of the latter class are very important. Fresh blood for our decadent
community, early Amigans that return home with all their experiences in the
real world of computing. They like very much an Amiga-like system (because
they know very well what they should expect from such a system), but, first of
all, they want Linux because they already use it. And they don't care if they
lose computing power using a PPC mobo, because they do not want anymore an x86
machine. If you know the "Dune" series of science fiction books by
Frank Herbert, these people are like the strange kinds of people
that returned home from the outside, after the dispersion. They come with new
experiences, do not care at all of our small, poor, ridiculous diatribes, but
only want to be free. They need this freedom so much that they disregard
powerful PPC Apple computers with their efficient but closed OS and
architecture. They also dislike any firmware that is not open: so they like
the Pegasos and don't like the AmigaOne because of the firmware (not only for
its quality but just for its open character!).
These people like very much the possibility to run Crux, Debian, Yellow Dog,
Gentoo, and all the other well-known flavours that complement the Linux kernel
and are available on the Pegasos. They like the standard character that these
distributions are assuming since they started to take care of our PPC mobo.
And they consider MorphOS like a very interesting bonus that our world has to
offer. It is an important reason for their return, but it is neither the
unique component of their decision nor the most important.
We need that all these people come to give new life to our platform. We need
all the Linux freaks and users that want to migrate, because they will
increase the diffusion of our PPC hardware. We need all of them because, first
of all, the hardware must live by means of its own forces, and only in this
case the software can evolve and enhance the hardware success. We should learn
to live with these newcomers, because the hardcore Amiga users are
insufficient to guarantee the survival of the Pegasos, even if our number
still grows up and will continue to increase in the future.
Our unity is due to the main reason of our aggregation: MorphOS. And the
newcomers should find a living MorphOS, otherwise they will lose interest soon
and will care only for the Pegasos. Until now MorphOS had a momentum, its real
force, which we should preserve, otherwise the small community of programmers
that create free and commercial software for MorphOS will disperse. If a long
stationary condition will come, that momentum will slowly disappear, the decay
of MorphOS will start, and we could have another Amithlon...
This message is directed to ALL the people that could avoid this destiny. Be
constructive!
Well, maybe there are other persons, items and details to describe, but we
will stop here. Overall, a nice event, certainly worth the kilometers we had
to travel (500 going plus 500 back for "Guruman" and 200 going
plus 200 back for "DoctorMorbius_FP"). And it was a pleasure to
meet the usual suspects...
This is a brief report from Pianeta Amiga (December
12, 2004 - Rome - Italy). We returned home just a few hours after the show and
wanted to fulfil the need for news by curious people. Actually there was not
that much to be seen, apart from a lot of MorphOS related news. This was also
caused by the fact that the location for this year's show (a Luxury Hotel in
Rome), while very nice and easily reachable, was definitely smaller than the
usual exposition center in Empoli, and therefore only few
AmigaOne's and Pegasos were on show.
