Moderator
Posts: 461 from 2003/7/21
Quote:
guruman wrote:
I'll be there, with an old digital camera and possibly a PowerBook G4! And if there's something vaguely interesting to report, I will...
Ok, no pics yet, but you can find quite a few on Facebook (no need to register: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.336954366447345.1073741839.326291577513624&type=1 ) and also somewhere else from other people (like: https://imageshack.com/a/MjkC/1 ).
About the news:
- MorphOS 3.4 was ready to be released (but you already know!)
- Frank and Mark resumed work on the Sam460 port after almost 1 year of "freeze". They dedicated the last 2 weeks to it. Low level support was rewritten mostly from scratch, as it was too hackish, and now codebase is much better and easier to mantain. Drivers for the Radeon R500 family have been written, "2D acceleration" is done, 3D acceleration and overlay would have required another 24-48 hours of love to be displayed in full glory. Mark was a bit sad they didn't make it, and indeed it would have been a nice showing on the Sam. Basic work has been made on even newer Radeon cards (I think I understood R700), but since there isn't even 2D acceleration it would have been sluggish if showed. The plan, however is to complete the drivers of these 2 families for the release of MorphOS for Sam, that, tentatively, should be 3.6 sometime during 2014. As usual, team wouldn't commit to release dates and acurate promises, so take this with more than the usual pinch of salt. Mark is happy to be able to work with newer gfx cards now that support of up to R300 is mature enough, as this opens for new features.
- In addition to the Sam, Frank brought an iBook G4 running the last release.
- 3.5 is due relatively soon and will be the usual bug-fix release
- JavaScript JIT (the bounty for OWB by Mark) is actively under development but a bit behind schedule and was not shown
- I asked also about OpenGL 2.0 now that we have full support of the R300 and they are working on 3D drivers for the R500 family. This requires kiero to be back on work, he had to stop working on MorphOS in the last months for various real-life reasons, but hopefully he will resume development with the team soonish.
- The plan is to have also Airport wifi supported in the Apple notebooks, sooner or later
- I did fire my PowerBook G4 up and showed mainly Odyssey with YouTube clips, MPlayer with hi-res videos (up to 720p, but also 1080p full-hd to show that it still can't do it at full speed) a few programs and games. I installed 3.4 as the first user in the world, one or 2 hours before the relase on the team's home page, and enjoyed the faster 3D driver immediately - I was trying to show an heavy game like Speed Dreams to the Bitplane magazine editor, after talking about the much slower 3D drivers of AmigaOS 4.1 (Return to Castle Wolfenstein port is done but still unreleased due to it showing 3-4 fps on AmigaOne), and I anticipated it would have been quite slow and sloppy, not due to the port, but because it is really gfx heavy... And it wasn't that bad, with 3.4 installed. Still not perfect, but enjoyable.
I think this is enough for now. As usual Frank and Mark are nice guys and I like having a chat with them. And the atmosphere of the (very small, this year) event was very friendly and relaxed in general, so a nice trip altogether.
Kind regards,
Andrea
[ Edited by guruman 16.12.2013 - 01:57 ]
