After a while with no Omega news, the users of our very own
forums spotted this little gem and started a
thread about it.
DESK, who are MicroDigital's European partner, based in the Netherlands, have a page on their website with some new photographs of the long-awaited Omega computer. There are three photos in total, one showing the Midi tower case with the door closed, another with the door open and one of the production motherboard.
This, along with other promising rumours, indicates that MicroDigital are finally getting themselves ready for the big launch.
The new case design was first brought to UK attention by the Cybervillage's report about German company a4com. It is believed that the case pictured will only be made available to MicroDigital's European customers.
The photos are available on this page. There are some additional pictures that are not referenced from the main page which we have linked to below.
If anyone can provide an accurate translation of the Dutch website, please
help us out.
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New Omega photographs |
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(21:19 22/1/2003)
Horse (15:28 23/1/2003)
thegman (16:33 23/1/2003)
Ian K (22:41 24/1/2003)
johnstlr (11:12 25/1/2003)
Ian K (19:08 26/1/2003)
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dune |
Message #91632, posted at 21:19, 22/1/2003 |
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The correct name of the website is DESK, which is also the company behind MicroDigital Europe. |
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Horse |
Message #91633, posted at 15:28, 23/1/2003, in reply to message #91632 |
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So will the Omega finally arrive and kick "ass"? Or is the highly-proprietary graphics system a big turn off, despite the 1GHz XScale? |
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Garry Taylor |
Message #91634, posted by thegman at 16:33, 23/1/2003, in reply to message #91633 |
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I find the proprietary graphics the most interesting part, I don't know how much of this wil be available on release, but I've seen mentions of JPEG/MPEG in hardware, along with Mesa/OpenGL. I think it's better to have fully supported slower graphics than fast graphics which we cannot make use of. The UMA arcitecture is very interesting and a very different direction for RISC OS hardware. If Castle fully support the GeForce2, then it could be a different story of course. |
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Ian Karley |
Message #91635, posted by Ian K at 22:41, 24/1/2003, in reply to message #91634 |
Member
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I'm not sure what the current status of the graphics exceleration is, but the 2D is deffently working.
The other parts of it weren't a requirement for release and were to follow later, but this may be done now.
I don't see any reason why a PCI graphics card couldn't be added if you need more performance. |
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Lee Johnston |
Message #91636, posted by johnstlr at 11:12, 25/1/2003, in reply to message #91635 |
Member
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Remember that the lightning chipset is supposed to be VIDC compatible. If this is still the case then the VIDC dependencies may not have been removed from whatever version of RISC OS MD eventually use and adding a PCI graphics card may not be as straightforward as simply writing a driver and plugging it in. |
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Ian Karley |
Message #91637, posted by Ian K at 19:08, 26/1/2003, in reply to message #91636 |
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The version of RISC OS the Omega is using is basically the same as for a Risc PC, so the Lightning has to emulate VIDC. Consequently the work done for viewfinder should be easily adaptable and much faster than on a Risc PC! |
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