Faster Power Power Computing are to release the fastest Amiga accelerator yet. The Last Patriot Details on the first Amiga NG game. Announcement At the start of October, after our last issue went to press with its speculative OS3.5 article, Amiga Inc. posted details of the new version of Workbench on their website at http: www.Amiga.com. 68000 chips, but the fact of the matter is that while other platforms have moved ahead with the times, the .Amiga is the only one that still works with 10- year-old hardware, and part of the reason why we haven’t got the nifty features that people want in an OS is due to having to support the extreme low7-end. Amiga Inc. have been inundated with questions about the new7 operating system and they’ve asked us to try to explain their point of view7 as best as possible. AmigaOS3.5 will be available in the first half of 1999, but there’s no price set for it yet, although it will probably be similarly priced to 3.1 upgrades. A CD-ROM drive is necessary as OS3.5 has grown to an unmanageable number of disks. Developers have also asked Amiga Inc. to make this item a standard component of the Amiga and this will be done by making OS3.5 CD-only. The main features of the new version are as follows: ¦ RTG (Re targe table graphics) card support ¦ RTA (Retargetable audio) card support ¦ Internet enabled ¦ Enhanced prindng ¦ Enhanced file svstem j ¦ CD file system ¦ Arexx update ¦ New Shell features and extended commands Improved interface ¦ PowerPC co-processor support The bar has been raised for base level machines too, since the minimum requirements for Workbench 3.5 are now a CD-ROM drive, hard drive, 68020 or higher processor, Amiga 3.1 ROMs and 4Mb fast RAM. The Kickstart 3.1 part is very important since there are a lot of A1200 users out there using a mixture of Kickstart 3.0 and Workbench 3.1 at the moment. While this combination does work, it’s not completely safe, especially when it comes to DataTvpes and other less obvious things. Workbench 3.5 will definitely require Kickstart 3.1. The 68020 requirement has also come as a bit of a shock to hundreds of annoyed A500 owners who still plod along with their Amiga OS3.5 is the ideal bridge between the classic Amiga and the next generation machine. As for support of third party products like Zip, Jaz and so on, OS3.5 will be an interim, maintenance release of the operating system, and so Amiga Inc. don’t really see the point in spending huge amounts of time putting new standards in place to support these things, especially since third party7 software allows easy use of such items.