Amiga reborn via Tao alliance

The Amiga company now regrouping under former Gateway marketing executive Bill McEwen has entered a strategic partnership with Tao Group (Reading, U.K.), a real-time operating system and software tools company. Tao will bring a new level of multmedia, Java and systems software support to Amiga, which debuted in 1982 as a games platform and won a loyal following among multimedia developers but failed to win a broad market under a succession of corporate owners.

What Tao stands to gain in return, by tapping Amiga's wealth of content and its broad development base, is a strategic foothold for its cross-platform technology.

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show here, Tao launched a suite of multimedia software tool kits and engines called 'intent.' Fleecy Moss, vice president of product development at Amiga, said the company intends to use the intent product as a foundation for the construction of a digital environment.

Tao Group chairman and CEO Francis Charig told EE Times that Tao "will provide a new software infrastructure on top of which the Amiga community can build world-class content."

McEwen said Amiga selected Tao as "the foundation partner for new Amiga" after "extensive research trawling the markets."

Tangled trail

Charig made no secret that Tao Group had helped put together the funding that had enabled Amino Development Corp., a startup headed by McEwen, to buy the rights to Amiga from Gateway late last year. Gateway acquired Amiga in 1997 with hopes of reviving it but failed. McEwen is now giving it a shot and has rechristened his startup Amiga to put the respected brand back out front.

Amiga's Moss described Tao as "a whisper among the OS community for a few years now, just hints of something special going on." Amiga chose Tao as its partner, Moss said, because the OS company "provides not just an excellent multimedia layer but one of the most advanced transparent network and almost organic parallel computing paradigms in the world. Amiga was always about excellence through simplicity, and Tao's is the only product we found that is also cut from the same cloth."

Tao, meanwhile, will troll for presence among the still-vital Amiga content-development community, which continued to crank out titles even after Amiga hardware production ceased. At film, TV and games studios worldwide, developers have been creating programs by using Amiga emulators running on top of personal computers.

"Amiga has never been about a particular platform," said Charig. "It's about a community of highly regarded people dedicated to creating high-quality multimedia."

The size of the Amiga community is unknown. "Estimates vary from 50,000 to 500,000," Moss said, "but since we announced the buyout, many of the ones who left are begging us to provide them with a reason to return."

The more strongly the Amiga community unites to embrace the Tao-Amiga partnership, the easier it will be for Tao to realize its vision of cross-platform multimedia content for connected digital devices. According to Charig, the goal for Tao and many of its software licensees in the consumer electronics industry is "to help portable, quality multimedia content that can be delivered across networks, running on various low-end devices [including] cell phones, digital cameras, handhelds, game consoles, set-tops and digital TVs."

Charig added that the Amiga community "long ago accepted that it was time to move on to a new generation of operating system."

Both companies declined to comment on details of their product plans or to offer a timetable for introduction. "The important thing is to get the development systems out into the market," Amiga's Moss said. "We have a detailed projection of where, when, who and how, but we want to break with tradition by only announcing product when it is on the table in front of us."

Missing elements

At a time when the Linux operating system is gaining momentum worldwide and Sun Microsystems' Java technology is proliferating in embedded systems, the Tao partnership will bring Amiga two crucial elements missing from the current Amiga OS: genuine systems portability and a Java strategy.

Tao's intent tool kits, serving as a content foundation, include an object-based deterministic operating system called Elate and a run-time engine that can run within a host OS. The company also offers its own clean room implementation of the Java Virtual Machine and Java libraries, both of which have been rewritten from scratch in Tao's portable machine code. Application programming interfaces offered by the company include Criterion's Renderware 3-D libraries.

Tao expects consumer electronics companies to implement its high-performance, small-footprint Java in digital devices, and it's betting that multimedia content developers and network service providers will license the whole foundation for content development. Consumer companies can use the intent tools to develop unique interfaces for their digital products, Charig said.

He said he's confident that Tao's content foundation and its strategic alliance with Amiga will give "hundreds of thousands of Java developers the confidence that Java can perform very fast and that the output can be very interesting."

Amiga's Moss noted that while digital convergence has been misperceived as "PC-TVs and talking toasters, it is far more than that . . . it is about providing entry into the digital content universe.

"That requires hardware, connectivity and usability. Hardware and connectivity are close to being where they need to be. Usability is at the state of using a stick to goad an ox in a certain direction. Amiga intends to concentrate on integrating hardware and connectivity and making people feel alive inside the universe of zeros and ones."

Tao claims it does not expect consumer electronics manufacturers to switch to Elate from the operating systems they've grown accustomed to using. "We have to be realistic about this," said Charig. "The CE companies can always use just a run-time engine of Elate that can work within a host operating system."

What separates Tao's intent multimedia software tool kits from its competitors' products is that intent's binary portable tools can run independently of the microprocessor architectures and operating systems used in embedded systems.

The tools also can be dynamically or statically loaded into the run-time environment. The fine-grained object-based run-time engine and "dynamic binding" technology mean that only those tools needed to run the application can be loaded. That results in a smaller memory footprint, suiting Tao's content foundation for embedded applications that require an intuitive user interface and high-performance multimedia at a lower cost.

The tool kit's binary portability hinges on Tao's translation technology. "We've created a specification for an imaginary CPU" called the Virtual Processor (VP), explained technology director Chris Hinsley. Using a VP model, VP code can be translated to target native code during load time or run-time.

Hinsley, who earned respect as a games developer in the 1980s before he joined Tao, turned his own handcrafted operating system and object-based development approach into a deterministic operating system called Taos in the early 1990s. That OS, which leveraged an early incarnation of the VP model, was to become Elate.

Hinsley noted that several chip vendors have come to Tao asking permission to build chips based on the VP spec. "We've always told them, 'Please don't do this,' because building a VP silicon defeats the whole purpose of a virtual processor itself," he said.

Work is now proceeding on VP2, the second-generation virtual processor. Hinsley and Tao's engineers have developed an assembler, disassembler, C/C++ compiler and Java just-in-time (JIT) compiler.

The VP-to-native translator technology also extends into the Java technology space. Java byte code is first converted to VP code. Then a Tao translator translates the code from the VP format to the appropriate native code for execution. Translation can occur in just-in-time fashion, according to Hinsley. Whereas conventional Java programs must be interpreted by JVM, in Tao's environment the Java code is translated on the fly to native code before execution, speeding application run-time performance.

Tao is one of three companies that have developed embedded virtual machine technologies compliant with Sun's Java platforms for embedded devices. The others are Insignia Solutions (Fremont, Calif.) and Access (Tokyo).

Processors supported by Tao's intent content foundation include the 386 and 486; Motorola's M-core, Coldfire and PowerPC; Hitachi's SH-3 and SH-4; STMicroelectronics' ST40; the ARM 6, 7 and 9 and the StrongARM; MIPS' R3000, R4000 and R5000; and NEC's V850. The software suite is also available as a binary portable content engine on Windows, Windows CE, Windows NT, Linux, QnX4 and OS-9000. Ports to EPOC and iTRON-based operating systems are in the offing, according to Charig.

In illustrating the efficiency of the company's software implementation, Hinsley noted that Tao was able to implement full Personal Java in native code on the ARM processor in 2 Mbytes of ROM. Included in the memory were a full operating system; necessary device drivers and full 2-D graphics engine; the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT); the Java core library; a JIT compiler, a garbage collector; and a translator for VP binary.

The intent offering has been incorporated into Motorola's Timeport P1088 dual-band GSM smart phone.