Hyperion: Ready For The New Amiga

Upstart European games house Hyperion is throwing its resources behind the new Amiga, promising to port a whole range of top-class PC hits. The firm will play a vital role in creating new Amiga compatibility with OpenGL, the industry standard for displaying fast and smooth 3D graphic sequences.

Hyperion's boss Ben Hermans is a Belgian lawyer and Amiga enthusiast who has proved in the space of one year that it is possible to license top-grade PC titles for the Amiga. For years, Amiga games players waited in vain for major PC ports, but in most cases they never came (Quake and Myth by Clickboom were notable exceptions). PC game publishers seemed not really interested in the waning Amiga market, and too stringent in their licensing conditions. Herman's experience in negotiating helped his young company to succeed where others failed, porting major PC titles not only to Amiga but also to Linux and Mac. The first product, Heretic II, will be released shortly, and has already earned itself an Amiga Format Gold Medal and AmigActive's Editor's Choice Award. Others are Sin, The Heretic Fortress, Freespace: The Great War, Worms Armageddon, and Shogo. "We are going to take as many as possible of the current high-end PC games that we have licenses for and port them to run natively on the new Amiga," says Ben. "We are not looking at developing brand new games at the moment. That would take two to three years, and the budgets are atrocious. Games development in that respect is moving in the same direction as movie production! We will continue to license high-end products on the PC platform and get them over as fast as possible to the new Amiga machines."

Amiga Inc. just recently sent two Hyperion developers to a three day training course with Tao, one of Amiga's strategic partners providing the foundation software for the Amiga environment. Upon their return, these programmers started work on a native implementation of OpenGL. Initially, Hyperion's work will be based on MESA, an OpenGL-compatible, open-source 3D system developed on Unix/Linux machines. Obtaining the OpenGL license has traditionally been a difficult task strewn with pitfalls, partly because of a host of tests, high licensing fees, and a certain wariness on the part of the owners, SGI. However, the situation is improving, according to Hermans. "Silicon Graphics has become a lot more lenient since the Linux days. They are apparently working with NVidia to get an official SGI OpenGL on the Linux platform, and becoming more favorable towards open source and open standards in general." If Amiga ever does decide to pursue an OpenGL license from SGI, Hyperion will be ready. "If you're doing MESA you're 99% there," he says. All ports by Hyperion are first developed on the Amiga by a team of three people, reworking code so that it is no longer dependent on Windows and Intel x86 functions--replacing, for example, Microsoft Direct3D with OpenGL. "It's a lot of work, but nothing can be done about that", says Ben. "We don't have Direct3D, and we don't want it!" Technically, the process of first preparing an Amiga port, and then versions for Mac and Linux, has proved viable. Once the Amiga version is finalized only another month of work is necessary to produce the Mac version.

So what does Hermans think of the possibilities that will be opened up by the new Amiga? "Almost endless. The problem is that right now we're being held back by outdated hardware. Even the current [Amiga] PPC boards are three years old, with bottlenecks all over the place. We could start out with a PPC Boxer or PoP motherboards." PoP is a public domain motherboard design based on the former Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) of IBM, Apple and Motorola. "Looking at the Motorola roadmap it's clear that the G4- G5 generations are going to be light-years ahead of anything that even AMD will be able to offer. "Combine that with industry-leading graphics capabilities, such as from NVidia, and you have an extremely capable platform. The whole issue of the new Amiga's virtual processor makes almost irrelevant what kind of hardware you are using," says Hermans. "The good thing is that if I compile something for the new Amiga running on PoP motherboards, it will run on x86 or whatever platform Amiga chooses to support. All the code is being compiled to a virtual processor, which doesn't exist, and the result is a completely platform-independent technology.

This is very nice, because if something goes horribly wrong with, say, IBM, and they decide to cancel PPC development, you're not stuck to a specific object-code or whatever. You can say well, OK, let's use something else! That along with the inherently high Java execution speed are major advantages." Thanks in part to contract work with Monolith Inc., Hyperion has built up considerable expertise in one of today's most advanced (if not the most advanced) 3D engine, LithTech. This is currently going into overdrive, being licensed to Fox Interactive, 3DO, Interplay, and others. "We are porting that engine to current and new Amiga systems, and this will allow anything based on that engine to be ported by us in a very short time, maybe two weeks", affirms Hermans. "We've also ported Heretic II, which means that we have a very good understanding of the Quake II engine, and this means that we can license games using this engine and get them ported in a matter of weeks instead of months." "Our good relations with games publishers would enable us to get a license before a game hits the market and a week or two after the PC launch we can have it on the new platform as well," says Hermans. "That's why we're focusing on specific engines, because if you have that know-how you can move really quickly. We shall be demonstrating that in the second quarter of this year, when we'll get a few Monolith titles and make sure that they are released [on the Amiga, Mac and Linux] nearly simultaneously with the PC version." Hermans is talking about ports to the classic Amiga here, but he points out that there is no reason the same procedure cannot be used for the new Amigas as soon as they become available. Hyperion's proactive approach to preparing for the new Amiga is what Amiga is looking for in a partner. This type of commitment to the future will pay off for companies that recognize the possibilities of the new Amiga. Hyperion surely envisions a bright future with the new Amiga.