FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Open Sound System(TM) for Tornado for VxWorks Announced! LOS ANGELES, Calif., May 6, 1997: 4Front Technologies is announcing the availability of Open Sound System(TM) for Wind River Systems' Tornado development environment - VxWorks, for x86 Board Support Packages (BSPs). OSS for Tornado will allow VxWorks developers to add digital audio capabilities to their embedded systems products. OSS for Tornado provides sound card drivers for most popular sound cards and audio chipsets under Tornado's VxWorks, the industry's most powerful and scalable real time operating system. These drivers support digital audio, MIDI, Synthesizers and mixers found on sound cards. OSS for Tornado will allow VxWorks developers to add digital audio capabilities to their embedded systems products. It opens up a whole new area where multimedia capabilities, unavailable up to now, will enhance and allow products to take advantange of the emerging technologies such as speech recognition, voice activated systems, speech synthesis, music and audio effects. It will also enable the developers to take advantage of audio devices found on many embedded systems boards that would typically go unutilized. Another key feature of OSS for Tornado is that it provides support for Java audio. Java based audio applications will run unmodified. "We are delighted to have 4Front Technologies as a Tornado partner," commented Joerg Bertholdt, Product Marketing Manager for Embedded Internet. "We are looking forward to the emerging digital audio technology they will be able to provide for the Tornado development environment." 4Front is also pleased to introduce its SoftOSS technology for Tornado. SoftOSS provides a software based wave-table engine that can render MIDI and MOD music files without requiring any special wave-table hardware. Any 16bit soundcard can now playback MIDI music via wave-table synthesis. SoftOSS provides real-time mixing of up to 32 audio channels. SoftOSS is ideally suited for game developers and audio/video conferencing. Information on SoftOSS can be found at http://www.4front-tech.com/softoss.html There are several hundred public domain as well as commercial Linux and UNIX based audio applications available for the OSS API and can be ported to VxWorks. Developers can cross-develop and test OSS based applications using VxWorks for Unix workstations such as Solaris/Sparc and AIX which also support the Open Sound System API. This enables quick prototyping and development of applications. Once the applications are developed on the host, the source code can be simply recompiled for the target BSP. OSS/VxWorks sound drivers comply with the Open Sound System API specification. VxWorks x86 users can visit 4Front's WWW site at http://www.4front-tech.com/vxworks.html for more information. Pricing and Availability The pricing of the drivers starts at $100.00 for single quantities. Volume pricing is also available. Support for other BSPs and processor architectures will be made available soon. Currently, 4Front will provide each customer with a driver configuration that is tailored for their needs. Customers can also obtain a free 1 week evaluation package from 4Front upon request. A user-configurable package will be announced shortly. --- xxx --- All trademarks and copyrights belong to their respective owners. Open Sound System is a trademark of 4Front Technologies. Copyright (C) 1996,1997 4Front Technologies, All Rights Reserved. Contact: Dev Mazumdar (dev@4front-tech.com) 4Front Technologies 11698 Montana Avenue, Suite 12 Los Angeles, CA 90049, U.S.A. Tel: (310) 820 7365 Fax: (310) 826 2465 Web: http://www.4front-tech.com