The authors and their friends

The group of MorphOS/Pegasos supporters who participated to this edition of Pianeta Amiga was formed (from left to right) by Fulvio "DoctorMorbius_FP" Peruggi, Michele "Miky060" Magliocca, Andrea "Guruman" Maniero, and Omar "H_Seldon" Laurino.

Guruman came to Empoli making a long trip from North Italy and bringing with him his Pegasos II and a rich set of new programs to show. He attended the show since early morning and was present at all the activities scheduled for Saturday.

DoctorMorbius_FP came to Empoli (500 Km away from Naples, where he lives) with Miky060 and H_Seldon. Miky060 was well-known as the leader of Pegasos-Italia for two years, then he "retired" because he wants to graduate and now has very important things to do that subtracts him the time necessary for assembling and selling Pegasos computers. H_Seldon, an Amiga user who became a Linux geek many years ago, is the guy who could possibly replace him. The trip was a relaxing way to let them know each other and discuss. It seems that in the end Omar will replace Michele as leader of Pegasos-Italia and official retailer of Genesi products in Italy, but we will be sure only after an official announcement (of course Genesi is informed and approves).

South guys arrived late in the morning, but remained at Empoli until the end of the show, late morning of Sunday. So they were among the 38 lucky persons who, having attended the show and being still present in the evening of Saturday, were eligible for a memorable Pantagruelian dinner based on Tuscan food and wine (Guruman is still complaining for what he lost).

MorphOS programs and games

The most interesting software product presented at the show was certainly Sputnik, the KHTML browser that for the first time will bring modern CSS browsing and state-of-the-art web experience to the MorphOS and AmigaOS worlds. Guruman had a demo version of Sputnik, but it was not possible to show it doing any actual browsing, because the current version of Sputnik does not read local files, and Saturday there was no web access (except in the entrance hall for portable PCs, and only after 5pm). So Guruman was able to show only the start window of Sputnik, because he returned home in the evening of Saturday. Full web access in the main hall was provided only Sunday.

Interested people had the chance to see also some other applications. One of the most awaited among them is definitely MOSPaint, the first 2D paint program for Amiga and Amiga-like systems in a long time, together with LunaPaint, which is presently mainly developed on AROS. The program has a multiwindowed MUI GUI, already supports layers, brushes and a couple of effects, in addition to all the usual "freehand" drawing tools. Its author, Pavel "Stefkos" Stefansky, seems to be very open to the feedback received and at implementing user requested features. The same author sent Guruman also a preliminary version of ImageMapper, a small tool to create HTML maps from images (you divide an image in various specific areas, and the final web user, clicking each one, will get a different result).

Ilkka "itix" Lehtoranta sent a new beta version of his highly acclaimed OS4Emu program - a wrapper that enables the transparent usage of many AmigaOS4 executables on MorphOS systems. The program was mainly shown running DvPlayer (including the new plugin for crypted DVDs), the new tracker MilkyTracker (thanks to "Varthall", author of the port to AmigaOS4, the problem of the wrong colors on true color screens was solved in real time at the show), and FPSE, the PlayStation emulator. DvPlayer mandatorily needs the new version of OS4Emu, though, and can't work with the currently available archive (V1.9).

Many publicly available softwares were shown as well, and among them the latest Blender release for MorphOS, MUI4beta, and a recent Ambient compile got some attention, as well as some games like the freshly released Warsow port and Virtual Grand Prix 2.

Samantha

The hardware queen of the whole show was certainly the new PPC board codenamed Samantha (SAM 440EP). This is a board whose design and realization were financed and directed by an alliance formed by three Italian companies: Alternative Technologies, Soft3, and VirtualWorks. The project started eight months ago and remained almost secret until now. The team preferred to keep a low profile until the board become already a rather mature product: a fact that can be seen explicitly by a careful examination of its physical realization.

The boards were only exposed because they belong to an early preproduction batch: they arrived two days before the show and were not yet tested by the development team. Anyway, if the hardware debugging phase does not detect big problems, the production of the first boards could also be done within December. We will see.

Samantha is a ten-layer board with a very low profile (less than 2cm). The processor is a 667 MHz AMCC 440EP, that is a PowerPC SoC (= System on Chip). The board includes 512 MB of system RAM, as well as an embedded ATI Radeon Mobility M9 video board with 64 MB of RAM. Anyway, the most relevant component onboard is without any doubt a Lattice XP FPGA that can be used to implement many digital circuits in order to expand the board's capabilities. Samantha operation requires low-power and therefore it is passively cooled. The external connections can be done through four USB 2.0 ports (only two external), two 10/100 Ethernet ports, and four SATA ports. The SoC also provides one USB 1.1 internal port, whose typical use can be the connection of a mouse or a keyboard.

Samantha price (rough estimates suggest 370-399 EUR + VAT) places very close to the price of a Pegasos board, but it seems mainly addressed to the net services market and the embedded market. Of course, running AmigaOS is possible with a few adaptations, so finally this OS will have again a hardware platform. Anyway it seems that the Amiga market is not seen by the producers as the main market for this board.

AmigaOS 4.0

32 bit icons with alpha channel: this is the new performance guaranteed by the latest betatester version of AmigaOS4. Of course the icons are true dual image Amiga icons usable in various formats (now PNG, in the future other formats with specific plugins). Also a beta of TuneNet, the native music player, was available, with the welcome addition of full skinning capabilities. Other highlights of the AmigaOS4 display were the new DvPlayer with the ability to show the encoded DVDs, and the tracker MilkyTracker.

Saturday events

Late saturday morning was dedicated to a full presentation of Samantha, with specific introductions by Libero Moschella (Alternative Technologies), Massimiliano Tretene (Soft 3), Enrico Vidale (Virtual Works).

In the afternoon the developers conference took place. It was mainly (even better, only) focused on development for AmigaOS4. Andrea Palmatè showed Emperor, a program that enables the realization of GUIs by means of simple point'n'click operations. Andrea Vallinotto, AmigaOS4 developer responsible for the new Partition Wizard and UBoot, among other things, explained how to make kickstart modules and how to code for the PCI interface. Nicolas Mendoza from Norway introduced the Aminet and UtilityBase projects, Andrea Palmatè again took the microphone to talk about setting up Cygwin and the SDK on a Windows machine and do some crosscompiling. Finally Dario Soccoli introduced the audience to AVD, the Advanced Visual Developer software by BITbyBIT Software Group LLC, a try at making a modern IDE for AmigaOS4. A CD with some of the software presented at the conference will be sent to the audience. At this moment it is not yet clear whether it will be available to other interested users as well.

During the show the Samantha crew issued an official press release about the SAM440EP project, and Bill McEwen (the resumed Amiga Inc. CEO), who couldn't make it to the show, sent an audio file wishing the best to the event attenders and to the new Italian hardware as well, and announcing Amiga's buyout of an Indian IT company, Ruksun.

At last, the show included an evening IRC session with the Frieden brothers, that was held in the entrance hall for the already mentioned problems with connectivity at the show.

Miscellaneous

Troika PPC boards
In the Guru Meditation stand people could see the Amy'05 and Panda boards by Troika. The qualitative level of the design and realization of the Amy'05 is evidently far away from the Samantha standard. This board is clearly an early and hardly working prototype, but we think it will not have a long life after Samantha commercial debut. The Panda board is actually an UDTech board, sold by the Chinese firm as a home media center. It is based on the Freescale 7448 CPU clocked up to 1.7GHz. The future Panda boards are said to be loosely based on the UDTech design, with some obvious changes (like PCI or AGP or PCIx in place of the 2 strangely placed miniPCI slots).
Guru Meditation also offered a software product, namely Audio Evolution 4 for AmigaOS 4.0.

AmiKit
Jan Zahurancik, author of the well known AmiKit package, a compilation of freeware/shareware software that turns a standard UAE installation on a fairly recent PC into a much better and more pleasant experience, was at the show with a booth. He came from Slovakia and offered a special edition on CD for 5 Eur. All the CDs of this edition went sold out in a few hours.

Bitplane
The guys of the last Italian paper magazine dedicated to the Amiga and MorphOS world presented their latest issue, number 15, that included a long preview of the Samantha project, a reportage from Codex Alpe Adria, as well as the usual bunch of reviews, tutorials and features. The back-numbers were on sale as well. On Saturday morning Michele Battilana from Cloanto left a number of copies of the video only edition (2 DVDs) of Amiga Forever as a gift to the community at this stand. They disappeared very quickly.

Lightage
Former Darkage (authors of demos and a couple on nice programs, like Extreme and Supreme, for the classic Amiga line a few years ago) were there and presented their newly formed company, focused on multimedia content for websites.

Amiga Demo Mania
Cristiano "Seiya" Cherchi attended the show also this year, bringing his powerful PC to show some demos (both classic Amiga ones under emulation, and newer Windows productions).

Ikir Sector
Ikir, the well-known leader of Iksnet, the Italian news and forum site , was present Sunday morning with his AmigaOne. He played many DVD's showing the capabilities of MPlayer. We also saw some excellent performances like five movies played at once by five DvPlayer tasks.

Zeta
Sunday morning also a BeOS amateur was present. He showed the latest version of Zeta on his PC. This is a really different experience from Windows: Zeta definitively is the OS most similar to Amiga-like OS's that is available in the market.

Final remarks

The turnaround of this show was more or less the same of the last few years (probably it was higher than in 2005), so not disappointing in general terms. Pianeta Amiga confirms itself as one of the biggest Amiga shows in the world, but maybe the organizers were expecting more, considering how many sites were contacted for this year's event, and the number of press releases anticipating the show. The main success in this regard, was the presence at the show of a television crew from RAI, the national broadcasting television in Italy, that resulted in a couple of interviews/brief reports that have been shown during the Neapolis program (October, 4 and October, 12).

Anyway, we think that Pianeta Amiga 2007 will be more rich and interesting than the current show. It seems that all the necessary prerequisites for a great success will be realized. We should have Efika and Samantha boards already commercialized and with a reasonable penetration in the market. And perhaps the success of this hardware could create opportunities for financing the software side of our world-in-a-niche and bring it out of the current stagnation phase. MorphOS 1.5 and AmigaOS 4.0 should finally see the light, and could make happy thousands of old users as well as collect new ones.

Is this a real scenario or the pure skeleton of a science fiction story? Time will give the answer.

Acknowledgements

The auhors would like to thank Stefano Guidetti and Szymon Tomzik who kindly permitted insertion of their pictures in the report (S.G.: IMGP0021.jpg; S.T.: img00026.jpg, img00028.jpg; other pictures were snapshot by the authors).