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Latest Executor News: 94/11/2



Hi Folks,

Since I've been unable to keep up with personal e-mail, I'm trying to  
use this list to keep you abreast even between new releases from us.

Here's a quick summary of what's up:

1.99a will not work on 386 based systems.  We hope to have a fix  
soon.

1.99a hasn't yet been released in any form other than a  
transmogrified commercial version, because we had an important  
meeting to go to on Monday.

The meeting was an informal talk with folks in the MAE (Macintosh  
Application Environment) group at Apple computer.  We showed them  
what we had and discussed plans for ways in which we can work  
together.  They were impressed by our new Speedometer numbers (a 75  
MHz DX4 486 gets comparable numbers to a 25 MHz 68040 based Mac).   
The meeting went well, that's about all I'll say now.

Currently, different platforms and versions of Executor use slightly  
different system files.  This makes things difficult for us when it's  
time to release a new version (especially, since we now support so  
many different versions).  As such, I'm in the process of changing  
that right now.  That's the last thing that holds back a release of  
1.99a in the other forms, but since we added some new code for the  
Apple demo, most likely we'll roll the new code in and make the new  
release be 1.99b.

Our new synthetic CPU speed is fast enough that if we were to take  
Apple ROMs and and Apple system file and drop them into our synthetic  
CPU with some "glue" to hold it all together, DX4 based systems (>=  
75 MHz '486) would have Quadra (>= 25 MHz 68040) performance and have  
and exceedingly high degree of compatibility.  We are now putting  
together a "dirty room team" plan so that in the future, you'll be  
able to buy a copy of System 7.x and drop it in on top of Executor  
and get a much higher degree of compatibility -- you can't do that  
now.

I'll post more infomation after I've gotten demo versions of 1.99x  
Executor/DOS and Executor/Linux out and a copy of Executor/NEXTSTEP  
1.99x out as well.

	--Cliff
	ctm@ardi.com