Aminet 1 (Walnut Creek)

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ Aminet 1 (Walnut Creek) / Aminet - June 1993 [Walnut Creek].iso / aminet / text / anno / pasadena.res < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1992-09-15 | 23KB | 517 lines

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)