Amiga Collections: MegaDisc/MegaDisc 06 (1988)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)[m][WB].zip/MegaDisc 06 (1988)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)[m][WB].adf/ARTICLES/ExpanDevices

Text File | 1988-03-28 | 6KB | 106 lines

                       ABOUT EXPANSION DEVICES



       Now that many people have had their Amigas for some time, thoughts
  tend towards getting extra pieces of hardware - RAM expansion,
  digitisers, hard disks and so on. Amigas love added peripherals, as they
  are open architecture machines, so the problems are A. the money and B.
  which one?

       The first necessity for the Amiga is expansion memory. Anyone buying
  an A500 should automatically get the A501 expansion module to bring their
  Ram up to 1 megabyte, especially with the excellent prices that are being
  offered for it at the moment. A2000 buyers get their machines with 1 meg
  standard, but should consider another 2 megabytes if they will be doing
  any graphics-intensive work, such as Desktop Publishing or Animation. And
  A1000 owners have a variety of alternatives which have developed over the
  past 2 years, both locally made and foreign.

       All Amiga owners should invest in an external disk drive too -
  because the Amiga looks for commands off the Workbench disk (system disk)
  it means that every time a command is issued to the system, that disk
  must be accessed, necessitating disk-swapping. This can drive you crazy.
  If you have another drive, however, you can keep the Workbench in the
  internal drive, and your application or data disk in the external drive.
  And with extra memory you can add what is a "Virtual disk", ie, you can
  organise your system to set up a RAM disk which can act just like a
  normal disk drive (but faster), thus freeing up your internal drive and
  giving you virtually 3 drives to play with. (Check the VDK-RAMDISK drawer
  in the PROGRAMS drawer to use it yourself, and look also at Gary
  O'Connor's hints in HINTS&TIPS in this drawer).
       Even the above setup is not too much - I  usually have 2 external
  drives along with a virtual disk and a hard disk.  That may seem like
  overkill, but with the Amiga you can use them all to  advantage. In
  short, anyone using the basic Amiga (512K, one drive) is  running the
  machine at about 10% efficiency and convenience. You can get
  either Commodore drives at about $400 or locally made ones at about $340
  if you shop around. It is also worth considering 5.25" drives for the
  Amiga - it is possible to get such a drive which can store 880K on the
  much cheaper floppies, and act just like a normal 3.5" drive (contact
  Megadisc for details).

       Having got your external drive and extra memory, you may begin to
  yearn for a hard disk. This is like a large and (fairly) reliable floppy
  disk, and has the benefits of greater speed, storage and convenience.
  Sizes of these disks are anything from 10 megabytes to 500 (say 12 to 600
  floppies), at corresponding cost. The convenience comes from having all
  your programs and data on one disk which is always accessible, so that
  you don't have to keep swapping disks. Any serious computer user must
  eventually get a hard disk, and what with the Amiga's memory-hungry
  graphics and sounds, it would be worth starting at a 40 meg hard disk.
  However, if you get a 20 meg one, you can always add more. To remember
  about hard disks - always do regular backups (I just spent a day trying
  to recover data from a crashed hard disk, and it's no fun). There are now
  some good hard disk backup programs available for the Amiga - a couple of
  public domain ones, which work but require reasonable knowledge of the
  CLI, and a couple of commercial ones, specifically QuarterBack by East
  Coast Software, which allows you to backup and restore with a minimum of
  pain and a maximum of mouse. Approximate prices of hard drives (20 meg)
  hover at about $1600 at present.

       Then there are modems, with which you can access the many bulletin
  boards around the country. These are dropping in price quite rapidly to
  the point where you can get a good 300/1200 baud modem for about $350.
  There is a lot of information and good public domain software to be got
  on these BBSs, and you can also access databases, Viatel, some banks and
  other services whose numbers are growing.

       You can also get "digitising tablets", on which you can draw, or
  mimic the actions of a mouse, though with a pen-like device. See a review
  of the EASYL in Megadisc7.
  Speaking of digitising, you can find Audio digitisers which can digitise
  sound samples for playback and editing. (Have a look in the OZ_PRODUCTS
  drawer for information about an excellent locally produced audio
  digitizer.)

       There are other more exotic devices you can add to your Amiga -
  video digitisers such as Digi-View, which allow you to grab any graphic
  as an image on your screen; Gen-Locks, which are used to synchronise and
  combine the video output of your Amiga with any other video source; and
  very soon Frame-Grabbers which allow you to grab any instantaneous image
  from any video source, such as your video camera or VCR and turn them
  into graphics for further enhancement.

       The main problem with all this of course is having the cash to pay
  for it all - these extras don't come cheap, and for the enthusiast they
  are very tempting. And you can be sure that more will become available,
  and that prices will drop as the number of Amigas increases.

  Some contact numbers:

  5.25" External disk drives - Mr P Chatfield [phone]
  3.5"  Internal disk drives - Diskworks [phone]
  RAM expansion units - Andrew Wilson [phone]
  RAM expansion/SCSI interface & Hard disks - Megadisc [phone]
  Genlock and Polaroid Palette - Neriki [phone]
  Audio Digitisers - George Vokalek [phone]
  Modems (Bit Blitzer) - [phone]  or DICK SMITHS ELECTRONICS

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