>> The last news are that the CENT30 could come out later, because our
>> dear (!) Atari Corp is freezing the 030 chips in USA, stopping the CENT30
>
>What? Why should Atari do that?? Sounds strange. Is he going to buy the
>chips from Atari and not from Motorola?
Oh sorry : I made a mistake : it's not the 030 chips, but three other
chips, which I can't remind of none but the SDMA... Without it, the CENT
couldn't be Falcon compatable from a 'noisy' point of view, I guess...
>> development for the moment... The good point is that the CENT40 will com>> sooner... :-> There aren't really sure informations about it, but sure it
>will
>
>The _BIG_ question is still, when? Are we talking about months or years before
>it's released? Maybe we could show one at NAS'96 in june?? :-)))
The machine is stille under development. But the release date isn't
fixed yet. I had a little chat with him, and he really wants to create a
_great_ machine, based upon the Falcon. He will release it when it's ready...
He actually decided to wait 1 month, to see whether Atari accepts to sell him
the SDMA chips for the CENT30. If they don't, he will then start the CENT40,
which will be more powerful, but there will be a 'Falcon compatability break',
as there will be no Videl (PCI Miro graphic board), no SDMA, and so on...
About the release date : I wouldn't be very surprised to see a CENT30
for the end of the summer, and a CENT40 for the end of this year.
About the ports available, it seems that every port from the Falcon
will be available, except the LAN, which is going to be replaced with a PC
Ethernet board.
The DSP part is quite uncertain, as he doesn't know which Motorola DSP
to include in the machine. He told me about a 56300.
The guys who are working on the OS seems to be well organized. CENTaur
told me about intra-application multitasking. According to him, the system
functions will be great enough to make people happy to use it... :)
About the dev docs : he isn't sure of the good way to procede, as he'd like to
survey the programs that comes out for his machine... The dev docs won't be
released since the machines and OS are out, as there will be changes...
For the release of the machine, he will get in touch with lots of cool
developers (sure Black Scorpions will be contacted... :), demomakers,
shareware authors, and so on, organize a little party and demonstrate his
machine...
They will organize so that developers and CENTek can communicate
easily, so that developers can make bug reports, and they could help
developers, when they have a problem.
The price he predicted is ~1000 UKP, with 8 Mb RAM, a 800 Mb SCSI HD,
and a Ethernet board. There will be ISA and PCI extension ports.
