Omega Progress: June 18th, 2009

For those of you anticipating the release of Omega Beta 2.0, I am sorry to inform you that our expected ETA (June 15th, 2009) must be pushed back again. The reason is that we are still working out the kinks, if you will. We are trying to ensure compatibility across a wide spectrum of available hardware and this sort of thing takes time. More time than I initially imagined, so the new ETA will be set for July 15th, 2009. I am sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at james@blacklistsoft.com.

Omega Progress: May 15th, 2009

So, a few hours became a few more hours than I initially had hoped. I am finally in the "clean up" phase of development. Right now, I am just going around through all of the code and fixing what needs fixed; basically, tightening up all the loose ends and optimizing what I can. As for the original estimated release date of the new Omega (May 15th), that date obviously needs to be set back a little. How about June 15th? Keep checking back for further updates.

Omega Progress: April 18th, 2009

Finally, I am literally just a few hours away from being done. I decided, due to the lack of available hardware to test this on, to offer this new version as Beta 2.0. I plan to keep Omega; in its newest form, beta for at least 3 months before I finalize it. This should give us enough time to gather enough information to determine the overall friendliness and effectiveness of Omega on a wide array of systems. Of course as a beta version, Omega will be offered up for free under the Freeware license. I estimate the release date to be approximately any date between May 1st and May 15th of 2009. I will make sure to update this post if the dates change.

Omega Progress: March 22nd, 2009

All is moving along quite nicely. I have finished the Arial font type and it is working well. I have been working on the menus and have just about completed those. I will be using the interpolation formula to create shadow effects to further enhance the menus and cursor. I still need to add life to the scroll bar and I still need to integrate the back-end to the new front-end. As soon as I have done that, I will begin developing support for the FAT32 and EXT2 file systems.

I have decided against allowing the user to choose a screen resolution at start up, so the first major release will default to 800x600x16M resolution. I plan to eventually allow the loader to choose the "best" available resolution in the near future. I still need to draw a few more controls/images and add full interactive support to each of them as well. I have a tough hill to climb before I will be done with the first major release, but the hardest part is already over.

Omega Progress: Feb. 27th, 2009

I have just about finished building the desktop and I have just now begun to fully support the Arial font type. I am also currently developing support for 24-bit image display and graphical cursor display with mouse synchronization. I have already further developed the boot loader which now provides the end-user the choice to boot into a desired resolution. Right now the choices are 80x25 (8/8-bit CUI), 800x600 (24-bit GUI), or 1024x768 (24-bit GUI).

Omega Progress: Feb. 22nd, 2009

After about 3 solid days of reading specifications and banging out code, I finally have a working VBE 2.0 protected mode driver! I am so excited to have finally seen my first pixel on screen after so many days of failed attempts. It was much more difficult to write this driver than I originally thought, so this one felt a bit rewarding to me when I saw it work for the first time. Now that I have a working graphics driver, I can begin developing the graphics library and designing the GUI!! The real fun begins now.

Omega Progress: Feb. 17th, 2009

I still haven't finished the graphics driver to support higher resolutions, because I was sidetracked by this terribly mundane yet essential PS/2 mouse driver. I have just completed it and it works on both real hardware and emulated hardware. It is amazing to see the mouse finally working. Right now I am just printing a dot in place of a modern cursor and it is pretty cool to see it moving around the screen in sync with my PS/2 mouse. I believe the USB mouse emulates a PS/2 mouse but works using a different IRQ, so I may also take more time to further develop the mouse driver to support the USB mouse as well. All this by the first major release. I hope.