---

Oberon System v4 for Amiga Released
News Date : 03 February, 1997

---

The Oberon System in key words:

• - Single-process multitasking
• - Garbage collector - memory will be released automatically if not needed anymore
• - Commandos: procedures that can be called like programs
• - Dynamic loading: modules are loaded and linked to the system during run-time (if necessary)
• - Text as a built-in abstract data type (for example a
• - Minesweeper game as a letter (like OLE and OpenDOC))
• - Graphical user interface

A special advantage is the very high compatibility of the systems between implementations on different computers. System V4 implementations exist for Amiga, Mac, Power Mac, Windows (NT), Linux, IBM-RS6000, Sun-Sparc, HP-Workstations, NeXt, ... You can use a program written on one implementation on any other without change. O4A is a full implementation of the Oberon System V4 with all usual programs. The system runs in its own task and therefore you can use O4A and the Amiga OS at the same time. Specific features of the Amiga implementation are its incremental heap allocation, support of the Amiga clipboard and the capability of accessing IFF files.

The O4A package contains:

• - A full Oberon-2 compiler
• - Development tools (Browser, Analyzer, Disassembler, ...)
• - XE, a comfortable 'editor' with layout functions
• - Kepler, an object-oriented 2D vector drawing program
• - Paint, a simple pixel-oriented paint program
• - A lot of additional tools (Draw, RX, AsciiCoder, ...)
• - Various text elements
• - VT100 terminal emulation
• - Games: Tetris and Minesweeper (with source)
• - Example sources and online documentation

To get more information about the programming language and operating system Oberon have a look at the "Oberon and Amiga" WWW page: http://sun1.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/~nhbidegn/oa-e.html There you will find links to other Oberon information resources.

New Features

• - All interface modules rewritten
• - Amiga font support
• - Many small bugs fixed

System Requirements

• - Amiga with OS2.0 or higher
• - at least an MC68020
• - a minimum of 1.5 MB free memory (2.5 MB recommended)
• - about 3 MB disk space
• - FPU for floating point calculations (without FPU Oberon-NonFPU.lha is required)

Availability
The Home of Oberon is the ETH Zurich. There you can find many Oberon System implementations, especially the Amiga version:

ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/Oberon/Amiga/V1.4/

Oberon.lha (1.1 MB)              - main archive
Oberon-NonFPU.lha (100 KB)       - to use O4A without FPU
Oberon-Src.lha (700 KB)          - the full source of O4A
Oberon-Fonts.lha (390 KB)        - additional fonts
Dialogs.lha (250kB)              - advanced GUI
Expressions.lha (130kB)          - math expressions within text documents
CoCo.lha (130kB)                 - compiler generator

Price
It's free, but not Public Domain. Please note the ReadMe file in every archive.

Distributability
Oberon System V4 for Amiga is (C)opyright 1990-97 by Claudio Nieder, Stefan Ludwig, Ralf Degner and the Institute for Computer Systems ETH Zurich. Some files in the archives are (C)opyright by other persons (for example Dialogs and Expressions).

All files in the archives are freeware. You can use it in any way you like but you must not include part of it in a commercial product.

Contact Information:

Stefan Ludwig - ludwig@inf.ethz.ch

Claudio Nieder

Oliver Joos

Ralf Degner - degner@pallas.amp.uni-hannover.de

Stefan Ludwig

Institut fuer Computersysteme

ETH-Zentrum

CH-8092 Zuerich

Back to World-Wide Amiga -- Online!
More Amiga News