Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1998 14:33:46 -0400 From: fleecy mossTo: Sinan Gurkan Subject: Re: Another Interview Request.Thanks for your interest. Sinan Gurkan wrote: Hi Fleecy Moss, I am the Amiga Translator Organization Turkish Admin. and also a member of Turkish Amiga User Group "Amigart" located in Istanbul,Turkey. In Amigart,our aim is to inform users about Amiga in general.We`ve opened some web pages to do this.. FLEECY: Hello there 8-) Glad to see the good sense that comes with the Amiga is appreciated all around the world 8-) Thank you for continuing to support the Amiga. Here are my Questions : --------------------------------------------------- 1) First of all,thank you for making OS 3.5 a reality. Some users think that OS 3.5 will be just a OS 3.1 with some patches.What can you say about this ? FLEECY: Obviously, we fill try to fix as many bugs as possible. We will also not bother reinventing the wheel where there is no need. For instance, we will use the Haage and Partner WarpOS engine rather than build our own. In other areas though, particularly the interface, we are writing code from scratch. We only have 6 months, a limited budget and we cannot impinge upon the development of the Next Generation Amigas. Given those constraints, I think ppl will be pretty pleased. Of course some ppl will complain because they think we should be adding many new features to OS3.5, but OS3.5 is a transition to the Next Generation machines. Given a choice of having USB and Firewire on the Next Generation or the Classic Amiga, there is no choice. 2)We know that OS3.5 will include RTG,RTA and CDFS support. Will this new CDFS support multimedia formats like VideoCD, DVD ?.Also does Amiga Inc and their OS 3.5 partners plan to bundle add-ons like VideoCD,DVD,AVI/QT player software with OS 3.5 ? (like found in MacOS or Win95/98) FLEECY:DVD will not be supported since it is a Next Generation solution. For the others, we are looking at a few of them. However, where third party solutions already exist, we will not replicate them. One of the driving forces behind OS3.5 is to keep retailers and developers in business so that they can migrate across to the Next Generation machines. We intend to provide the core functionality that is needed by everyone, but for extras, we look to the developers to provide the solutions. For the Next Generation Amiga however, yes, you should expect all of these and much more. 3) Amiga Inc. stated that there`ll be some kind of PPC support in OS 3.5.But we know that two different PPC kernels exist. Will OS 3.5 support WarpUP or PowerUP ?.Do you think that P5 will cooperate if you decide to go on with WarpUP ? FLEECY:We have chosen WarpUP. We have talked to P5 and they are not happy about this but they will co-operate, in as much as they will not change their products to invalidate the WarpUP model. They are a great company and really have kept the Amiga alive during the period when there was no owner. We hope that by finally settling the dispute over the PPC co-processor standard, many more users will now buy their products. FLEECY:Of course, if they chose to invalidate the OS3.5 PPC solution (but I can't imagine why they would) then there are other HW companies interested in providing such solutions. I do not see this as a problem. 4) Will OS 3.5 have Locale support ?.Do you plan to contact A.T.O for translations ? We have already done so. 5) Can you say that Amiga OS 5.0 will bring a new standart to PCs (anyway Amiga is a PC,too.) and will it change the way that we look at computers ? FLEECY :We hope so. We intend to bring a brand new look to the world of the digital information revolution, knocking down the barriers that have kept computers and other electronic devices separate for so long. This does not mean we are abandoning the tradition Amiga community or market. On the contrary, if anything, we will provide features that will make the Amiga THE computer of choice for the next millenium.