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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!swrinde!gatech!destroyer!news.iastate.edu!barrett
- From: barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett)
- Subject: Re: CBM at CES/Vegas quickie report
- Message-ID: <C0Izus.L12@news.iastate.edu>
- Sender: news@news.iastate.edu (USENET News System)
- Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
- References: <73144@cup.portal.com>
- Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 08:06:27 GMT
- Lines: 57
-
- In article <73144@cup.portal.com> Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser) writes:
- >One new thing being shown, altho very quietly, as in no
- >signs and no press release is MPEG on a card inside a 4000
- >running full motion full screen video streams in a sizeable
- >window. Jeff Porter of CBM Engineering (a real nice guy btw)
- >told me this is a new Amiga product in development. Release date/price
- >to be announced later. It looked damn good to me.
-
- Good. I just hope Commodore does not take their usual eternity in getting
- this product to the market. Of course, I hope this also means that Commodore
- is getting serious about developing Amiga (not CDTV) CD-ROM systems, since
- MPEG and CD-ROM go hand-in-hand.
-
- >I also attended the absolutely standing room only
- >press conference for the new company 3DO, founded by
- >E/A's Trip Hawkins. I'll post more about this later when
- >I get home and get a chance to type in some of what was
- >in their press kit but for now I'll say that what I saw in
- >th way of demos was damn impressive, although rather limited.
- >The first 3DO machine is already being shown in prototype form
- >in their booth with the Panasonic name brand on it, and
- >they plan to ship in Fall '93 with an anticipated price of
- >$700.00 or thereabouts. They claim 80 software houses
- >are already working on titles and their financial partners
- >include AT&T, Time Warner, and a number of other financial heavyweights.
- >RJ Mical and Dave Needle, both of the original Amiga Inc.
- >were on the stage driving the demos during the presentation.
- >They are part of the software and hardware team that has been
- >developing this product in near secrecy for quite a while
- >now. The proto machine is RISC based, full 24 bit output,
- >has a CD drive, plays many kinds of media including music and photo CDs,
- >and is equipped with coprocessors which let it do nice
- >things like real time image mapping and rotation and warping
- >and transparency and real-life lighting effects. 2MEG RAM is standard and
- >the prototypes had a plethora of ports on its butt end
- >and is manipulated with a hand-held controller not unlike a
- >games console. No keyboard was shown. All the software I saw
- >looked to be very carefully crafted demos of very early stages
- >of what has the potential to be a mind-boggling new product,
- >as revolutinary in 1993 as the Amiga was in 1985.
- >We'll see :)
-
- Too bad they've already made agreements with Panasonic to let them sell
- it. I guess there will be no miracles opportunities for Commodore to get
- outstanding technologies cheap this time.
-
- BTW, is it me, or does this seem a bit like the NeXT-Apple situation of
- a few years ago? With the NeXT, a former Apple founder made a new company
- and a highly-advanced very-Mac-like product. With this thing, it seems
- that some former Amiga founders have made a new highly-advanced
- very-Amiga-like product. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
-
- ---
- | Marc Barrett -MB- | email: barrett@iastate.edu
- --------------------------------------------------------------------
- "No, I just think that a computer grafted on top of another computer
- is a kludge. It has nothing to do with the AGA chipset." -- me
-