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AmigaOS 4.1 builds on the solid foundations of Amiga OS 4.0, Amiga OS 4.1 introduces a wealth of substantial new functionality which is a prerequisite for the deployment of industry standard applications on the Amiga platform.
State-of-the-art applications such as modern web-browsers, productivity software or digital imaging software typically operate on large datasets with a corresponding memory footprint which rapidly outstrips the physical memory of any computer system. Amiga OS 4.1 offers intelligent memory paging and uses transparent disk based memory - but only when you need it.
Sophisticated media content creation packages, multimedia applications such as video players and 3D games have sparked a revolution in storage technology with hard-drive capacities now reaching the terabyte range. Amiga OS 4.1 introduces an all new filesystem, JXFS, the fastest and most robust filesystem available for the Amiga platform, with support for drives and partitions of multiple terabytes.
Graphics cards too have become increasingly powerful and versatile. Amiga OS 4.1 implements 3D hardware accelerated Porter/Duff image composition which is deeply integrated into the system. The upside is not only that the Amiga OS 4.1 user-interface offers unprecedented functionality and customization options such as transparent windows with arbitrary shapes. The use of a compositing engine also results in totally flicker-free screen-updates.
Building on this compositing engine is Amiga OS 4.1's implementation of the "Cairo" device-independent 2D rendering library which has become a de facto industry standard and is used in applications as diverse as Firefox 3, Java/ClassPath's SWING and even Open Office.
With these new features, Amiga OS 4.1 paves the way for countless exciting possibilities for the Amiga platform. Indeed, Amiga OS 4.1 is not only the most advanced AmigaOS incarnation to date, it is also the best way to reacquaint yourself with times when computing was fun!
A non-exhaustive list of key new functionality of Amiga OS 4.1:
Required hardware: Pegasos II
Required graphics card for hardware compositing: Radeon 1xx or Radeon 2xx
Recommended graphics card: Radeon 9250