Several weeks ago, Amiga OS 4.1 was announced for Amiga-one systems. I received my copy about a week ago, and have been putting it through its paces since. It is definitely a big improvement over Amiga OS 4.0, but still feels like the same system. Visually the operating system is much more impressive. However, most of the improvements are in the underlying system, and are thus hidden from view. From graphics, to USB, to DOS, almost every part of the system has been improved in some form. Here is a quick summary of my impressions of Amiga OS 4.1 so far. Installation I opted ...
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Celestia running using MiniGL 2.x on Amiga OS 4. I'm pleased to announce that MiniGL 2.1 beta has been released. This release includes many bug fixes, including the elusive MiniGL watchdog task crash, which was responsible for random lockups. The release also includes updated developer files for all new features in MiniGL 2.x. MiniGL is a 3D API which is compatible to OpenGL(tm). It implements a subset of that API and was designed for speed, therefore it directly interfaces with Warp3D. This also means that there is currently no software mode. MiniGL 2.1 beta can be downloaded from os4depot . More information about MiniGL ...
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A generous donor gave me a Diamond Radeon HD 2400 Pro PCI graphics card. This card uses the RV610 chipset and is, thus, one generation ahead of the Radeon x1300 that was used during initial development . After plugging the new graphics card into the Amigaone, I have successfully opened a screen on this new card . This required a small set of changes to the code. Since development of this driver relies heavily on the open-source RadeonHD driver for Linux (the documentation alone is not enough), I had already added most of the code specific to driving R6xx cards prior to receiving actual ...
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The first truly personal development project is finally online. Over half a year ago I installed a Radeon X1300 PCI graphics card into my Amiga-on, with the intention to develop an Amiga OS 4.x driver for such cards. Till now this project has been kept silent because I do not with to announce something that will never be finished. Today, the first major milestone was reached; the graphics card was programmed with a 1280x1024 true-colour screen mode and an image was displayed. This is still a long way off from a true graphics driver. However, I am now confident enough that I can finish ...
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The first major milestone in the RadeonHD project has been reached ; Amiga Workbench (indeed, any screen) can now be displayed by the RadeonHD driver on Amiga OS 4.x. Dragging of large windows can be sluggish due to lack of hardware graphics acceleration. Despite this, movies are playable, albeit with higher CPU usage. This sluggishness and high CPU usage will disappear once hardware acceleration is implemented. Progress of this project can be followed via the RadeonHD Development Log .
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