AmigaOS 4 Update
by Ben Hermans

During the past month, very substantial progress has been made on OS 4.

One more component (Reaction) has been marked as completed whilst several more (DOS, Roadshow dialer, P96, AmiGS, AmigaInput) are so close to completion that we expect to sign off on them within the next few days.

The Intuition work is now down to implementing the default OS 4 appearance, a process we are confident to complete in the course of April. The default OS4 appearance has been created by a well-known Amiga interface specialist and is something that has not been seen before.

Screenshots will be released as soon as possible.

Hyperion's own developers have meanwhile been working on integrating the 68K emulator. The idea has been to get a plain 68K OS 3.9 running on top of ExecSG which serves as "proof of concept" of the emulation integration.

We have ran into some unexpected hardware bugs on the CSPPC development platform (e.g. access speed of custom chip registers) but overall we are very pleased with the progress we have made and by the time you read this, it is very likely that we will have a full OS 3.9 system up and running on top of the new kernel. This means a pure 68k operating system running on the PPC ExecSG through its 68k emulation service.

At this point, we will start migrating all 68K-based modules to join the PPC based modules in AmigaOS4.0.

This is a job which can be undertaken fairly easily and by several developers at the same time thanks to various cross-compilers as all modules are already compiling with
GCC and we have produced a complete "how to" guide on migrating these modules from OS 3.x to OS 4.0.

Meanwhile, a team of 6 people is working on developing AmigaOne replacements for the Amiga devices. This will remove the dependencies that the CSPPC AmigaOS4.0 version has on the classic hardware and represent the final step in the transition from the old to the new.

Ben Hermans
Managing partner Hyperion Entertainment