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Date: Wed, 5 Oct 94 06:20:52 -0600
From: "Clifford T. Matthews" <iclone!ctm@sloth.swcp.com>
Message-Id: <9410051220.AA09625@iclone>
To: executor@nacm.com
Subject: Status Report
Sender: Executor-Owner@nacm.com
Precedence: bulk
Hi Folks,
Here's what's up with Executor 2.0 for all platforms. I am sending
this e-mail to the Executor Interest mailing list and also posting
it on comp.emulators.misc.
Mat Hostetter has almost finished major modifications to our
synthetic CPU (the original one was written by Mat too), which
should bring the CPU performance of Executor up to where a 90 MHz
Pentium performs integer calculations at about the speed that a 50
MHz 68040 would. Exceedingly good, when you compare how quickly
our emulator emulates a 68040 on a Pentium to how quickly Apple's
emulator emulates a 68040 on a PowerPC.
We have many new versions of Executor in the works. All of them
are awaiting the new synthetic CPU. We're doing non-synthetic CPU
work as well, but it doesn't make sense for us to release anything
between now and next week when we think the new synthetic CPU will
be up and running. Here are the new versions that we're working
on. We are also rewriting our literature to document exactly what is
available now and what will be in 2.0 and what will have to wait for
2.1 and beyond.
Executor/DOS 1.3 Commercial
This will be the the last monochrome version that we release.
It will be sent free of charge to anyone who has previously
purchased any version of Executor/DOS and sent in the registration
card. This version will also be a key that can be used to
unlock commercial versions of the color experimental versions
of Executor. There will be no fee to use these experimental
versions as we finish work on 2.0.
Executor/DOS 1.99a Commercial
As work progresses on the release of 2.0, we will be making
experimental versions designated 1.99a, 1.99b, etc. available
for our current customers to use and comment on.
Executor/DOS 1.99a Demo
In addition to allowing our current customers to see our color
version, a time-limited demo version will also be made available.
In addition to the time limit, the demo version will not allow
you to access CD-ROMs or disks.
Executor/Linux 1.99a
Internally we're doing almost all our development under Linux.
This version will allow people with Linux to see what Executor
looks like under X-Windows. It will have a time-limit that
can be removed with an activation key. The price for this
activation key hasn't been set yet.
Executor/NEXTSTEP 1.99a
We haven't forgotten our original customer base, and we should soon
have a color experimental version of Executor for our NEXTSTEP users
to use.
After these releases have come out, we will automate our experimental
release process so that the DOS, Linux and NEXTSTEP versions are all
released simultaneously and with little hassle over here. Less hassle
for us turns into more frequent releases.
Some of the new features that have been added into Executor between our
last experimental DOS release and now include:
Executor can now read and write SCSI disks that are not seen
by the BIOS if you have an ASPI manager that does see them.
There's a more efficient one-bit-per-pixel (i.e. black and
white) mode of the color version of Executor.
The color version of Executor works on more VESA compliant
graphics cards than it did before.
HyperCard works much better under Executor than it used to --
it's fast enough to be usable, and many bugs have been fixed.
There are still some major problems, and many stacks won't run
at all, but the major impediments to HyperCard running under
Executor have been found and fixed.
In addition to all the work described above, Bill Goldman has been
writing a Graphical User Interface to the filesystem, a filesystem
browser, that will be released *with source* when it is a little
more stable. Releases of it will usually not have to be timed to
coincide with Executor releases, since it *should* just drop in
without many hassles.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the work that we've done
on supporting color, what we've done is supported most of the calls
in "32-bit color QuickDraw", although the number of bits per pixel
that we support on the screen is currently limited to 1, 4 and 8.
Our original plan for 2.0 was only to support the color model that
was available on the first Macintosh II, so just like our synthetic
CPU improvements, we are winding up supporting more in terms of
color than we originally intended. The drawback is we still have
a few routines to finish and the debugging effort is also much
harder than debugging the original color model.
On the e-mail front, our transition to a new internet provider was
a little more rough than we realized. Apparently many sites were
not able to send e-mail to "@ardi.com" addresses, and in addition,
because of the bouncing, I was off the Executor Interest mailing
list for a while. E-mail that is addressed to "question@ardi.com"
should be responded to fairly promptly, e-mail sent to me, is
usually examined in batches, in between major amounts of coding,
and is frequently just forwarded to questions@ardi.com for Vaune
Fischer, our technical support person to handle.
You now know what Bill, Mat and Vaune are doing -- I'm doing almost
everything else, which includes technical work and discussions with
potential investors and partners. Work of the latter type temporarily
takes me away from programming, but we would very much profit from
having a few more engineers on the payroll, and I'm working on a
few different ways to make this happen.
Since this letter is a de-facto acknowledgement of the folks who
have done the most work on Executor over the last few months, let
me publicly thank Cotton Seed for his implementation of Color
Quickdraw. Cotton is back at MIT now, but we hope to have him
working for ARDI again in the future.
BTW, ftp.cs.unm.edu is currently the location where we first make
experimental versions of Executor available (in the pub/ardi
directory), but since that site has severe limitations on the number
of people that can access it simultaneously, we'll also get the
1.99 experimental versions onto the the appropriate sites for
