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Aminet - June 1993 [Walnut Creek].iso
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1992-09-15
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An amusing way to waste away an hour or so...
If you want to play this game, just go to the bulletin
menu and capture buffer this and send it to your printer
after logoff...
______ Amiga WordSearch Puzzle
(__ __) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/ /
/ /
(_/he puzzle below was made with a slick search-a-word type puzzle generator
created by Jeff Sprague. It has a user-friendly interface that allows you to
enter custom word lists, save, sort, generate and print your own puzzles of
different sizes. Created with AMOS, it should work with all operating
systems; a printer is required to make full use of it.
_________________________________
Circle the words below in the box | |
to the left. They may be vertical, | E C C D H J A Y M I N E R C H |
horizontal or diagonal, forward or | L C O U N K E Y B O A R D L P |
even backwards! | J O U M W U D B L I T T E R Z |
| O M S F M Q O K A J O T C C N |
| Y P A O M O H S V I D E O G G |
AMIGADOS ANIMATION | S A C V D S D U Z I P G P R S |
BLITTER CLI | T T L A G A Y O L K E N R A J |
COMMODORE COMPATIBILITY | I I I V L R G K R S S I O P O |
COPROCESSORS DENISE | C B A Z A U T I I E B K C H L |
DIGITIZING GAMES | K I I G Y N A N M L I S E I D |
GARY GUI | F L D N P Q E P Z A Y A S C I |
GRAPHICS JAYMINER | F I E O N D L Q B U M T S S G |
JOYSTICK KEYBOARD | E T M B R O E B C T O I O U I |
LORRAINE MULTIMEDIA | N Y I Y E H I Q U R U T R T T |
MULTITASKING MIDI | I M T C A C G T E I S L S A I |
MOUSE PAULA | A I L Y L E A E A V E U S L Z |
REALITY SPEECH | R U U I I E M D I M E M M U I |
SOUND VIDEO | R G M B T P E K E D I P J Q N |
VIRTUAL WORKBENCH | O T Z Z Y S S G S C I N R L G |
| L O H C N E B K R O W M A L N |
|_________________________________|
The following two stories are inside reports from
some Amiga fanatics who attended the show down in
Pasedena who share with you the USERS point of view
on the good and the bad of this years show...
Of particular importance is the amount of info they
were able to glean about the FUTURE of the A2000 and
even the 500 and 3000.... things look shakey as they
node the compatibilty problem that CBM seems to have
glossed over in their glowing press releases about the
new A 4000.... Read on and learn...
The World of Commodore show in Pasadena showed both
promise and disappointment. Let's start with the most
talked about computer in the past few weeks -- the Amiga
4000. It's amazing how quickly some people on the net
get their information. The A4000 has:
.
- 25 MHz 68040 on a removable processor board
- 2 MB of Chip RAM
- 4 MB Fast RAM with SIMMs (16 MB maximum)
- 512K ROM
- keyboard with mini-DIN in the rear
- 2 joystick/mouse ports on the left (why?)
- Four Zorro III slots, 3 inline with PC/AT
slots, one with a video slot.
- 2-button mouse, 94-key keyboard
- 120 MB IDE drive
- internal IDE port, no SCSI
- HD disk drive
- 4 3.5-inch drive bays
- 1 front 5.25-inch drive bay
- AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture, aka AA) chip
set with all the rumored modes
- same sound (more on this later)
- 15.25" deep, 15" deep, 5" inch, 20lbs
- MSRP $3695 (Creative was taking preorders for $3K)
.
That's the lowdown on the A4000. The only available
Commodore SCSI host adaptor is the 2091, although Jim
Dionne said there will be a 32-bit one around Xmas.
The performance of 4000 is pretty good. It seems like
the faster of the SVGA cards running Windows -- you could
see regions visibly redraw when you move windows around.
There wasn't much software for it except for ADPro, so I
couldn't see how fast it could move whole screens around.
The machine itself looks like a PC-clone, ie cheap and
ugly (sorry, Commodore engineering).
Now the bad news, the A3000 seems to be as orphaned as
the A2000 is. Jim Dionne (president of CBM, Inc.) said that
they will produce 3000's as long as there's demand for it.
That sounds like a death knell to me. Further, there is
no "easy technical" way to upgrade a 3000 to the AGA.
However, within the next 6 months, expect to see a number
of special promotions from Commodore including a power-up
from the 3000 to the 4000, according to Dionne.
Actually, there was one other piece of software running
on the 4000, and that was AmigaVision Professional (AV 3.0).
AVPro looks pretty nice. To everyone named Marc Barrett
out there, this is Commodore's integration of CDTV with
mainstream Amiga computers. It can read and play back
CD-XL files (full-motion video), it can play CD audio
tracks from the CDTV, supports CDTV preferences, and has
improved MIDI support. It now has arrays and addressable
objects, more transitions, and a better object editor.
According to Lou Wallace of Amiga World, who was demoing it
for Commodore, it's still in gamma (geez, didn't know they
extended testing periods, but then again testing is HARD! :)
and very stable -- it crashed once in his two-day use of it.
Perhaps most importantly of all, it now has a freely
distributable player. MSRP is $399. There is an upgrade
path for current owners. I don't know how much it'll
cost.
On to Commodore's lower end stuff. They had the 600
there and it's a pretty small computer. It seems to have
pretty aggressive marketing -- the $399 MSRP floppy version
comes with three games (Jim Dionne, comparing himself to a
drug dealer, said Commodore has to get kids hooked on the
Amiga before they can sell more expensive systems). The
games are Myth, Robocop III, and Shadow of The Beast III
(no I didn't get to see any game other than Myth), and the
whole thing is packed in a really loud, attention getting
box with Robocop as the main feature. The "high-end" 600HD
comes with a 40MB hard drive, Virtual Reality Studio 2 (don't
know what's new), Pushover, and some other serious software.
It comes in a more sedate box, and has an MSRP of $599. Street
prices for the 600 was $299, and $499 for the 600HD. This
is a really good move on C='s part.
Some more interesting stuff came during Dionne's keynote
address. Using AVPro on a 4000, he presented all the new
machines and the following stuff.
Commodore is doing a 4000 reasons to own an Amiga
contest where you can win an A4000, A600HD, or AVPro,
by stating in 25 words or less why you own an Amiga.
The winner will be announced at Winter COMDEX. Please
don't email me for details, I don't want to type in all
the rules, and no, I'm not entering.
Dionne also explained the difference between 3.0
and 2.1. 3.0 is for AA machines, and is otherwise
similar to 2.1. I don't think this is completely
true, but for practical reasons it probably is the
same. 2.1 will ship within 90 days to 2.0 people.
The upgrade is a disk and a manual.
Commodore's also starting a really aggressive ad
campaign in other magazines like Byte, PC World, and various
trade rags. Their strategy is to specifically attack
Apple and IBM-clones in areas they feel they have a
clear advantage in. As one would expect, those areas
are multimedia presentations, training, and desktop video.
One of the snappier lines in the ads was: "The MPC version
of multimedia may cost more than ours. But it's harder to
use and requires more equipment." They're also starting
to get in touch with user groups and trying to keep them
up to date and getting input from them. They realized that
70% of their sales are influenced by Amiga owners and
are trying to "keep the faith", as Dionne put it.
Also encouraging was Dionne's statement that CD-ROM was
very important to Commodore, and that the upcoming months
would see a lot of developments in that area, including
CD-ROM support for the 2000/3000/4000. He wouldn't say
any more. Also, we should see a full-motion MPEG video
board in a year. This seems pie-in-the-sky, but he's
the boss.
The question and answer session was pretty long and
mostly devoid of stupid questions. The first question
was (can you guess?), why IDE over SCSI? Dionne explained
that it was cheaper to get large drives this way, and that a
full 32-bit host adaptor would be available around Xmas.
He called the 2091 an 8-bit adaptor, so does this mean
he's talking about wide SCSI? I don't think it would be
because you need an extra cable for wide SCSI, and people
won't buy drives that expensive.
Other interesting questions concerned the sound
capability of the Amiga. Dionne said he wished that
16-bit sound was ready for today, but wasn't. He
did say it would come soon. Upgrades to it might
be easy with the 4000 since they kept emphasizing
the modularity of the 4000. He also said that, yes
a low-cost 68020 system is in the works. Other questions
were about the upgradability of the 2000/3000 and this
is where we heard the line I mentioned above.
Also, the Toaster will not work in a 4000. I
don't know whether this is a physical thing, but
Dionne definitely said it was an AA chipset problem.
He did say that NewTek was privy to all the technical
details of the AA chipset.
Phew, that was the Commodore stuff. I have to express
my feelings here. Personally, I'm slightly disappointed that
the 3000 has been orphaned in Commodore's future plans, but
it makes sense to go to the 4000 where it seems to be
cheaper and easier to upgrade both processor and chipset
(should there be an AAA chipset). I'm surprised they
had an IDE interface instead of a SCSI interface. I hope
Dave Haynie (or whomever else involved in its design)
will comment on the design decisions that went into this.
To me, that's one slot taken up by a SCSI card, one more
by an Ethernet card (yes, I'm one of those people who
believes all computers should have networking capabilities),
and two left. If you use the Bridgeboard, you'll eat up two
slots with the board and a multifunction IBM board. If
you use a Toaster, or OpalVision and have some kind of TBC
or some other random video peripheral, that's two slots
as well. Now, what if I wanted to add more memory? Or
some other card? I know normal users won't use their
machines like this, but SCSI would have added one more
slot to the system. Oh well, I'll wait for the people
in the know to speak.
So, on to the rest of the field. I stopped by DMI
and gave them the third degree on Vivid. Okay, here's
the upshot of it: the coprocessors are not arranged
in any special pipeline or anything, they just have their
own private, 20ns SRAM cache that they can play with.
Apparently, the Vivid board was working only three
weeks before the show, and the demo I saw wasn't
terribly impressive. It could handle a Gouraud-shaded
cube pretty well (not too snappy), but when it came
to the X-29 fighter plane, which any lowly Personal
IRIS can whip around, it slowed down to an oozing
2 frames per second. To be fair, the programmer said
that the program wasn't optimized yet -- he wasn't
using the private RAM of the coprocessors and so forth.
But, it seems that DMI's SGI-stomping numbers are
inflated and hard to get at. There was also no C
compiler for the Amiga presently that will produce
34020 code. They had a Mandlebrot set generator
and some unknown company writing a raytracing (why
a raytracer??!!) program for the board. I didn't
stay around to look, but they seemed okay at a glance.
For people wondering about Jim Drew and Emplant,
the DMI people said they wouldn't let him display
his product because "he didn't have a working product
with a Resolver". I didn't see him or the Emplant
board. Emplant-haters and lovers can interpret
this however they like. I think Jim Drew is full
of it.
Next was GVP. Their morpher looked like your
typical parametric-surface warper, and they were
warping random trucks. What was neat was the EGS-110.
The Workbench support was really nice and fast (faster
than AA) with a nice Presentation Manager-like look.
I didn't play with the paint program too much, but
the Elite II-like game (really, it had that Elite
style radar) was really fast and responsive. It
had big ships which launched little fighters, so
there were lots of objects moving around all over
the place. If Elite II looks at all like that, I'll
not be disappointed :). According to the GVP guy,
it's just a giant framebuffer that can move scads
and scads of pixels like nothing else. I wish I
had one.
Next up was OpalVision. Very nice board, very
nice software. I saw Aliens playing in a loop on
it and the paint software. Of course you people
all know about it already, so I won't say anymore
about it.
Octree was there with Caligari 2. But all they
could do was rag on Allen Hastings and Lightwave.
I didn't stick around for long. Wil Vinton's
Playmation was there. It was pretty nice. The
rendering quality has gone up, except it still
doesn't antialias. Apparently Disney TV studios
uses it and someone from Disney was complaining
to them about not receiving manuals. I guess
SGI animation software companies aren't the only
flakes around :). Ben Williams was there being
defensive about his fax thing. ASDG was there
in the form of a looping videotape. Morph plus
and ADPro were being presented. Morph plus is
really nice with all of its special effects. The
morphs looked very natural and effective, and the
swirly stuff was really smooth.
I also saw ProWrite. It looked like ProWrite --
Red Porsche with text flowing around it. Oh boy.
If only we had something like Ami Pro 2.0.
Jerry Pournelle was also there looking at
the 4000, but I don't know what he thought of it.
So that's the World of Commodore on Friday.
I'm going back tomorrow to see and hopefully talk
to Commodore's President of Engineering. He's
suppose to be a very receptive guy and Jim Dionne
suggested that we throw our technical questions
and suggestions at him.
--Andre
P.S. Someone suggested to Dionne that Commodore
should go after Atari music people since Atari
looks like it's in trouble. I guess AMIGA 600
and AMIGA 4000 will CRUSH extinct Atari (deep) DODO
bird computer. Commodore start advertising in
BYTE and PCWORLD. Many SMART people read BYTE,
so MANY MILLIONS and MILLIONS of SMART people buy
AMIGA!! Commodore SMART and change it DIAPER already.
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)
--
Andre Yew andrey@tybalt.caltech.edu (131.215.48.100)
Wow!
I just got back from the second day of the World of
Commodore show in Pasadena, and today was definitely
more impressive than yesterday.
The definite highlight of today (even over seeing
Kiki Stockhammer in person and various other celebrities :)
was Louis Eggebrecht's, VP (not president like I said
yesterday) of engineering, keynote talk. The talk focused
on the engineering aspects of Commodore. There are
about a dozen groups in Commodore that do the engineering.
Among them are the VLSI group (the largest, I think),
the systems group, the system architecture group
(Eggebrecht's thing), CATS, the machining group --
Eggebrecht mentioned that some toolings of plastic
parts took longer than the VLSI design stage of the
Amiga -- and the product assurance group. All in
all, they number over 200 people. Anyway, on to
the interesting part of the talk. BTW, the talk
was presented on an Amiga 4000 with AVPro (AmigaVision
3.0), and the speed of the display was pretty quick.
It looked like it was an 8-bit mode that was fairly
high-resolution.
Eggebrecht first talked about their improved
design facilities, about how they could send their
designs to be manufactured elsewhere. He mentioned
names like HP and VLSI. For example, the Lisa
chip which replaces the Denise chip in the AGA
chipset is sourced from three different places.
He said that this has several advantages, the
new chips are done in CMOS instead of NMOS, and
designs could be turned around and tested faster.
It seems that the only thing they're using the
CSG (Commodore Semiconductor Group?) for now is
for making 6-micron parts for C-64's, which are
selling on the order of 700K/year in Europe. That
surprised me.
Eggebrecht, who worked at IBM as a hardware guy
before coming to Commodore, presented the future
hardware goals of Commodore first. First off was
the low-end chipset. He said it would be 2 chips
with about 100K transistors. As a comparison, the
ECS uses 60K transistors and the AGA uses 80K
transistors. It would address 32-bit DRAM and have
a 57MHz pixel clock. It would be very much ECS and
AGA compatible. Eggebrecht said that backwards
compatibility was very important for the low-end
stuff. You could have a 4MB floppy drive (he said
"four megaBIT", but I think he meant byte), and
the chipset would support 32-bit processors.
The memory bandwidth would be 8x what it is now,
and 72Hz refresh rates are possible in some modes.
He said it would be "easy" to do 2x the blitter
performance and a 800x600x8 bit 72 Hz modes (!).
The low-end chip set would support 16-bit truecolor,
meaning you could have 65536 colors at once, and
a FIFO'ed serial port would be part of it. The
FIFO will clear up a lot of present serial port
problems present now. Gee, I wouldn't mind
having the low-end stuff now :).
Now, Eggebrecht continued, let's talk about the
exciting stuff -- the high-end chipset. The high-end
chipset is made of 4 chips with a total of 750K to
1M transistors. It could use either 32-bit or 64-bit
VRAM, giving it much increased performance. It would
have a reprogrammable pixel clock of 57 to 114 MHz.
The present pixel clock is 28MHz (AGA, I assume). Let
me go off on a tangent here. Apparently, Commodore's
new philosophy on systems design is to make subsystems
clock-asynchronous, so each part can be tuned to its
most optimal speed. The decoupling of the graphics
chipset from the processor clock is one example. Future
processors will also have asynchronous clocks from
the rest of the system.
Anyway, going back to the new chipset, it would also
support chunky modes, without losing its bitplane nature.
It would support CD-ROM in the form of some kind of really
fast serial line where it could display video and play
back sound in realtime. It would have framegrabbing
builtin (frame rate unknown), and screen promotion builtin.
It would have a 1Kx1K screen (I don't know if this is the
default or not). It would also have 8 channels of 100KHz
16-bit sound (sounds like overkill, no?). Supporting all
this would be on-demand DMA -- I assume this means we
aren't tied to having certain DMA channels for certain
parts only. It would be backwards compatible with the
ECS and AGA, although Eggebrecht didn't stress it as much.
The performance of this chipset is 12-20x current bandwidth.
There will be a 32-bit blitter with 8x the performance of the
present one. The system is capable of having 1 blitter for
EVERY bitplane! There will be 24-bit truecolor (yeah, now
where's my 48-bit color?). There will be some kind of
enhanced decompression stuff builtin to handle different
data types. I presume he means MPEG and JPEG. Let's see,
what else? The genlocking would be improved (no specifics).
The system is modular so you can upgrade to later chipsets.
The default screen refresh is 72Hz with the system capable
of 100Hz. The processor slot would be 32-bit and processor
independent. He mentioned RISC processors, but said
nothing more. Wow is all I can say at this point. But,
he wasn't through yet.
Eggebrecht next went on to talk about the upcoming
product features. AGA will be incorporated into all
upcoming Amiga products. All future Amiga computers
would be modular allowing you to add stuff like RISC
processors (he said it again!). Commodore realizes
that in the past they've kind of stayed apart from
everyone else and haven't been keeping up. No more
of that now -- Commodore will keep up with the industry,
which means, Eggebrecht says, they will introduce 100MHz
processors as soon as they are out. Commodore "won't
dilly-dally" anymore. DSP support is coming. 32-bit
SCSI-II is coming around Jan 1993, and may be incorporated
into future motherboards. CDTV is going to merge with
the Amiga line. We're going to get full-motion video
with MPEG. CDTV itself is going to be cost-reduced and
enhanced. Eggebrecht stated in no uncertain terms that
Commodore still thinks CDTV is one of its most important
projects. Software is going to be upgraded to handle all
this.
Speaking of software, Eggebrecht also mentioned the
new OS's that are going to be coming out. He stated that
both compatibility and stability are their two greatest
goals. Retargetability is also a major goal (he had about
5). Specifically, release 3 has all of the 2.1 stuff
plus AGA support and multimedia support. 3.1 has API
network extensions. I asked Allen Havemose about this,
and he seemed to imply that the 2.0 TCP/IP software is
not going to be released but instead integrated into
the OS. 3.1 also will have file and printer sharing,
and DSP support. Release 4 will be retargetable and
have full Postscript printer support. I asked Havemose
about resource tracking, and he said, "Not in the next
version", meaning 4.0, but he said it will be in later.
I'm somewhat surprised at this and I hope I heard wrong.
As to how far along these things are, Eggebrecht
says they're close to working silicon, but would not
give any dates at all. He didn't say much about the
OS release dates. Eggebrecht and Jim Dionne said in
very certain terms that the current Amigas (the 500,
2000, 3000) cannot be upgraded to AGA. Eggebrecht
gave some technical reasons for it. They include:
surface mounting of chips to reduce capacitance
when the chips are run at a high clock rate, 32-bit
access to memory, and the unsuitability of current
Chip RAM to be used. However, Dionne said that
"about a million" people have already asked him about
a power-up deal, and there will probably be one.
The question-and-answer session wasn't as exciting
as the talk because a whole bunch of people started
asking irrelevent questions like, "Why isn't C=
promoting C-64's and C-128's in schools?" "Is the
C-64 and C-128 going to be discontinued", etc, etc.
It was very annoying especially since we didn't have
much time to ask Real questions in the first place.
So all I have to say is, way to go Commodore!
You guys are doing great things and I hope things
don't get stopped as abruptly as they have been in
the past. I think I'll be thinking hard about
powering-up to an A4000 or whatever new computer
they come out with.
--Andre
(who isn't making any of this up, really)
--
Andre Yew
andrey@tybalt.caltech.edu (131.215.48.100)