TPUG - Toronto PET Users Group/TPUG Users Group CD/TPUG Users Group CD.iso/AMIGA/(A)TB/(A)TBR.ADF/AMReport

Text File | 1991-10-21 | 28KB | 585 lines

                          AM-REPORT v1.14  10/18/91

                             ABBREVIATED EDITION
                             *******************



EDITORIAL
---------
This editorial looks like it will be a long one, as I've got a lot of
things to say.

First off, let me apologize for the last two weeks of AM-Report.  I've
been quite busy with my job and haven't had the time needed to devote
to compiling AMR.  Heck, I haven't even answered most of my email!  As
a result, the last issue wasn't up to par.  There were errors in fact
and typos galore.  (I've limited it to just typos in this issue. <grin>

Now, to answer some mail publically.

I was asked about the relationship of AM-Report to STR, PCR and MCR.
ST-Report is the parent magazine, put out weekly in the Atari arena
and covering the ST and the Portfolio.  PC-Report, Mac Report and AM-
Report are all separate magazine that are designed for their target
audience:  clone, Mac and Amiga owners respectively.  While I am not
quite sure where you can go about getting access to PCR and MCR, I can
pass messages to Ralph Mariano, editor of STR, who will know.  Contact
information will be published in a future issue of AM-Report.


                                     ***
AM-REPORT WILL, FOR THE NEXT TWO MONTHS, BE GOING OUT ON A BI-WEEKLY
BASIS.  THAT IS, ONE ISSUE EVERY TWO WEEKS.
                                     ***

This will allow me to catch up with my family, job and all the news.
I will finally have time to get a spelling checker and grammar
checker on the A3000, which should improve the quality of AMR by a
noticable amount.

This issue includes only this editorial, a review on GVP's IV24 board
(which I promised to a number of people) and a report on AmiExpo in
Oakland.  The only other item I'd like to mention is a PD file I found
called JPEG.LZH.

This file takes a graphics file and compresses it using JPEG algorithms,
or it decompresses compressed files.  I scanned in 6 photos in 24-bit color
and scaled them to 1/6 of a page.  I then used ADPro to put them all on
one screen in a 3x2 grid.  The resulting 24-bit picture was 933,550 bytes
when saves as 24-bitplane data.  After JPEG compression the file was
57,134 bytes long.   Decompressing the JPEG file gives me a file with
the length of 1,069,536 bytes.  Loading it into ADPro then saving it
back gives a length of 955,804 (the original and the final are
compressed IFF whereas the intermediate file is uncompressed IFF).
I can see *no* visible difference.  File size (736x484) was retained and
I recovered a lot of hard disk space.

Practically, what does this mean?  A normal business week in Orlando
sees 100 individuals booked through the jail system.  Each individual
is photographed and each photo is stored in digital form.  If each
photo is 750,000 bytes long, a 600 meg optical disk (629,145,600 bytes)
would be filled in a little over eight weeks.  In one year, seven disks
would be necessary for the image storage!  By using JPEG compression
(soon to be included in ADPro) that figure is reduced to one disk every
two years and three months!  Needless to say, that makes recalling older
information *much* easier.

Thanks for being patient.

 -Chas
AM-Report

 =========================================================================



                           GVP'S IMPACT VISION 24
                           ----------------------

Great Valley Products' Impact Vision 24 (IV24) board is a dual-slot
expansion board for the A3000 or A2000 series of computers.  It is
designed to provide 12 or 24 bits of color information to an Amiga
screen; 12 bit, non-HAM, live picture-in-picture (PIP) and either
12 bit or 24 bit real time framegrabbing from a separated RGB video
source.



                                  HARDWARE
                                  --------

The IV24 package comes in two versions: A2000 and A3000.  The A2000
package includes an extra cable to hook the board up to the A2000's
video slot.  Both versions include the IV24 internal expansion card
and a multi-function cable.

The IV24 card is designed to fit in the A3000's Zorro/Video inline
slots.  The two card-edge connecters look similar to an ISA-AT style
card, though much larger.  Beta test boards had visible jumpers on
the back of the card and came without an end brace to screw down to
the machine, but final release boards had no jumpers and the proper
end brace.

Writing on the board says:  "Great Valley Products"
                         "Amiga 3000/PVA Revision IV"

The board has a very polished look.  It is a "done" product.

The end of the board has a 31 KHz output port, a multi-input port and
a three position switch.  The 31 KHz output port can be software
switched down to 15 KHz and is designed to hook to your monitor.  The
IV24 board has the ability, unlike Commodore's flicker-unit, to
deinterlace/scan double 15 KHz output.

The multi-input plug hooks up to a special cable supplied with the board
and provides four input connecters and two output connecters.  On the
input side, there is separated Red, Green, Blue and Composite RCA-style
plugs.  For output, there is an S-VHS connecter and an RCA-style composite
out plug.  This combination allows for output to a composite destination
(television, VCR, etc.), an S-VHS receiver (television, VCR, etc.) or
RGB (monitor, film recorder, etc.)

I had no occasion to test the composite or S-VHS output.



                                INSTALLATION
                                ------------

The IV24 card is designed to fit in the A3000's inline Zorro/Video
slot (topmost slot).  A connecter cable and adaptor plug is provided
for A2000 owners.

The card slides in and screws down smoothly in an A3000.  It is a tight
fit, but from what I understand all A3000 cards are a tight fit.  On an
A2000 there is a bit more work.

The A2000 model plugs into a Zorro slot and then a cable is run from a
special connector on the board over to the video slot.  The manual
recommends running the cable *over* the power supply until the card
burns itself in, then reinstalling it by running the cable *under* the
power cage.  To do this, you must physically remove the power cage.
This is not an experience for the squemish or for those with machines
still covered by a warrantee.  Have your dealer do it (most charge
around $30 if you purchased the card elsewhere -- $0 if you got it from
them.)



                                  SOFTWARE
                                  --------

GVP, while selling the unit, claims that the software is all gamma-test
and still being worked on.

That is an understatement.

The IV24 package includes three commercial software packages: Scala,
Caligari and MacroPaint; and a host of IV24 utilities: IVPIP, IVCP,
IVGRAB, IVVIEW, IVREAD and IVCMD.

The three commercial programs are all versions designed to support the
IV24 board.  Of the three, Caligari is the most finished product.


MACROPAINT
----------
MacroPaint requires 5 Mb of RAM to run, and it crashes and burns if you
have less memory.  MacroPaint is also the most bug-ridden of the three
packages.  The manual has a nice large "Preliminary GAMMA" stamp on it,
and they ain't kidding.

MacroPaint's biggest strength (besides being able to work on 24-bit
pictures in real time <Hi NewTek!>) is it's support for ARexx macros.
MacroPaint can be controlled via ARexx and can send commands out via
ARexx.  This is very handy for those or us with hordes of memory and
a program like ADPro sitting in the background.

The memory used for the images in MacroPaint must be contiguous.  If
you want to load a 1.2 meg image, you must have 1.2 megs of contiguous
RAM.

In normal operations, I have ADPro running with a 1.75 meg buffer (to
handle 24-bit pictures); DNet running (hooking my A2000 upto the A3000)
and now MacroPaint.

Now, with ADPro taking 2 megs, MacroPaint taking 5 megs and a loaded
picture taking another 1, that is a total of 8 megabytes of RAM in
use already.  What happens if you want to load in a second image or
a full-screen brush?  You run out of memory, even on a 10 megabyte
A3000, that's what!  If you want to fully manipulate 24-bit images, get
LOTS of RAM, then buy some more for extra measure.  I recommend at least
10 megabytes for any multitasking while running MacroPaint.  Having
MacroPaint send an image to ADPro for manipulation and then getting it
back is wonderful.  With the requirements for contiguous memory, you
need a lot of RAM to spare.



SCALA
-----
In truth, I haven't used Scala very much.  It looks like a smooth
program, but it ships on a grand-total of one (I counted twice) disk
for the IV-24.  The regular version ships on 6 or 7 disks!  Has GVP
got some fantastic new compression method I'm unaware of?  I don't know
what's missing but then again I don't have the original version of
Scala around.



CALIGARI 2.0
------------
I haven't played much with Caligari, either.  It seems to be quite
nice and I haven't been able to crash it.  Unlike Scala and MacroPaint,
Caligari doesn't multitask.  Like Scala, there is no ARexx port.

Some friends of mine purchased the IV24 board solely because it
came with Caligari.  They had been using Caligari Broadcast with a
Bridgecard and a Targa board and wanted to try it out.  While they
are impressed with the product, it isn't upto Caligari Broadcast
standards.  Considering the Broadcast version is thousands of dollars
itself...no one expected it to be.

Caligari requires an accelerated Amiga with a math coprocessor and at
least 3 Mb of RAM to run.  The faster the better, the more RAM the better.

Caligari does not do ray tracing, but renders in another fashion.  Ray
tracing takes longer, but yields better results.  Caligari renders
quicker and gives quite good results.

A full review of Caligari 2.0-24 will come at a later date.  This program
is big and I'm not familiar enough with it to do it justice.



IV24 UTILITIES
--------------
The IV24 utilities allow control over the PIP feature, image capture,
output destination, input destination and board-level registers.

Separated RGB input is necessary to do framegrabbing or PIP.  Colorsplitters
are available, but I used an RGB camera.  A colorsplitter would be
necessary to capture input from a composite source, such as a VCR.  True
RGB is cleaner and sharper, though.

The IV24 board will provides two banks of 12-bit RAM.  This allows for
double-buffered 12 bit (4096 color) animations or a single-buffered
24 bit (16.7 million color) image.  12 bit images are not HAM, but true
12 bit.

PIP is 12 bit live video overlayed on a 12 bit Amiga screen.  The screen
can be swapped so that the live video is the background and the Amiga
screen is in the PIP.  The PIP can be resized, moved, zoomed and the
scale changed.  It can be turned on and off and all this can be done
with a mouse, keyboard or via ARexx.  The manual says the PIP can be
framegrabbed, but so far this function does not work.

Full 24 bit images can be framegrabbed without any problem.

The IV24 has three display modes:  full Amiga graphics; keyed source and
full external.

Full Amiga graphics is just that -- an Amiga display.  Full external is
a direct feed of the RGB signal so you can see what the camera is pointing
at.  Keyed images allow the external video to show through the background
color (genlocking) OR the live video to show through every color *but*
the background.

Other software allows direct reads and writes from/to the boards own
registers and memory; viewing of 24 bit or 12 bit pictures; and frame-
grabbing.

Everything works to some extent.  I cannot seem to get the PIP to load
from a CLI without crashing, but it loads fine from the WorkBench (or
the 2.0 wbstartup drawer).  Some of the ARexx commands listed in the
manual are not in the software, or are implemented differently than
stated.  I cannot get the default settings on Framegrabs to save
properly, so I have to reset them everytime I boot the machine (via
ARexx).  Framegrabbing PIP just plain doesn't work.

GVP is aware of the problems and has people working on them.  (I know,
I've called them enough times to get on a first-name bases with half
of their staff!)

The IV24 board is a great piece of hardware that has a lot of potential.
Third party support is forthcoming (ASDG will support the IV24 in their
next release of ADPro in November.)  The board *is* a bit pricey, retailing
right around $2,000 with another $50 to $100 for the A2000 adaptor.

Hopefully this will change soon.  Chips & Technologies has introduced a
new chip that handles full PIP in a computer.  The chip is $40 in quantity
compared to $200 - $300 for the sets currently on the market.  Don't
expect cheap competitors until at least 1992, though.

 =========================================================================


                               AMIEXPO OAKLAND
                               ---------------

The following report was posted on Usenet by Steve Worley.


[1] AmiExpo Show Report (long)
Date: Tue Oct  8 14:31:21 1991
Lines: 269

Well, I spent the weekend (and a day off from work on Friday)
attending AmiExpo in Oakland. Great fun! I met several members of the
Imagine Mailing List, like Todd Landry, Mike Simpson, and Evara Ligue
(sorry if I mangled your name!).  I got a chance to talk lot of well
known Amigans, like Perry Kivolowicz from ASDG, Steve Gillmor of
Impulse, Joel Hagen, Harv Laser, Bill Seymor, Joel Hagen, Mike
Smythwick, and more that I forget. And I met Allen Hastings and Jay
Miner (both locals) there as well.

Anyway, I want to talk about some of the stuff I saw- this is all with
a graphics/3D slant, so forgive me if I ignore Dr. T's super-dooper music
things or the new MicroProse games.

First, the big toys that everyone was flashing was the new graphics
boards.  There are a lot! I carried a pocketful of floppies with
IFF24s and had them displayed on the different boards to compare
quality- this was a great idea, because some of the vendors had really
stacked the deck with the type of images they were showing. A brief
rundown of the boards that were being shown:

The GVP IV24.  768 by 482 DEINTERLACED 24 bit.  Very nice, especially
the PIP.  They had a lot of Lou Markoya's stuff being shown on a 1950
monitor.  The deinterlacing was not very apparent for any of the
images (24 bit tends to have smooth gradients, hence no flicker) but
I'm sure if you were using it as a 24 bit text display it would really
show it's power. They had a camera and were doing screen grabs and
showing the picture-in-picture. A lot of fun.

The Colorburst. Finally saw one! There are big rumors about MAST
having to drop the product because the designer was miffed about the
software. I asked, and the guy demoing CB didn't say anything. I mean,
he just looked at me, and then turned away. Geez! They were selling at
the Creative Computers mini-mall for $700, I think. The quality of a
displayed IFF24 was excellent! But the software they were showing was
really hokey. There IS a paint program, but it didn't have a very good
feel and didn't respond smoothly. Big bummer. 768 by 482 24 bit.

The Rembrandt. Progressive was showing their pre-production model, and
fishing for developers. 1K by 1K 24 bit, with a 2K by 2K memory
buffer. On-card 34020 coprocessor at (40?) Mhz, and (something)82 math
coprocessor. The boards display was slick, but not as lively as any of
the other boards- it might have been the monitor, but the images were
dim with too little contrast. Anyway, this board's coprocessor can
render and do math computations in parallel with the Amiga- a demo
showed a mandelbrot set being rendered real time with the A3000's
68040 (!), then with the board's processor. It was a tie. With more
coprocessors, (up to 4), the board would speed up it's calculation
that much more. Pretty slick! The cool part was blitting around a 320
by 200 sub-image at 30fps- not too shabby! Another fun trick was
running an anim with the 040 at full speed, while simultaneously
rendering stuff on the Rembrandt. Anyway, they are working on a paint
program and other software, but in 6 months this could be The Thing.
List is 4K.  Ouch.

Firecracker 24. Impulse wasn't there, but many people were using them.
1K by 482 resolution, 24 bit. The Virtual Reality Labs were showing
the new verson of Vista Pro (amazing!) with these boards, and there
were startled gasps of amazement as people walked by. These images and
the output were just beautiful! Perry Kivolowicz also used one for a
talk on using the Amiga as an imaging workstation, and it was pretty
slick.  (it went through a genlock and out to a video projector). He
even used ADPro to drive it. :-) Anyway, the quality is very
comperable to Colorbursts- very clean colors, a bright and lively
feel. The FC24 is sharper, though, which gives it a really nice edge
for raytraces. For scanned images, you might not be able to tell. The
FC24 paintbox is functional, and real-time, but not as nice as the
DCTV paintbox. One COOL feature of the FC24 paint (Light 24) is the
ability to LOAD IMAGINE OBJECTS AND RENDER THEM DIRECTLY ONTO AN
IMAGE. This is GREAT fun! You load an object, and manipulate its
orientation, size, and position on the image. (in wireframe). Then you
punch a button, and it renders a scanline version of the object (with
world reflection mapping) Also, there is nice Firecracker support in
ADPro, though I bet the newest version of ADPro will support many of
the others. Street price of the FC24 is something like $860.

Digital Creations had a very popular booth, showing off DCTV. I bought
one, finally! [There goes the piggy bank.] The DCTV outputs composite
video- it's not 24 bit. But the output is terrific! It can't compete
with the sharpness of any of the 24 bit boards, but I preferred the
image quality to a lot of the stuff being shown on the Rembrandt. The
neat part is you can animate the DCTV at whatever speed you can
animate hires, typically 10 fps, faster if you take a cut in image
quality. The paint program is top notch. They were showing off the new
version of the software, (1.1??)  with undo, and a few more features.
[sorry, I don't know exactly].  They will ship the software in a few
weeks, $15 upgrade for current DCTV owners. I also made them promise
they would make a DCTV loader for their DCTV.library, and to make sure
ASDG got it. (they only had a saver, before). Cost is $400, street.

Fun anecdote setting up my DCTV, it turns out my CABLE TV had AC power
coming in on it's grounded shield (!!!!) , and my VCR and TV had been
operating on this signal for months by floating over the supposedly
constant ground. I never knew this until I was about to hook up my
grounded DCTV/A3000 to my VCR, and ZZZAAAPP..  right though my body.
Yow! No damage (to me or the hardware), but I plan to really nail the
cable company. I want to get a junk VCR and melt the inside with a
blowtorch just to see the cable guy's reactions... I have NO IDEA how or
why it's like that and I'm just surprised my TV and VCR actually worked.

Newtek was there and showed off the Toaster. Of course. More later,
epecially on the new Toaster 2.0 release this month. The Toaster
framebuffer is 24 bit internally, but it has NTSC composite output.
This decreases the sharpness considerably, but if you're going to
video anyway, it's really good. (though not as good as the IV24 with
S-video AND RGB out).  Still, the Colorburst, FC24, Rembrandt and IV24
all beat the toaster output for sharpness and quality. Interestingly
enough, many times it is REALLY tough to tell a DCTV from a Toaster
display.

Last board I saw was the Digital Micronics 8 bit board. This board
also has a 34020 coprocessor like the Rembrandt. The output is 1280 by
1024, 8 bit, and is pretty slick. Many detailed images were stunning,
but it started to lose when I asked them to display some very colorful
images. (it only has 256 colors..) It's really meant for UNIX and
hi-res text, and performs admirably in this manner. Another company
was using the board for it's Postscript-output presentation software,
and the quality was terrific. This board isn't really meant as much
for images as the 24 bit boards, but it is a great pinch-hitter. Price
is >$1,000, I don't know exactly.

I never got a chance to see HAM-E. Black Belt was not at the show, and
nobody was using one. Oh well.

Well, that's it for display hardware. If I was asked to recommend one,
I would say first get a DCTV ($400). It has animation support, a
decent price, and great software. If you wanted great quality, go for
the Firecracker 24. It's quality is stunning, and the price is
reasonable. Colorburst is a good option for 500 and 1000 owners who
can't use the plug in FC24, but the extra price of the FC24 ($860 vs
$700) is well worth the investment. If you can afford both the DCTV
and the FC24, you have a dream setup. This is all IMHO. :-)

Please, no flames, especially about the Toaster output quality. It is
excellent, but not sharp! Still, if/when a 3000 version comes out, I'll
probably get one.

Going on, there were four companies showing 040 boards, two for the
3000.  The progressive A3000 040 board was $1600, and was marginally
(5%) faster than the GVP 040 board. ( Don't know the cost of the GVP).
I didn't compare 2000 versions, but the Mega-Midget-Racer guys were
showing them off, though I'm not sure if they were selling. (GVP
wasn't, Progressive was. I even held Perry Kivolowitz's A3000
accelerator from Progressive, being careful not to drool directly on
the packaging.) The Fusion-40 from RCS (A2000 only) was also being
demoed and sold.

More 3D.

Real-3D had a booth and was pushing their program. They had the latest
Amigaworld open to the Impulse Imagine ad, and were comparing those
images to versions done in Real-3D. The images they showed were pretty
slick, but the salesman didn't want to give me a hands-on demo of the
modeller and such- he just wanted to show the pictures. Considering
they have a demo version of the software out on the BBSs and FTP site,
my guess is that the guy I talked to just didn't know how to use it.
The boolean operations do look keen, though, but they need some help
with their textures and modelling. Also, tinted glass and non-white
mirrors really should be added..

YANRT. Yet another new ray tracer was announced at the Expo, this
one a low-end $100 script-based ray tracer called RayDance, from
Radiance Software. [Nothing to do with Mark Thompson!]
 Some VERY interesting features like brush maps that follow morphing
objects. [Where have I heard that before?] I'll type in the press
release sometime this week. Release is sometime this month. It
probably won't be immediate competion in the Lightwave/Imagine battle,
but it might fill a low-end niche. [First impression, I sure could be
wrong]

The big 3D support software this year seems to be packages of
digitized surfaces like brick and wood. Two companies were selling
these at the Expo, Texture City, and MicroSearch (the ChromaKey guys).
I'll post some images using the Microsearch textures and write more
about them later when I get a chance to play with them more, but they
were great! They have three texture volumes: Stone, Tiles, and Wood,
selling for $50 a pop, $30 on the street. The president of Microsearch
told me that he would make one image on each package freely
distributable- I'll upload them. Anyway, they are great packages, and
worth the money. Nicolas Alwin made some great Imagine renderings with
them.

The other set of images was from Texture City. This is a really
professional package, and they were trying to sell to the high-end
video buffs as backgrounds for titles and framestores as well as to the
3D rendering crowd. They had an incredible selection of textures,
something like 200 images!! The quality of the images they showed was
impeccable. But the cost was absolutely outrageous: they wanted $350
for 40 images (I'll check on the exact number, but roughly 40).
Ouch!!! I couldn't reccomend these to the casual user unless you had a
lot of cash or absolutely needed top quality. For that kind of money
you could buy a scanner of your own.

I met Victor Osaka of the Turbo SIG (a paper 3D newsletter), and
talked to him for a while. He was working in the Texture City booth,
and was selling copies of his newsletter. He wasn't overly interested
in talking about rendering, though, and looked more like he just
wanted to get out of the Expo and go home. By Sunday, most dealers
were like that. :-)

Sunrize was showing off it's new sound boards- a 12 bit mono
sampler/playback board and the stereo 16 bit version. These things
were great, especially the 12 bit! The quality is VASTLY superior to 8
bit, and Sunrize is trying to sell them for video sound editing. They
are perfect for this- and they're cheap! (on the order of $450). They
even have SMPTE time code for syncing everything, and some decent
support software. (much like Audiomaster) The 16 bit sampler was
great, too, but > 1K in price.

Axiom software was showing off the newest version of Pixel 3D 2.0.
This version now includes object conversion, BEVELING OF EXTRUSIONS,
and some really fun other tools like intensity->height mapping. I
picked up a copy, I'll post a long description and mini-review of it
as soon as I have a chance to play with it. It was selling for $70
street price. First impression: Interchange is a dead product unless
their new version is absolutely top-notch.

Some of the seminars were interesting. Steve Gillmor showed off his
pet product, Foundation, on a multimedia panel. Perry Kivolowicz did
NOT show off ADPro 2.0, much to my disappointment. (JPEG will save us
from out 24 bit storage problems!) I sat next to Kiki Stockhammer for
the Toaster 2.0 keynote, and had to endure the most vile perfume for
an hour and a half....

At the Toaster 2.0 unveiling, they showed most of the new features.
(the 2.0 is a software, NOT a hardware update. $100 sometime this
month) Genlock control from workbench and two new panels of
transitions were the big additions to the main software. The Toaster
framestore is now compressed for faster loading. [I always thought it
was stored UNcompressed for faster loading!] That's about it.

Lightwave 2.0 has a bunch of new features, though, and Allen Hastings
took most of the keynote time to show them off.

Most of the Lightwave features have been added to it's modeller. Here
is a list, from memory, that covers most of them. [I know I'll miss
quite a few, both because he never talked about them and because I've
forgotten.

 Skinning between cross-sections
 Magnetism point-dragging
 Twist, shear, scaling, bending of objects or points of objects
    [bending was really cool]
 Ability to load attributes from a library on disk
 Cylindrical and spherical bump (altitude) mapping
 A better file requestor (with a parent button)

 In the layout/renderer:
 A couple of new textures, including "underwater"
 New shadings for moons/planets/etc [Mark Thompson told us about this]
 Morphing now allows multiple morph targets, so an object could go from
    version 1 to version 2 to version 3 of an object.
 More control of the envelope splines, allowing kinks and control of
    overshoots
 Faster rendering overall.
 Super-lo-res for quick rendering (1/2 lores?) and one super-hi-res
   (2K by 1K?) for magazine covers, etc.

----------------

That's my quick report on the show.  Anyway, more later on the FC24,
Pixel 3D, and the Microsearch textures.


-Steve

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Worley                                       [e-mail]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 ========================================================================


See you next week!


  -Chas
AM-Report