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- Hi Folks,
-
- For the last two or three weeks I've been saying that 1.99n is "at
- least" a week away. Now I'm changing that to 1.99n is "about" a week
- away. Specifically I think we'll be done with the 1.99n code by next
- Wednesday and that we'll spend the later half of next week testing and
- then get 1.99n out on the ftp sites by Monday the 12th of June.
- However, our record for predicting when the experimental releases will
- come out has been bad in the past, so more slippage may occur.
-
- One nice thing about the slippage is that all of Mat's new blitter
- will be in 1.99n as originally planned. For a while we thought he'd
- only get half of it done for 1.99n and it wouldn't be present in its
- full glory until 1.99o, but this is now not the case. Mat has already
- finished the new blitter and is now working on retooling the dividing
- line betwen the portable graphics that all Executor ports use and the
- implementation specific graphics routines. This retooling will
- greatly help us with a NEXTSTEP port and an SVGAlib port. In fact, it
- will make an SVGAlib port so easy that we think we'll have one out
- very soon after the NEXTSTEP port is out again, which should be "soon"
- after 1.99n is released.
-
- Just as a reminder, here are the major new things in 1.99n:
-
- *many* bug fixes
-
- ability to format floppies
-
- much faster blitter
-
- Tex-Edit (it will work this time)
-
- Ability for programs to detect that they are running under Executor
-
- Access to DOS drives other than the installation drive from E/D
-
- Access to DOS drives from E/L
-
- Font/DA installation (bitmap fonts only)
-
- low-level foreign keyboard support (not directly usable by end
- users, but usable by some of our testers, and a good step in the
- right direction)
-
- Thanks for being so patient. We're working hard on coming up with
- hard dates for the "hackathon" period before 2.0 officially goes beta.
- We're getting very close to having all the 2.0 functionality in place,
- and once that happens, we'll be able to devote all our resources to
- making more and more apps run flawlessly.
-
- We're also moving forward with funding so that we'll be able to get
- some quality documentation, packaging and ads for 2.0.
-
- --Cliff
-
-