_______________________ _____________________________ / ___________________ \ Current / Esquimalt Digital Logic Inc \ | / \ |version 2.50| 820 Dunsmuir Road | | | OMEn Herald | | (2.58 soon)| Victoria, BC | | | Volume 1 Number 4 | | | Canada V9A 5B7 | | | October 1994 | | Call for | Phone: (604) 384 0499 | | \___________________/ | Free demo; | Fax: (604) 384 0575 | \_______________________/ runs all | Genie: CCarmichael (Pres)| OMEn software!\_____________________________/ (C) 1994 Esquimalt Digital Logic Inc. All rights reserved. Back-issue newsletters and latest Atari OMEn demo releases are also available in the Atari RT library on GENIE. ___________________________________________________________________ / OMEN: A New Deal for Software Developers \ | | |* A universal software platform. Software for OMEn runs on all | | machines without modification: | | Macintosh (running) | | Atari (available now) | | Amiga (in progress) | | Power PC (Macintosh version) | | PC/Pentium (by 680x0 emulation, in progress) | |* Readily available to your customers: OMEn "Shareware" style demo | | copies for every machine run 100% of OMEn software. (Economical | | OMEn licencing arrangements are also under consideration so OMEn | | can be included with commercial software.) | |* A user friendly generic graphical environment for customers -- | | and programmers. | |* A truly practical open system, not a closed architecture. | | Programmers can expand the OMEn system for new hardware, new | | connections, even new computers. | |* A fine software development platform: easy to learn, easy to | | write for, with easy debugging. | |* OMEn does more. A compact, real-time system, OMEn will find its | | way into applications in robotics, industrial control, embedded | | control and multi-media equally with home and office desktop use.| | | |Why suffer the headaches of programming with DOS, Windows, Mac, and| |other cumbersome systems, when one OMEn version of your product | |will cover virtually every market and machine? | \___________________________________________________________________/ OMEn General Progress * OMEn Prices have been reduced, with the option of printing out your own manuals using OMEN's "Micro-Word" to save additional money. * Networking software is being written. * "Mouse droppings" -- leftover bits of mouse arrow on the screen -- have been cleaned up. There are fewer display "glitches". A number of other minor problems have also been dealt with. * Additional features for word processing are being added. Indents, tabs and programmable line heights are handled by windows. * Additional bitmapping calls for practical font printing on dot matrix printers by combining bitmaps will be added. * A 680x0 disassembler which shows OMEn system calls and I/O commands has been created to facilitate debugging of new software. * Floppy disk formatting has been added, with 720K/800K (regular), 1440K/1600K (high-densite) and 360K/400K (for single sided and 5-1/4" disks) formats. To format a floppy disk, click open DOS File Protocol and follow the menus. In theory, the formats are all DOS compatible, but DOS only reads 360/720/1440K formats. * Settings and preferences: A text file ("OmenPref") holds infor- mation about I/O channels, wallpaper, startup programs, and so on. (Licenced copies only - demos boot with default settings.) It is little short of astonishing to see the background picture and all the programs pop up at once as OMEn boots. Specific Machines Atari Falcon: can now start OMEn from any video mode and exit without rebooting. Both VGA and NTSC (Atari color & TV) monitors work fine, but Atari Hi-rez monitors currently aren't working. Mac: A key problem has been solved and all or most Mac models should soon be working. Power PC is untested at this writing. Amiga: Work is proceeding slowly due to other committments. Hopefully the OMEn screen will come up at the next work session. PC: The plan has been changed! Instead of using a circuit card, the PC version will be run by software 680x0 emulation. Newer 80486 PCs can emulate a 68000 at about 16 megahertz performance, and Pentiums are even better! That could make OMEn for PC considerably faster than Microsoft Windows even without converting anything to native Intel code. A test-prototype version may well be ready in October. This means that OMEn demos can be released for DOS machines, and it won't cost PC owners money up front to give OMEn and OMEn based software a try. It will be the first time that large numbers of PCs will move towards compatibility with other machines instead of the other way around. OMEn software will thus become very acceptable on the PC. The programming headaches of accommodating the PC/DOS architecture and the many flavours of PC hardware will be transparent to application software. Why is OMEn Taking so Long? In spite of the potential a universal operating system holds, the project remains a part-time endeavour. Promising sources of funding have proven elusive, even though the product is highly demonstrable. (Knowledgeable computer professionals have been very impressed with the OMEn system when shown by a person familiar with it.) With unlimited resources, OMEn might already be running on every conceivable machine with all the useful features incorporated and several programming languages available. On the other hand, high-budget teams have thus far delivered complex, high-budget solutions to your computing problems instead of simple, open-system capability, so perhaps it has been an advantage to NOT have such resources! Are high-budget "sophisticated" and "professional" incompatible with "simple" and "elegant" solutions? Certainly many valuable OMEn innovations would not have been possible if the product specifications had been fixed too early and OMEn had been rushed out the door two years ago. One thing is certain: advances of recent months are turning OMEn from a "golly, it all works!" prototype into a platform where one can count on reliable performance and needed features for everyday work. This section is written with apologies to those who have been expecting to receive OMEn over the summer and are wondering what has happened to it. Version 2.58 will definitely be sent out about the end of September. "Text Ed" will have margin settings, and double sided printing capabilities. It is crossing the threshold to being a "Word Processor", so it's being renamed "Micro Word", which is a reflection on its 12K file size. Along with current programming work, the OMEn Programming Reference Manual (around 350 pages - a featherweight compared to Mac or Windows) and the Eazy Asm Structured Assembler Manual are being edited and checked over for mistakes. Although we may miss the odd one, we do realize that errors in system documentation can drive programmers nuts. Earlier estimates of the time required to prepare the manuals have been proven over-optimistic, but we do expect to release the software development system very soon. Technical Tidbits: Memory/File Management System The 32 bit integrated memory/file management system of OMEn treats files and memory allocations alike. Memory allocations are opened dynamically, and are relocatable, but only under specific circum- stances under control of the software using the allocation. When a memory allocation is opened, the system returns a pointer to a Memory Definition Block, with the memory initially locked to the task which opened it. This block is a twenty byte structure that holds the start and end addresses of the allocation, the access state, the use of the memory, and its purgeability status. Files, including directories, are "mounted" into the system as individual memory allocations. These allocations are given "#FileId" as the memory type and are flagged "#PurgeOnReset" - not purgeable. Allocations, including files, may be in any of the following states of access, which are set by system calls: * Free - Not in use by any task (or process, or thread) * Flagged - One or more tasks has an interest in the memory (but may not be currently accessing it). It cannot be closed/deleted/put-away by another task. * Selected - for shared-read access by one or more tasks * Locked - for private-read-write access by one task "Flagged" and "Selected" status are indicated by a bit in a long word corresponding to each task. Locking is by task number. "Selected" and "Locked" access states are mutually exclusive. Flagging, selecting or locking a file is the same as with any other memory allocation, except that the file's file manager is consulted. (If the file is on a network drive, the file server needs to know about the remote state of the file.) Purgeability, as currently implemented, has two options: * PurgeIfFree - If the memory is not flagged, selected, or locked by any task, it is closed (purged). * PurgeOnReset - The memory is never closed by the system while OMEn is running. Files are in this category. * NeverPurge is an (unimplemented) option for systems where memory contents are held by battery power. When a task closes (quits) for any reason (even in the event of a "bomb") its Flag, Select and Lock are removed from all memory allocations. If this should make an allocation totally free of use, and if it is flagged "PurgeIfFree", the allocation is closed. This is OMEn's means of automatically freeing up file accesses and memory space when a program quits, and is partly why terminating a program is simply a call to "_CloseTask". ... to be continued next issue.