CLOANTO LICENSES PICASSO96 SOFTWARE

Cloanto is proud to announce that it licensed both the "Picasso96"
software from Alexander Kneer and Tobias Abt, and Brian King's "UAEgfx"
Monitor implementation, for use in Amiga Forever.

A shareware version of Picasso96 has been providing RTG (Amiga
retargetable graphics) functionality to the emulation software which is
part of Amiga Forever since 1997. With the new license Cloanto would
like to acknowledge the precious contribution of the Picasso96 Team to
the ease of use, compatibility and speed which made Amiga Forever so
successful, and further contribute to the future development of the
Picasso96 software. The new license replaces the shareware status of the
Picasso96 software included in Amiga Forever. Support and upgrades will
continue to be provided by Cloanto as part of the Amiga Forever product.

Thanks to the Picasso96 implementation in the Amiga emulation, when an
Amiga program makes a function call to open an RTG screen, or to
otherwise read or change its contents, that functionality is in most
part executed as native and very fast x86 code. Furthermore, the Windows
versions of the emulation programs included with Amiga Forever (i.e.
WinUAE and WinFellow) fully exploit the latest versions of Microsoft
DirectX, which is normally used by games and multimedia applications to
provide maximum performance by providing low-level access to specialized
hardware features, without having to re-write hardware-specific code. In
practice this means that while other emulation programs only offer
proper support for a handful of display cards, Amiga Forever has been
running fine and will continue to run fine with hundreds of different
display cards, including most graphics card currently available, and
those which will be released with Windows drivers in the future.

The combination of Picasso96 and DirectX technologies provides
palette-based, hi-color, true-color and multi-monitor screen modes well
beyond the functionality and speed of the original Amiga hardware. Also,
while other emulation packages do not even support simple peripherals
such as a USB mouse, keyboard, joystick and speakers, DirectX includes
DirectInput and DirectSound, which allow the emulation as included in
Amiga Forever to support all popular input and sound devices.

The Picasso96 software is just one of the many components which have
been carefully selected, preinstalled and tested for compatibility in
Amiga Forever, to make Amiga emulation a simple one-click experience
which works on the widest possible range of different PCs. Hundreds of
other items, including for example GIF/LZW code used under license from
Unisys Corporation (and not available in the version of Personal Paint
included on Aminet), ColorFonts and AnimFonts by Kara Computer Graphics,
and anything from entire software packages to single icons are carefully
listed in the Copyright and Credits sections of the Amiga Forever
documentation (which includes 8 KB of text only to list the individual
third-party contributions).

In spite of increasingly difficult times Cloanto keeps improving its own
software technology and licensing valued third-party contents to
constantly improve Amiga Forever and offer continued support and
compatibility to the Amiga community. Cloanto is grateful to all of its
valued customers for supporting these efforts.


LINKS

Picasso96 Home Page

Amiga Forever Home Page

Cloanto Home Page