@mbrantley

I appreciate your more considered tone.

I can assure you we are not going after Amiga Addict. We have an existing mark in Class 16 and the form filed just affords additional time to examine their application. Unfortunately their application was spotted last minute and there were two choices: let it go through without getting advice or use the form to extend the application process by an additional month.

If the application had been spotted sooner then the additional time would not be needed.

@pjs

Your advice on getting more staff has been taken on board: Ross has joined us last month. He is a really nice guy, has learned and picked up the work well so far and is proving to be a great addition to the team. He will make a big difference to our customers.

I know it is very tempting and the easy option to get the pitch forks out before actually doing any research, however I expected some due diligence from the years of personal interaction with many of you.

ASB Computer rebranded their business as AmigaStore.EU in 2016.

AmigaKit started trading in 2004. Our domains that we own such as Amigastore.co.uk and Amigastore.com have been registered some 12 years before this so ASB Computer cannot claim exclusivity. They replicated everything about our business even down to the product descriptions. AmigaStore.net was registered for two reasons: to stop another new retailer starting up and diluting our name and to reinforce our name in the community.

AmigaKit is more than just a store. The retail division of AmigaKit has been branded since day one as “the Amiga Store”, “your Amiga Store”, “Amiga Kit Amiga Store” predating ASB Computers more recent rebranding. On note that there are no complaints from you on this behalf.

I am currently just moved house so have no internet yet and living out of boxes etc. I will send some emails this week to everyone here that has expressed concerns.

Many of you have met me in person and I have sponsored many community events for over 15 years. I would hope you would like to hear about my viewpoint without name calling. My investment over a decade and half in the community seems to count for zero.

@mr2

The residual amount is simply the credit card transaction fee. It gets added at checkout to cover the high fees the credit card companies and PayPal charge (especially with multi-currency). There is a bug that needs to be resolved where Amistore just deducts the product price and not the credit card fee from your balance. This makes your balance appear in credit when in fact it is not. Currently moving at the moment so I will not be available for at least another week to come. The bug is marked for further investigation.

The official support email for Amistore and Amisphere is support@amisphere.com

Today the following public releases have been made available to download on Updater utility:

Copy v54.7
Warp3DNova.library v1.85
W3DN_SI.library v1.85
W3DN_GCN.library v1.85

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A concern raised was about our new commands being consistent in functionality and features with the older Hyperion command set. The OS3.2 product comes from the same source as OS4.1 so you would think that the commands set would be consistent. If the "official" AmigaOS Wiki documents commands shouldn't they work the same on both 3.2 and 4.1 where ever possible?

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As you know our 68K project is self-booting so does not need to have any licenced commands from third-parties. There are a few things still to do. Our IPrefs is work-in-progress and partially operable. There is still a lot of work fathoming that out.

Quote:

It seems that OS3.2 is subject to legal entanglements (see recent statements from Cloanto). We do not want to get involved with any product that has an uncertain future. We prefer to sell our own software that can be actively maintained, can be updated when our customers demand. If we pay licence fees for OS3.2 where does the money go? At least when we pay our developers to create our own software we know that the money is going back into the community.


@Kas1e

Quote:

Yes I agree with you - they are long overdue replacing. However the same arguments that you have levied against replacing other components should be equally valid against your eagerness to replace these components. There does not seem to be any consistency- either you are against replacing Hyperion components completely or you are not. I suspect you are only in favour when there is no prospect of Hyperion being able to do it.


"older" means component that predate ours.

@tonyw

I agree "clean" implementations are essential and critical to the project. The only downside, as we have found to date, is they sometimes spawn totally different bugs to the older components of the same name due to different coding styles. In some instances that has proved to be an unexpected benefit in routing out longstanding hidden bugs in the older component.


@Steady

Some interesting points.

With respect to commands, we will continue to ensure that they are fully compatible with other implementations to keep a set standard across the Amiga world. For example, recently the OS3.2 team decided to add GROUP to the List command. However in OS4 and our command it is GROUPS (plural). They also changed FORMAT to NOLONGNAMES whereas on our command and OS4 is is LONGNAME. So for completeness we add FORMAT NOLONGNAMES=LONGNAME to keep compatiblity across the board. It seems teams working for Hyperion do not keep to the same standards themselves.

We have had components such as our Sound datatype released to public for some time and it is API compatible with older components. However the streaming functions enhancement are specific to the our version. We have kept the versioning higher so developers can ascertain which version they are calling.

Later this year all of these components will be together in a larger body of work which will make it much easier to segregate from older components and not conflict with OS4.

Since day one, programmers have always had the choice to develop for the Enhancer Software baseline or not. We released the free of charge Enhancer Software Core so they can do this. Further updates are due for that. So rather than they specifying it needs version x of some component, they can more broadly simply state that the Enhancer Software Core should be installed.

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User can continue to choose whether they want to install them or not. The Installer gives users the explicit choice.

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It is always regretful when a command lacks a feature. Software development sometimes yields bugs and oversights but it is important how we respond. You will notice that there was a rapid new release of Copy and Version command to rectify the issues.


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Absolutely, I have already confirmed previously that is the intention.

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Yes that will be coming in future months- lots to new developments to blog about.

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Warp3D Nova is not a driver. Do you mean RadeonHD or RadeonRX as a standalone? We have already done that.

The entire cost of the Enhancer Software pays for only the graphics sub system (including drivers). No funds from the retail price go to pay for replacement system commands. So if we unbundled the system commands the price would be the same.

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Its a free world and customers can make up their own minds. They can buy the software or not. It is up to them what they choose to install on their systems, whether they use A-EON hardware platforms or other manufacturer's machines.

We will carry on listening to customers feature requests, investing in software development, and see where it leads in future.

@kas1e

Like AROS, MorphOS, Scalos, DOpus 5 and various third party commands on Aminet ?

Hyperion went through 5 years of no updates. Who knows what the future will hold ? We rather not sit on our hands and wait patiently whilst the rest of the world moves on.

Is it realistic for 29 Euros retail price they will have enough money to invest in anything more substantial than house keeping updates to OS4 in future ? They are living off the hard (free) work of volunteers but that is not sustainable for more meaningful functionality.

@orgin

It seems OS4.1 will continue down the same path of legal issues, financial problems, management leaving, developers not getting paid and leaving, lack of core investment, 5 years between maintenance releases etc.

However to do something about this the Enhancer Software was created. It is now growing in new directions as the third party situation gets worse.

User can stick to using OS4 pure distribution or they can use the Enhancer Software components: it is their free choice.

@steady @orgin

The replacement system commands we offer are *optionally* installed by the end-user. Users can make a decision to select or deselect them in the install so it’s their free choice to use them or not.

We will need these for a larger project coming down the line later this year.

They are being constantly updated and improving rapidly.

They have the major benefit of not being based on old Commodore source code so they are free from legal entanglements, licensing agreements, cannot be held hostage for years between releases. We are not building our house upon sand.

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Every component that we write from scratch is free from legal entanglements that have blighted this community for at least 12 years. We are sidestepping the legal obstacles and supporting our paying customers with ongoing software development. The Enhancer Software has provided the most significant features to OS4 in over a decade: 3D Shaders, Video Acceleration, OpenGL ES 2, Sensor API, Power Management, 2D Radeon RX and HD drivers. We are determined to continue to deliver more than periodic "house-keeping" releases to end-users with more significant advances.

I understand that our initial releases of the commands needed more features for compatibility. We are now iterating our releases quickly, beta testing and improving them at every step.

Quote:

Up until 2015, the regular price of OS4 was 99 EURO. Since then Hyperion are continuing to charging a mere 29 Euro for OS4.1. Is this discounted price a credible investment in future "meaningful" development? Will it generate any money to pay developers for the features we all want to see?

When users buy Enhancer Software they know that the money gets wholly invested back into further development. It does not go to lawyers, legal expenses or paying debts.

Understood. I wondered if he was referring to the Amiga Developer CD, keeping on topic with this thread. I have now read Rigo’s comments and see the context.

@NinjaCyborg

No it’s not.

Amiga Developer Network (“Amiga Developer” for short) is part of Amiga.org. It was formed in 1997 to promote development in our community. As the present day owners of Amiga.org we have supported and resourced this important part of Amiga.org for many years.

Historical Reference:

https://web.archive.org/web/1997061217 ... /www.amiga.org/developer/

Today the following public releases have been made available to download on Updater utility:

Copy v54.6
Version v54.10

@Raziel

I fully agree.

We have now changed our Format command to maintain compatiblity:

54.12 (18.05.2021)
- Added NOLN=NOLONGNAME=NOLONGNAMES/S switch option. [main.c]
- Bumped revision to follow V46.12 build.

@ddni

Ditto, thanks to Simon and Andy too for those bug fixes.

Kas1e is a one man marketing machine for Hyperion. These updates have achieved more publicity and comment than the last major release of Warp3D Nova and RadeonRX 2.5 which were months of toil by Hans De Ruiter.

A question for the OS3.2 volunteer developers, who presumably also have access to the OS4 Repository:

FORMAT LONGNAMES (OS3.2)

In the OS4.x and Enhancer Software Format V54.1 and V46.11 system command this is:

FORMAT LONGNAME (OS4 & Enhancer Software)


LIST GROUP (OS3.2)

In the OS4.x and Enhancer Software List V54.7 and V46.7 system command this is:

LIST GROUPS (OS4 & Enhancer Software)

Is it better to keep things the same as much as possible across OS4 and OS3 ?

@walkero

Absolutely! We try and avoid overlooking some lesser used functions.

The great news is that we have an update which will also include enhanced functionality. We will release it on Updater utility very soon. Onwards and upwards!

Thanks to all who helped beta test it.

Of course there is nothing "broken" with our Version command. This wouldn't be the way I would describe it and it is exaggerating the situation.

As a command built from scratch there were some missing marginal non-core functions. However they are implemented and we are beta testing them right now in the new release.

We will offer a public release through the Updater utility in the next week or so.

We will always respond to bug reports or feature requests as quickly as possible.

@broadblues

Thanks for your continued updates.