Im making this post in the hope of raising awareness of a superb little multi-platform OS called BeOS. BeOS takes the best GUI features of AmigaOS, MacOS, and Windows and effortlessly combines them with a rock solid kernel to provide the world with the OS of the future! I had BeOS Personal Edition installed happily existing in windows as an icon on my desktop in one evening without needing a manual. By the time I had setup my internet connection and downloaded an MP3 player, I was hooked, this OS positively rocks!! B) It makes windows look like a bad joke...i mean not like Microsoft needed any help ...So why isn''t everyone using it? Beats me... BeOS 5 Personal Edition & Developer Tools can be download from http://www.be.com/ A document which describes a simple method for creating a true BeOS Native install can be found here I hearby issue a challenge to GameDev.net and it''s patrons: To go where no half-intelligent human being has gone before - The land of the premeditated OS. Take a look I think you''ll be pleasantly suprised... P.S. This message posted from a BeOS Box wytraven@kik.net There is nothing real outside our perception of reality. Is there?

I agree it is a great OS, very fast and very portable. The only problem with it is the lack of OEM support. There are virtually no drivers for it. There is also the lack of applications. I know there are a number, and of quite good quality, but they are not going to appear until there are more users, and the users aren''t going to appear until there are more apps and drivers...
It''s the old chicken and the egg thing.

BTW ID have done a Quake II port for BeOS, downloadable from Be''s site - that should get ya trying it! ;-)

BeOS5 simply rocks
I love this OS, and I use it.
It''s fast, good and easy to use, as well as to program.

I definetly support this OS.
I''m in the process of writing drivers, but Yamaha don''t want to send me the YMF744 docs I need

I''m supporting BeOS by making any of my games available for it
Fastest OpenGL1.1 support
OpenGL1.2 support expected before the end of the year.

SDL is available for BeOS

If it was economically viable, I would only write BeOS games, unfortunately a windows release is required to ensure good sells...
Well maybe making a console version and a BeOS only PC version ?



-* So many things to do, so few time to spend *-

quote: Original post by TheEarl

I agree it is a great OS, very fast and very portable. The only problem with it is the lack of OEM support. There are virtually no drivers for it. There is also the lack of applications. I know there are a number, and of quite good quality, but they are not going to appear until there are more users, and the users aren''t going to appear until there are more apps and drivers...
It''s the old chicken and the egg thing.

BTW ID have done a Quake II port for BeOS, downloadable from Be''s site - that should get ya trying it! ;-)

Thanks for the pointer about Q2. I''ll go have a looksie

wytraven@kik.net
There is nothing real outside our perception of reality. Is there?

I''ve been fooling with it off and on for about 3 months now, and while I am impressed so far with the OS itself, it needs more drivers (that''s up to users, who need to hound the hardware companies). Also, as a developer, I am getting extremely frustrated by the very poor bebook docs (online and the one that comes with R5). It is in a poor state, missing all kinds of information (keyboard codes, accelerated graphics function descriptions, .....). It makes developing for it very difficult. They say they''re working on it, but they need to make 3rd party developers the #1 priority if they want to get users.

Rock

Why isn''t anyone using it? Because it has 0 H/W support.

I''m in the porocess of designing a platform independant base for my game and I was wondering some things about BeOS...

1) What common drivers does it not support in general? What about things like sblive drivers, tnt2 etc . ie staple gamer machines...

2) Are there any special programming considerations? ie are threads handled similar to win32 (bad os example but for now it''s all I know).

I guess when programming for BeOS you can assume the that zealot OS owner would already have selected hardware with supported drivers. From this I assume that BeOS people who want to get more drivers for their OS merely need to vote with their $$$ (and perhaps remind the companies their buying from of the rerason for thier hardware choice).

If I wanted to port to BeOS (and it''s previously crossed my mind) does anyone have any information to suggest? Are there any radically different concepts I need to understand from a programming perspective?

gimp

Something i should mention....
I''m sure some of you saw the OpenGL benchmarks that were released a while back, showing BeOS destroying Windows and Linux. Well, these benchmarks aren''t quite what they seem. First of all, it was a dual-cpu system. Windows(98) doesn''t support dual cpus. Second, the Linux benchmarks were done on XFree86 3.3.6, I believe, and this is a hideously slow platform. They could''ve used XF86 4.0, which offers much better performance.
I''ll take another look at BeOS when someone releases some *fair* benchmarks, on a single processor system (i.e. what 99% of us have), with all of the latest stuff for each platform. But until then, it''s Win98 for gaming and coding, Win2k for work stuff, and Linux for, well, fun.

Just my 2 cents.

Martee
Magnum Games
http://MagnumGames.8m.com

What? You said in that last post that Win98 doesn''t support multiple CPU''s? I think it was supposed to be able to support multiple CPU''s? Mind you I don''t have a multi-CPU machine but I think it can!
- Ben

What are the options for compilers right now? Any decent IDE''s?