Alpha Omega Richard Hallas reports back from seeing a first glimpse of the MicroDigital Omega at its press preview in Bradford

[This article appeared in issue 10 of the magazine (September 2002), and was published shortly before Castle's IYONIX pc was announced to the public. Some minor details in the specifications table at the end of the article may be slightly out of date.]

It would be fair to say that the MicroDigital Omega has had a significantly longer gestation period than anyone would have anticipated, its creators included. It's now a couple of years since the Omega first entered the spotlight in the RISC OS market, and there have been various missed release deadlines and public previews of the machine in various stages of operation.

The public previews have not always worked in MicroDigital's favour. The excitement generated by the mere promise of this fast new machine made the disappointment all the keener on the occasions when deadlines slipped, or MicroDigital demonstrated a machine that was not working quite as well as the public had hoped. The obvious example of the latter situation was the Wakefield 2001 Show, where MicroDigital displayed an Omega which was actually fully working but which was suffering from severe screen stability problems. In my show report I described the screen, perhaps a little unkindly, as being about as stable as a house of cards in an earthquake. In reality the machine itself was working just fine, and the screen problems were merely incidental (albeit quite serious). However, the public perception was one of a non-working machine, even though that was not actually a fair attitude to take.

MicroDigital appears to have taken something positive from such unfortunate experiences, and has since refrained from showing off its machine before it felt that it had something in a fit state for people to see. The company has also ceased to predict any firm release date. Therefore, the press preview of an 'alpha-release' Omega that I attended in mid-July suffered from no apparent glitches. The demonstration machine appeared to be working not just stably but perfectly. It was seen to run a very wide range of popular applications, including ArtWorks, Impression and Sibelius 7, all at the same time and without any visible problems at all. Despite running multiple applications of all kinds, there was never so much as an error message to be seen, let alone an actual crash. What we all saw was a machine that looked, superficially at least, to be just about ready for release.

The press day took place at the Victoria Hotel, Bradford, in the afternoon of Thursday, 18th July 2002. Unfortunately for Foundation RISC User, this was quite soon after issue 9 of the magazine had appeared, and so there was a long delay before this report could appear in issue 10. Such is the penalty of producing a relatively infrequent magazine. Anyway, the venue was very convenient for me, being only a few miles from Huddersfield, where I live, but many of the other guests had to travel a significant distance. Representatives of all the RISC OS magazines were present, together with people from some of the RISC OS-related Web sites and a few other individuals. We arrived in a large room with an optimistic number of chairs (far more than were needed) in three rows facing an electronic projector, and David Atkins (Managing Director) and David Prosser (Technical Director) appeared just in nice time to kick off their presentation at 2:30pm. David Atkins did nearly all the talking, whilst David Prosser sat and operated the machine for the demonstration and answered a few technical questions.

A few of the individuals in attendance: from left to right, Paul Beverley (Archive), Dave Holden (APDL), Nathan Atkinson (Flaymz), almost eclipsed by Jeremy Coates (Co-comp), and finally Andrew Pullan (author of WebsterXL)

A spectrum of opportunities

The MicroDigital corporate buzzword is Spectrum, though this obviously has nothing to do with the Sinclair ZX variety! MicroDigital's Spectrum development programme comprises seven colours, each of which represents a product line (or board design) on which the company is working. Omega is the Green project, and David Atkins also explained what some, but by no means all, of the other colours represent.

During the presentation, various references were made to several unfamiliar or proprietary terms, and it's worth being aware that MicroDigital has designed its own chips for various purposes. David Atkins made much use of the terms Lightning, Northbridge and Southbridge; the first is MicroDigital's own proprietary technology, and the latter two refer to PC-style architecture components. Lightning is the chip-set that MicroDigital has designed for its range of products, and it exists in different versions for the varying capabilities of the projected systems. The term 'Lightning' is mainly used to refer to MicroDigital's graphics system, but it may in fact also relate to other aspects of the system such as the Northbridge chip. In effect, Lightning has been designed to replace Acorn's proprietary VIDC and MEMC chips, and handles both graphics and memory operations. Northbridge is the component responsible for PCI expansion and other bus control (including image processing such as JPEG/MPEG hardware decoding), whilst the Southbridge chip encompasses control of peripherals: ethernet, USB, ATA, floppy disc, serial and parallel ports.

Because of this confusion of terms, the specification summaries below list the various aspects of the systems separately by their usual names (PCI, USB and so on), rather than specifying Northbridge and Southbridge chips.

Another very important aspect to bear in mind about the Omega (and related products) is that it is a 'soft' computer, or 'soft hardware'. Aside from the processors and the Southbridge chip, the machine is completely designed around FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) components which can be reprogrammed in software to update the behaviour of the machine. This allows new facilities to be added later, after the basic machine has shipped.

MicroDigital's assertion is that their design combines maximum flexibility with low-cost architectural hardware from the PC world, resulting in a cheap but high-performance and reliable system. So, with all the technical considerations in mind, let's work through the colours of the spectrum.

Red and Orange For the moment, MicroDigital has not revealed what these colours represent, but they are at the low end of the scale in terms of price and capabilities.

Yellow MicroDigital's Yellow product is being designed for two particular clients, for use as a Point-of-Sale (POS) terminal and a Visual Control Learning (VCL) data point (discussed below), along with an in-house project. Its features will include:

• Single 300MHz StrongARM processor
• 266MHz or faster dual-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM
• 32-bit data bus
• Single-chip, low-resolution version of the Lightning graphics chip-set with LCD support
• 100Mbit ethernet
• 6× USB 2 ports
• ATA100 drive interface
• RISC OS in flash ROM

This system will not feature a PCI expansion bus; USB will be used for all expansion. However, the system can easily be customised for individual clients.

MicroDigital acknowledged that it would theoretically be possible to create a low-cost RISC OS computer, of a lower specification than the Omega, based on the Yellow board design. However, it has no plans to do so, as the Yellow board is intended purely as an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) product.

Green Green is the Omega machine. Although in the centre of MicroDigital's spectrum of plans in terms of its capabilities and price range, it represents the starting point for the company's visible public products, as well as being a high-end desktop computer, and major efforts have been put into its development.

The basic system was priced at £1000 at the time of the press preview, although an increase of about 15% has recently been announced because of rising component costs and other factors. (Pre-orders placed at the original price will be honoured.) A summary of Omega's specification is as follows:

• Dual processors: initially there will be a 306MHz StrongARM and an optional XScale (up to 1GHz, as a plug-in card), but in the future ARM9, 10 or 11 processors may be used as the second processor
• Single-chip, high-resolution version of the Lightning graphics chip-set with 2D/3D accelerator code and JPEG/MPEG hardware decoder
• PCI 2.2-3.3V expansion bus
• 100Mbit ethernet
• 6× USB 1.1 ports (USB 2 to follow later)
• ATA100 drive interface
• Parallel and 2× serial ports
• RISC OS in flash ROM
• Various other ports and drives

A more detailed specification for the Omega appears at the end of this article. MicroDigital was very keen to stress that the Green project is its only desktop computer: the other products discussed are destined only to be made available to OEM customers.

Blue The Blue system is a graphics engine; it's similar overall to the Omega, but even more powerful. Its proposed features are as follows:

• Dual processors: 300MHz StrongARM and 1GHz XScale with ARMTwister technology
• 266MHz or faster dual-data-rate (DDR) SDRAM
• 64-bit data bus
• Single-chip, high-resolution version of the Lightning graphics chip-set with larger 2D/3D accelerators and enhanced geometry functions, based on a 1 million-gate Xilinx Virtex 2 FPGA.
• PCI 2.2-3.3V expansion bus
• 100Mbit ethernet
• USB 2 ports
• ATA100 drive interface
• RISC OS in flash ROM

MicroDigital is apparently discussing its Blue system with a large Japanese company with a view to producing a specialised board for use with medical products. At present, the data-processing equipment used to create three-dimensional images from medical scans is exceedingly expensive, and MicroDigital's Blue product, though itself expensive, is expected to form the basis of new equipment of this type at a greatly reduced price.

As with the Yellow board, Blue is destined to be a product for OEMs, not for release as a desktop computer. It will consist of a main board with optional daughterboards to provide the OEMs with maximum flexibility.

Indigo and Violet Again, MicroDigital has not yet divulged what developments are related to these colours, but they are at the top end of the scale and therefore represent the company's most powerful and expensive projects.

Oh-my-gosh, Omega! So, those three 'middle' colours were as much of the overall Spectrum project as David Atkins was prepared to discuss. Much of the time was then spent on demonstrating the Omega itself. While presenting technical details of the Spectrum products, David was using the Omega to display a series of Web pages in the WebsterXL browser (whose author, Andrew Pullan, was present), and after having shown this package to work as expected on the Omega, he went on to demonstrate some other popular software. To prove that the machine was indeed working stably, and capable of running the software that most people find useful, David Atkins went through brief demonstrations of various leading packages: ArtWorks, Impression, Vantage, EasiWriter, DaVinci and Sibelius 7 were all shown to run correctly. Indeed, most of these applications were working at the same time, so the system had a reasonable amount to cope with, and it performed faultlessly. One unavoidable limitation was of course the size of the screen generated by the digital projector. These machines generally only offer a resolution of 1024×768 pixels at best, and it's much more common for them to provide just 800×600 pixels. The one available for MicroDigital's use was of the standard 800×600 resolution, so it was really not possible to get a good idea of how it would feel to use an Omega in a really big screen mode. Whilst it would not necessarily have been realistic to expect MicroDigital to show the machine running at its advertised top-specification mode of 2048×1536 pixels in 24-bit colour (not many monitors can display such a high-resolution image), it would have been nice to see it running at 1600×1200 or 1920×1200 pixels on a standard monitor. Another interesting idea that we were not able to see in action was support for both landscape- and portrait-format screens. A further demonstration showed the Omega handling a 25Mb image with great ease. The hard drive interface is capable of a data transfer rate of 40Mb per second (compared with just 8Mb per second under absolutely optimum conditions on a Risc PC), and the large picture did indeed load up in an instant. The machine can even run current games: TEK was seen to work fine, aside from a minor issue of screen flicker. (The point should be made that this was a minor software-related problem rather than anything inherently wrong with the Omega; it was not screen instability of the sort seen at Wakefield 2001!) When the Omega ships, it is MicroDigital's intention to include a range of commercial applications, which may be viewed as an unexciting but stable software bundle. Aside from the fact that MicroDigital is working with R-Comp to create its own Lynx Internet connectivity suite, other bundled software will include Ovation (the very old version 1, not Pro), DrawWorks, Mr Clippy, Masterfile, StrongED and Zap. The latter two freeware programs of course represent the very best multi-function text editors on the platform (and among the best, in fact, on any platform); however, it was felt by many of those present that some of the other proposed inclusions were unexciting at best, and that the overall bundle wouldn't compare too favourably with the sort of bundle that accompanies many new PCs (which often includes an up-to-date copy of Word and other big-name software). MicroDigital felt that this was a peripheral matter from the basic consideration that the Omega will be an attractively priced, stable and solid computer which works reliably and is easy to use; owners can always buy a Word-compatible word processor later if they want one. David placed a lot of emphasis on the stability of the system, and the fact that it never exhibited so much as a glitch, let alone a crash, helped to lend credibility to his claims. It is MicroDigital's intention that the Omega should maintain the reputation that Acorn RISC OS computers have always had for ruggedness and being largely bullet-proof (metaphorically at least).

The MicroDigital Omega in its attractive, compact standard case David Atkins describes the features of the Omega motherboard; the machine displaying the Web page in WebsterXL is of course the prototype Omega itself Here we see the screen display of the Omega running ArtWorks, Impression and Paint In this shot the Omega is showing how easily it can handle large bitmap graphics; in this case, a PhotoCD image David Atkins (left) and David Prosser (right) behind the Omega

Learning from experience

However, David was very keen to stress that he does not see selling desktop computers to schools as a significant market; particularly not in the short term. Schools have made their investments in PCs and are now very unlikely to want to change, particularly with most new software and initiatives being exclusively PC-based. However, he does believe that there's an opportunity for success in the education market, particularly if MicroDigital can provide an all-in-one solution to a specific problem which does not conflict with schools' requirements for desktop PCs.

One area in which he feels that these circumstances can be fulfilled is in a package for running practical control experiments in schools' technology departments. Apparently many schools are still using BBC Micros for running equipment because they're ideal for the purpose: they're easy to interface to a variety of devices, they're stable, and they can be devoted to the task without conflicting with the use of desktop PCs for more general-purpose education.

So MicroDigital sees one potential market as a device (based on the Yellow product) that can drive electronic experiments in conjunction with control simulation software, which it will sell to schools to replace their ancient BBCs. David Atkins demonstrated (on the Omega) an early prototype of the Visual Control Learning software that's being written for this project. The software is apparently highly modular and can easily be expanded for different simulations. It supports up to 128 inputs and 128 outputs, and 'circuits' can be designed easily on screen, simply by dragging components around and linking them together. The software then makes them interact correctly, and can display their behaviour in detail and allow the user to alter switches and so on.

David Atkins demonstrates MicroDigital's forthcoming Visual Control Learning educational software

Although it was hard to make an informed judgement about this software without seeing a more comprehensive demonstration, or seeing it in action with some peripheral equipment, it appeared to be extremely simple to use and to be very powerful. The user interface was only provisional, and will look entirely different in the release version, but the fundamental ability to just drag components around on the screen and connect them easily is at the heart of the software, and it appeared to have plenty of potential from David's brief demonstration.

Aside from the VCL project, MicroDigital also intends to set up its own software publishing house to serve the RISC OS market and the Omega in particular, with products ranging from serious applications to games. No further details are currently available, but it will be interesting to see how this idea progresses.

No ARMs twisted here

So the Omega is expected to ship initially as a 306MHz StrongARM-only computer, with the XScale processor following some time later as an optional plug-in card; another expected plug-in card is a floating-point co-processor unit. The PCI bus will be used for providing many of the machine's facilities, such as its sound, ethernet and SCSI support, and MicroDigital has a range of optional PCI cards that it intends to make available to Omega customers.

One of the more interesting cards is a single-board PCI-based PC, and MicroDigital had a card to show to us (though it wasn't seen working). This card is a fully functioning PC in its own right, with a Pentium III or Celeron processor of up to 1GHz. The card has its own memory bus, supporting up to 512Mb, together with its own video controller, ATA drive interface and ethernet. The card can share the Omega's various drives and peripherals, or it can be given access to its own dedicated peripherals (including even a separate keyboard and mouse): thus it's effectively like having two separate machines in a single case. Note that use of the PC card requires the Omega to have a desktop or Midi tower case, not the small standard case.

If XPerience has not yet taught you otherwise, you can stick one of these PCI cards into your Omega and allow it to run as a PC as well as a RISC OS machine

Speaking of cases, the working Omega was housed in the standard case, and it really is a particularly attractive design. The optional, larger desktop and Midi tower cases look like 'any old beige PC', but the standard case is not only neat but also very eye-catching in an attractive way. It's easy to be eye-catching for the wrong reasons (one thinks of the screaming yellow Phœbe), but the standard Omega case manages to be neat, distinctive and elegant. Many users will probably fancy one for looks alone.

David Atkins would also not allow his arm to be twisted on the question of a delivery date for the Omega. At the time of the demonstration he was confident that the machine could be released within a few weeks, and there were hints of a possible September launch. Based on the apparently fully working state of the machine, this appeared reasonable, but at the end of September there was still no sign of it, unfortunately. It will be interesting to see if the machine appears for sale at either of the two RISC OS shows in November, though, as if it were to do so it would be timed perfectly for the Christmas market.

Impressions

Under these circumstances it's very difficult to say anything particularly objective. What was notable, though, was the speed with which the machine could launch applications and load large files off its hard disc. Of course, a major improvement is only to be expected here, as hard drive technology has advanced enormously since the days of the Risc PC, which had less than blistering disc performance even when it was new.

As for the raw processing speed of the machine itself, if I'm perfectly honest I have to say that I couldn't see a vast improvement over my own StrongARM Risc PC. ArtWorks documents were drawn quickly but not astoundingly so; a complex blend in Draw still took a significant time to appear on the screen. I don't mean anything negative by that comment; the machine was undoubtedly fast, and it would no doubt show a significant performance increase over my 200MHz StrongARM Risc PC if I could time equivalent operations on both machines. It's just that the speed increase didn't seem enough to provoke a reaction of astonishment in me; it looked like a useful performance increase, but not an improvement to compare in relative terms with the StrongARM upgrade of six years ago. Of course, given that the processor is still a StrongARM, it would be unreasonable to expected otherwise, and no doubt the situation will change once a much faster XScale is brought into the equation.

Of course, aside from the basic processor and hard drive performance, the Omega has many other advantages, not least its video hardware. Even if, like me, you have a ViewFinder card in your Risc PC to enhance its graphics, a machine like the Omega, which has been designed to produce high-performance graphics from the outset, is always going to be much the better performer in this area. I personally like to use a 1280×1024 resolution screen mode in 16 million colours with my ViewFinder, and it's a great asset, but because of the limitations of the Risc PC's graphics system, use of the ViewFinder does impose some performance overheads to counterbalance its advantages. A new machine like the Omega should not be subject to any such restrictions. Beyond that, of course, the Omega also provides access to modern peripherals via its PCI expansion slots and USB interface, so it's easy to see why the machine is so tempting to current Risc PC owners.

MicroDigital also hopes to take the machine to other markets beyond the existing one. As well as selling to both existing users and former users who have gone over to the PC in recent years, the company also hopes to sell to people around the world who want an alternative to the PC. MicroDigital claimed that there were potential markets for both desktop computers and OEM machines in Russia, China, the Middle East, the USA and Canada.

Overall I was impressed by what I saw. The innumerable delays surrounding the Omega may have led many users to become disenchanted with the project and feel that it will never see the light of day, but the press preview not only proved that the machine exists, but that it actually works, too.

Various details do remain unresolved, and the initial version of the Omega will not represent the 'final' machine as such. As stated above, the XScale card will not be available until some time after the machine's launch, and its graphics system will also be awaiting an upgrade in some areas. Though obviously the video system will be fully working, certain enhancements, such as the JPEG/MPEG hardware decoding, will follow at a later date as free upgrades for the soft hardware. It remains to be seen how well the ARMTwister technology and XScale will actually perform, of course: this was the one area about which no questions would be answered, and no-one has yet seen the technology actually working, even though MicroDigital has consistently played down the technical difficulties involved in making it operate successfully. Many users have adopted a quite understandable "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude towards this technology, and others have doubted how efficient it could be in reality, wondering if it might cause a bottleneck for the faster processor. However, MicroDigital claims that use of the ARMTwister technology in 32-bit mode will only cost about 1% of the processor speed. We shall have to wait and see!

An Omega motherboard; this was not the machine that we actually witnessed running, but was a separate board in a larger (Midi tower) case

It would be nice if a working ARMTwister demonstration could be shown by MicroDigital in the near future. That may indeed happen, though; in mid-September the company announced that the ARMTwister hardware had already been designed into the pre-production Omega motherboard, the firmware was fully coded, and debugging had started. Following some further weeks of testing, the ARMTwister technology is due to be demonstrated in public. Perhaps something might be on view at one or both of the November RISC OS shows.

Regardless of the XScale question, I came away from the demonstration with a much more positive attitude towards the Omega than I had previously. At the very least, it's a fully working StrongARM-based RISC OS computer, and the first such genuinely new machine since the StrongARM Risc PC was launched by Acorn six years ago. Of course, Castle has since improved the Risc PC and made it faster, but it's still the Risc PC; Omega is the first genuinely new StrongARM-based design, and will be the fastest and most modern StrongARM-based machine available to RISC OS users when it is finally launched. Having seen the machine in as advanced and stable state as it was in at the July press day, I have confidence that the remaining issues will be sorted out and the machine sent into production sooner rather than later.

Sales and enquiries

From 1st October, the basic Omega system is priced at £1149 ex. VAT. Optional extras are available when ordering, and are listed (with prices) below the technical specifications. Replacing the standard case with a desktop or Midi tower case would add approximately £135 (ex. VAT) to the basic price (check with MicroDigital for precise costs).

Technical specifications

Omega optional extras