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[Forum] Cloanto Licenses Picasso96 SoftwareANN.lu
Posted on 29-Oct-2001 15:59 GMT by Cloanto32 comments
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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. 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
http://picasso96.home.pages.de/

Amiga Forever Home Page
http://amigaforever.info

Cloanto Home Page
http://cloanto.com

List of all comments to this article
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Comment 1Anonymous29-Oct-2001 15:06 GMT
Comment 2Björn Hagström29-Oct-2001 15:15 GMT
Comment 3Dave29-Oct-2001 15:20 GMT
Comment 4kevin orme29-Oct-2001 15:35 GMT
Comment 5Anonymous29-Oct-2001 15:45 GMT
Cloanto Licenses Picasso96 Software : Comment 6 of 32ANN.lu
Posted by kevin orme on 29-Oct-2001 16:10 GMT
right, now that's the buzz (and I fully intend to get my copy! :). but Amithlon didn't even exist until early last summer when the australian dev's handed a copy to Bill McE. Cloanto has been supporting the community for several years with AF. So both are worth our support and praise for sticking by the rest of us who aren't expert programmers. . .
kevin
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List of all comments to this article (continued)
Comment 7Bernd Meyer29-Oct-2001 16:11 GMT
Comment 8Darrin29-Oct-2001 16:16 GMT
Comment 9Graham29-Oct-2001 17:28 GMT
Comment 10Dave29-Oct-2001 17:52 GMT
Comment 11Alastair Marett29-Oct-2001 18:04 GMT
Comment 12Alastair Marett29-Oct-2001 18:06 GMT
Comment 13kevin orme29-Oct-2001 18:43 GMT
Comment 14Paolo D'Urso29-Oct-2001 21:47 GMT
Comment 15Dave30-Oct-2001 08:36 GMT
Comment 16John Klumpp30-Oct-2001 11:12 GMT
Comment 17jAy06-Nov-2001 23:41 GMT
Comment 18Juergen Haage06-Nov-2001 23:47 GMT
Comment 19From Italy08-Nov-2001 11:15 GMT
Comment 20Unisys08-Nov-2001 12:19 GMT
Comment 21Ben08-Nov-2001 14:12 GMT
Comment 22Mike Veroukis08-Nov-2001 14:56 GMT
Comment 23priest08-Nov-2001 15:00 GMT
Comment 24Mike Veroukis08-Nov-2001 15:02 GMT
Comment 25Mika Hanhijärvi08-Nov-2001 19:30 GMT
Comment 26John McKenzie08-Nov-2001 20:09 GMT
Comment 27Anonymous08-Nov-2001 20:10 GMT
Comment 28Troels Ersking08-Nov-2001 20:23 GMT
Comment 29Mike Veroukis08-Nov-2001 21:13 GMT
Comment 30Meh08-Nov-2001 22:52 GMT
Comment 31Jeremy Taylor08-Nov-2001 23:00 GMT
Comment 32djnick09-Nov-2001 00:03 GMT
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