@database "ar406.guide"
@Node MAIN "Amiga Report Online Magazine #4.06 -- April 23, 1996"
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  April 23, 1996              @{" Turn the Page " link MENU}             Issue No. 4.06
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One of the things I miss on the Amiga now, is good 2D-games. Everybody seems to have been taken by 3D-mania. I can remember a lot of good 2D-games. The Turrican-series, Giana Sisters, The New Zealand Story, World/Summer/Winter-games, Syndicate, North and South, and a lot of other good games that came out in the Amiga's golden days. I can't remember any really good 3D-games, that I have played for many hours. So, why can't the software-publishers make any good 2D-games? I miss it, and I'm sure many others do too. -------------- From: Rick Lui ismail@ionsys.com SUBJECT: AGAExtender: 24bit+chunky on AGA without GFX board. [The AGAExtender is not the only device of this type in existence. There are at least two other AGA RGB attachments that provide chunky displays. -Jason] AGA obsolete for multimedia, image processing, games and SFX? Perhaps not. Thanks to an independent hardware designer in Italy who discovered that the AGA computers can (at maximum bandwidth) achieve a LOT more than most think possible. With the help of a small, low cost external adapter in the RGB port the Amiga becomes a superior graphics and sound system. This is achieved through a clever design that does NOT require a DSP for 16 bit sound and does NOT require a SVGA chip for 24 bit graphics. This relatively simple circuit is based on a line buffered design and uses a constant maximum AGA bandwidth (Lisa chip supplies an SHRES signal). This means low cost to manufacture and full compatibility with all AGA systems independent of CPU type and speed. The concept is simple; we can avoid having to upgrade to a new graphics or sound chip by easily exploiting the tremendous untapped resources (bandwidth) of the standard AGA machine. The aim is to upgrade to 24 bit graphics and get 16 bit sound. All the extra features delivered by the AGAX design would not implicate additional costs but are simply the fallout of a versatle design (free goodies). - plugs into RGB port of any AGA machine (does not hinder existing HW) - true colour (24 bit) plus 8 bit Alpha channel for SFX - YUV conversion for fast MPEG/JPEG display - resolution independent of scanning frequency (hardware mode promotion) - chunky screen modes (optional chunky+planar combination) - real-time zoom effects (CPU-free!) - parallax effects and sprites (quad playfields and transparency) - hardware image flips and rotations - crossfading & cross-transparency (CPU-free!) - vertical/horizontal anti-aliasing (linear interpolation) - 4 channel 16 bit 3Dsurround sound (44KHz; independent & asynchronous) - 4 separate audio connectors (2 Amiga+2 AGAX) for 4 way speaker systems - fast and safe software switch from AGA to AGAX - agaextender.library in development to provide complete OS legal use The AGAExtender gives programmers and hobbyists virtually unlimited capacity to create and develop MS rear kicking software. For example, hardware scaling and a chunky screenmode will free the CPU to show full screen MPEGs at a very high frame rate (who says you need a 100MHz Pentium to do that!) Another example, Scala multimedia type software using hardware crossfading and cross-transparency running with little or no CPU overhead. Think of all the extra CPU power left for other combined special effects! Imagine AlienBreed3D with 8 bit Alpha channel "fog/light" effects and 3D surround sound with real-time echo and reverb so true to life that you can locate exactly where the monsters are with your eyes closed! Bizzetti's design is like a gift from heaven for AGA owners providing compatibility with all current software and hardware and delivering many things that the PC's SVGA chips could never do (CPU-free crossfading, CPU-free scaling, Alpha channel playfield, etc.) not to mention the AGAX audio capabilites. The beauty of it all is that it is relatively simple and inexpensive to build. Unfortunately, Bizzetti does not have (likely never will) the financial or R & D backing of AT. AT is moving in the opposite direction (PowerAmiga) and their differences in philosophy may be irreconcilable; perhaps a 3rd party manufacturer would be interested in making lots of money and becoming very popular. Bizzetti's dream is to take the million or so AGA Amigas into the year 2000 with the reassurance that Amiga does possess the absolute best technology which no PC box can offer. He needs the support and encouragement of the entire Amiga community. Don't look at this as a sad plea to save our beloved AGA Amiga. Instead, see it as a chance for Amiga to reign supreme in audio and visual once again! Let Bizzetti, AT and Amiga dealers know that there is a demand and need for this innovative product (otherwise we may never even see a prototype). "Nowadays the competition is MultiMedia, and the Amiga needs a revolution... millions of already installed machines cannot and must not become obsolete. The solution exists, and it's optimal both technically and commercially." - Fabio Bizzetti The designer (Fabio Bizzetti) can be reached at Please download the file AgaEXTENDER.lha (on Aminet or this BBS) for design details, illustrations and low level operations (all you VLSI/ ULSI engineers should take a look at this and give some feedback. -------------- From: Tak Tang Dear AmigaReport, Regarding Mike Erasmus' letter (AR 405) - No, unfortunately there are no Visual Basic type software for the amiga (yet), although there are a few promising GUI editors, which take much of the drudgery out of coding a gui, and could form the basis of a VB type program. I guess the closest we ever got to point and click programming was AmigaVision, although the pro version was only available to CDTV developers. Regarding compilation - I'm told that VB2 compiled the code into 'p-code', rather than machine code. Finally, regarding SQL. I'm trying to get hold of ASQL, by Charles O'Reilly. I understand its still being worked on, though it has an arexx port, which could be used to tie things together. Regarding Ron Upton's letter (AR405) - You could try MainActor, which comes in three versions - shareware, available on aminet; professional and broadcast, both available in the UK from BlitterSoft (I think). I also have a (commercial) program named AWorks. I got it from a cover disk, though I cant remember which. Both the above programs will read the animations from disk, so memory is not a problem. Regards, Tak ---------------------------- From: Carlos M M Rodrigues Jason, I'am an avid reader of AR for a long time (2 years to be more precise) and I would like to give my congratulations for the excellent job that you and all the AR staff have been doing on this magazine, but I write this letter mainly to express my frustration for the type of support, or lack of it, that some Amiga developers give. I read with interest the letter wrote by Shane Kuntz in AR405 and I'am forced to agree with the points exposed there, but what I don't really understand is that, we have finally a company decided to bet on the Amiga and some developers decide that it's time to leave the machine behind and go to machines like the BeBox, simply because they think the machine will not have any great future. Before continuing let me say that I know the technical characteristics of the BeBox and I even have screen shots from the GUI. At first sight it appears to be a great machine but let me remind what happened to a machine called NeXT. If those developers stopped supporting the Amiga, only to concentrate on the PC or Mac market, I would understand, but leaving a machine that already has the market position and the support that the Amiga has and go to a platform like the BeBox is something I really don't understand. For the first time we see people, with years of programing experience on the Amiga, involved in the PPCAmiga OS project, for the first time we see machines like the Walker that will give us the possibility not only to buy Amigas at prices commonly practiced in the PC market, but even to use PCI peripherals and it is precisely at this time, that some developers start to lose their hope on the future of the machine. As Shane Kuntz said, a pessimistic Amiga community sucks but a pessimistic Amiga developer community sucks even more. @endnode @node OPINION1 "The Joker Survey" @toc OPINION =========================================================================== The Joker Survey By: Jason Mulligan manwe@valinor.hna.com.au =========================================================================== Hi Jason, Well those comments about the german Amiga survey came out and I just couldnt let it pass without saying something. I must say some of the figures were interesting, like the figure of 12% owning AT-1200's (I guess they are selling somewhere). >- Only 7% of the readers also own an PC-clone. This supports my opinion > that many Amiga owners only still cling to their Amiga because they have > not seen and played about with today's PeeCees too much. If they did, > many would already have left the Amiga in no time (especially when it > comes to games) :-( Now this, I certainly wouldnt agree with. I'm sure most Amiga owners have used PC's (it's pretty hard to avoid 'em these days). For me, with the collapse of C= the only reason I had to move on to a PC was to get games. My Amiga did and still does everything I need it to do except play new, advanced games. For me, I just cant justify spending such large quantities of cash on a P120 or greater just so I can play the latest PC games at a reasonable speed. Considering the survey results, I'm pretty sure alot of Amiga users are in the same boat. In my case, to get my games fix I spent a fraction of what it would cost for a high-end PC and bought a Sony Playstation console. The combination of Amiga for real work and Playstation for fun IMHO is a better combo (functionally and wallet-wise) than any PC could be. Anyway, keep up the great work. With ACAR and other mags dissapearing we need you now more than ever. @endnode @node NEWS1 "W.F.M.H. LocalePL v2" @toc NEWS [It's largely in Polish, I know. They insisted. -Jason] TITLE W.F.M.H. LocalePL - Complete polish envirionment for your Amiga - Polski system operacyjny dla Twojej Amigi VERSION 2 AUTHOR Marcin Orlowski E-Mail......: carlos@dedal.man.szczecin.pl MAXsNet.....: 86:30042/203 FidoNet.....: 2:481/22.2 GlobalNet...: 52:4800/6 Packet Radio: SQ1BSC @ SR1BBS.#SZ.POL.EU DESCRIPTION This complete polish envirionmet for all Amigas equipped OS2.1 and better. Wszystko czego potrzebujesz aby Twoja Amiga polubiξa jezyk polski... FEATURES (PL) * Kompletny zestaw plikσw umoϋliwiajβcych spolszczenie systemu operacyjnego, czyli wszelkich moϋliwych komunikatσw bβdϊ tekstσw wykorzystywanych przy komunikacji komputera z uϋytkownikiem, poczβwszy od wersji 2.1 systemu a skoοczywszy na najnowszej, 3.1. Ponadto, plik zawierajβcy podstawowe dane charakterystyczne dla danego kraju, np. format zapisu daty bβdϊ oznaczenie waluty, plik zawierajβcy nazwy poszczegσlnych miesiλcy oraz ich stosowanych skrσtσw oraz tekst pomocy nt. programu AmigaGuide. * Polskie czcionki... * Program FONTPLPATCH umoϋliwiajβcy zastβpienie zawartych w ROMie Amigi czcionek TOPAZ 8 i 9 na odpowiadajβce im TOPAZPL 8 i 9, dziλki czemu wszystkie programy uϋywajβce klasycznego TOPAZa, a nie przewidujβce zmiany czcionki przez uϋytkownika, bλdβ pozwalaξy na korzystanie z polskich znakσw narodowych. * Sterowniki do najpopularniejszych modeli drukarek, umozliwiajβce wydruk tekstσw zawierajβcych polskie znaczki narodowe w trybie tekstowym * Dodatkowo, dla uϋytkownikσw MagicWB, spolszczone czcionki z tego pakietu: XenPL, XHelveticaPL oraz XCourierPL. * Mapa klawiatury zgodna (tak jak i caξy pakiet LocalePL) ze standardem AmigaPL w angielskiej i niemieckiej wersji klawiatury * Polskie pliki dla ponad 50 rσϋnych programσw. * Wygodne w uϋyciu konwertery tekstu pozwalajβce szybko "przetξumaczyκ" teksty z polskiego na nasze. Zaξβczone gotowe definicje 8 formatσw, moϋliwoτκ prostej definicji dodatkowych formatσw uϋytkownika * Tablice konwersji dla systemowego CrossDOSa * Program sortujβcy a'la systemowy SORT, jednakϋe z uwzglλdnieniem wszelkich reguξ stosowanych w danym jλzyku, czyli oczywiτcie takϋe w polskim. * Poprawki do systemowego programu SAY oraz do speak.handlera, pozwalajβce na poprawnβ wymowλ polskich sξσw. W zestawie takϋe plik zawierajβce zasady polskiej wymowy dla najnowszej wersji translator.library v42+! REQUIREMENTS AmigaOS 2.1+ AVAILABILITY W.F.M.H. LocalePL Home BBS: Silver Dream!'s BBS: +48 91 540431 (section Files/W.F.M.H. Support) WWW page: http://dedal.man.szczecin.pl/~carlos/PL/locale.html Aminet, for example: ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/misc/Locale20.lha REGISTRATION (UK) To register send 15 zl (foreign users: US$10) to: (PL) Oplata rejestracyjna: 15 zl Marcin Orlowski ul. Radomska 38 71-002 Szczecin Poland DISTRIBUTABILITY Demo version may be freely distributable in unaltered form. @endnode @node NEWS2 "Amiga Convention in Japan" @toc NEWS EVENT NAME Amiga Convention in Japan BRIEF DESCRIPTION An Amiga convention planed/managed by Amiga users group in Japan. LOCATION HAMAMATU SHOUKOU-KAIGISYO 10F Hamamatu city,Shizuoka Pref,JAPAN TIME 1 day, Sunday,April 28th - optional: You can stay from the evening of 27th. Please contact us for details. CONTENT - How to get Amiga items from overseas. Never mind distance. - lecture on 3D graphic. - MOD show. - etc ENTRY PRICE 1,000YEN(almost $US10) URL http://www.vier.mech.nitech.ac.jp/~umashika/ HOW TO CONTACT Email:sdi00828@niftyserve.or.jp Shinji Miyoshi TEL(Japanese):+81-53-455-4468 Junya Nagai TEL(English)/FAX:+81-564-27-8035 Joe Yamasaki AUTHOR INFORMATION This is few chance to meet another Amiga users in Japan.Come and Visit! NIHON NO MINASAN E: HAMAMATSU DE AMIGA NO TAIKAI WO HIRAKIMASU. ZEHI OKOSHI KUDASAI. OKIGARU NI OTOIAWASE KUDASAI. See you in HAMAMATSU! (^_^)/~~~ @endnode @node NEWS3 "Almathera WWW Presence" @toc NEWS Almathera are in the process of setting up a significant WWW presence to promote and support its range of Amiga products. As part of this commitment, and because we are all heavy uses of Amiga shareware software ourselves, we intend to offer a service to all Amiga shareware authors to enable them to accept credit card (and eventually electronic cash over internet) registrations, either via electronic mail, telephone, fax or postal mail. MasterCard, Visa, Access and, in the UK, Switch, can be accepted. This will be a service ONLY available to individuals and/or groups of amateur Amiga programmers, and at a very low cost. Commercial software authours can contact us for options for commercial electronic distribution and publishing. If you would like to take credit card payments for your software registration contact me at jralph@cix.compulink.co.uk We are trying to keep the costs for this service at the bare minimum as a service to the whole Amiga community (they will be comparable with the normal charges credit card companies demand). I will post a longer message later this week with full details once these costs and operating procedures have been sorted out. Jolyon - Almathera @endnode @node NEWS4 "Final Writer Release 5" @toc NEWS At long last SoftWood is happily announcing Final Writer Release 5. Ship date is estimated to be the first week of May, 1996. This first announcement is in the form of a list. Over the next week or so more details will be given both here and on our web site. The following list is not in any order of importance. Some features are minor while other are major. This list contains everything we have done to Final Writer in Release 5. 1. Added "Font" menu item that bypasses TypeSpecs requester and goes directly to the font requester. 2. Added predefined zoom magnification levels to the "View" menu. 3. Made the "Define Styles" requester operate in immediate update mode for faster more intuitive operations. 4. Implemented "Next" style. 5. Implemented "Based On" style. 6. Increased maximum main styles from 16 to 256. 7. Named Preference sets. 8. Named Stylesheet sets. 9. Begin new documents using templates. 10. Updated Grammar Correction System to the latest version. 11. AutoCorrect--correct as you type. 12. Datatype support for graphics. 13. Option to show section click-tabs without showing page click-tabs. 14. Added TypeSpec definitions to macros which can be named, saved and activated by buttons or menu items. 15. Ability to create a new style based on where the insertion point is. 16. Ability to modify existing style based on where the insertion point is. 17. ASL file requester option. 18. Ability to rearrange main sections. 19. FW's custom screen is now public. 20. Font preferences--ability to specify fonts to be preloaded. 21. Tables. 22. RTF import/export--this is a full, useful implementation unlike... 23. HTML export--create a useful web page from a Final Writer document. -- Woody @endnode @node NEWS5 "Chris's Button Strip v2.0" @toc NEWS TITLE Chris's Button Strip (CBS) VERSION 2.0 AUTHOR Christopher Schnurr Email : cjs@icbl.hw.ac.uk Snail : Sandstich Combe Lane Widemouth Bay Bude Cornwall UK DESCRIPTION CBS is a set of three button strips for Final Writer which cover most aspects of HTML editing. Using Final Writer's User extendable menus and button strips, a number of Arexx scripts have been written to allow both point and click and keyboard short cuts to the most used HTML web designing codes. FEATURES NWYSIWYG (NearlyWYSIWYG) viewing as editing : centered text is centered, italic text is italicised, headings are larger, etc.. o Keyboard and menu shortcuts o intelligent cursor and code positioning o Automatic list and table generation systems o 40 most common HTML codes in Arexx code (incl. tables & forms) o Equivalent text clips for use without Arexx o additional 20 customisable textclips o transparent saves to Ascii .html o use of HTML3.0 templates o different colours / fonts for HTML code o Source code of macros is not compiled or encrypted :) o fully documented in HTML format SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS CBS requires: * Final Writer R3 or above with Arexx support (for greatest benefit) (Final Writer Lite is untested but should work.) * ARexx (bundled with Workbench 2.04 and above.) * 217k of disk space (including html-ised documentation) * No special memory requirements (apart from running Final Writer) AVAILABILITY - WWW - http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/~cjs/cbs/index.html - Most Aminet sites. Examples of which are: USA: ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/text/misc/cbsv16.lha EUR: ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/aminet/text/misc/cbsv16.lha PRICE This editing suite is Chocware. To register, send chocolate particular to your home country. Once registered you will receive Version 2.0 and free further updates. Example Fees: Mint Hershey Bar (US) Dark Chocolate (Belgium) Viennese Truffles(Austria) Small Thorntons bag(UK) Irish Cadbury's product(EIRE/NI) DISTRIBUTABILITY The unregistered version is freely distributable if done in a non- commercial way. It is *NOT* to be distributed on magasine coverdisks or similar without the owner's explicit written consent. The registered version is *NOT* freely distributable. This suite of programs is copyright 1995, 96 by Christopher Schnurr. OTHER To encourage users to register (I'm hungry), version 1.6 has only the Arexx macros for button strip 1. This does however include most of the commonly used HTML codes, except for those needed for tables or forms. Version2.0 has three button strips and approximately 60 different functions involved in web authoring. @endnode @node NEWS6 "VDisk V2.6" @toc NEWS TITLE VDisk V2.6 (Update from V2.5) AUTHOR Etienne Vogt (Etienne.Vogt@obspm.fr) DESCRIPTION vdisk.device is a driver for a recoverable RAM disk. Main features are : - Up to 16 units with virtually unlimited size (512 MB) - Dynamic memory allocation and (optionnaly) deallocation - Full support of all AmigaDOS Filesystems. - Will survive the heaviest system crashes as long as its own data is not corrupted. - In case of a recovery failure, the cause can be reported by a support command. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS VDisk requires AmigaDOS 2.04 or higher (V37). AVAILABILITY On any aminet site. It was uploaded to : ftp://ftp.cnam.fr/pub/aminet/disk/misc/vdisk26.lha (22534) PRICE Free. DISTRIBUTABILITY Freeware (C) Copyright 1994-1996 by Etienne Vogt. CHANGES Some minor bugfixes and improvements to help surviving reset on some configurations. See the documentation for details. @endnode @node NEWS7 "Letter From Carl Sassenrath" @toc NEWS [This piece of mail has become the most ubiquitous letter in the Amiga community in the past week or so. Not only is it worth a read, but it gave me a chance to use the word "ubiquitous." From Carl Sassenrath, Viscorp's Director of Software, to a concerned Amiga user. -Jason] From: Carl S.[SMTP:carl@sassenrath.com] Sent: Friday, April 12, 1996 2:51 PM To: Peter Ostrowski Subject: Re: amiga? At 2:19 PM 4/12/96 -0400, Peter Ostrowski wrote: >HI carl.. Im a happy amiga user who just found out the company you work >for has just bought (almost) the amiga.. DO you have any mor einfo on >this.. I aslo heard that you worked on amiga dos os.. THATs cool.. Best >Dam Os I have ever used... If you have any info the what viscom has >plans for the amiga, Please email them to me.. I would be for ever >greatful.. > >thanks! >Pete >Peteo@student.umass.edu > >THe Amiga: Back for the Future What I have been telling people is not to worry. We are all Amiga lovers here. Unlike ESCOM or even Commodore, VIScorp does not have a single IBM PC person in the development group. We are all solid Amigans from the very beginning. Personally speaking, I don't plan on killing the Amiga. In fact, I'm hoping to build one killer Amiga! Carl Sassenrath Director of Software, VIScorp URL: www.vistv.com PS: Please feel free to post or forward this anywhere and everywhere, as I am getting swamped with the same email question from so many dedicated Amigans. Keep the faith! This is for the better! __________________________________________________________ Valid Addresses: EMAIL: carl@sassenrath.com (Please try this one first) or: carl@pacific.net (Only, if the above fails) or: carl@vistv.com URL: www.sassenrath.com or: www.vistv.com POST: PO Box 1510, Ukiah, CA 95482, USA NOTE: NO LONGER ON Compuserve, AOL, AppleLink, BIX, CIX or videostream.com @endnode @node NEWS8 "Oberon System V4" @toc NEWS TITLE Oberon System V4 for Amiga VERSION 1.2 AUTHOR Stefan Ludwig, Claudio Nieder, Ralf Degner E-Mail: ludwig@inf.ethz.ch, degner@pallas.amp.uni-hannover.de S-Mail: Stefan Ludwig Institut fuer Computersysteme ETH-Zentrum CH-8092 Zuerich DESCRIPTION Oberon System V4 for Amiga (O4A) is a full implementation of ETH Zurich's Oberon System V4. Oberon is both a programming language and an operating system developed by Prof. N. Wirth and Prof. J. Gutknecht. The Oberon System in key words: - Single-process multitasking - Garbage collector - memory will be released automatically if not needed anymore - Commandos: procedures that can be called like programs - Dynamic loading: modules are loaded and linked to the system during run-time (if necessary) - Text as a built-in abstract data type (for example a Minesweeper game as a letter (like OLE and OpenDOC)) - Graphical user interface A special advantage is the very high compatibility of the systems between implementations on different computers. System V4 implementations exist for Amiga, Mac, Power Mac, Windows (NT), Linux, IBM-RS6000, Sun-Sparc, HP-Workstations, NeXt, ... You can use a program written on one implementation on any other without change. O4A is a full implementation of the Oberon System V4 with all usual programs. The system runs in its own task and therefore you can use O4A and the Amiga OS at the same time. Specific features of the Amiga implementation are its incremental heap allocation, support of the Amiga clipboard and the capability of accessing IFF files. The O4A package contains: - A full Oberon-2 compiler - Development tools (Browser, Analyzer, Disassembler, ...) - XE, a comfortable 'editor' with layout functions - Kepler, an object-oriented 2D vector drawing program - Paint, a simple pixel-oriented paint program - A lot of additional tools (Draw, RX, AsciiCoder, ...) - Various text elements - VT100 terminal emulation - Games: Tetris and Minesweeper (with source) - Example sources and online documentation To get more information about the programming language and operating system Oberon have a look at the "Oberon and Amiga" WWW page: http://sun1.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/~nhbidegn/oa-e.html There you will find links to other Oberon information resources. NEW FEATURES - Problems with > 16 colors fixed - New Text-Elements - New docu (ReferenceCars.ps, Prog.Guide.Text, ....) - Several bugs fixes - Dialogs.lha - advanced GUI and very nice programming example - Expressions.lha - mathematical expressions within text documents - and many, many more (see Release.Notes.Text) SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS - Amiga with OS2.0 or higher - at least an MC68020 - a minimum of 1.5 MB free memory (2.5 MB recommended) - about 3 MB disk space - FPU for floating point calculations (without FPU Oberon-NonFPU.lha is required) AVAILABILITY The Home of Oberon is the ETH Zurich. There you can find many Oberon System implementations, especially the Amiga version: ftp://ftp.inf.ethz.ch/pub/Oberon/Amiga/V1.2/ Oberon.lha (1.1 MB) - main archive Oberon-NonFPU.lha (100 KB) - to use O4A without FPU Oberon-Src.lha (700 KB) - the full source of O4A Oberon-Fonts.lha (390 KB) - additional fonts Dialogs.lha (250kB) - advanced GUI Expressions.lha (130kB) - math expressions within text documents It is available in the Aminet directory dev/obero, too. PRICE It's free, but not PD. Please note the ReadMe file in every archive. DISTRIBUTABILITY Oberon System V4 for Amiga is (C)opyright 1990-96 by Claudio Nieder, Stefan Ludwig, Ralf Degner and the Institute for Computer Systems ETH Zurich. Some files in the archives are (C)opyright by other persons (for example Dialogs and Expressions). All files in the archives are freeware. You can use it in any way you like but you must not include part of it in a commercial product. @endnode @node NEWS9 "AmIRC v1.0" @toc NEWS TITLE AmIRC - The AmigaOS IRC Client VERSION 1.0 AUTHOR Oliver Wagner DESCRIPTION AmIRC is a fully featured GUI IRC Client, including builtin-DCC and ARexx scripting support. See the WWW site or the Readme for a thorough description of features. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS AmigaOS 2.04 is required (OS 3.1 suggested) Requires a TCP/IP stack compliant to the AmiTCP or as225r2 API. (e.g. AmiTCP 4.0demo, AmiTCP 4.2, as225r2, inet-225, Mlink). MUI 3.0 (3.3 suggested) AVAILABILITY http://www.vapor.com/AmIRC/ ftp://ftp.vapor.com/support/AmIRC/amirc10.lha ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/amiga/comm/amirc/amirc10.lha Also available on Aminet in /comm/tcp. PRICE Shareware (unrestricted demo version). Shareware fee is DM 35,-- or US$ 20. DISTRIBUTABILITY (C) 1995-96 Oliver Wagner (owagner@lsd.wupper.de) All Rights Reserved The package is freely distributable in unmodfied form. @endnode @node NEWS10 "Shock v1.2" @toc NEWS TITLE Shock - SlideShow editor and player VERSION 1.2 AUTHOR Vittorio Ferrari email: vega@tilink.ch Vittorio.Ferrari@unifr.ch fido : 2:301/231.39@fidonet DESCRIPTION A picture displayer that is able to generate and visualize SlideShows (sequences of images appearing in a defined order). Main features are : - Various graphic effects applyable to your pictures - Allows music modules to be played during the SlideShow - Continous visualizing (without stop and return to Workbench) - Images crypter - Shows every picture in a selected drawer, a single image or a SlideShow - Adapts fade effects to your graphic coprocessor (AGA or OCS/ECS) In the package you will find the player and an editor, wich will allow you to define your own SlideShows, selecting the sequence of pictures and their various features (maximum displaying time, appear and disappear effects, and so on). A short demo of Shock's skills is also included. Shock is particoulary designed for graphic astists, who can crypt their pictures, assemble them in an amazing SlideShow, add them a music background, and release something more attractive than a simply list of their images. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS OS 2.0 required by the editor. AGA chipset increases fading effects quality (Altought is NOT required) AVAILABILITY ftp://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/pub/aminet/gfx/misc/shock.lha (392478) PRICE Requested shareware fee is $8 US. DISTRIBUTABILITY The version available via aminet is a fully functional but old version; it is freely distributable. Registered users will receive the last version, wich is NOT freely distributable. OTHER For any question or suggestion please email me ! @endnode @node NEWS11 "MasterISO v1.23" @toc NEWS TITLE: MasterISO VERSION: v1.23 COMPANY: Asimware Innovations Inc. 600 Upper Wellington St., Unit D Hamilton, Ontario Canada L9A 3P9 Phone: (905)578-4916 Fax: (905)578-3966 EMail: info@asimware.com MasterISO v1.23 Maintenance Release ----------------------------------- We would like to announce the availability of MasterISO v1.23, which was released as of March 11th, 1996. This is a maintenance update for the MasterISO v1 package. Registered uses may contact us directly for information on obtaining this update. MasterISO v1.23 adds support for the Pinnacle RCD-5040 CD-R drive. With the recent decrease in CD-Writer pricing and the great interest in Amiga CD mastering, Asimware Innovations Inc. has decided to agressively reduce the cost of MasterISO. Our new retail price is $199.00 (US $), or $249.00 (Canadian $)! We hope that this new pricing will greatly increase the Amiga's stature in the CD mastering environment and provide a cost effective CD mastering solution to Amiga users. About MasterISO... ------------------ The MasterISO software package allows a user to control a CD-R recorder to create custom CD-ROM and CD-Audio discs. CD-ROM discs are formatted in the universal ISO 9660 format, compatible with Amiga, IBM, Macintosh and virtually any other CD-ROM equipped platform. CD-Audio discs are formatted to the Red Book standard and offer universal compatibility with standard CD players. For reference, our current list of supported CD-R drives is: - Yamaha CDR-100, CDR-102 - Sony CDU-920 - Pinnacle RCD-1000, RCD-202, RCD-5040 - Philips CDD-522, CDD-521, CDD2000 - Pioneer DW-S114X - HP 4020 Please contact us for a current list of tested CD-R and SCSI controller combinations. Asimware Innovations Inc. is an Amiga software development house specializing in CD-ROM and CD-Recordable technologies. Our current product line includes AsimCDFS, MasterISO, Texture Heaven, Texture Heaven 2 and PhotoCD Manager. Sincerely, Paul Reeves Asimware Innovations Inc. March 11th, 1996 @endnode @node NEWS12 "fMSX Amiga 0.8" @toc NEWS TITLE fMSX Amiga 0.8 AUTHOR Hans Guijt (h.guijt@inter.nl.net) DESCRIPTION fMSX Amiga emulates an MSX computer on an Amiga. Features include: - Full emulation of the MSX1 system. - Partial emulation of the MSX2 system (to be expanded in the future). - Support for reading/writing MSX disks. - Support for the SCC sound system. - Support for MSX memory sizes of up to 4Mb. (for those not in the know: MSX is an 8-bit computer system, similar to the C64) Software is not included with the package, but many packages (mostly games) can be found on FTP sites: ftp.saitama-u.ac.jp/pub/msx/ altair.komkon.com/pub/MSX/ ftp.funet.fi/pub/msx/ riaph.irkutsk.su/pub/ Hundreds of games are available from these sites, and some form a worthy addition to the Amiga software collection. Of course fMSX Amiga is fully multitasking, runs in an intuition screen, and has a font-sensitive user interface. NEW FEATURES v0.8 at last supports two joysticks! MSX2 features were expanded. VDP emulation is complete now, and screen 5 features sprites (admittedly in the wrong color but enough to make it useful). Two more megarom mapper options are now available, and the others have been improved. Many small improvements were made to the user interface, mostly on request by users. v0.8 is quite a bit faster than v0.7, and several bugs were removed. The most notable of these is the 'Konami-corrupted-graphics' bug. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS Required are: - Amiga OS 2.0 - 68020 processor - 400 kilobytes chip ram - 900 kilobytes other ram Recommended: - 68030 processor, at least 25MHz - Those 900 kilobytes of 'other' ram had better be fast ram! Note that fMSX Amiga does *not* require the AGA chipset. In fact it runs on any chipset upto and including graphics cards! AVAILABILITY fMSX Amiga 0.8 is available from any aminet site, such as: ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/emu/fmsx_0.8.lha PRICE It's free. DISTRIBUTABILITY fMSX Amiga 0.8 is publically supported freeware. If you are interested in the source, and you're not afraid of function pointers and huge amounts of assembly intermixed with C, you can request it from me. If someone wants to do a special version (and I can think of several possibilities, such as a version that uses the MMU for optimized Z80 emulation, or a version that has been optimized for the CyberGfx system), contact me. @endnode @node NEWS13 "PLog v1.1" @toc NEWS TITLE PLog VERSION 1.1 RELEASE DATE 03.04.1996 AUTHOR Kai Hofmann (i07m@zfn.uni-bremen.de) (http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~i07m) DESCRIPTION Generates log-file entries in PhoneLog standard (SGML) format. Similar to AmiLog, can be used with AmiTCP/IP. NEW FEATURES New installer-script for AmiTCP/IP 4.3 AVAILABILITY ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/comm/amiex/PLog.lha And all other Aminet sites. PRICE For NON-COMMERCIAL USE this is Giftware! Permission for COMMERCIAL USE is only given by an extra available commercial license that must be validated! Contact me directly for this license, because it will be individually handed out per your needs! DISTRIBUTION You can copy and distribute this source code as long as you do not take more than $5 for one disk or $40 for one CD! @endnode @node NEWS14 "AmiFTP v1.264" @toc NEWS TITLE AmiFTP VERSION 1.264 AUTHOR Magnus Lilja e-mail: lilja@lysator.liu.se Postal Address: Magnus Lilja Alsδttersgatan 9C:17 S-582 51 LINKΦPING SWEDEN DESCRIPTION AmiFTP is an easy to use ftp-client with a GUI built on the ClassAct BOOPSI system. Some of the features are: * Localized (Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish catalogs are available at the moment) * ARexx interface * Resume transfer * Multiselect when up/downloading files * Caches the 5 latest directories * Has hotlist with submenus * Online AmigaGuide-help Make sure to use the installerscript and follow the instructions there before you start AmiFTP. This is really necessary in order to install the ClassAct classes on your system. NEW FEATURES The major new features are the possibility to have submenus in the hotlist and that AmiFTP now supports both bsdsocket.library (AmiTCP) and socket.library (as225-alike) TCP/IP-stacks in one binary. The ARexx command-set has also been extended. An Aminet search script written in ARexx (by Sami Itkonen) is also included. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS AmigaDOS 2.0 or higher. One of the following TCP/IP stacks: AmiTCP 3.x or higher AS225r2, I-Net 225, CPR TCP/IP Base Kit or mlink. AmiFTP also needs ClassAct gadgets, which are included in this archive. AVAILABILITY AmiFTP 1.264 is on Aminet, in comm/tcp/AmiFTP-1.264.lha. ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/comm/tcp/AmiFTP-1.264.lha (216503) It's also available from the AmiFTP www-page: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~lilja/AmiFTP.html PRICE AmiFTP is Shareware. This version is not crippled in any way which means that there's no extra features available for those who register, but this shouldn't stop you from supporting this program. The Shareware fee is $15. See the documentation in the archive for more information. DISTRIBUTABILITY AmiFTP is Copyright 1995-1996 by Magnus Lilja. Read AmiFTP.guide for information about distributing AmiFTP. @endnode @node NEWS15 "UMS RFC v0.12" @toc NEWS TITLE UMS RFC VERSION 0.12 AUTHOR Stefan Becker E-Mail: stefanb@yello.ping.de World Wide Web: http://www.ping.de/sites/yello/ Address: Bonner Ring 68 D-50374 Erftstadt GERMANY DESCRIPTION UMS (Universal Message System) is a database system specialized in the handling of mail and news messages. UMS RFC is a package for UMS which allows you to receive and send mail and news messages with the following protocols: - UUCP (Unix to Unix CoPy) - NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) - POP3 (Post Office Protocol V3) - SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) NEW FEATURES Changes since UMS RFC 0.11: - Library interface changed. Please make sure that you only use the programs and library of this version together. - Support for systems without own domain name added. - The variable rfc.pathname is now optional. - Support for ESMTP added. Currently implemented is the SIZE extension. - Added new tool umsrfcprint for printing RFC messages. - Added Installer script. - Several bug fixes. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS - AmigaOS 2.04 (V37) or better - UMS V11 or better - AmiTCP 3.0 or better (if you want to use NNTP, POP3 or SMTP) AVAILABILITY UMS RFC 0.12 is available on Aminet, e.g. ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/comm/ums/umsrfc.lha (341744) PRICE Free DISTRIBUTABILITY Freely distributable, (c) 1992-96 Stefan Becker @endnode @node NEWS16 "Analay v1.12" @toc NEWS TITLE Analay VERSION 1.12 AUTHOR Marc Necker (Marc@buster.apl.s.shuttle.de) DESCRIPTION There were some people who had problems with the printout in the Layout Mode. This bug fix should eliminate this bug. What is Analay? Analay is an analysis program which provides all the standard functions such a program needs. The special feature of this program is the integrated DTP mode which allows you to layout a page with full WYSIWYG! The program is divided into two independent parts running at the same time as separate tasks. The Math Mode contains all functions for plotting and analyzing function graphs. It's no problem to create the derivative of functions or to calculate the zeros or the area between functions to name only three of the many facilities. Moreover, the design of the graphs can be changed in many ways. You also can place texts, points, etc. in the windows or hatch an area. Tables, lists and legends can be created as well. The Layout Mode contains a small, but complete DTP program with full WYSIWYG and Intellifont support! It allows you to layout a page with function graphs, tables, lists, legends, text blocks, etc. Moreover, it knows formulas which no program apart form TeX was able to display or print up to know! The page can be printed in highest printer resolution! NEW FEATURES None since V1.11. I'm currently working on V2.0 which will have a fontsensitive and resizeable GUI. It will be completely multithreaded and support drag and drop. DISTRIBUTABILITY The Analay archive without key file can be distributed freely as long as all files are kept together. You also may place it on PD-collections or CDs. REQUIREMENTS Analay runs on every Amiga with AmigaOS 2.04 or higher and at least 1.5MByte RAM. It's better if you have got more RAM and a harddisk. To use all of the program's features AmigaOS 3.0 or higher is required (e.g. color printout). RELEASE DATE February 24, 1996 HOST NAME Any AmiNet-Server i.e. ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/math/Analay112Patch.lha (91422) PRICE Shareware-fee of 20US-$/30DM. See the documentation for further information. Some functions are disabled in the unregistered version, e.g. the print-function. This update is free of any charge. @endnode @node NEWS17 "PhoneLog Developer Kit v1.1" TITLE PhoneLog Developer Kit VERSION 1.1 RELEASE DATE 15.03.1996 AUTHOR Kai Hofmann (i07m@zfn.uni-bremen.de) (http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~i07m) DESCRIPTION Generator and parser for programs that want to write and read log file entries about modem connections in a standard SGML format. Full ANSI-C/C++ source code included. NEW FEATURES - Important bug fixes - Improved code SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS ANSI-C or/and C++ Compiler. AVAILABILITY ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/dev/c/PhoneLogDevKit.lha And all other Aminet sites. PRICE For NON-COMMERCIAL USE this is Giftware! (Non-commercial includes Giftware and Shareware!) Permission for COMMERCIAL USE is only given by an extra available commercial license that must be validated! Contact me directly for this license, because it will be individually handed out per your needs! But in both cases you have to follow the guideline below: You "must" send me a full version of your product at no cost including free updates! DISTRIBUTION You can copy and distribute this source code as long as you do not take more than $5 for one disk or $40 for one CD! @endnode @node NEWS18 "PopPhone v2.2" @toc NEWS TITLE PopPhone VERSION 2.2 AUTHOR Jon Rocatis - jon@funcom.com DESCRIPTION PopPhone is a freely-distributable phone/address book commodity. It hasn't got a zillion features, but is instead small and effective. (Executable is approx. 24K) FEATURES - 100% font sensitive - Supports the Clipboard - Keyboard and/or mouse operated - Your Amiga can dial the phone numbers for you if you have a modem - Online context sensitive AmigaGuide help (English and German) - Print option. Prints a single entry or the whole phonebook - Style guide compliant - Localized (English, German, French and Danish at the moment) Catalog files included for making additional languages - Easy to install. Uses "Installer" SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS MUI 2.3 or better installed AmigaOS 2.0 or better AmigaOS 2.1 or better is required for the localization AVAILABILITY Available on Aminet ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/biz/dbase/pphone22.lha (approx. 26K) PRICE Kind words to the author :-) DISTRIBUTABILITY Freeware @endnode @node NEWS19 "Muse Interface Development System" @toc NEWS TITLE Muse Interface Development System VERSION Release Version 1 AUTHOR Michael Sparks. mps102@bridge.anglia.ac.uk csbs94mps@bridge.anglia.ac.uk http://www.anglia.ac.uk/~mps102 (nb under construction! Is also Muse's web site!) 40 James Street, Cambridge, CB1 1HX. Tel: 01223 563995 (+44 1223 563995) DESCRIPTION Muse is an evolving project with its end goal being highly usable, user configurable, interchangeable, extensible programs. This version is the first step towards that goal, and is aimed at programmers using the language AmigaE. The system is a set of modules with the following features: The ability to define most multiply windowed interfaces (including menus, gadgets, keyboard shortcuts etc) which can be script controlled via REXX, just by declaring them. The processing of these many and varied inputs however is via a simple and standardised system consisting of two components: The events processing system and virtual variables. It is also efficient - the example paint program had to have code inserted into it to slow it down, and I work on an A600... The same program is about 30K in size compiled... The distribution includes: o A full tutorial taking you from opening a window and customising it, all the way through to a paint program and simple database. The source to the simple examples is included in a hypertext form as well as plain text form so that ease of reference when reading the tutorial is not sacrificed when it comes to compilation. o A _FULLY_ hypertexted on-line reference document - with plain text version for those who don't like hypertext (?!) - which deals with every part of Muse from the syntax of minor parts to conceptual explanations of other major parts. o Two quick reference guides for day-to-day use containing the key information needed to use Muse to the full. (each fits on one side of A4 when printed) o 52 standard images (supplied as icons since everyone who has a workbench disk has an icon editor) for use in _MENUS_ and gadgets. o Although the support modules are subject to change 5 of them which are useful in their own right have had their useful bits documented And if all that wasn't enough for you, it even has it's own web page as on-line support. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS An Amiga with 2.0x upwards of the operating system. Amiga E version 3.x upwards REGISTERED! (It's worth it) (However some of the sub-code will work with the unregistered version, so it's still worth a look) AVAILABILITY Aminet, dev/e directory: (eg) ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/aminet/dev/e/muse.lha (168303) ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/aminet/dev/e/muse.readme (3.5K) website: (This contains current documentation) http://www.anglia.ac.uk/~mps102 PRICE FREE! (Copy as you like - make no profit) If you use it though, you are required to let me know what you think of it. Politely of course! DISTRIBUTABILITY FREEWARE, I retain the copyright. OTHER Amiga E is Wouter van Oortmersson's BRILLIANT programming language. It is his ideal for a programming language (according to his docs). Muse is my idea of a decent interface programming system. April will see the availability of a printed manual. Mid '96 will see the availability of the registered version. Try it! You might like it. (It is free after all!) Enjoy! @endnode @node NEWS20 "Audio Hardware Interface" @toc NEWS TITLE AHI - Audio Hardware Interface VERSION Beta release 1 AUTHOR Martin Blom DESCRIPTION Device-independent audio, first try. This is a beta release of the AHI audio system. The intention of this release is to gather opinions about the design and attract programmers using the system and/or contribute with sound card drivers. Quick overview: * Driver based Each supported sound card is controlled by a library-based audio driver. For a 'dumb' sound card, a new driver should be written in a few hours. For a 'smart' sound card, it is possible to utilize an on-board DSP, for example, to maximize performance and sound quality. Avalable today are working but unfinished drivers for Paula (8/14/14c bit) Wavetools * Fast, powerful mixing routines (yeah, right... haha) The library's mixing routines mix 8- or 16-bit signed samples located in Fast-RAM and outputs 16-bit mono or stereo (with stereo panning if desired) data, using any number of channels (as long as 'any' means less than 128...). Tables can be used speed the mixing up (especially when using 8-bit samples). The samples can have any length (including odd) and can have any number of loops. * Support for non-realtime mixing By providing a timing feature, it is possible to create high- quality output even if the processing power is lacking, by saving the output to disk, for example as an IFF AIFF or 8SXV file. A driver for sample rendering is not available yet, but it is being worked on. * Audio database Uses ID codes, much like Screenmode IDs, to select the many parameters that can be set. The functions to access the audio database are not too different from those in 'graphics.library'. The library also features a requester to get an ID code from the user. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS AmigaOS release 2. 68020 processor or higher. AVAILABILITY Aminet, for example: ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/aminet/dev/misc/ahi.lha WWW: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~lcs/ahi.html PRICE Free. DISTRIBUTABILITY Copyright ©1994-1996 Martin Blom. Freely distributable in unmodified form. @endnode @node NEWS21 "Aminet CD 11" @toc NEWS TITLE Aminet CD 11 AUTHOR Urban D. Mueller (umueller@aminet.org) CONTENTS Aminet CD 11 contains, you already guessed it, about 1 gig of freely distributable software. The newest archive included is from March 2nd. Apart from the new software, the CD concentrates on maps collected from various sources. The space is used as follows (after decompression): 670M of software newer than Aminet CD 10 (all time high!) 150M of high resolution maps covering most areas of the world 80M of top downloads 20M of commercial software: XiPaint 3.2, full version XiPaint is a nice 24-bit paint program that works gfx boards and just about any image format. It is licensed to the buyer of the CD only, and not freely distributable. Check the upgrade offer that comes with it. The freely distributable part is composed as follows: 500 mods, most of them new 200 utilities 200 communcations programs 800 programs of other categories plus 700 maps in 24-bit JPEG format, covering most areas of the world. The maps have an index that is sorted by continent, and a search facility. ACCESS SOFTWARE Still the well known Amigaguide based user interface with extensive search facilities. Some bugs fixed. Included is now a search tool for owners of single Aminet CDs (ie people who do not own Aminet Sets). PRICES The CD can be ordered from the following addresses: (credit cards OK) Germany: Stefan Ossowski (English spoken) Tel: +49-201-788778 Fax: +49-201-798447 Email: stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de Price: DM 25 USA: Fred Fish Tel: +1-800-804-0833 Email: orders@ninemoons.com Price: $19.95 Prices exclude shipping. Subscriptions are available. A complete index is found in docs/lists/Aminet-CD-11.lha Authors of software on the CD are entitled to one free CD. Send HELP FREEBIES to aminet-server@wuarchive.wustl.edu for more info. Aminet Set 1 and Aminet Set 2 are still available and give you, together with CD 9 to 11, a complete snapshot of Aminet. @endnode @node NEWS22 "MoronCX v1.0" @toc NEWS TITLE MoronCX - The commodity which does not suck VERSION 1.0 AUTHOR Thomas Eicher Hans-Schmidmayerstr. 26 85435 Erding t.eicher@hsp.zer.de thomas.eicher@x3network.net http://royal.owl.de/~eicher/ DESCRIPTION Basically, this is a programm that will increase the coolness factor of your amiga by severals degrees. If your amiga sucks, this program might work as a de-sukka-pacator. Right. See, for the Mac there's a program called SimB&B. It will play random Beavis and Butthead samples at random intervals. But Macs suck, because there's no multitasking. So you can either have a Mac which does not suck (running SimB&B) but can't do anything else or you can have a Mac which sucks. Well, I got an Amiga which does not suck by definition. It got multitasking, so the only thing missing is SimB&B. Well, actually MoronCX is a lot better than that. FEATURES o It plays _your_ favorite 8SVX samples off your disk drive, you aren't limited to built-in samples o You can still work as if it weren't running o Like every good CX, MoronCX can be given a hotkey, or be remote controlled via Exchange. o You can determine the exact minimum and maximum delay between two samples o You can have MoCX shuffle your samples, or arrange them in a order you like o It is startable from WB, from WBStartup or from a shell o It will always load and save it's config from and to it's icon's tooltypes. o You can select a volume which will be calculated into the sample's internal volume level. o It doesn't use MUI o There will be lotsa ready-to-run sample packs for MoCX You're still reading ? Reading sucks. Better install MoCX now. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS 0 AmigaOs 2.0+ Some 8SVX samples or sample pack While you're at downloading, why not try Aminet:util/cdity/MoCX_BnB.lha AVAILABILITY The package has been uploaded to AmiNET so it should be available from your local AmiNET provider, for example: ftp://ftp.uni-paderborn.de/aminet/util/cdity/MoronCX10.lha 54265 Bytes PRICE If you are the programmer of a shareware product for the Amiga, I consider it only fair that you send me a registered version and/or a keyfile for your product. If you use this program regularly, please send me an email and consider registering. Registering is free. DISTRIBUTABILITY MoronCX is copyrighted 1995,96 by Thomas Eicher. Permission to use is granted to everybody. All rights reserved. It may be freely distributed in its original form and with its unmodified documentation. @endnode @node NEWS23 "Tyschtschenko's Speech" @toc NEWS Keynote from Petro Tyschtschenko, April 13 1996 Press conference at World of Amiga in London Ladies and Gentlemen, First of all, I'd like to thank you for being here at this first World of Amiga show in the UK this year. As you might most certainly have heard already, our company, Amiga Technologies GmbH is about to be sold by ESCOM to VIScorp. The process, engaged by the signature of a binding letter of understanding between ESCOM, VIScorp and Amiga has been announced on Thursday this week. I will use this opportunity to introduce you Mr. William Buck, president and CEO of VIScorp. I'm quite sure that Bill will say a few words afterwards. A lot of questions arise. Why is this happening ? Who is VIScorp ? What does this mean for Amiga ? In 1995, when ESCOM took over the intellectual property of the former Commodore, ESCOM was in a financially good shape. The year 1994 had been excellent and the corporate policy was set to expansion. A multimedia company was formed. The decisions taken at this time were good and ESCOM saved the Amiga computer from its bad destiny. Amiga Technologies was founded and Amiga computers were brought back to a demanding market. Strategic decisions were taken to ensure the venue of new technology based models as soon as possible. We have achieved all this and we are proud of that performance. Of course, all these projects and plans are to be financed. it was clear from the beginning that it would take some time for a break-even point to be reached. The company created in may 1995 only could begin with sales in mid-September. We have then sold 40 thousand A1200 , 13 thousand monitors and 2000 A4000T machines worldwide until now, which is a satisfying result. As you might be aware of, ESCOM is currently facing a quite difficult financial situation. A bad christmas season and inventory write offs were the main reasons for this. This situation of course is also directly affecting Amiga Technologies. The fact is that ESCOM currently does not have the financial resources needed to support the still ongoing costs of our operation, especially advertising and research & development. To continue a successfull Amiga business, a solution to this situation has to be found. I checked a lot of possibilities, I looked into a lot of alternatives. Ladies and Gentlemen, I personnaly think that VIScorp is one of the best solutions. It is a very interesting opportunity for our future. Last year, in december, a license agreement was signed between Amiga Technologies and VIScorp, for the making of the Amiga set-top box. This product is network oriented and needs a system like the Amiga with its video abilities and tight operating system. The relationship between Amiga Technologies and VIScorp built up from this time on became closer and closer. VIScorp is a research & development oriented company. These research efforts are based on the Amiga technology for use in set top boxes. Former Commodore engineers work for VIScorp, which will of course be an appreciable synergy for the development of Amiga in general. The set-top box market is huge and will be a fantastic engine for our activities. As I told our staff yesterday, this procedure is not affecting our daily business and ongoing projects, as well as my position as the president of the company. We want the migration to be made as smooth and transparent as possible, for our company and also for our business partners and the Amiga community. I am confident that this is a good chance for us to be successful in the future. When this deal will be finalised, the Amiga technology will return to an American company, which understands our technology and its manufacturing. Thank you very much. Regards, Gilles Bourdin -- Gilles Bourdin / Amiga Technologies GmbH Public Relations Email to: gbo@amiga.de URL: HTTP://www.amiga.de @endnode @node NEWS24 "Wonder Computers International" @toc NEWS WONDER COMPUTERS INTERNATIONAL LAUNCHED April 8, 1996--Ottawa, Canada Some resurrections take longer than others. In late January, Wonder Computers Incorporated of Ottawa, Canada, one of North America's largest Amiga-only corporations, entered bankruptcy proceedings. The company, consisting of a six-store retail arm, a budding engineering division, a distribution network across the continent, and an Information Technologies division responsible for the previous month's World of Amiga show in Toronto, was unable to cover a recalled loan despite record sales just a week prior to the crisis. The company had little choice but to submit to court-supervised liquidation. WCi founder and CEO Mark Habinski addressed a concerned Amiga public when the bankruptcy proceedings began. He announced his intention to secure additional outside funding in order to procure some or all of the Wonder inventory, property, and holdings in order to start a new, more financially sound company to advance the cause of the Amiga in North America. On April 4, 1996, over two months after the situation began, the bankruptcy trustees from the firm of Ernst and Young announced that the tender made on behalf of the new Wonder organization had been accepted. Pending completion of the transaction due on or before April 15th, Wonder Computers International will pick up where Wonder Computers Incorporated left off. Wonder Computers International acquired the inventory and capital equipment of the two largest and most successful WCi retail locations, Ottawa and Toronto. In addition, the inventory and equipment of the Ottawa corporate headquarters was purchased, as were the rights to the Wonder name. The new WCi will initially consist of a single retail and corporate headquarters located in Wonder's strongest market, Ottawa. This site, coupled with a Sales office in Vancouver, British Columbia, will form the nucleus from which a pattern of measured, financially backed growth into more cities will be undertaken. Habinski has indicated that a Toronto-based retail operation will be launched as soon as possible, and that a fourth operation in one of the remaining former Wonder markets is possible before the end of the year. In addition, it is quite possible that at least one former Wonder retail location will join with the new company as a privately owned affiliate. The primary markets for the new WCi will initially be in direct, retail sales and in product distribution across the continent. The WCi Distribution branch plans to investigate and re-establish the distribution relationships of the old company, as well as forging new strong links in other sectors of the Amiga market. In addition, Wonder Computers International has already begun investigating venues for the planned World of Amiga Toronto show, to be held at the end of 1996. The new Information Technologies division will focus on working with existing service providers in order to ensure easy, efficient network access for Amiga users--initially in Wonder home markets, but progressively across more of Canada and North America as time goes on. Lazarus Engineering will not be a branch of the new company. Wonder wholeheartedly wishes the new company the best of luck. Mark Habinski will serve as President and CEO of Wonder Computers International and will sit on the Board of Directors. The initial management and staff of the new company has been carefully hand-picked by Habinski from the ranks of the old, but as the company expands there will be a need for experienced Amiga-industry employees, and the ranks of the old company will be invaluable resources. The uncertainty has ended. From the ashes of Wonder Computers Incorporated comes Wonder Computers International, dedicated to serving the North American Amiga community. @endnode @node NEWS25 "VIScorp Acquires Amiga Technologies" @toc NEWS VISCORP USA AND ESCOM AG ANNOUNCE LETTER OF UNDERSTANDING FOR ACQUISITION OF AMIGA TECHNOLOGIES BY VISCORP Heppenheim, Germany and Chicago, IL, April 12, 1996 -- ESCOM AG, a German computer manufacturer and reseller and Visual Information Services Corp. (Nasdaq: VICP, Bulletin Board), a developer of interactive TV (ITV) set-top-boxes to enhance television use and viewing by providing Internet access and electronic communications function, today jointly announced that a binding letter of understanding has been signed between the companies. The letter states that Chicago-based VIScorp would acquire Amiga Technologies, including the intellectual properties of the former Commodore Business Machines, excepted Commodore trademarks. The transaction value is approximately US $40 million. Terms were not disclosed, and the pending acquisition would be subject to approval by both companies' boards of directors. "This intended acquisition is part of VIScorp's strategy to build market leadership in the fast-growing field of ITV", said William Buck, Chief Executive Officer. "As a result, we would own Amiga intellectual properties, including several that are currently used in our set top-box, Electronic Device (ED(). We would also have control over the supplied chip sets used in ED as well as Amiga inventories and access to the company's current sales and distribution channels." Commenting the proposed acquisition, Helmut Jost, chief executive of ESCOM AG, said: "VIScorp has a clear vision of the Amiga technology potential for ITV applications. We are eager to support and work together over the term of the letter of understanding to ensure a smooth transition between the two companies. VIScorp anticipates the support of ongoing European sales of popular models such as the A4000T and the A1200 as well as the current developments and future releases of Amiga Technologies." Petro Tyschtschenko, president of Amiga Technologies stated "I am looking forward to being able to take advantage of the research and development support potential that an Amiga-related company like VIScorp can provide." Commenting that the primary objective of the proposed acquisition is to give VIScorp full access to the Amiga technology to support development of its ITV device, Mr. Buck noted: "Our intention is to rapidly develop and begin manufacturing TV set-top interactive boxes -- products that give home users capabilities such as telephone reception and dial up capabilities, facsimile, video games, pay-per-view options, electronic mail, and access to on-line services, including the Internet." Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Contact : Gilles Bourdin Amiga Technologies Berliner Ring 89 D-64625 Bensheim Tel +49 6252 709 195 Fax +49 6252 709 520 email: gbo@amiga.de HTTP://www.amiga.de @endnode @node NEWS26 "Lazarus Engineering Corporation" @toc NEWS LAZARUS ENGINEERING CORPORATION --------------------------------------------------------------------- Ottawa, Ontario * (613) 798-3617 * Fax: (613) 798-6923 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Date: April 15, 1996 Contact: Lynda Harju v: (613) 798-3617, f: (613) 798-6923, e: lazarus@achilles.net Lazarus Engineering Corporation Secures Amiga Intellectual Property Ottawa, Ontario - Lazarus Engineering Corporation would like to announce that it's tender to purchase the Intellectual Property assets of the former Wonder Computers Inc. has been accepted by their trustees in bankruptcy. Commercial software products included with the transaction include: DesignWorks, PowerManager, Flow, QuickWrite, Profonts, WordMaker, Mac2Dos, Dos2Dos and Disk2Disk. Commercial hardware products included the KB-10 IBM-Amiga keyboard protocol converter. All other intellectual property including unfinished software and hardware projects, marketing materials, commercial graphics, in-house as well as out-sourced developed utilities, and production stock were also included in the transaction. Mr. Steve R. Cockwell, President and CEO of Lazarus Engineering, has renewed his committment to the Amiga platform with this acquisition. "Our strength is in the people around us. From our talented engineers, technical writers, graphic artists, and support staff to the customers around the world that have shown us their support through the EMails, Faxes and letters that we have received in the past few months. It takes an entire community to make a company like this possible, and we are proud to say that we are a part of the one called Amiga." Mr. Cockwell also noted that production will soon begin again for Lazarus Engineering's newest commercial products: KB-10 and DesignWorks 2.0, and that a special promotion for these will be announced shortly. Lazarus Engineering Corporation was founded in 1993 by Steve R. Cockwell, a long-time veteran of Corel Corporation in Ottawa, Ontario. The company can be reached for comment about any of the above information during regular office hours (8:30 to 17:00 EST, Monday to Friday) or via EMail at the above address. @endnode @node NEWS27 "Team Amiga Call To Arms" @toc NEWS *** From: Gary Peake (1:106/7511.1) A CALL TO ARMS FOR ALL TEAM AMIGA MEMBERS: In this time of shuffling, it is very important that VisCorp have a clear understanding of the support and unity of the Amiga Computer user base. I have seen the hard work put in by many of the managers at Amiga Technologies. I have seen some of our staunchest vendors hanging tough with us because they care and they believe. I have seen and heard from many of the user base who really want to see a resurgance of the Amiga, it's vendors, and it's market position. I have had email after email from programmers asking for info on developer support for the Amiga. Before the pundants and gloomers crank up their Macs and clones, it is important that we take a moment to really 'think' about what is happening. VisCorp was in this almost from the beginning with Escom/Amiga Technologies. They see the value of the Amiga custom chipset and it's slim OS for the set top box market. They are willing to pay $40 million (US) for the tech and all that comes with it. They are very interested in having an Internet box in the low end market and they have said that they will continue supporting the big box market as well. I could be totally wrong in my analysis. That will be for history to judge. But, my take on the sale of Amiga Technologies to VisCorp is that this is a good move that will give some needed working capital to the platform we all love. Change is not always bad. Many times change is needed to advance the ideas that we hold dear. I really think that this change may be the very spark needed to get the Amiga it's North American presence in a way that will benefit all of us as well as helping to increase the user base in the European markets. Many have followed my lead and have listened to my predictions here. I will make one more 'Mystic Meg' for all concerned ... stay the course, do not bend in your avid support, show VisCorp that we are united behind them the same way we have been with Amiga Technologies, and they will make us proud! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - This weekend I have received literally hundreds of emails from Amiga users all over the world that have gotten my email address either from Fido or from posts on Usenet. Each and every one is asking what to do. I have chatted with both VisCorp and Amiga Technologies and have been assured by both sides that all is well. But, I am still not positive that VisCorp understands that we want and need the 1200, the 4000T, the Walker and the Power Amiga. I have also spoken with some of the most ardent supporters of the Amiga who are urging that we all take some united stand in a POSITIVE way to let VisCorp know our feelings on keeping Amiga Technologies and the R&D for Walker and Power Amiga ongoing. I have given this a lot of thought. I really feel that it may be the right time to let VisCorp know what we are willing to buy from them and from Amiga Technologies. BUT, this MUST be done in a very professional, non-FANATICAL manner! Acting a fool will get us no where! The following are email addresses to VisCorp and Amiga Technologies. Please send a nice, one or two paragraph note telling them that you support the Walker, the Power Amiga, the 1200, the 4000T, Amiga Technologies, and Viscorp! Let them know that we are a united user base and that we care about what happens to the Amiga platform and are willing to put our money where our mouths are! Amiga Technologies info@amiga-tech.de general mail bot gbo@amiga.de Gilles Bourdin VisCorp fradulovic@aol.com Florence Radulovic drosen@ix.netcom.com David Rosen kreck@ix.netcom.com Steve Kreckman carl@sassenrath.com Carl Sassenrath Again ... NICE will get their attention and a positive response! Do NOT delay! Pass this to every bbs in your area! Get anyone and everyone you know with an Amiga to send an email message now so that VisCorp can see that there IS a market across the world for the Amiga platform! (Team AMIGA is a grassroots movement designed to give support to all AMIGA users, to Amiga Technologies, VisCorp, and AMIGA vendors!) @endnode @node NEWS28 "ESC Membership Form" @toc NEWS ESC Membership Form (European Software Creators) ------------] ESC Application Form [------------- Name: Email: Computer Type (eg. PC, MAC, SunSparc): Computer Details (ram, harddisk etc): Software Tools (ie. programming languages etc): Interests/Reasons for joining ESC: Membership type: __ Existing Shareware Author __ ESC Developer __ Existing Group ------------------------------------------------- [Existing Author] Please include the names and details of any applications you currently have developed and wish to release through ESC. ------------------------------------------------- [ESC Developer] 1. Can you write HTML? 2. Are you interested in doing Research? 3. Would you be interested in helping standardise and create standards for ESC? 4. Would you be interested in beta-testing? 5. Do you have news access? 6. Do you currently have any ideas for a new application? 7. Would you be interested in working on a new OS? 8. What platform/computer would you be mainly interested in developing for?? 9. Do you have a WWW Homepage? 10. Please feel free to add anything else :> ----------------------------------------------------------- [Existing Software Group] 1.What is the name of the group? 2.Have you developed any applications? 3.Are you currently working on any applications? 4.What is the main type of application you develop? 5.What is your main interest in joining ESC? 6.Is your group a company or a usergroup/voluntree arrangement? ------------------------------------------------------------ Please add any further information here -> ------------------------------------------------------------ Return to 9517693@ul.ie @endnode @node NEWS37 "Ravebusters Homepage" @toc NEWS I'd like to announce The Ravebusters Homepage for inclusion into Amiga Report. The Ravebusters mainly are 3 people from Germany (Saarland) who have already done 322 modules (all on the Amiga of course) ranging from house to hardcore-techno. A couple of those modules have been uploaded to the Aminet and have already made it to the top downloads. The Ravebusters have done their first live-act recently with a second to come on the 4th of March - and all that with ProTracker-made modules on the Amiga :) The homepage gives you the opportunity to get information about the people behind songs like the greatly acclaimed "95RaversMegaMix" or "95HouseMegaMix", the ability to download 6 of their songs and much more. Try it at "http://coli.uni-sb.de/~rade/rbs/the_rbs.html" Have a nice time, Ralph Debusmann @endnode @node NEWS29 "The Internet Starter Package" @toc NEWS INTRODUCING THE INTERNET STARTER PACKAGE FOR THE AMIGA: NOW SHIPPING ACROSS CANADA The Internet Starter Package contains all the preconfigured software and instructions to get your AMIGA connected to the Internet. Included is your first months access through the Internet Direct and Istar Networks. Local dial-up numbers are provided for 85% of Canada. The retail price is $29.95 Canadian, which is the regular price of one months access to the Internet. Included is the following preconfigured software: AmiTCP 4.0 Demonstration version: Magical User Interface 3.3 Auto Dialer for Slip or PPP connection Amosaic 2.03 and 1.2 WWW browsers GUI-FTP Graphical FTP client Telnet Client Term 4.5 for all your communication needs ; BBS and Slip/PPP Minimum Requirements: Any Amiga with Workbench 2.x or better, One half meg of CHIP RAM 2 megs of fast ram A hard disk with 6 megs of free space Recommended System: 020 or better processor Workbench 3.x AGA or 24 bit graphics card 2 megs Chip RAM 4 megs fast ram Hard disk with 20 megs free space (for downloading/ftp) This package is fully supported with online help via Email, amiga@idirect.com or amiga@inforamp.net and FTP sites containing all the latest Internet software for the Amiga, pretested and approved for our subscribers. Regular Updates are available from ftp.idirect.com/pub/amiga/slip or at ftp.inforamp.net/pub/amiga as well as the web pages at http://web.idirect.com/~amiga and http://www.amiga-support.ca (available April 30 1996) The Amiga Internet Starter Kit is NOW available at the following dealers: CONPUTE 333 King Street West Oshawa, Ontario L1J 2J8 (905)433-7033 http://web.idirect.com/~conpute conpute@idirect.com Comspec 85 Wingold Ave. Toronto, Ontario (416)785-3553 http://www.comspec.com comspec@idirect.com joe@comspec.com Computer & You 6 Points Plaza Toronto, Ontario (416)231-0205 comyou@idirect.com National Amiga Oakville, Ontario (905)845-1949 http://www.interlog.com/~gscott/NationalAmiga.html national@idirect.com Randomize Computers Tottenham, Ontario (905)939-8371 randomiz@idirect.com Visual Visions GeorgeTown, Ontario (905)873-4959 visualvz@idirect.com To order by phone, if you do not have an Amiga Dealer in your City, call 1800-848-6786. Quote Vendor Certificate number "250010 AMIGA" and you will be given instructions for downloading the Amiga Internet Software. For More Information please call 905-723-0930 voice or 905-576-1997 fax iSTAR Dialup Points of Presence NOVA SCOTIA AMHERST (902)667-4096 ANTIGONISH (902)863-0211 BRIDGEWATER (902)527-1300 HALIFAX (902)494-7726 KENTVILLE (902)679-2246 MIDDLETON (902)825-6454 NEW GLASGOW (902)755-1280 PORT HAWKESBURY (902)625-1262 SHUBENACADIE (902)758-4290 SYDNEY (902)567-1162 TRURO (902)897-0007 WINDSOR,NS (902)798-0275 YARMOUTH (902)742-4547 NEW BRUNSWICK MONCTON (506)858-1019 QUEBEC MONTREAL (514) 954-1704 QUEBEC CITY TBA ONTARIO KINGSTON (613)384-4833 LONDON March 31, 1996 OSHAWA (905)404-6691 OTTAWA (613)780-9933 PEMBROKE (613)732-5401 TORONTO (416)363-2815 MANITOBA WINNIPEG (204) 947-2604 ALBERTA CALGARY March 31, 1996 EDMONTON March 31, 1996 BRITISH COLUMBIA VANCOUVER (604)669-8216 VICTORIA TBA Internet Direct Dial up Points of Presence Toronto 416-233-1735 416-233-2999 416-233-0127 Oshawa Whitby 905-427-5958 905-427-5120 Burlington 905-847-1456 Georgetown 905-455-4519 Newmarket 905-713-2422 @endnode @node NEWS30 "Neather Realm Software Releases" @toc NEWS From: Neather Realm Software The following are our current products that have just been released: Retail: US $39.95 International Flow Charter : Flow Charting for engineers, marketing or what ever you need. The same as Flowcharting 3 on the IBM by Patton& Patton. Retail: US $29.95 NRS Publisher Fonts Vol I : 50+ Fonts divided into 3 sections, Serif, Sans Serif, and Script. HD install Retail: US $29.95 NRS Publisher Fonts Vol II : 50+ Fonts divided into 2 sections, Old Style, Decorative. HD install inc. Soon to be released: Retail: $49.95 NRS Developer's Book For Blitz Basic Neather Realm Software 2930 8Th Street Cuyahoga Falls Ohio 44221 (330) 928-1738 FAX @endnode @node NEWS31 "VIScorp: The Phoenix Strategy" @toc NEWS FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Posted to WWW.VISTV.COM, COMP.SYS.AMIGA.MISC, 19-APR-96 Permission Granted to Distribute without Alteration VISCORP and AMIGA: The Phoenix Strategy Much has been said and written about the recent announcement of the signing of a letter of understanding between VIScorp and Escom AG Germany. In addition, VIScorp has received hundreds of telephone, fax and Email communications requesting information as to the status of the deal and our plans for the Amiga. We are providing this posting to inform those interested in the knowing about the current arrangements -- and will provide additional information as the they develop. 1. VIScorp is currently conducting a thorough due diligence assessment of Escom's Amiga holdings. This process is painstaking and extremely time consuming; however, without full disclosure, no satisfactory deal can be concluded. Due to the letter of understanding, VIScorp is restricted from releasing information relating to the negotiations until they are completed. Until such time, Amiga remains the asset of Amiga Technologies/Escom and all inquires relating to current Amiga operations should be directed to Amiga Technologies/Escom. 2. VIScorp currently holds a license to the Amiga OS and chip sets and is developing a family of TV-based products that utilize the Amiga's unique functionalities. 3. Many of VIScorp's senior management have previously worked for Commodore and have a thorough knowledge of the Amiga. Our intent to purchase the Amiga comes out of (i) an appreciation of the core technology and its importance to VIScorp's long-term business development and (ii) a belief that the Amiga can -- like the Phoenix -- rise from the ashes and become a profitable technology for the future. Over the coming days and weeks we anticipate to see a flood a mis-statements in the press, on the Net and via voice communications -- some will be made out of ignorance, others out of malice. We will do our best to keep the Amiga community regularly informed. We have received hundreds of messages and anticipate many more to be received until final resolution of formal negotiations is completed. While we are making every effort to do so, please excuse us if we do not respond to your individual message. David Rosen Vice President, Business Development April 19, 1996 @endnode @node NEWS32 "IPISA '96" @toc NEWS IPISA '96 Incontro dei Programmatori Italiani per lo Sviluppo Amiga Sixth Edition Call for Papers November 1996 - Milano, Italy IPISA is an annual meeting autonomously organized by a group of people interested in computer science, programming and applications of the Amiga line of computers. The meeting is dedicated to the presentation and diffusion of projects, experiences and commercial products which have been developed using Amigas. As in the previous events, it will be possible to discuss research programs or job contacts with people otherwise difficult to reach. The organizers invite authors to submit proposals in the form a short and detailed abstract, which must be received by June 1, 1996. The submission of papers to be published in the proceedings independently of their public exposition is encouraged (if necessary, the space presumably occupied on the magnetic support has to be specified). The papers can be submitted in English or Italian. In case the author desires to personally exhibit his or her work, it is necessary to specify the estimated duration of the talk. The authors will receive confirmation of their participation by July 1, 1996, and will have to send the complete papers and related software for proceedings inclusion by October 1, 1996. Exact day, place (in Milan, Italy) and subscription directions for the Conference will be disclosed in future press releases. Subscription costs are aimed to cover all, and only, expenses, and will be, all being well, less or equal to 50,000 italian lire (50 DM, 40 US$). Surface Mail (preferred for papers submission) IPISA '96 c/o Roberto Attias via A. Lissoni 5 I-20162 Milano MI Internet attias@mirtillo.usr.dsi.unimi.it (Roberto Attias) spisser@dsi.unimi.it (Reinhard Spisser) Web: http://www.dsi.unimi.it/ipisa/ @endnode @node NEWS33 "SystemPrefs v3.7" @toc NEWS TITLE SystemPrefs - Preferences for CPU (up to 68060) and RAMSEY. VERSION 3.7 AUTHOR Richard Koerber E-Mail: rkoerber@tfh.dssd.sub.org DESCRIPTION This is a preference editor for steering the processor caches, RAMSEY, VBR and Audio Filter. Gain the maximum speed out of your AMIGA! SystemPrefs fully supports 68060 and DraCo! :^) FEATURES - Supports Instruction- and Data-Caches, Copyback, Write Allocate - Supports 68060's Branch Cache, Superscalar mode, Store Buffer and Half Cache Size Mode - Supports RAMSEY FastMode (60ns RAM access !!!) - Supports audio filter - Supports VBR to Fast RAM - Font adaptive GUI - Shows your system setup (System,CPU,FPU,MMU,...) - new: Shows Graphic OS (CyberGraphX, ProBench, EGS, ...) using expname.library V2+ - 100% MacroSystem's DraCo workstation compatible :^) LANGUAGES German, English, Svenska SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS Requires AmigaOS 2.04+, 68010+ should be present AVAILABILITY - Your next AmiNet site: util/wb/SystemPrefs37.lha - My home page: http://www.bg.bib.de/~a2h4ko - V3.4 available on AmiNet CD 10 (util/wb/SystemPrefs34.lha) PRICE FreeWare! DISTRIBUTABILITY Free distributable with the usual restrictions. See documentation for further details. @endnode @node NEWS34 "ExpName v2.1" @toc NEWS TITLE ExpName - Get full expansion board names from expansion ID VERSION 2.1 (major update) AUTHOR Richard Koerber E-Mail: rkoerber@tfh.dssd.sub.org DESCRIPTION This system shared library decodes the manufacturer and product ID of hardware expansions, as you can get them from the system's expansion.library. It returns the full name (if expname knows the IDs) or a simple number. Since V2.0, this library returns information about the Amiga system it runs on, too, as e.g. main processor, FPU, MMU, OS version, RAM size or Graphic OS (CyberGraphX, ProBench, EGS, ...). With your help, I hope to get as much full names as possible. So please send the name, manufacturer ID and product ID of all your expansions to: "rkoerber@tfh.dssd.sub.org". You can get the IDs by using ShowConfig or the included tool ListExp. Thank you! FEATURES - knows the name of 160 expansion boards - may even get the board name of not yet known boards - new: get information about the system (supports DraCo) - full assembly and c support (new: GCC inlines) - new: boards.library replacement, for full future compatibility - English and German documentation (.guide and .dvi) SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS Requires AmigaOS 2.0+ (V1.3 *could* work, but is not supported) AVAILABILITY - Your next AmiNet site: util/libs/ExpName21.lha - My home page: http://www.bg.bib.de/~a2h4ko - You can also get an uuencoded version via e-mail, on request. - Maybe on the next AmiNet CD?! ;-) PRICE FreeWare! It can be used in commercial products without prior permission. DISTRIBUTABILITY Free distributable with the usual restrictions. See documentation for further details. @endnode @node NEWS35 "New North American Distribution" @toc NEWS New Distribution in North America--SMG Is Out Service Management Group, the company initially selected as the North American distributor and warranty service provider for Amiga Technologies products, has been terminated by Amiga Technologies president Petro Tyschtschenko. QuikPak, the manufacturer of the Amiga Technologies Amiga 4000 Tower, will now be free to sell at distributor pricing to any company which meets a minimum order requirement--something SMG had been failing to do. Three distributors have already committed to keeping stock of 4000T's: MicroPace of Champaign, IL, Software Hut of Philadelphia, PA, and Creative Equipment International of Miami, FL. Dealers are encouraged to place their 4000T orders with these companies. QuikPak is committed to providing warranty service for any machine they assembled and sold. For more information, contact: QuikPak: 610-666-8080 MicroPace: 217-356-1884 Software Hut: 610-586-5704 CEI: 305-266-2800 @endnode @node NEWS36 "Champion Manager 2 Delayed" @toc NEWS Domark have announced that the eagerly awaited follow-up to the successful Championship Manager has been delayed. Due to the delays, Domark reconsidered the development of Amiga games, and now they they are "unlikely to be producing Amiga titles in the future". More news on Championship Manager 2 as we get it. @endnode @node FEATURE1 "Using Multiple ISPs With Your Amiga" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== Using Multiple ISPs With Your Amiga Robert Davis - Amateur Radio K0FPC rdavis@nyx.net =========================================================================== Robert Davis 1107 Mary #4 Emporia, KS 66801 For the month of April, 1996, I am comparing the Internet Service Providers of Emporia, Kansas. My plan is to choose the best of the three and drop my accounts on the other two. So I have to make my Amiga, running AmiTCP 4 and ppp 1.45 alternately connect to the ISPs, which we shall refer to as C, V, and S ... because their real names don't matter. I had been starting my Internet connection by typing internet from a shell. That script (sys:s/internet) looks like this: .bra { .ket } .key param ; Installed with iNTERiNSTALL 1.51 path >nil: amitcp:bin add ; run >nil: execute >NIL: amitcp:bin/startinternet {param} The startinternet script reads the ppp0.config file (env:sana2/ppp0.config) which tells the program to use the ppp.dial script (env:sana2/ppp.dial) to actually call the Internet Service Provider. So to call multiple ISPs, I created a separate ppp.dial script for each one. Those files are stored on my hard drive as: envarc:sana2/Vppp.dial envarc:sana2/Cppp.dial envarc:sana2/Sppp.dial In these files, the telephone number of the ISP, username, and password are different for each script. Of course, other differences may exist in the logon procedures. Those differences may require additions or other changes to the scripts. Every ISP is different from all the others. Then, instead of one sys:s/internet script, I created three different scripts: sys:s/callV sys:s/callC sys:s/callS Here is the callV script: .bra { .ket } .key param ; Installed with iNTERiNSTALL 1.51 path >nil: amitcp:bin add ; copy envarc:sana2/Vppp.dial envarc:sana2/ppp.dial copy env:sana2/Vppp.dial env:sana2/ppp.dial ; run >nil: execute >NIL: amitcp:bin/startinternet {param} And that script copies the appropriate ppp.dial script to the necessary directories on both the hard drive and the ram disk before calling the rest of the procedures which accomplish the connection to the Internet. Except for the first letter of the filename to copy from, the other two scripts are identical to this one. So instead of typing internet to start my internet connection, I type either callv callc or calls and my Amiga calls the Internet Service Provider of my choice. If you normally click on an icon to start your Internet connection, you will have to create separate icons for each ISP, and probably use xicon to execute the scripts. I shall leave that as an exercise for the reader. @endnode @node FEATURE2 "World Of Amiga 1996" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== The World Of Amiga 1996 Alan L.M. Buxey kccil@central.susx.ac.uk =========================================================================== Finally I regress to my days as Amiga Reports' UK Correspondent for what was probably the most exciting event for the Amiga in the UK for a few years! What am I talking about? Well, the title of this report says it all. "The World Of Amiga" exhibition held in the Novotel Exhibition Centre in London on 13th and 14th of April 1996. The place was totally packed, they could have easily booked it for a larger place....say Olympia or Earls Court and that would have attracted even more people from both the consumer and the supplier sides of the industry. As it was, mid morning the queues were building up outside and announcements made on the internal system asked whether people wouldn't mind leaving for an hour of fresh air and come back in with their ticket-stub later on (an offer that I took up at about 1pm for a lunch break). So, who was there? Escom, Amiga Technologies Ltd., Scala, HiSoft, Power Computing, ZEUS (hi guys!!), Team 17, Amiga Computing, CU Amiga, Amiga Format, Power Computing, Analogic, Blittersoft, Wizard developments, Microniks, Digita, E.M. Computergraphic, EM Magazine, Epic Marketing, Eyetech Group Ltd., HiQ, ICPUG, SNAP supplies, Siren software, Gasteiner and more! (Sorry if I missed you out). Who was absent? Silica, Phase 5, loads of companies that usually sell massive amounts of software packages (e.g. Special Reserve and the game companies :( ) Walker! ------- Of course, the thing on everyone's mind was this new machine from Amiga Tech. What would it be like in reality? How well did it perform? When will it come out? What exactly has it got to offer? Should I keep my A4000? Who chose the design???? etc. Well.....I liked it! The design really does look good when you are there with it. It looks futuristic (but not too much so) it looks like it can really integrate into a setup that would make the user appear to be a computer utilizer rather than nerd. It would give a large amount of cred to anyone who owned one (I reckon :) ) There are plenty of documents around the Net already shouting out its specs and all the recent mags have articles on it, so I wont say much more than 1) I am glad its going to have a HD Floppy and come with HardDrive and CDROM drive as standard, 2) I am almost overjoyed by the new IO chip 3) pleased that the power supply is inside and NOT a power brick 4) amazed by the expansion slot g- it really is a marvel! (There is no reason why a third party cannot make a card to slot into it that would give a PCMCIA port, an A1200 trapdoor slot, a few Zorro III slots and a couple of PCI slots next to a gfx card slot!!) But, PLEASE Amiga tech. what did you think you would achieve by displaying the "walker" that wasn't encased in a cabinet in such a fashion. This new machine was sitting there with just a 4-colour plain WB3-style screen with no-background picture, no fancy icons.. Nothing! They didn't even bother to try to get the thing to run the new "Amiga Surfer" pack :( (More on the setup in musings down below) All in all, the Walker looked a great bit of kit to look forward to! Amiga Technologies Ltd. ----------------------- Apart from the "walker", AT were showing off an Amiga running scala presentations - these ran every half-hour roughly (see musings down below) and there were 4 A1200s lounging around on stands. All were beautifully Magic-Workbenched and looked a real treat. AT had BIG problems getting the Amiga Surfer display running for the simple reason that the internal phone system has to have a zero dialled, followed by a pause and hen the number to connect to (they didn't know this for quite a long time....) The rest of the Amiga were doing their things (one of them was actually being used to play some games - which has been supplied by Epic Marketings CD people) Big news on everyone's lips (well, anyone is the business) was the recent news of the VISCORP takeover. A few Escom people knew about it, but when I approached the AT staff, there was a barrier....until I pulled out my printed email that had all the details taken from the Amiga Web page (http://www.amiga.de) (thanks to Mat Bennisson and his cu-announce mail list!) They then started to talk a bit - but not much. They said I'd have to go to the press room and talk to Gilles Bourdin (who was there) but I didn't have a press card on me so I couldn't :( ) Magazines --------- All the magazines were there trying to sell latest issues, subscriptions and a few games....nice to see them supporting the machine they make their living out of...CU Amiga had either talked to Team 17 beforehand, or they had basically hi-jacked Team 17 at the show since they shared the same booth! Team 17 ------- ...were very busy showing off "Alien Breed 3D II - The Killing Grounds" (and if that title gets any longer, there will be quite a few people complaining! :) ). It looked great running on an A1200 powered by a 50MHz 060 Blizzard card (from Phase 5). Unfortunately, it didn't go so well on full screen 1x1 but that can ONLY be blamed on the AGA chipset Team 17 WILL develop AB3DII-TKG for graphics cards so long as the gfx card companies can support them! They are getting NO developer stuff from ANY of the companies. They have got access to Cybergfx stuff on the Aminet - but that doesn't get them a 24-bit card to try as well! The game was running very well.....when confronted about the speed on an 030 card, the replied "Oh! Well, when its optimized, THIS will be the speed it will run on an 030" !! - wonder what the 060 version will be like THEN :) The serial link in TKG worked well, and most of the afternoon on the Team 17 stand was spent holding a death-match competition! The levels look great - some work needed here and there - but there wont be a chainsaw among the 10 available weapons but worst of all, there wont be any Worms in the game to kill! ;-) Talking of Worms, the AGA version sounds very nice and won't be long in coming out. AB3DII - TKG will be released at the end of May. Digita ------ Digita were very busy trying to get everyone to use WordWorth 5 as THE Amiga wordprocessor and I must say, it looks very nice indeed. I might finally have to leave the Softwood stables myself if Digita can keep this up! They also has all their other products on display but I was pushed along to..... Wizard ------ Wizard developments has all their Amiga gadgets present but most exciting of all was the demoing in public (for the first time?) of Directory Opus 5.5 This package is really going from strength to strength. Fortunately I am a shell man myself but anyone who doesn't know a single command line argument for any dos command should really get this package - money well invested (Wizard just mail me a royalty okay ;^)) David Pleasance --------------- Yep! the ex-MD of C= UK was there himself too! We talked for a short time just before I went off for lunch. He was selling his "Everyone's Girlfriend" CD - a tribute to the Amiga. Nice to see some enterprise from people using Amigas...why AT didn't pick him up I'll never know (just because he was competition.....) ZEUS Developments ----------------- ZD were almost the closest stand to the entrance and were proudly showing off their BBS program ZEUS BBS...very rightly so since this really is an awesome package. The show price was 90 UKP and if my cashflow wasn't so tight my credit card would have flown straight into their hands :) Such a powerful program for the price beating everything else hands down...well maybe (sorry, cant be too biased reader). ZEUS even has ZAPP - Zeus Asynchronous Packet Protocol now (very nice!) For more info on ZEUS BBS, try the following, Tel: +44-1273-505474 Fax: +44-1273-382524 BBS: spa..58 +44-1273-474352 24 hrs. 33k6 support BBS: BoeBingo +44-1273-383524 24 hrs. 22k8 support email: zeus@mistral.co.uk 2:441/58.0@fidonet 39:139/122.0@amiganet WWW: http://www.mistral.co.uk/zeus Just tell them that I (Alan Buxey) sent you their way (and that I should get a free copy 8-) ) - see the bottom of this to find out how I can be contacted EPIC marketing -------------- EPIC were selling a vast range of CDs. The stand was a couple of people deep throughout the show (who said that CDROM drive owning Amigas were rare?) A few cheap bargains for all! Eyetech ------- Want a good HD kit? This was the place to be - the drive, installation and cables were all available for a very good price. GG2+ bridgeboard drivers were also available - use PC ethernet, serial, modem cards etc. as Amiga devices! Videomaster PCMCIA was also being demoed - looked like a good piece of kit! HiSoft ------ Surf Squirrel! Yes, it was on display! Running the surf-pack that HiSoft have put together. This PCMCIA card was linked up to an "Enterprise 28800" modem and it flew! A very competent piece of kit to own (and a good reason why PCMCIA should be available in some form on the Walker - just to support people who upgrade) Squirrel MPEG - This new device was also on display, showing flawless MPEG video from a linked up CDROM drive. No artifacts or jerkiness..surprise surprise, "Startrek" was being shown when I passed by. "Cinema 4D" was also being demoed - it really does produce some stunning images (and is a lot cheaper than "Lightwave 4".....) The Net/Web software that HiSoft are selling costs 39.99. It comes with an old version of AmiTCP, install software (at last!), a news reader, a mail reader and a version of IBrowse. The full version of IBrowse will soon be available from HiSoft and can be bought separately for 29.99 UKP very soon. ("MindWalker", the Web Browser in the "Amiga Surfer" pack from AT still is ahead of the field though - we are going to see a great battle between these two products...at least Softwood and Digita aren't involved this time ;-) ) ICPUG ----- (when are you changing your name guys/girls?) were at the show too A good group of people to get to know...I didn't spend much time here though since I wanted to check out.... MicroniK -------- MicroniK has so many towers and configurations...its almost unbelievable! Case upgrades to suit any upgrade from any Amiga seemed totally possible. Want to give your A1200 5 Zorro II slots, 5 PC slots space for 5.25" and 3.5" drives? Get one of these towers! I must say that these are only for the real enthusiasts since the price is still a bit too high for such a piece of kit. HOWEVER, anyone wanting to buy a good tower from the start would be MUCH better off buying an A1200 and putting it in one of these towers than buying an A4000 - the price saving is enormous! Scala ----- Scala UK were busy showing off their multimedia products and given huge reductions on their range - slashing over half the price away on some titles! Power Computing --------------- Want a piece of hardware for you Amiga? This was the place to be. One of the only other Amigas in the show to have games played on it (!) was to be seen here. "Breathless" left everyone in that state after they played it on an 040 card. ----------------------------- So that was basically it all really. New products everywhere, new Amiga on display, thousands of UK Amigans turning up to see everything and make everyone wonder why this wasn't sooner(!) and in a bigger place. I think the show was probably one of the best Amiga events I've been to for a few years now. Since my machine is 4 years old now, I was expecting to find my next machine been shown off....and it was. Now I am caught between a rock and a hard place. "Walker" machine or the PPC Amiga in the next year....it might just be the "walker"! Musings #1 ---------- There are 3 "walkers" in this world. They are worth 1,000,000 pounds each as valuable one-off prototypes. 2 were at the show, one back in Benheim. One at the show as on display in a case with documents. One was out on full display. Linked up to a keyboard, mouse and monitor. I crashed it twice ;-) This is nothing to do with the machine - or with my flippant use of a machine that should really have been out of bounds - it was to do with a desire of getting the thing to look presentable (they had left it bare!) So I went into the prefs drawer and gave it a background pattern, added some colours. Then ran some software. SCALA worked fine - albeit all in German. Wordworth 5SE also worked well. PPaint didn't, it did some disk access, then mouse froze up. We finally decided it was the s/w not the machine since everything has registration files someone must have been playing around earlier. Oh, my proof of crashing it? When it reboot it comes up with a red alert Beta test version Developers only (or something similar). Hell, if I buy an Amiga, I want to know whether I can at least crash the thing! ;) Presenter - "The machine actually costs 1 million pounds!" Me - "Oh no! I've heard of stupid pricing policy on Amigas before but are they really planning to sell any at THAT price!!??" 8-) Musings #2 ---------- A group of us near the "walker" machine. Me - "Its important that this machine gets 2MB of RAM. It would die if it loaded up my current A1200 config - there wouldn't be enough ChipRAM" Man - "No, since if it has no more ChipRAM, it puts it into FastRAM and displays it from there..." Everyone - "Err, no it wouldn't" Man - "Yes, I have a 1.8MB picture file that I can view with no problems on my A4000 but it doesn't load on my chipRAM only A1200" Me - "Hmmm......sounds like you've got a gfx card in your machine!" Man - "I don't know what's inside, I got it for 550 UKP not long ago" Everyone - "What!? Oh no! I want to go home!!" :) Me - "When it [your machine] boots up, do you see a message such as `CyberGfx' or `Opalvision' or `Retina' or something?" Man - "Yes, yes I do! `Opal..something'" Me - "You got a gfx card!!" We then discussed what it would look like when he opened up his machine that night! 8-) Oh, if you don't feel sick enough already at the fact that he had an 040 A4000 desktop with an OpalVision card an 12MB FastRAM for just 550 UKP, console yourself with the fact that he could only view Workbench through a 17" monitor that came with it! (aaargh!) Musings #3 ---------- Nice to see those software errors happening now and then throughout the day....eh lads? ;-) Musings #4 ---------- Large AT stand with massive screen that would be doing Scala/Amiga demo - WOULD be if it wasn't for the prompt on the screen saying "script not found".....so I went over to someone manning the stand. Me - "Err, there are some people hanging around and sitting down but its doing nothing - doesn't look good" Man - "Well, its got jammed at some point, Do you now how to run Scala without a mouse?" Me - "But of course!" :) A few key pushes later, the demo was thumping away, a large group has gathered around and everyone is pleased. They really do need some good people to sell the Amiga at such shows (oh, Peter or Gilles, if you're reading this....you know my address ;) ) ------------the end------------------- This report was written by Alan Buxey, a freelance journalist working in England under the guise of doing a Chemical Physics PhD ;) EMail kcci1@solx1.sussex.ac.uk WWW http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/kcci1 BBS Scratch BBS +44-1273-709799 @endnode @node FEATURE3 "One Of Those Days In England' @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== "One of those days in England" - The World of Amiga Show, Saturday the 13th of April, 1996, Novotel, Hammersmith, London, England. Luke Osbaldeston lo3@ukc.ac.uk =========================================================================== 'Osbaldeston's 1st Law of Computer Shows' states that there will always be at least one loser at a show in a Pink Floyd T-shirt with long hair (often receding) and a geek-like voice, usually wearing spectacles, and, if they can manage to grow it, a bit of bum-fluff they hope will pass off as a beard and / or moustache. Certainly, this show had more than its fair share of those who confirmed this law as absolute. In fact, this law could have been written solely to describe Nick Veitch, sometime editor of Amiga Format, who certainly had the Pink Floyd, voice and hair aspects off to a tee. More on him later. For the record I like Pink Floyd, and have longish hair myself, so I'm not impervious to the law either. No flames about these subjects then please. Oh well, I guess a lot of us will know the sort of person (usually male) who hangs out at these shows, and I doubt if they're much different the whole world over. The event was taking place on two days, Saturday, the 13th of April and Sunday the 14th of April. It opened at 10.00 am on both days, and closed at 5.00 pm on the Saturday and 4.00 pm on the Sunday. I went to the Saturday show in search of some hot news about the Amiga, and actually found some I guess, along with everyone else there who bothered to go to the press conference which took place after the show had finished on Saturday, at approx. 5.30 pm in the Champagne Suite of the Novotel. Before I try and recall what took place at the press conference though I'll try and remember what I can of the show itself. I arrived at 11.00 pm to find a large queue outside of the building. I remember the advert for the tickets saying "avoid the queues, buy a ticket" or something like that, so it didn't look too promising at first. I then discovered that the big queue was for people who were paying on the door, and there was a smaller queue for people like myself with tickets. I still had to wait to get in though, approx. twenty minutes or so, as the organisers were only letting people in as other people left, it was that full in the hall itself. After browsing the free show guide whilst queuing, the word came along the queue that Gasteiner ( one of the exhibitors ) had ram at low low prices. They had the first stand in the hall, right near the entrance. They certainly did have ram going cheap - I bought an 8 MB simm from them for 75 pounds ( times that roughly by 1.5 for USA dollars I think ) - a bargain. If I had had the money I would have bought a 16 MB simm, as these were only 199 pounds, and the guys serving were open to bartering too, so it probably could have been got for even less if you were prepared to haggle. They didn't have anything ground breaking on show or any machines set up either, just lots of bargains to be had - by the end of the day 50 Mhz PGA FPU's were going for 50 pounds. It was worth visiting their stand just to see what was on offer. Once you were in the hall itself, standing near Gasteiner's stand, you could appreciate how small the room was that the show was in. The last Computer Show I had been too was at Olympia some years ago, a cavernous venue also in London. It made this show look like a car-boot sale ( read: garage sale for the USA. ) It brought it home just how far the Amiga has slipped down in terms of relative popularity. I felt a little sad upon thinking this, perhaps I had the notion that this might be the last ever Amiga show in this country, or perhaps even anywhere else. Going clockwise and keeping to the perimeter of the hall, next to Gasteiner's stand was the bar. Just thought I'd mention it. I'll tell you, you needed to save some money on bargains at some of the stands, because the bar prices were outrageously expensive. The thieving bastards. It didn't stop people from drinking though. Next to the bar was Tangent Music Design Ltd. This, as some of you might know, is a business involving naughty David Pleasance, ex head- honcho of Commodore UK, and, as if by magic, there was the man himself, on the stand, with another guy, flogging a load of crappy old Amiga software amongst other things. He also had the company's Amiga produced CD, called Everybody's Girlfriend, for sale, which he was playing through a CD32. Price - 9.99 pounds. He seemed to be selling a few too. The main thing was seeing him though, strange, after only ever seeing pictures of him in various Amiga mags to see him in the flesh. There isn't as much of him as you might think, he is quite a short guy, around 5.8 I'd say. I felt a bit sorry for him in a way - a year ago he was gonna save the Amiga with a brave new Company, now here he is as a barker, trying to sell dodgy old gear. Oh well. Perhaps he's a millionaire for all I know. Some guy asked him some questions about the Amiga, so I decided to eavesdrop on what he said in reply, though it was nothing earth-shattering. Just some stuff about how when he had seen triple A it had been done but was only about 80% finished and still unstable, about how it was being run through hardware and yet was still awesome, about how they had some risc- based machine on the go which of course has never happened because of CBM's demise etc. etc. I was gonna ask him about why he wasn't employed by Escom after their swoop, but it didn't seem right, so I didn't bother. There weren't any computers set up on the stand. Next to the Tangent stand was Snap Computer Supplies. They sell consumables and what have you, probably had some bargains but inkjet cartridges et al. didn't really figure in my plans, so I passed to the next stand which was Wizard Developments. They're well known in the UK, mainly for selling Directory Opus. They certainly had a good crowd at their stand nearly all day. They had a couple or three machines set up, and were demoing Opus 5.5 ( not that all you soft sods who use pirate copies will be interested - please avert your eyes ) which now has some FTP support. From what I saw of it it looks pretty good. You could buy the latest version of Opus ( not 5.5, I don't know the version number ) for 30 pounds at the show, a good saving and no mistake, but sadly I couldn't afford it, and I'm still happy with 4.12 for the time being, though I realise that you can't keep on using old stuff forever, otherwise you end up like all those A500 owners who complain about lack of software for their machine. Wizard had some other bits and pieces, but nothing special, I think Opus was the main draw. Next to Wizard was Digita International, makers of such splendid software as Wordworth, which is what I'm using right now to type this text into, albeit version 2 AGA. Oh dear, seems I'm guilty again of using old software again ;-) I was planning on buying Wordworth 5 at the show, but just couldn't afford it after buying the ram ( and an FPU. ) A real shame, because they were selling it for 39.99 pounds, which is a very very good deal indeed. I will upgrade as soon as I can afford it though. Not that I really need the new features mind you, but it seems right to support the company. They had all their other software for sale too, you know the stuff, Personal Paint, Datastore, Money Matters etc. They didn't have any computers set up though on which to demo the software, which I thought was a bit poor. Their stand was long and narrow compared to the other stands. They seemed to be doing good business, and it was good to see a software company still supporting the Amiga. I think Wordworth 5 was the latest and greatest thing that they had there though. Next to Digita was Micronik. Now, Micronik have been running ads recently in the UK paper magazines for their Infinitiv ( their spelling ) tower systems and other hardware gizmos, so I was looking forward to seeing what they had to show. I was a bit disappointed though. Although they had a tower system there, I don't know, it just kind of left me cold. They had a kind of PC & Amiga combined machine around on the other corner of their stand ( which was a sort of capital L shape ) but the main problem was that all the software that they were running was in German, and my German being rusty to say the least, it kind of spoiled it as regarding having a go at using any of it. They had some other bits and pieces such as rom sharers and that kind of thing, and looking at their flyers now, they seem to concentrate on that kind of thing, small hardware items. However, the tower thing seems like it might be okay, does similar things to the HiQ affair of the same name, i.e. Zorro II & III ports ( depending on which version of the tower you go for ) on an A1200 fitted internally into their tower box. These things will have to be a bit cheaper I think though if they are to catch on. I'm sure that they are well made though, they seemed it, and German goods as a whole seem to be of a superior build quality to most other stuff, apart from possibly the late, lamented GVP's early stuff, such as the HD8+ ( it remains the favourite add-on I've ever bought. ) It strikes me that with Phase 5 working on a new Kickstart / Workbench for risc ( assuming that this is true ) as well as risc board(s) too ( and who knows what else ?), and Infinitiv working on cases and tower stuff, that they could get together and pretty much build a new Amiga between themselves. I can vouch for the quality of Phase 5's stuff, it is excellent - their A1200 accelerators are simply the best. It's a thought anyway. There was a bit of a gap, and then the next stand was Scala UK. I've never used Scala and doubt I will, so although I looked at their stand, there didn't seem to much of interest going on there, although they were selling a few copies of their products, at cheaper show prices, for example, MM 400 was 199 pounds, a saving of 100 pounds from what I gather. They also had a 'theatre' ( since when has a large Sony TV with a few chairs around it been a theatre ? ) on the Amiga Tech. stand opposite, but more of that later. After Scala was the Emap and Team 17 stand, though I think officially, this was just an Emap stand. Emap for those who don't know publish CU Amiga ( I hope ! ) or at least one of those Amiga mags anyway. I don't buy the magazine being a dyed in the wool Format buyer ( but for how much longer ? see later on. ) Now, this stand was busy, just about all day. The reason ? Some major hardware ? A bargain perhaps ? Nope. Just a couple of A1200's running a demo of Alien Breed 3D II. And Matt Bettinson's 3000 as well. At least I think it was him, I wouldn't know him from Adam personally. I found his 3000 more interesting that AB3DII, as he seemed to have some interesting software running on it, which on later examination turned out to be the Surfer Software, i.e. AMIrc, MindWalker, all the rest ( so it seemed. ) Certainly it was an impressive display, I assume he has a decent graphics card in the machine because the overall display it gave out, with all the various programs running on it, was pretty impressive, and colourful too. I've a feeling the version of AB3DII was networked between the 2 A1200's, and that people were playing against each other on the game. It was crowded anyway as I've said. They were also selling their mags too, with some subscription offer for the show. They had their editor as well as other staff, and some Team 17 people were their, including Steve McGill, ex-Amiga Format games editor / staff writer, who now works for Team 17, though in what capacity it was hard to discern. Next to the Emap stand was E. M. Computergraphic & Magazine stand. They do all clip-art and that kind of stuff, and seemed to be doing a reasonable business, but there wasn't anything too exciting on their stand for me. They didn't have any machines set up. Next to them was Golden Image who make some quality products for the Amiga, such as mice and track-balls, that kind of thing. They do scanners too. It goes without saying that I had a look, but there wasn't anything on their stand I hadn't seen before so I passed on to the next stand. Again, no machines set up. I'm sure they had some bargains though if you were looking. IDG Media were adjacent to Golden Image. No machines again, as I remember. They do storage devices mainly ( I think ) so they had Zip drives there, cartridges and what have you. Again, this wasn't that exciting for me, so, as I had done with every stand, making sure that I wasn't missing something special, I moved on to the next stand, which was Analogic. They specialise in Amiga repairs, and were also selling some computers pretty cheaply. Seeing as I wasn't after either, I wandered past. Yet again no machines set up. Next up were Siren Software, a company who sell various things for the Amiga, from Apollo accelerators ( which seem a bit dodgy to me ) to modems, consumables, various bits and pieces. They had one of the better stands in terms of stuff for sale, and I did have a good look, but there wasn't anything there that really stood out, perhaps apart from their new Apollo 1240, an A1200 68040 based accelerator, that ran at 33 Mhz ( allegedly, they, along with most other stands, didn't have any computers set up ) to give performance of 30 mips ( assuming you have got some fast fast-ram ), which if it is true, is very good. The price ? 440 pounds to you guv'nor. A bit steep, but a better buy I think than Power's Falcon 68040 board, which is 400 pounds for a card that runs at 25 Mhz and 19 mips. Still, ya pays ya money and takes ya chance I guess. I'd have either if they were being given away. Then came Eyetech, the people behind the new SX expansion for the CD32. They had this and some other pretty impressive hardware on show, including some sort of fancy genlocking type thing, which was linked up to an Amiga. They had a good demo disc in their souped-up CD 32, which had the original UK TV advert for the same on it amongst other things. Certainly their stand was one of the better in the whole show I think, looking back. Next to Eyetech were Zeus Developments, the only people I hadn't heard of. Their ambit, according to their flyers, is to produce "high quality Amiga Bulletin Board Software." They had a couple of machines set-up which were running ZAPP ( I think ), Zeus Asynchronous Packet Protocol, which allows you do various things comms wise. They seemed well-tooled up tech. & software wise, and looked like they knew what was what ( if you can understand that. ) I don't think that they actually had anything for sale, but judging from the demos they had of their software, it looks good. Well, that was the entire perimeter of the hall. You might be wondering where the likes of Amiga Tech. and Future Publishing were ? Well, they and some others had stands that were in the middle of the hall, so now I'll describe them, again clockwise, from the stand closest to the entrance, which was Hi Soft. The Hi Soft stand was doing great business when I first arrived. They had a large tv showing the film Star Trek 6 on it. Always a good bet at computer shows is anything to do with Star Trek, as you just know that there will be some Trekkies there. In fact, 'Osbaldeston's 2nd Law of Computer Shows' states that wherever computers are on public display, at least one of the people in the crowd watching will be a "Star Trek fan", or "person most in need of a life" for short ;-) Actually I like Star Trek as well, but I'm not one of those people who lives for it, unlike other people I'd normally pretend not to know. You might wonder why Hi Soft were showing Star Trek, or indeed even had a tv on their stand at all ? Well, it was to demonstrate their new Squirrel MPeg player thang, and the quality ( apart from the acting that is ) was excellent on the tv, much better than just about any other MPeg I have ever seen, even better than Sony's MDec system in the PlayStation. The itself was pretty neat too, compared to most of the other stands, Hi Soft had gone in for a specific theme on their stand which was to call it all Net&Web, the name of their new Web software ( Ibrowse, MUI, some other gubbins. ) Their stand was also predominantly black, with a neon sign on it ( unlit for some reason ) saying Net&Web. They also used the very clever ploy of just having a Fender Strat ( I think ) just lying around on their stand, which always excites the anoraks at these shows, I think it stirs their dormant virility. Yes, this years academy award for most useless item on a stand goes to Hi Soft for their sepia Stratocaster, just pipping all the Amiga Technologies staff into second place ;-) I got chance to have a play with the Web software and it seems okay, though I think Mindwalker looks slightly better. You need MUI ( they had v 3.4 there ) to use IBrowse ( v 0.98 ), and I would rather live without MUI than with it, even though I have plenty of ram and a fast Amiga. Of course, Hi Soft could be banking that most of us Amiga owners already use MUI for AMosaic, so it shouldn't bother us to use it for IBrowse. Well, maybe. Still, what do I know, right ? The software package, called Net&Web just in case that wasn't clear, was selling for 35 pounds, which was pretty reasonable I guess. You got various things with it, and it does seem a good deal. Hi Soft seem to have struck a deal with Demon Internet ( a service provider here in the UK ) that you get when you buy the software, I guess to make it all as easy as possible to get started on the Internet etc. and good luck to them. I hope they sell truck loads. They might have to strike now, though, before the Amiga Tech. bundle comes out. Still, although I have said it before about Digita, it is good to see a company like Hi Soft still supporting the Amiga with some decent new products, and praise indeed is due to both these stalwart companies, mind, I'm sure they don't just do it for the love of the task alone. Hi Soft had some other cheap stuff for sale too, including Aura, Cinema 4D, Hi Soft Basic & Pascal, Surf Squirrel ( though I heard that they weren't actually selling those ) oh you know, the usual stuff. Pity I couldn't afford to buy any of it. Which reminds me, they sold out in a few hours of their Net&Web package. I heard an employee telling a punter that they were hoping to get more stock in before the end of the day, whether they did or not I don't know. They will have slipped up if they didn't. Next to Hi Soft was HiQ. The make and sell various things for the Amiga, including their naughty Tower system. They have also come up with a new thing, their Siamese system, which is something like an Amiga and PC in the same box. Their stand was popular, and looked quite good too. Looking at their flyer again they also sell other small items for the Amiga, I'm sure you can guess the sort of thing, internal hd's for the A1200, accelerators, nothing really out of the ordinary, apart from the tower stuff. They had several machines set up, running various things, one of which was probably the eponymous Siamese thing. Not being that interested really in having a PC & Amiga in the same box, I can't tell much more. On the other side of the HiQ Stand was the ICPUG (Independent Commodore Products User Group). I was surprised and pleased to see these people still going. They must have had the highest ratio of staff on their stand to the public than just about any other exhibitor. I picked up some info about Demon Internet off their stand. They had some bundles of other stuff for sale, and a few machines set up, but not really doing anything special, so that was that. There was a small gap for walking through, then the next stand, which was PD Soft. They are a pd mail-order company. They seemed to be doing a roaring trade for quite a while, I don't know why because their prices didn't seem that much different to their normal advert prices. Takes all sorts I guess. No machines or anything set up, just lots of pd software. Next to them though was Future Publishing, home of Amiga Format, reputed to be worlds biggest selling Amiga magazine, though for how much longer I don't know, and I think I might have an idea why. Their stand was poor, especially compared to Emap's. They only had a single machine set up, running a copy of Capital Punishment, which some might know is a beat 'em up. It looked okay, but I think the A1200 the had it running on was a bit ropey, as, to use that nice Americanism, it kept crapping out. Mind you some kids moved it once and I think the monitor lead was jolted out of the back of the machine slightly. The game looks okay though, better than I thought it would be, smoother. It seemed popular enough, but then everyone loves a beat 'em up don't they ? Witness Rise of Robots, possibly the worst beat 'em up ever, but it still sells today, so someone must like beat 'em ups. Future had some staff from some of their Amiga Magazines at the show, namely the aforementioned Nick Veitch, and David Taylor, who writes mainly for Amiga Shopper. They spent time wandering about though, often to the bar, or that way in general. As I've said, compared to the roaring turnover the Emap stand had, Future wasn't doing nearly so well, which seems an indictment of sorts of Amiga Format itself, which has gone from a circulation of approx. 140,000 copies a month some time ago to just 60,000 a month now, with each issue getting more feeble. This seemed to me to be reflected later on at the press conference. Of course, only some of the blame for this probably lies at Future's door. On the other side and to the right of Future was Epic Marketing, another PD mail-order company. Again, their prices didn't seem that cheap to me compared to their usual adverts in the magazines. Still, they too seemed to be doing a good trade. No machines set up or anything, just pd stuff, cd roms, the usual gear. However, special, very special, mention must be made of the Epic stand. It featured the guy who must win this years academy award for "destined to run through a mall with an automatic weapon in 10 years time." Epic have sold cd roms for some time featuring 'glamour' pictures of women. I don't know the nature of these pictures, as I've been fortunate enough to never come across ( no pun intended ) one of their cd's myself. However, now they have bettered themselves. They are now selling a cd rom full 'glamour' pictures of women in, yes, believe it, 3D ! Not just that, but, you also got a pair of 3D glasses with the cd to view them with. The slightly faster of you will have got their ahead of me with this one - yep, that's right, this guy actually went up and bought one of their cd's. I can still picture the fat guy on the stand selling it to him. Oh dear. I was non-plussed. Bloody 3d soft-porn pictures ? The mind boggles. If your that guy who bought that cd then shame on you ! At least he had the sense to wait until late in the afternoon to buy it, when the stand was quieter. Behind Epic was Power Computing. They are well known in this country, and sell some quite good gear, though often a little pricey. Their main products are stuff like the Viper 1200 accelerators, not as good as Phase 5's stuff, but not bad, the old GVP line of things, Breathless ( a 3d Doom clone for those who don't know it ), cd rom drives, graphics tablets, oh, I'm sure you can guess. There didn't seem to be too many bargains going there though, unless you consider a few quid off Breathless a bargain. They did have a few machines set up, one running Breathless which was popular, and one with a graphics tablet connected to it and some art package running. Some of their prices were exactly the same as their magazine adverts, such as their Falcon A1200 accelerator. And that was it. "Eh, what about Amiga Technologies ?" some of the more perspicacious of you might be asking. I've saved them till last. They had the biggest stand at the show, one half being 'devoted' if that is the best word to the new Amiga products, the other half consisting of the Scala 'theatre'. I'll describe the theatre first. This was a large Sony ... oh, you read that bit did you ? Okay. An A4000 was linked to it running MM400 ( I think ), and they were using this to display what Scala could do. Quite impressive. That was it really. If you've seen Scala running before, then I'm sure you can imagine what it looked like. The Amiga Tech. side of things consisted of various machines. Yes yes, for those of you who haven't yet lost the will to live ploughing through all this and may have been reading it all just to for this part, they had two of the 'new' Walker Amigas there, one set up, the other in a glass case. Yes, I have touched the new Amiga - I am the chosen one ! For those of you who haven't yet seen the pictures of them, well, if you imagine a dark grey mini-tower case, squashed slightly, and heavily rounded with a scoop out of the top curving down to the rear of the machine getting steeper as it goes, then your getting there. In the front is a cd rom drive and a single 3.5 " floppy. At the back were the usual ports but minus a few, which they were I'm not entirely sure, as non of them were marked at all. Of course, you could guess certain ports, like psu supply, monitor, sound etc. but some of the others ... who knows. They were all standard sizes and shapes though. The case is metal in case people aren't sure, and has four little pointy feet on it. It reminded me of something out the original Flash Gordon adventures featuring Harry 'Buster' Crabbe as Flash - anyone remember those brilliant space ships that they had in them ? The ones that used to fire great gobs of flames at each other. It looked a bit like one of them anyway. The shape did grow on me after a while - I like it. Perhaps not the colour so much, but it's okay too I guess. The machine had Kickstart 43.1 in it, which was copyright 1996 Escom, and a newer version of Workbench too, but I think it could have been 3.1 at a push. The cpu was a 68030 @ 40 mhz. We never saw it really doing that much though because the Amiga Tech. guy who was on the stand near it wouldn't really let anyone have a go on it. So we never saw the cd rom doing anything, just the machine running a slide-show of sorts I think. Not really that impressive. The Amiga Tech. guy who was by the machine was talking to people, answering questions that they were asking him etc. You know, I don't really think that guy knew a lot about Amigas somehow. Wonder why I think that ? Well, when asked whether or not a new A4000 T they had on display was a 68040 or 68060, not only did he not know, he didn't know how to find out. Fortunately you could kind of have a go on that machine, and the guy playing with it went straight to Tools on the sys: partition and ran ShowConfig ( as myself and probably a few others were thinking of suggesting ) and lo and behold, we discovered that it was a 68040. Wow ! As I say, this guy, who wore glasses for any John Hegley fans interested, from Amiga Tech., who was 'demoing' the Walker, didn't seem to know but two things about the Amiga, Jack and Shit, and Jack left town ;-) He did speak about David Pleasance to one guy though, and he said something along the lines of "he wanted the Amiga all for himself" in reply to whatever the question was. I also heard Pleasance speak about Amiga Tech. now I think of it, he said something like, on several occasions to a guy who was asking him things, "I can't understand why they haven't done X, I can't understand why they haven't done Y ... " etc. etc. There was a little info about the Walker stuck on the display case the other machine was in, which gave out some technical specs, along the lines of what I have already said. Going to be released around September / October if you believed what you read. Price - around 700 to 750 pounds. It will also come with a quad speed cd rom drive, half gig hd, 5 mb of ram ( 1 chip, 4 fast - go figure that one out ) and will be highly, nay, infinitely, expandible, according to Amiga Tech. I guess these things may be subject to change though before the release, if it ever is released. Amiga Tech. did have some other machines at the show as I've mentioned, mainly German A1200 hd's, the 4000 T, and that was about it. Fortunately there was a guy there, who worked for Escom, called Ash, also manning the stand. He was a student at Brunel University amongst other things, and seemed to know a fair amount about the Amiga, and was very familiar with using it. He was using AMIrc at one point, on channel #amiga ( where else ? ) as AshWOA if any of you spoke to him. I believe Matt Bettinson was on too on his 3000. The Surfer Software does look pretty good to me, even on a vanilla A1200 it works pretty well. There were at least 3 Amigas at the show that were connected to the Internet, the Emap 3000, the Amiga Tech. A1200, and the Hi Soft A1200, which was good to see. That was it really for Amiga Tech. Their flyers were just the usual stuff, Q Drive, 4000 T, Surfer Bundle etc., you know the score. Their stand had a bit of a cheap look about it ( and with hindsight we know why now ... ), and was also predominantly black too, like Hi Soft's. If it has seemed like I've been down on the stand I suppose that isn't really fair, but I'm sure some people will agree that it could have been better. There were a few well known faces at the show round and about, apart from those mentioned previously were Andy Davidson ( author of Worms amongst other things, and who had a splendid run-in with the boss of Viscorp - see later ), Jeff Walker ( looking pretty scruffy ), Gilles Bourdin, Petro Whatishisname from Amiga Tech., the editor of CU Amiga whose name I don't know, the editor of Amiga Computing, whose name I also don't know ( do these two count as well known faces then ? ), Anthony Jacobson, publisher of Amiga User International, and I think that was about it. With the show being as small as it was, and with the crowds thinning later on, I completed many 'laps' as it were of all the exhibitors at the show, and saw every stand many times over. I was satisfied with the show once I had seen it all a few times, and just looking at it from a pecuniary perspective, there were killings to be made in some areas. I wasn't sure as to what time I was going to leave the show at, as at around 3.00 pm, I had seen everything plenty of times, and thought that there wasn't much point hanging on. For some reason though I couldn't tear myself away, and stuck around till 4 pm. At around this time, I saw the Amiga Tech. guy called Ash on AMIrc, and he told someone that there was going to be a press conference after the show was over at 5.30 pm. After finding this out I decided I would stick around until the show finished, and try and gate-crash this press conference, to see what was 'going down'. So I wandered around some more until it started to approach 5.00 pm, when the show closed. A few announcements came over the P.A. system asking people to leave etc. now that the show was drawing to a close. At just after 5.00 pm I left the hall where the show was and went upstairs into the Novotel to the Champagne Suite. There was a bar just outside the suite where some people were gathering waiting to get into the conference. I sat down at a table near a group of people from Team 17, and eavesdropped on what Andy Davidson had planned for the next version of Worms, amongst other things. Earlier on I had heard him telling a guy something which I found very interesting indeed. This may be well known in certain quarters, but I had never heard it before. According to what he said, Commodore, around November 1991, a full year practically before the A1200 & A4000 were released, had a new machine ready to release called the A3000+. Apparently it was AGA, and had various other new features in it which would have really been dynamite for the time, and would have kept the Amiga still to the forefront of the cutting edge, technology wise. However, Commodore, in their infinite wisdom, sat on the machine. The reason ? They had made the cases for the A4000 and wanted a machine to fill them. Well, this is what I heard anyway. It seems that the A3000 is still regarded as the best machine Commodore ever made. Oh well, who knows how things might have turned out if such a machine had been released ? Back to the press conference - I waited around until just after 5.30 pm. From what I had heard and could gather, the press conference was just for press ( never ;-) ), exhibitors, and business, and seeing as all these people at the show had been wearing badges saying this sort of thing on them, I didn't think I'd get in. But I thought I'd give it a try anyway, just front it out and hope no-one tried to stop me from getting in. I needn't have worried, there seemed to be quite a few members of the public who had thought along similar lines to myself who were already inside. [The actual story of the 3000+'s cancellation does not directly hinge on the "A4000 case" crisis. The 3000+ was ready well before the 4000 was built, but it was cancelled due to the management's call for a mid-range ECS machine which never made it to market. -Jason] I took a seat near the back ( the suite was almost full, at least 200 people I'd say, nearly all seated, with a table and mic at the front from where the speeches were going to be given. ) It struck me as odd that the ticket, nor any other official info I had seen, mentioned the fact that there was going to be a press conference after the show. It was just luck really that I had found out about it. A moment after I had sat down, the conference began. First up to speak was a guy called Peter Brameld, who was the Director, World of Amiga '96 Ltd. He had organised the show pretty much ( so he said ) and just said a few things about what was going to happen in the next minutes etc. He named all the people sitting at the front table, which seemed to contain a few Viscorp staff for some reason - I suppose the writing was on the wall from that moment on. He introduced Petro Whatishisname, who came to the mic. Being at the back it was difficult to see any facial expression as he spoke. However, what he said was clear enough. At this point I wish I had taken a tape recorder, but I'm sure his speech will have been transcribed already by various people. The gist of it was this :- Amiga Tech. has sold the Amiga to Viscorp of Chicago, USA. Pretty simple really. Of course, he said more than that. He explained why this had taken place, and why it had had to take place it you get my drift. The only thing that shocked me ( for I was shocked ) more than hearing this was the fact that he had intimated in his speech that some people already knew what was going on. Well, I'm sure the Viscorp guys already knew what was going on ;-) It may be that all sorts of rumours have been going around the internet suggesting the same - if so, I must have missed them all, not having time to read the newsgroups etc. Some people didn't seem that surprised by it, but then again, some of us did. The guy sitting next to me seemed as taken aback as I was. Petro went on to mention Escom's losses, other things that had contributed to the decision, I'm sure some of will have read 'em. He also said that they had sold 40,000 units of the A1200 since restarting production of it, which he thought was quite respectable, and I think I would agree, along with 2000 units of the A4000. Then he called up Bill Buck, the president of Viscorp. Bill wouldn't let Petro sit down for a moment, he kept him standing whilst he thanked him for all he had done for the Amiga, however, he only got a lukewarm round of applause for 'all he had done' from the crowd. David Pleasance was sitting 3 chairs away from me, and I noted that he didn't applaud Petro at all. I wonder why ? ;-) Once Bill had let Petro sit down, he cracked on with what he had to say. The gist of it was this :- Viscorp had paid Amiga Tech. 40 million dollars for the Amiga Tech. Were they mad to have done this he wondered when Escom had paid only 10 million or so for Commodore ? No, of course not, because Escom had spent a lot more than 40 million dollars getting the Amiga into ( a funny ) shape again ( the Walker shape ! ) ( see later on for more info about this figure of money though. ) After naming a few people who worked for Viscorp who were with him at that moment, he said that they had a number of ex-Commodore employees, one of whom did the marketing and PR for the CD-TV which made me giggle - like this was impressive or something ? Another guy had also done something else which was pretty poor, it may have been the A500 cd rom drive fiasco. Either way, naming these as credentials about the staff in question hardly filled me with confidence anyway, these people sounded exactly like the type of people who really buggered things up for Commodore in the first place. Oh well, I guess like what Viscorp does in general we'll have to see what happens, and give them the benefit of the doubt. He ( Bill ) then went on to outline, as best he could, as details were still pretty sketchy as the ink was still wet on the deal, what Viscorp's plans were for the Amiga. This is where the fun really started ... their main plans are to stick the Amiga hardware into a television so people can use it to access the internet. Yep, that pretty much says it all. He did say that Viscorp were going to carry on with what Amiga Tech. had been doing with the Amiga itself, but also go down this set-top box route, with the emphasis firmly on the set-top box. Well, of course people already knew that Viscorp had a licence to do this anyway. Why might they buy the Amiga then to do a set-top box when they already had a licence to do one ? It seems that Bill was more than a little worried that the 'Chinese' ( he never mentioned any company in particular ) were about to come and get a licence also for making a set-top box along similar lines to Viscorp's, and he didn't want that to happen at any cost, so by buying the Amiga itself, they don't have to sell any licences to people who might want to make a set-top box. Other licenses would be sold though for people to do things. He didn't actually say the thing about the Chinese in his speech, it was afterwards in conversation with a group of us that he mentioned that. ["The Chinese" would seem to refer to the company Escom initially pegged for Amiga manufacture last year. They seem to indeed hold an Amiga license. -Jason] After saying a bit more about what he was about, he then started to take some questions from the floor. I can't remember every question, and didn't hear them all anyway, as some people didn't speak in a very loud voice. The were a few pretty good questions though. A notable one was asked by Anthony Jacobson, big cheese at AUI. He asked for some information about Viscorp, like where they were based, how long they had been going, their capitation ( is that the correct word ? ), turnover, number of employees etc. Bill didn't answer every part of this ( in fact he seemed to intentionally dodge certain parts of it ) but he did say that Viscorp was worth around 200 million dollars ( I think ) and had about 40 employees, that from 1990 onwards they had centred around a particular goal, this being visual information or something like that. He said something unintentionally funny, along the lines of the internet was like electricity, and he wanted to make a set-top box that could be plugged into it. It made a guy laugh out loud behind me, one of the Team 17 crew I think. It did sound very corporate and American. Nick Veitch timidly asked a poor question, which I didn't catch all of, but it wasn't very good, and this Bill, who has very likely done a psychol. course in power talking snapped him up easily. However, one guy who really got under Bill's skin was Andy Davidson, yes, author of Worms etc. who I have mentioned before. He asked the 64 million dollar question, the question I'm sure had been in a lot of people's minds ( mine anyway ) since Bill had described what he wanted to do with the Amiga. The question was along the lines of "are you going to continue with research of a new Amiga computer, as well as your set-top box ?" It was a worthy question, and although Bill tried to argue that he had already answered it ( he hadn't really, other than alluding to continuing what Amiga Tech. had started ) Davidson kept hounding him for a straight answer over it, and rightly so, as the more Bill tried to explain what he wanted to do, the more it became apparent that he couldn't ( or wouldn't ) really answer the question to Davidsons' ( and the rest of our ) satisfaction. Davidson really had him on the backfoot for a while, eventually Bill said he thought he was being rude, and took a question from elsewhere. This didn't go down well with Davidson and his surrounding group. He had certainly made a point. Someone else asked about the development of a PowerPC based Amiga - Bill said that they were meeting with Motorola on Wednesday of this week ( the 17th I think ) and it would depend on what might happen with the meeting. He also said ( to a lot of disgruntlement amongst the audience ) that the "Amiga uses the 68000 right ? Well, we're gonna keep on with that." Oh dear, that didn't make him Mr. Popular either. He didn't seem to know too much about the Amiga, or so it appeared to me, or even that much about Amiga Tech. / Escom for that matter, but he is a guy who can think on his feet that is for sure, and managed to keep a flow going pretty much all the time. He also mentioned that there would be another press conference on the 24th of this month ( in Chicago I think ) where more details would be made available to people about what was happening. Also, in answer to another question, about whether or not research and design would be moved back to the USA, he said that Viscorp had research facilities already in West Chester (where have I heard that name before?) with a few guys there. He said that Viscorp would continue to use Escom as a retail outlet along with other stores ( I wouldn't have thought Escom were a good choice personally ) and also that he wanted to thank everyone for coming and supporting the Amiga, and that he wanted our input as much as anything. If any of us have any good ideas, we should get in touch with him, or someone at Viscorp, no matter what, let them know what we think. He seemed in earnest over this, and if you have got a good idea, and tell Viscorp about it, you might just find yourself a job there, who knows ? Also mentioned was that the whole deal had apparently made the front page of the European Wall Street Journal - perhaps if anyone saw this they might comment? Bill said he had been in touch with Manfred Schmitt recently twice as well about the affair. After answering quite a few questions, he sat down again ( to applause, whether it was for sitting down or for what he said I don't know ;-) ) and Peter Brameld stood up again. He now said a few words of thanks to everyone who had come along to the show for making it a success. He had a go at the exhibitors and other people who had decided not to go to the show ( and there were indeed a few notable missing companies, namely Silica, Almathera ( busy working on a new cd rom based Photogenics so they claim ), Gordon Harwood ( I'm sure they would have sold a good few accelerators at the show if nothing else ) and one or two more ) for whatever reason. He told a little anecdote about having organised quite a few of these shows, and then said that there was a drinks party immediately after the press conference finished, that there were free drinks and food ( though mainly drink ) and to have a good time. Well, that was a bit of a bonus really. Before he had stopped speaking, people were off towards the bar, which was at the back of the suite. Some tables had been set out, with baskets of crisps and salted nuts in them. I made my way to the bar, grabbed a glass of white wine, and went and sat down. Hey, it wasn't bad wine either. After sitting for a few minutes, eating the crisps and drinking more glasses of wine, I decided to circulate to see what was going on. I saw, surprisingly, Andy Davidson and Bill shaking hands within a group of people, so I guess they must have patched up their differences. Pity I didn't hear what they had been saying to each other. I was a little concerned how all the Viscorp guys ( I think it was all but one anyway ) were wearing grandad shirts, that is shirts without a tie-collar, just a button. I stood in a group around Bill and listened to what he had to say to the people who were quizzing him over things. Bill stood around and spoke some more, whilst the editor from CU Amiga ( I think - a Scottish guy anyway) did a bit of creeping to him (Bill) though he did make some good points whilst crawling. Stuff was mentioned such as local telephone rates, not trying to re-educate the market like Trip Hawkins has tried to do with the 3DO, about how the tv was a good idea for using the internet as people use the tv all the time, that sort of thing. I'm not sure just how much the European market might mean to Viscorp, that was an impression I kind of got from the way how Bill spoke of things here. I don't think he knew too much of how things work in Europe. After a while his sidekick, a guy he had introduced earlier at the conference, David Rosen, came and joined the group, whilst Bill excused himself and went off somewhere. Anyone remember the guy out of Die Hard who tries to strike a deal with the terrorists ? Well, he wasn't exactly the same, but I could see some similarities. Anyway, this guy Rosen, apart from looking and even sounding a bit like Dawber (spelling?) out of US sitcom Coach, seemed okay. He was being asked various questions by people. I spied a chance to speak and grasped it. Remembering my Amiga Report lore about Alex Amor and CEI, and bearing in mind what he had just been talking about, namely, selling licences for the Amiga, I asked thus :- "If someone like Alex Amor of CEI of Miami wanted to carry out research into a new Amiga whilst you did your set-top box, would you sell him a license ?" I thought I'd try and ask something that firstly, made him sit up and think, as he may be surprised about me, an English person having heard of, or perhaps even knowing, Alex Amor, someone from the USA and prominent Amiga person to boot, and secondly, would be the sort of thing Amiga Report readers would want to know. The gist of his answer was thus :- "Oh yes of course, we'll sell licences to anyone." I asked him further did he know Alex, just to try and pin him down a bit. "Oh yes, we know of Alex, of course." Well, that was my 2 cents worth. Thinking about it, on the one hand, Viscorp bought the Amiga to stop other people doing a set-top box with it (so they say) and yet on the other they say that they will sell licenses for the technology to anyone more or less. Seems a bit of a contradiction there (if anyone really wants to buy a licence for the technology.) I suppose that they might stipulate a contract saying what they are going to use the technology for, to stop people from using it to make a set-top box. I don't know. It makes me wonder, as Robert Plant sang. He also mentioned that Viscorp hadn't really paid 40 million dollars for the Amiga, nor would they be doing so, it was just a good figure to use, it sounded feasible. Charming. Some other people were kind of brown-nosing to this guy Rosen, and I stood and listened for a little while longer, then went off elsewhere. One of the editors of an Amiga mag ( not sure which one ) recorded his answer to an important question he asked him, though Rosen said that he didn't want to be held to anything he might say, jokingly. I got a card off Rosen - however, it was starting to approach 7.00 pm at this point, and I had to go somewhere else that evening as well, so after a few more glasses of wine, I made a final tour of all the little groups in the room whose conversations I could listen to surreptitiously ! There was an interesting table with David Pleasance, the boss of Digita and a few other exhibitors on it who all seemed to be deep in conversation, doubtless putting the Amiga bang-to-rights. Oh yes, whilst I remember, David Pleasance had the 1,000,000 Amiga A500 with him at the show, gold coloured, with a certificate of authenticity. There was another tall American guy from Viscorp, I think he might have been ex-CBM, had a few people around him, but he didn't seem to be saying much of interest. There was a guy wearing a suit from Viscorp, short and stocky, obviously the Joe Pesci of the company (joke) telling people to cheer up. He should realise that us British are always lugubrious looking ;-) I think he went off to get a 50 lb. bag of lime. I started to reflect about what American Amiga people might think of what had occurred at the show. It struck me that many of them will be delighted that the Amiga is 'coming home' as it were. Well, I'm not so sure myself, but all we can do is wait and see what happens. What I heard straight from the horses mouth of Viscorp didn't exactly instill a great deal of confidence in me concerning the future of the Amiga - in fact you might be forgiven for thinking that the Amiga as a computer doesn't really have a future. The truth is neither I nor anybody else knows what is going to happen, probably not even Viscorp themselves at the moment. To sum the show up then overall I guess I'd say it was probably a success, and I certainly enjoyed it, and found it most worthwhile. Even if I hadn't been fortunate enough to make the press conference it would have been a good show (at least bargains wise), but being able to attend the announcements as they were made (and drink the free booze !) was a real bonus. It did make me sad, when I remembered shows of a few years back, many times the size of this one, all based on the Amiga. The phrase "how the mighty have fallen" seems appropriate there. A good question I was going to ask Bill was why did he think Viscorp could make a go of the Amiga, when it had been at least partially responsible for the troubles in 2 big companies already, and also what did he think of the claim that Escom had just washed its hands of the Amiga, but I never really got the chance. At this point, it is hard to know what will become of the Amiga. They seem to be something of an enigma - I've just spent over 400 minutes typing over 10,000 words into my trusty A1200 ( using Wordworth 2 as I mentioned ) and all simply to share a few recollections and opinions about some show in a place many have never been to. It's not a life or death thing with them, but I can't help but feel that if they should disappear that the world would be a slightly worse place for that. I should take this chance to say a few things about this piece too. I have very likely made some mistakes whilst writing this. Shows can be noisy distracting places ( hence the name 'show' after all. ) If I have said something which is slightly erroneous, misquoted a price or what someone said, then I am sorry, I never intended too. Just about every speech I have quoted is only a paraphrase, I hope I have made that clear by using the word 'gist' judiciously. As I have typed this entire thing from memory, it is indeed possible I have made some mistake or other, and probably forgotten a few things I wanted to say that I thought were important. I was going to provide a list of all the email address and web pages that the I got from the various company flyers I picked up but it doesn't really seem worth it, the information is probably available elsewhere. What I will provide is David Rosen's email address and Viscorp's URL. Both David and Bill were very keen as I have said about people submitting their ideas to Viscorp, so get to it, if you think you can help what have you got to lose ? Mind you, it might be an idea to make sure your idea is copyrighted first, just in case. If anyone should want to mail me about this, then my address is at the top of the piece. David Rosen - email: DROSEN@VISTV.COM Viscorp - URL : www.vistv.com Postal address - David Rosen VP Business Development 111 N. Canal Street Suite 933 Chicago, Illinois 60606 USA As I went to leave the Champagne Suite at 7.13 pm, Bill was about to come through the door I was using in the opposite direction. Of course, I stopped and held the door for him. He said "thank you" as he went through. I'd had enough time to reflect at this point upon what I had seen and heard at both the show and the conference, and said to him, in a voice he probably couldn't tell was either being sincere or cynical, "It's the least I could do." He turned and gave me a very strange look, half grinning, half frowning, mumbled something, and walked away. @endnode @node FEATURE4 "Lightwave 5.0 Preview At NAB" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== Lightwave5.0 Preview At NAB Bohus Blahut - Modern Filmmaker bohus@xnet.com =========================================================================== "imitation is the sincerest form of copyright infringement" ©1996 Bohus M. Blahut ======================================== LightWave 5.0 Preview at NAB NewTek's booth attracted users from all computer platforms once again, their demos often being six people deep. NewTek employees and artists demonstrated the award winning Video Toaster, the Video Flyer, and LightWave for both PC and Amiga. We will publish a full features list of Amiga LightWave 5.0 as soon as we receive it. NewTek is currently shipping LW 5.0 for PC, and promise to have an Amiga version 30 days from now. Though Amiga LW 4.0 came out only a few months ago, the Kansas company is wasting no time getting Amiga LW 5.0 to market, and promise reasonable upgrade fees. The following is by no means a complete list of the new and exciting things planned for the Amiga 3D future, but they stand out as being vehicles for more creativity than ever before. One of the most significant improvements of PC LightWave depends on the PC's openGL architecture. This allows for color previews in both Modeler and Layout. While not fully textured, these stand-ins are in the model's basic color, and let Layout's lights to play off the models in real time. Moving lights has real-time effect on the illumination of the model. Unfortunately this highly useful feature won't be making it to the Amiga, due to current Amiga's lack of horsepower. However all non-openGL features will be present in both Amiga and PC versions. Modeler now features several NURB (Non-Uniform Rational B-spline) based modeling techniques. The demo I received was using a tool called "meta NURB". The best analog I can draw is to a lump of clay. While "metaform" allows the modeler to take rough and squared off shape and erode it in a wind tunnel, metaNURBS allow you to start with a soft primitive shape, and use the mouse to tug at it. The demonstrator modeled the head of a bunny, and a smooth hair dryer in seconds. In the September 1995 issue of LightWave Pro, Stuart Ferguson (programmer of Modeler) cautioned that NURBs are simply a 3D package "buzzword", and NURBs would probably never make it to LightWave. I'm glad that he's changed his mind. Now if only we could get Layout's bones only to deform specific surfaces... Surfacing has always been limited to a single surface per surface name. Now, one may layer an unlimited number of surfaces on atop the other, all on the same surface name. The PC also features a surfacing preview bar that lets you see the surface mapped onto a ball in the surfacing menu. This gives you a "down and dirty" look at the actual surfacing and image maps, and the openGL lets you see a single color preview in Layout. LightWave has also expanded exponentially its collection of Plug-Ins for both Modeler and Layout. Ori Furikawa (creator of FreeForm; a shareware spline modeler for LightWave) has contributed an interesting plug in for modeler that allows one to apply a surface in modeler, and also tile and stretch a bitmap onto the face of your object. All of this happens interactively, using the mouse to move the surface around in real time. No more fussing around with figuring out the texture's center, and shifting it around. Another highly necessary plug in has finally arrived. This allows you to "train" an object to a behavior, and to get other objects to also use this "training" For example: take a vehicle with four wheels, and rotate one of them through 360 degrees. Once this is done, you can set the other three wheels to follow the first wheel, and get all four to execute turns, go in reverse, etc. The example that NewTek had pre-rendered was of six termites, each with six legs. The insects all walked toward the center of the screen at varying rates, backed up, and moved on about their buggy business. Setting keyframes for all of this leg action in the past would've served more as a Zen exercise in patience than effective cinematography. LightWave Pro featured an article and a plug-in of their own that would calculate rotation of wheels on the ground so that the wheels wouldn't appear to slip. While a testimony to the innovation of LightWave modelers out there, this plug in makes those calculations unnecessary. Many of the Plug-Ins invoke post-processing effects. An example of this type plug-in is the "glow" attribute in LW 4.0. First LightWave renders the scene, then searches out the portions of the picture that have glowing activated. Then LightWave's image processing takes over, "glowing" the appropriate parts of the picture in a smooth bath of light. The fact that LightWave can communicate polygon location to in-built IP routines has several important applications. Theoretically, LW could call on an external facility to replace its motion blur. The current invocation of motion blur takes the trailing edge of the object and appears to stamp it down multiple times. More often than not, the effect works, but is often quite visible in LW animations I've seen. Thought I'm unfamiliar with the programming difficulties that this might entail, it would be nice if LW could call an actual blur routine, or perhaps invoke ImageFx's smooth looking motion blur. Both Warner Brothers animator Rusty Mills and I found the "cell look" plug-in to be amongst one of our favorites. This renders out individual frames, and through a post-processing technique makes each frame resemble a hand drawn cell. Many of the demos of that facility resembled Japanese style animation. This style also embraces animating to the 2's or 3's. Current animation most often isn't rated at a full 30 cells per second, but often every other frame or 3rd frame is created. This is why classic studio animation from the 40's i.e. Bugs Bunny, Disney cartoons, look so lavish and move so fluidly. In those days, animation ran at a strict 30 fps. Today, only Disney, and some Warner's, features that kind of fluidity. It's obviously less expensive to have artists creating only every few frames. This "limited" animation style was pioneered by the animation sweatshops of Hannah Barbera. Their slogan being, "if a scene doesn't fit under the crack of the head animator's door, it's too long. Japanese animators were able to embrace limited animation as a style instead of a limitation. The upshot of this is that if you are creating animation to emulate the look of Japanese "mango" animation, you only need to render every frames using LightWave's "frame step" window in the render menu. This preview of Amiga LightWave 5.0 should whet the appetite of even the most seasoned 3D animator. Many of the cyclic animation features rival those of the Microsoft-owned package: softImage. It is to NewTek's credit that they continue to produce software for their Toaster and Flyer user base. In coming issues, look for a complete review of LightWave 4.0, and then the step up to LightWave 5.0, when available. Bohus Blahut (BOH-hoosh BLAH-hoot) Bohus@xnet.com Modern Filmmaker 312.465.5158 Panjandrum/Creative Strategy Director- DraCo Systems @endnode @node REVIEW1 "Review: Hillsea Lido" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Hillsea Lido By: @{" Ken Anderson " link KEN} =========================================================================== Published by: Vulcan Software As I write this, summer has apparently just arrived in Scotland. The clocks have just jumped an hour forward, the spring has sprung, and it's almost time for a holiday. And here comes HillSea Lido, right on cue. Lido sets you up as the manager of 30m (that's 9 yards for all you Imperial types) of beach and promenade. You are allocated a budget of 1,000,000 somethings, and the challenge is to make much much more. Personally, if anyone gave me a million and a stretch of beach, I'd sell the latter to the first property developer and head to the airport ... Sites on the promenade and beach can be allocated to various stall-holders and businesses. A postcard stall will attract lots of punters, but won't make you much margin on each item. On the other hand, motor boats hires makes lost of profit, but not everybody wants to hire a boat. A pavilion hall can play host to a number of entertainers, all who have their price. Still, the more you pay, the bigger the name, and the more people who'll pay for a seat. That's if you pay for advertising, of course. "Hang on Ken", I heard you tell your monitors, "this is all sounding a bit Theme Park-esque, isn't it?". Predictably enough, you're right. Hillsea Lido is Theme Park Jr. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Bullfrog classic had a major part to play in the design of Hillsea Lido. Let's see: security guards, litter collectors, "intelligent" tourists, wholesalers, all pretty much as they are in Theme Park. But how many of you out there ever played Theme Park on "realistic" mode? Haggling with union bosses over wages? Placing security guards in exactly the right place to stop trouble? Lido cuts out a good deal of the "administration" required in keeping your enterprise going. Ordering stock is a simple matter of setting how many you want, and then ... click! ... it's ordered. This simplicity has it's price: interest in the running of things will soon wane. After you've set up all of the shops, seen all of the acts and got things running pretty smoothly, there isn't much else to do. On the other hand, it's only 13UKP. Pros: Effortless gameplay, and enough pace and character to keep you interested. Cons: Limited appeal. May not be enough of a challenge for some people. Overall: Cheap, fun entertainment. If Theme Park was too much for you, try this. [Additional notes from Jason Compton: Initially, I was going to review Hillsea, but when Ken signed on it took a load off. Still, I have a few comments to make...] Hillsea Lido does suffer from simplicity in a few parts--and this evil crops up in Theme Park as well. It can get mind-numbing simply trying to afford the next most expensive attraction or shop, and that seems to ALWAYS be what the customers are looking for, without fail. Bleah. Lido has the one thing Vulcan seems to have mastered--cuteness ALMOST to the point of sickness, but not quite. They've quite economically and unobtrusively mixed in their trademark speech snippets as well. Lido is ECS compatible and installs effortlessly to hard drive. Vulcan Software Ltd. Vulcan House 72 Queens Road Buckland Portsmouth Hants PO2 7NA @endnode @node REVIEW2 "Review: TimeKeepers" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: TimeKeepers By: @{" Ken Anderson " link KEN} =========================================================================== Published by: Vulcan Software Time is relative, apparently. Time also flies when you're having fun, according to the saying. I must be having fun. When TimeKeepers first landed in the hallway of FabWhack Towers, I didn't think much of it. My summary for this review was already planned: "Top-View Lemmings". A cute, simple little game which involved shoving cute, simple little characters around cute, simple little landscapes. A week later, my view has become much more objective. Cute, yes. Little, no. Simple ... if only. It _is_ top-view Lemmings. You act as coordinator to 14 TimeKeepers, who have to be guided from their starting position in each level to the teleport exit. Directional arrows are dropped onto the vertically-scrollable landscape which instruct the next TimeKeeper who makes contact with it to move in that direction. Just like in Lemmings, there are hazards to be avoided: water, bottomless pits, land mines. And so it goes on for 15 levels. It's easy as first; take one TimeKeeper, work out where he should go, what he should avoid, and plonk all the arrows in the correct place. First level over and done with. Then things get a little tricky. Switches have to be pressed to open doors and activate bridges, and this demands one of the little chaps to be there to press it. TimeKeepers can be made to jump certain things or made to wait around, otherwise they tend to wander around, bumping into each other and getting killed with increasing regularity. Unlike Lemmings, TimeKeepers don't arrive one by one at a certain position, the all arrive in the level at the same time. Before you know it, the one arrow you put down has caused one guy to bang into another, and 10 of them are off to a watery grave. That's before you meet the enemies who are wandering about the levels. It's frustrating, but addictive stuff. The graphics are fine, the sound functional but unremarkable. At only 13UKP, you can't really complain: it will appeal to the puzzle fan who doesn't mind playing a level 20 times to get it right. Pros: Easy to understand and play. Addictive and challenging. Cons: Not enough levels to satisfy the seasoned puzzler. Can be _very_ frustrating. [This is being alleviated by a new low-cost level disk. -Jason] Overall: Throw this on your hard drive, and you'll play it until it's finished. Just try to stop yourself clicking that icon ... Vulcan Software Ltd. Vulcan House 72 Queens Road Buckland Portsmouth Hants PO2 7NA @endnode @node REVIEW3 "Review: Slam Tilt" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Slam Tilt By: @{" Ken Anderson " link KEN} =========================================================================== Published by: 21st Century Entertainment under licence from Liquid Dezign When a bunch of Scandinavian ex-crackers wrote "Pinball Dreams" in 1992, they can't have known what they were about to start. Before then, pinball was the about the only thing programmers had tried to emulate with any degree of success. Games such as TimeScanners and Pinball Wizard suffered from wooden ball movement, unresponsive controls, and the lack of any kind of "feel". Pinball Dreams set the standard with catchy music, fast graphics, and such addictive gameplay that it became an overnight success, if not a huge commercial one. Since then, we've had Fantasies, Illusions, Preludes and Quests with which to play the silver ball. REAL pinball games evolved; out went the two-flippers-and-a-stainless-steel-marble numbers, and in came the all-singing, all-dancing super tables, with enough balls to take on Mike Tyson, and more flippers than the entire cast of SeaQuest DSV. Pinball sims followed suit; first came the extra flippers, then the hi-res multiball modes. Purists complained that the programmers were sacrificing the gameplay for technical excellence; others said all the games were becoming the same. It looked like it was all over for pinball games. Now we have SlamTilt (which deserves an award just for not being called "Pinball Mysteries" or something similar) hailing from another scene group, Liquid Dezign. And it's good. Very very good. There are four tables; Road, Pirate, Ace of Space and Night of the Demon. Buying any other pinball game usually results in a feeling of slight disappointment, as there's always one table which is simply awful. In a break with pinball sim tradition, all of SlamTilt's tables are actually worth playing. The action takes place on a now-familiar scrolling screen, with a simulated LCD panel at the top. User-definable keys control the flippers, nudging of the table (forwards,left and right nudging) and the firing of the ball. There's provision for up to 8 players, high scores can be saved, bonuses can be bonused, extra balls can be won. It's all pretty standard stuff, and nothing much is new until 3 minutes into play when you hit a sub-game. There are 42 sub-games in all, some of which take place exclusively on the LCD panel, some which involve both the display and the main table. Night of the Demon has "Escape from the Mega Mutant Meatball", in which each feature hit increments a ticking timer; all accompanied by a dinky animation on the LCD display and a bouncy tongue-in-cheek tune. Ace of Space has you destroying asteroids or zooming through a space corridor; Pirates gives you another bonus game if you blow up an enemy ship. The sub-games add to the addition factor considerably. Rather than just mindlessly battering the ball around the table in the hope of a memorable score, the sub-games give the proceedings a sense of purpose. The LCD display, however, can be distracting - you're so busy watching the reward for hitting your target, the ball is racing down the screen and out of play. The sound effects are pretty basic click-clack noises, with the addition of different spot effects for each table: zooms for the space table, splats and screams for the zombie sub-game in Night of the Demon. The music is of good quality, with plenty of differing ditties for each table. The volume of both the music and SFX are adjustable. I can't find much to fault about Slam Tilt, apart from the fact it's still just a pinball game. Anyone who thinks the Amiga games scene is dead should take a look at this sharpish - it will take something extremely special to top this. Pros: Smooth, fast, playable. The sub-games are great fun. Extremely addictive. HD Installable. Cons: Pinball is pinball. It doesn't have any music from "Tommy". Overall: The best pinball game there is on the Amiga (and anything else). All it needs is an add-on to swallow your change, and it's perfect. If you like pinball games, buy this. If you don't, buy this and you soon will. @endnode @node REVIEW4 "Review: Quarterback v6.1" @toc REVIEW4 =========================================================================== Review: Quarterback v6.1 By: @{" William Near " link WILLIAM} =========================================================================== I'll admit it; I'm guilty of using the original HDBackup program that comes with Workbench for quite some time now. That is, until Quarterback v6.1 came my way a few weeks ago. I guess I was just too lazy to check out more than a few of the Shareware/PD offerings in this area. After all, HDBackup had done an acceptable job of backing up my data onto floppy disks. When I bought my SyQuest EZ135S drive, all that changed. HDBackup would not recognize my EZ drive as a valid device to backup my data to; although it would recognize it as a valid source device to backup! Go figure. Enter Quarterback from Quasar Distribution. [Note: For those of you confused by this, keep in mind that Quasar obtained Quarterback from the liquidated New Horizons assets. -Jason] Quarterback installs easily onto your hard drive using the Commodore (should I still use such a profane word?) Installer. Upon first starting the program, you are presented with the main Quarterback screen that consists of: a listing of all devices and assigns, four buttons (Backup, Restore, Enter, and Back), and a series of pulldown menus. The first thing you must do is configure Quarterback to your liking by setting a series of options from the pulldown menus. The Backup options are the first in line. You must select whether you would like to make a Selective or Complete backup of the data, what media you would like to use to backup the data on, e.g., floppy, removable media, tape, or an AmigaDOS file. You must also select what type of Compression you wish to use (none, 12-16 bit, or device compression). Keep in mind, the higher the compression value the less space you will need to make the backup, but the longer time it will take to make the backup. There are also settings for: password protection, setting archive flags, verifying data after write, warning if destination is an AmigaDOS volume, and if you'd like the entire directory structure backed up. The Restore options are next. You can choose between Restore, Compare, and Test as possible restore options. The Compare option will check the content of the destination against the source's content after a backup is completed, showing any discrepancies in the data. The Test option will read all data from the destination device and make sure that there are no errors present. The same options for selecting the various device types are present, as well as: replacing files with earlier or later dates (yes, no, or ask), set file dates (current date, backup date, or original date), restore empty drawers, restore archive flags, and whether to keep the directory structure intact when restoring data. This last option is critical, as it can cause a restore of data to be placed entirely in the root directory of the destination device! This could make for quite a mess as none of the original directories will be used for the restored data. Making sure that this option is set will save you from having to delete possibly thousands of files from your root directory. Quarterback generates a Catalog of activities when making a backup. This Catalog is saved to the beginning and end of the backup data so that if one Catalog becomes unreadable then the other one can be accessed by the program. There are several configuration options available to control what is included in the Catalog and how the information will look. The options are: file information (show file size, protection flags, date modified, and time modified), time format (show seconds and/or AM PM), sort by (name, size, date, group drawers first), and the date format. During a Backup or Restore a Session Log is generated in the output window of Quarterback. You can select what will be displayed in the Session Log from these options: errors only, errors with drawer names, errors with drawer and file names, rate in megabytes per minute, compression efficiency, no Session Log displayed while the operation is in progress, and options for saving the Session Log. There are settings for the Buffer options too. These include: backup and restore buffer sizes ranging from 1K to 8192K, what type of memory to use for the buffers (graphics, 24-bit, or any), and whether to use asynchronous I/O (this is faster, but some SCSI controllers do not fully support it.) The thing to keep in mind here is just how much memory do you have to spare for making the program run faster? I used 1024K for both buffers on my machine. Tape backup options for auto-retensioning inserted tapes and rewinding after a backup or restore are also present. I could not test either of these, though, since I don't have a tape backup drive. Finally, there are Preferences for flashing the screen and playing the system alert sound upon disk completion and/or error notification. Also included are preferences for including icons with Quarterback files, warning on invalid filenames, and if you would like assigned directories included in the device listings. Printer preferences are included in another menu for outputting the Session Logs or Catalogs generated by Quarterback to your printer. Quarterback also includes some other utilities. Tape Control options for rewinding, tensioning, erasing, and advancing a tape are included. A SCSI Interrogator utility allows you to get information about any SCSI device attached to your computer, e.g., device type, vendor, model, revision, block size, and media size. Up to ten macros can be called from the Function keys or by pulldown menu choices to execute ARexx scripts that the user has defined. The list of Macro Language Commands available in Quarterback seems to be quite extensive and two example scripts are included too. Enough of the boring details, let's make a backup! The first step is to click on a device name in the window that you wish to backup. After doing so, the number of disks required for the backup will be shown in the window if you are backing up to floppy. Clicking on Start will begin the process. A list of all files and directories will begin to appear in the window and the progress will be indicated by way of files/bytes tagged and files/bytes completed status lines, and a percentage completed line. If you chose a complete backup then Quarterback will jump directly into the backup process; otherwise, Quarterback will scan the entire source device and present you with a list of directories and files from which to tag only those you wish to backup. Jumping into a directory to tag just a few files is as simple as double-clicking on the directory name and tagging the desired files. The are also buttons to enter and exit directories. When using the floppy backup option an indicator will unghost representing each of the drives available to the system. These indicators show the status of all floppy drives on the system at all times. You are shown when a new disk needs to be inserted and into which drive it belongs. The floppy swapping routine seems to be pretty much idiot-proof. I also used my EZ drive to backup my hard drive partitions. While the manual states that the backup process will work across volumes, I found this not to be true in the case of the EZ drive. I had to use the AmigaDOS file backup option to use my EZ drive. This option just creates one huge file on the destination device. This worked just fine, but I would have rather used the tape/removable option with my EZ drive. I contacted Quasar and they are working on the problem with recognizing the SyQuest EZ drive in this particular mode. When the backup is completed, the backup rate, compression reduction, number of errors, and date/time of the backup are displayed in the window. If you enabled the verify-data-after-write option then the newly completed backup will have already been tested for errors. Of course, you could do the verifying and comparing (Test and Compare) as a separate step from the Restore menu if you so choose. It took 3:30 hours to complete the backup and compare of my WORK partition (173 Mb of data) to the SyQuest drive. The only thing I didn't like about using the AmigaDOS file backup option is that if you run out of room on the disk, Quarterback will just tell you that the volume is full and commences with deleting the entire archive! Who cares if you have just waited two hours for the backup? Quarterback should have a way of estimating the needed space when using the AmigaDOS file option. Restoring a backup is a simple process. Just click on the device to restore to and set the options for source device, etc. You can also select which files to restore or just restore the whole backup to the destination device. All the same on-screen information that was presented while backing up a device will also be shown during a restore. It took 1:41 hours to do a complete restore of my WORK partition from the SyQuest drive. One other note: you can pause a backup or restore at any time by clicking on the pause button. Just for your curiosity, here is the data from my hard drive archive: * Restore rate: 0.- megabytes per minute * Compression reduction: 28% * Number of errors: 0 * Restore finished Apr 14, 1996 at 7:33:22 PM Quarterback also includes a separate program called Schedule Pro. This is a program that allows Quarterback to perform automatic backups on a one-time basis or on a preset schedule. I have Schedule Pro's icon in my WBStartup drawer and I have it set to remind me to backup the hard drive on the first day of each month. You can also use Schedule Pro to remind you of birthdays and other special events, as well as having the program execute any AmigaDOS program or ARexx macros at any time you specify. It makes for a nice addition to the Quarterback program. Quarterback seems to be a very complete archival program. It is very intuitive to use and you shouldn't really need the manual all that much. Speaking of the manual, it's well written and includes many screenshots too, but it lacks an index, which makes it hard to find specific items. The table of contents is usable, but it doesn't really show you where some of the finer details of the program's functions are located in the manual. There is a nice section explaining incremental backup strategies and a troubleshooting section. Generally, Quarterback v6.1 seems to be a fine piece of work and it's well worth the money, especially if you're still using HDBackup! Once the problem with the EZ drive not being recognized under the tape/removable option is fixed (remember, you can still use the EZ drive -- you just have to use the AmigaDOS file option, providing you have enough free space on the cartridge ahead of time!) and an index is added to the manual, I won't have any complaints. @endnode @node REVIEW5 "Review: Inet-225 TCP/IP Software" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Inet-225 TCP/IP Software From InterWorks, Inc. By James Melin =========================================================================== System Requirements: AmigaDos 2.0 or higher At least 2 megabytes of RAM (6 to 8 is recommended) A Hard Drive is recommended (Though floppy install is possible) Any 68000 family processor (Though at least a 68020 is recommended) Inet-225 is a fairly complete implementation of TCP/IP for the amiga and is based upon AS-225r2 orginally created but never released by Commodore Business Machines and features many things commonly used in the unix world. These features include SMTP, FTP, NFSd, GMail a GUI based mail program, NNTPpost, NNTPxfer, NNTPxmit, NcFTP, rSH and others. INet-225 also includes a built in dialer that may be used to dial an Internet Service Provider and establish a slip connection. Inet-225 supports the following network protocols: ARP, ICMP, IP, TCP and UDP. Inet-225 is published by InterWorks of Temecula California and has a retail price of $350.00 for a 5 node license. This price may first seem to be quite high for what Amiga owners are used to paying for software however, this price include 90 days of FREE technical support calls to the InterWorks Technical support staff to resolve any problems that might arise with the software. At this time, InterWorks does not have a single node license package available but are considering a package for single node use that will be somewhat more limited in the features that it offers. InterWorks has not decided at this time what the possible differences in functionality will be should they produce a single node license version of Inet-225. Installation: For this review I recieved the pre-release version of Inet-225 and after speaking with Allen Brooks, the company President I expected no difficulties with the installation process. Installation of Inet-225 was purported to be very easy and I was somewhat surprised to run into difficulties with the installation script. These problems turned out not to be the fault of the user nor even the fault of the installation script, but due to a flakey version of the Installer utility. I spoke to the individual who is currently re-writing the Inet-225 installer script about my problem and was most cheerfully given a copy of Installer version 2.17 which solved the problem. It should be noted also that Installer version 1.24 will also install Inet-225 with no problems. This problem will be taken care of before the final release version is frozen. With the updated installer running on my system I was able to easily and quickly install Inet-225 on my A3000 and my A2000. You must have the following information from your service provider in order to install Inet-225 sucessfully. 1) Address of the host system you obtain service from 2) The Domain Name of your service provider (e.g. scotland.com) 3) The address of your machine (Static Slip/PPP only. Dynamic connections do not require a dedicated IP address. 4) The name of your machine will use on the net (e.g. sheep.scotland.com) 5) The address of the domain name server you will use for translation of ip names into ip addresses. The Inet-225 installer script shipped with the pre-release version of the software quickly allowed me to set up my initial environment including the establishment of the first user account, but the pre- release installer script does not have any capability of allowing easy modifcations to the installed package. To change to PPP from Slip one must re-install the package completely, and there is no facility for a GUI driven user management system or GUI driven configuration tool to allow multiple interfaces on one machine at a given time. (e.g. 2 amigas connected via Ethernet or Arcnet with one machine serving as a gateway and the other as a user of that gateway) At this time I have not tested the new installer script for Inet-225 but I hope that at some point in the near future these types of reconfiguration tools will be built into the installation script. Network Startup Inet-225 Installer will create an icon in the INET drawer with the tooltypes that reflect the choices you made during install. Double click this icon to start the network once you have used a dialer program to establish your modem connection. You will be prompted to login after the network startup has finished. If you have not set your password during install your login password will be null and you should click on the OK gadget on the LOGIN requester to continue, otherwise, type in your password and press enter to continue. At this time, you may begin running whichever TCP/IP related applications you need, such as an FTP client, a Web Browser, and IRC client, a News reader, mail reader or even the Network File System. Possible startup problems: There area only a couple of situations that may cause a problem during network startup. Inet-225 absolutely requires that the modem connection to the service provider be established and that the dialer program, what ever it may be is not in control of the serial port being used for the network connection. In the case of no network connection being established, Inet-225 will report that it cannot connect to the network and indicate a possible connection problem. This is remedied by dialing the service provider and making certain that the slip or PPP connection has been established properly. Once this is done, double click the StartInet icon in the INET drawer to start the network as normal. In the case of the network connetion being established but the dialer program still being in control of the serial port, Inet-225 will report similar errors to the above mentioned scenario and fail to start. Termination of the dialer program and clicking the startnet icon again will not work. The network software will not properly initialize and the Amiga must be rebooted in order to clear this up. If your modem is set up to not recognize DTR loss as a hangup your modem connection should remain on the modem and as soon as your system completes booting you may double click the StartInet icon and continue. 00530400 Network Shutdown To shut down Inet-225 the command StopInet is used. Stopnet will inform you you if there are other tasks still using network resources and it may refuse to completely shut down. Make certain you have ended all TCP/IP related programs before attempting to shut down the network. using the status command from a CLI windo will show any active tasks. StopInet will display a message 'Network is completely shut down' when it has detected that all processes have completed. Possible shutdown problems: Inet-225 uses a commodity called Login to handle user login. unfortunately, this task does not get signalled to terminate when the StopInet command is issued. Although the interface for the login commodity at this will show a shutdown button, it does not appear to actually terminate the Inet-225 TCP/IP software. This still must be done manually. In order to manuall shut down the network the login commodity must be stopped. Use the Exchange program or another commodity manager in order to either remove the login commodity or to display the user interface and select the shutdown icon. In either case, you must then manually enter 'StopInet' from the CLI or from the execute command requester of workbench. If StopInet insists that there are still tasks using the network and those tasks cannot be terminated, a reboot of the Amiga is required in order to remove Inet-225 from the system. Software compatibility: Inet-225 works with the following software programs. GrapeVine IRC client AWEB World Wide Web Browser Envoy Peer to Peer amiga networking package Enlan DFS Ethernet peer to peer networking package AmIRC IRC client AmiWin X windows client Chimera World Wide Web Browser for AmiWin Amosaic World Wide Web Browser (Requires AS-225r2 version) Ibrowse World Wide Web Browser (Requires AS-225r2 version) DaFTP GUI driven FTP client AmiFTP GUI driven FTP client Telser.device TCP/IP modem emulator/telnet daemon In addition, any program writte to be compatible with AS-225r2 will have no difficulties functioning with Inet-225. However, AmiTCP specific software will not function with Inet-225 at this time. Software found not to work with Inet-225: AcuSeeMe CuSeeMe client (requires AmiTCP) Questions and Answers with Allen Brooks, president of Interworks AR: What are the differences between Inet-225 and AS225? IW: In bullets, we have the following changes: o More Unix-type clients and servers than AS225 o Significant numbers of bug fixes o Elimination of inet.library o Significant efficiency enhancements o Replacement of old buggy ports of some clients with new ports o The additional of the commercial version of INetUtils o A graphical newsreader (commercial GRn) o A graphical mailreader (commercial GMail) o tn3270.device (a telnet/rlogin/3270 emulator for use with a terminal program such as VLT). We've taken all the bug reports from the BIX networking developers area, and from the adsp.networking newsgroup (a closed newsgroup for Amiga developes in Europe) and addressed all of those bugs. Several clients have been rewritten from scratch. Other have been re-ported from scratch. The stack is significantly more stable, faster, and just plain better than AS225r2 ever was. AR: Due to CBM's failure to release AS225-R2 as a product, AmiTCP a competing TCP/IP protocol stack has entrenched itself in the amiga user community. Are there any plans to include compatibility software in Inet-225 so that AmiTCP specific applications will run under Inet-225? (Similar to BSDSocket.library in AmiTCP which provites AS225-R2 compatibility) IW: We do not have an AmiTCP emulator, however, we have written our software in such a way as to allow AmiTCP and standard UNIX applications/utilities to be easily converted and recompiled to support our stack WITHOUT extensive modification. (I will ask the programming staff to add to this!) As Allen has said, we have no specific plans to release an "AmiTCP compatibility library". However, a beta-tester has indicated an interest, and we've provided him with sufficient information to create this. In general, we provide an include file for programmers, "amitcptoiw225.h", which provides most of the hooks which should be required for converting an AmiTCP application to an I-Net 225 application. For most applications, a simple recompile is all that it should take. AR: The pre-release installer does not offer any reconfiguration capability (I.E. I cannot run the installer to change address information, user ID and information or other general stuff) Is there an improved version of the installer script planned and if so, what features will it have? IW: I am referring this to the programmers too. We do have plans, however, the exact timing has not yet been determined. A GUI configuration utility for most items exists in the package, called WConfig. It can deal with some simple changes. We intend to create a more in-depth re-configuration utility, after 1.0 is released. If sufficient time presents itself prior to final 1.0 lockdown, there may be some further improvement to the installation script. AR: With the Advent of ESCOM purchasing the Amiga, what is the status of INet-225? IW: I-Net 225 is, for all intents and purposes, owned by Interworks, Inc. due to the amount of work we've done on the product. As you may be aware, a portion I-Net 225 is the basis for the "Surfer Pack" being sold by AT; and of the "SurfWare" soon to be sold by AT. I-Net 225 is being continuously developed and enhanced by Interworks. It expected and hoped that we will have a long, mutually beneficial relationship with AT. AR: Is there currently an Interworks Web site? IW: Currently, the only specific site we have with publicity is http://www.iam.com/amiga/interworks.html -- after we finish polishing 1.0, that will change. AR: What is the Current pricing and availability of INet-225? IW: As of today, General Availability is only for the 5-user version of I-Net 225, at $349. Within a few short weeks, we will start shipping a single-user version of I-Net 225 for $150. Obviously, Amiga Surfer is available in Germany, and soon SurfWare will be. An upgrade from Amiga Surfer and/or SurfWare to the full package will be available as well. AR: What is the status of NFSd? IW: Available at an extra cost of $80. Enhanced over the one in AS225r2 in terms of speed and reliability (but, before you ask, it still requires a mapfile). Purely subjective opinion of Inet-225 as a whole: I personally found Inet-225 to be easier to deal with than AmiTCP/IP. It seemed easier to install and operated with more stability than my experience with AmiTCP/IP. I was able to see a small improvement in throughput when severely loading the connection, but under normal use there does not seem to be much of a performance difference. I liked the Gmail mailer, and I liked several of the clients I played with. I found Ineterworks to be very helpful when I ran into problems with installation or configuration, most of which were solvable by liberal application of the RTFM princible of software installation :) They have a generous tech support policy which, with the full license package include 90 days free technical support. I do not have a policy on the single users package, but I would wager it will be similarly generous. In short, if you read the manual, you should have no trouble with the installation of this package. A basic working knowledge of TCP/IP and networking will be invaluable however. Ordering and other information: To request current pricing info and ordering information e-mail: Info@iworks.com @endnode @node REVIEW6 "Review: Cinema4D" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Cinema4D By: Bohus Blahut - Modern Filmmaker bohus@xnet.com =========================================================================== Cinema 4D began life as a German 3D modeler and stage program. The British company HiSoft cooperated with Maxon to produce an English manual, and perform updates. Cinema 4D has been developed for both Amiga and PC. The Amiga version ships on 6 low density floppy disks which decompress into almost 6 1/2 megs of hard drive space. The manual's recommended system is a 3.x system with 3 megs of RAM, and a 68040 processor. Cinema 4D will work with a 2.x system, and even render on a 68000 system, though if you've done any kind of rendering work on this kind of processor, you'll realize that an accelerator is a necessity. I installed Cinema 4D onto my 50 mhz '060 DraCo with 32 megs of Ram. The DraCo uses CyberGraphx to route the display to the Altais Graphics card. The display is a 17" Iiyama monitor. The 1024x768 screen allows me to have several windows open at the same time. A smaller monitor with lower resolution will work as well. The program is strictly style-guide compliant, with special attention paid to keep the display from flickering on non-sync monitors. Cinema 4D has proven to be one of the most option laden softwares that I've ever used on the Amiga, while not being difficult to operate. The program features no less than six rendering algorithms for varying degrees of detail. When one clicks the render button, a pop-up list allows mouse selection of a particular rendering method. By hitting the shift key while selecting any of these options the user can define preferences for each method. This ease of use is pervasive throughout the program. There are also 18 types of light sources. While it's true that one can create these type of lighting effects in other packages, it's quite handy to have them available as presets. One lighting effect here, that I've seen nowhere else is a time-lapse type light that takes your object from "day" till "night". Building architects will like this feature. C4D also features more structural primitives than anything else that I've seen. When modeling, it's often a good idea to first break up your model into its most basic shapes. Then use primitives to start the basic construction, then edit individual polygons to fine tune the model. C4D features the regular assortment of primitives, and each has the preferences function mentioned earlier. An interesting distinction about sphere creation is that C4D can create a mathematically perfect sphere, instead of creating it out of polygons. No matter how far the camera zooms in on the perfect sphere, there will be no indication of polygonal lines. In addition to the basic shapes (i.e. cone, cylinder, disc) there are several primitives I've never seen before. There's a torus (a donut shape), pyramid, tetrahedron, a user-defined sided polygon, star, even a stylized flower. There's also a stylized human figure. It's already set up for inverse kinematic motion, and makes a good starting point for animation. The bound manual is well written, with a generous number of illustrations. My suggestion to HiSoft is that a sophisticated program like Cinema 4D that requires the user to look back and forth from the manual to the program should have a manual that can lay flat on a desk. While wire bound works fine, I'm partial to the 3 ring binder approach. This allows the user to add blank pages for notes and techniques, and also makes it easier on the publisher when it comes time to add or change pages for updates to the software. When started, Cinema 4D opens several windows on the Workbench. The first to grab your attention is the large perspective window. This window can be changed from a single large window into three smaller windows that show the X, Y, and Z sides of your object (much like LightWave's modeler) along with the perspective view in the fourth window. The program does take a slightly different approach to 3D in that the modeling of objects, and the placement of those objects in a scene happen in a single interface. This is much like building props right on the movie set. This has the advantage that when building objects, one can render them out in color and see how light plays on them, and not have to flip back to a modeling interface top make changes. Another window that opens is a long control window that can be dragged anywhere on the screen. It's a tool palette that can be dragged and minimized just like any intuition window. Here again is more of C4D's flexibility, the idea that the user doesn't need to adapt to the program, but vice-versa. The screen controls object movement and placement, and also starts rendering. All of the windows feature useful on-line help. As the mouse pointer passes over the various buttons, a single line appears in the menu bar informing you of what a particular button does. Other floating menu bars that can be opened and placed anywhere on the interface are tool palettes for texturing and for the selection of object primitives. Texturing controls feature the ability to wrap a texture spherically, cylindrically, or to lay flat. Also, we can tile and mirror textures. The objects tool palette allows one to choose from the primitives mentioned earlier. More special primitives are a fractally generated landscape, the ability to emboss a picture into a flat sheet of polygons, even to add a ground plane (instead of having to create a polygon and place it flat on the ground) and add the sky. The manual has a good tutorial section designed to get the modeler started right away. These walk the user through simple object creation and manipulation, to the creation of an inverse kinematic animation. Inverse kinematics is a much sought after animation feature. This allows the user to create an object hierarchy, much like the directory hierarchy in a computer. The same way that you can have a file inside a directory, inside another directory, inside a different directory, inside a volume, it's possible to set up 3D objects in the same way. Imagine the human form. After modeling all of the different parts, you could set out to create the hierarchy i.e. finger, hand, wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder, etc. Before inverse kinematics, the only way to move these objects would be to animate from the top down. This would entail starting at the shoulder, then moving the upper arm, etc. Instead, IK lets us move the hierarchy from the other end. This allows us to move the entire arm around just by pulling one of the fingers. It's amazing to have this high end feature included in software that's low-end in price. There are many other Cinema 4D facilities that are quite advanced in their nature. The program's ray-tracer is adaptive. Ray-tracing is the time-consuming method that computer programs use to create reflections and precise shadows. C4D only raytraces the parts of the picture that need it, as opposed to the whole picture. This is a definite performance boost. Also present in the program are two animation techniques: keyframe and path. Keyframe animation lets you move and object into place, then snapshot (keyframe) it. Move to another frame, create another key, etc. Path based animation lets you actually draw a path with the mouse, and have the object follow it. There's even a timeline based interface for special effects. You can trend changes in object size (individual letters in a logo change in size according to a specific waveform), and object rotation (get those same letters in the logo to spin around individually). How about deformation effects like Melt. This takes any object and crushes it down the Y-axis, while extending it along the X&Z axes making the object look like it's melting into a pool. Explosions are another built in effect. This takes any multipolygonal object and bursts it into its separate polygons. Look for other effects like Morph, Wind, and various lighting effects. While there is going to be the inevitable comparison between Cinema 4D and LightWave, these two programs do have different markets. C4D does have a good number of features, especially at its price point. My main goal is to see if I can get the same kind of cinematic good looks out of C4D as I can with other packages. As you can see, there is such a wealth of features here, that it is impossible to list them all in detail. Over time, we will investigate many of these features in the future and see how they benefit the 3D modeler. If you're interested in seeing the results of C4D's modelling, find the LightWorks CDrom (Schatztruhe). This disc contains a C4D demo version, and also a wealth of objects created with the program. For the most part, these objects are outer-space themed and show off the abilities of the software reasonable well. Obviously, since these are models of recognized scifi spaceships, many of them can't be used in your own productions, but they do serve as a good lesson on how to get started. The CD also has completed pictures of the models in action, so you can see what the end result of your work is going to be. Cinema 4D retails for about US$300. Cinema 4D by Maxon Computer and HiSoft Distributed and supported in America by: Oregon Research 16200 S.W. Pacific Highway Suite 162 Tigard, OR 97224 vox: 503.620.4919 fax: 503.624.2940 orres@teleport.com @endnode @node REVIEW7 "Falcon 1200/040 Review" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Falcon 040 A1200 Accelerator By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== For years, people said it was impossible to get an 040 into an A1200. It's too hot, they said. It'll never fit, they said. Why would you want to? they said. But someone (actually, by now, several someones) have gone ahead and done it. Macrosystem Netherlands' Falcon 040 was one of the first cards on the market that pulled the feat off. The Falcon's standard configuration is a 68040 RC 25 mhz, but also is advertised as an EC part and as a 33 mhz RC unit. In addition, the Falcon is 060 upgradable, but the 060 upgrade is not yet available. In this, the first of two parts of this review, we'll deal with the installation of the device...because it can get tricky if you're not careful and patient. Next issue, we'll talk about performance. The Falcon comes in a relatively nondescript box, with a short illustrated installation manual and a few basic notes on the operation of the device. The card itself is a very large affair. It takes up the entire available space in the A1200's trapdoor slot, which actually means it's a very snug and stable fit. Um, once you get it in, that is. You're going to need to crack open your A1200 to get this installed. The card is laid out so that the majority of the chips are on the top of the card, and the single SIMM slot and the SCSI controller chip are on the bottom. The SIMM slot runs the SIMM parallel to the card, but that means the socket itself is rather large and requires a custom trapdoor replacement (or you can hack up your own, or just leave it off, but this means your card is exposed to the desk below. The Falcon is supposed to ship with this custom trapdoor...mine didn't. So, open your A1200, remove the keyboard, and you're ready to go to work. Slide the card in from the bottom of the machine, and slide it upwards. It should "snap" into place reasonably well. At this point, you will want to install your SCSI connector board into the small socket that leads to the back of the machine and the little punch-out SCSI door. However, my unit didn't come with one and GVP is still waiting for a shipment from Europe. The SCSI on the Falcon is a different concept than most other A1200 peripherals. Generally, you buy an accelerator which has an external connector. If you buy the SCSI attachment, you hook it up to this header. The SCSI attachment contains the SCSI chip and logic necessary to control external SCSI devices. The Falcon puts the SCSI chip directly on the accelerator card. This means that the SCSI connector unit is far cheaper (advertised for about US$35) but means that if you don't need or want SCSI, you pay for the bulk of it anyway when you buy the card, as the SCSI connector card is essentially just a header. Now it's time to make sure your computer doesn't melt. The 68040/25 RC is a rather hot chip. A fan is included in the Falcon. (You're going to love tihs.) In order to install the fan and keep it in place, you position the fan on roughly one third of the chip, aligning one of the corners of the fan with an open space in the RF shield between the Falcon and the floppy drive. Then, you DRIVE A SCREW THROUGH the bottom of your Amiga's case, holding the fan securely in place. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? This will enable you to place the keyboard and cover back on your Amiga 1200. Alternately, if you scoff at FCC violations and don't want to bore a hole through your computer, you can take a different, much more hackish approach. The present Falcon setup on my desk is as follows: The top of the case is on a shelf. The fan is actually attached to a small piece of plywood, which is being held in place by the cushion-spring positioned on the floppy drive to keep it from being crushed by the keyboard. The keyboard rests on this setup. This of course means the 1200 is pretty much exposed, but it does keep the chip reasonably cool. Power up your Amiga 1200. With luck, you'll have a full 68040 with MMU and FPU at your disposal! Actually, the initial installation process was pretty easy, and I've installed it on two different machines. For both, the actual physical process of getting the card in place and wiring up the fan was 10 minutes. Toying with the fan for maximum cooling took a little bit more work, but that was nothing appreciable. So, what to do with an 040? We'll talk about it next issue. @endnode @node CHARTS1 "Aminet Charts: 15-Apr-96" @toc FTP | The most downloaded files from Aminet during the week until 15-Apr-96 | Updated weekly. Most popular file on top. | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- FTPMount-1.0.lha comm/tcp 113K 0+Mounts FTP sites as part of a filesy AWebHotlist.lha comm/tcp 4K 0+Compose a well designed AWeb hotlist VirusZ_II130.lha util/virus 171K 0+VirusZ v1.30 by Georg Hoermann AirMail3_MUI.lha comm/mail 148K 0+AirMail 3.0 MUI internet mailer PictDT43.lha util/dtype 183K 0+Picture.datatype V43.713 for AGA/CGr Gui-FTP.lha comm/tcp 352K 0+Gui-FTP V3.0 GUI based FTP client AmiPhone1.5B.lha comm/net 113K 0+AmiTCP based voice chat program AmIRC_OPSv2.lha comm/tcp 3K 0+AutoGreet and AutoOp script for AmIR SysPic301.lha util/boot 55K 0+The best boot-time picture displayer urouhack17.lha util/wb 127K 0+Sysihack&framepatch, XEN-style butto Appetizer.lha text/hyper 246K 1+EASY! Point & Click Web Page Maker s2meter37.2.lha comm/net 68K 0+SANA-II network device statistics mo ALTTCP43icn.lha pix/icon 6K 0+Icons For AmiTCP 4.3 PRO mwm101.lha text/hyper 73K 1+Magic Web Maker v1.01 - BugFixed Ver atcp43scripts.lha comm/tcp 7K 0+My AmiTCP4.3 Startnet script (slight MCF4AmIRC.lha comm/tcp 17K 0+MCF V1.0 ARexx Integrated Scripts fo Patch2AmiTCP43.lha biz/patch 514K 0+Patch AmiTCP/IP 4.1/4.2 to AmiTCP/IP mwm103.lha text/hyper 73K 0+Magic Web Maker v1.03 - The story co AllowBad.lha disk/misc 15K 0+Format damaged floppies (like BForma xfd113.lha util/pack 116K 0+Decrunch almost every packed file (e | The highest rated programs during the week until 15-Apr-96 | Updated weekly. Best program on top. Please rate all the programs you | download. To do so, send to aminet-server@wuarchive.wustl.edu : | RATE | where is the file you want to judge and is a mark from 0..10 | with 10 being the best. You can rate several programs in one mail, but | don't rate your own programs. Example: RATE dev/gui/mui23usr.lha 8 | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- MagicMenu_1.29.lha util/cdity 106K 124+PopUp menus for OS 2.x and newer term-030.lha comm/term 655K 3+V4.6, MC68020/030/040/060 version VoxelEngine25.lha gfx/aga 71K 4+Landscape routine. V2.5 ReqToolsDev.lha util/libs 284K 13+ReqTools 2.4 - the requester toolkit AWeb.lha comm/tcp 253K 3+New fast non-MUI WWW browser. V 1.0a thor222_main.lha comm/mail 790K 15+Offline reader, main archive (requir DeliTracker224.lha mus/play 736K 2+Enhanced/bugfixed players, e.g. s3m Play16_1.6.lha mus/play 91K 9+Plays WAV, IFF, MAUD, etc, 14 bit ou aglogo.lha pix/misc 44K 5+AMIGAmes 'logo' picture (Finnish Ami BlacksEditor.lha text/edit 222K 1+Wonderful Text Editor (Version 1.01) FTPMaker.lha comm/misc 40K 11+Help you to configure your ftpaccess AmiPOP118.lha comm/net 98K 29+Amiga POP3 Client V1.18 AmiTCP-demo-40.lha comm/tcp 738K 76+TCP/IP protocol stack ass_gfx.lha demo/euro 579K 140 Top 10 pics from Asm93 gfx compo Odyssey.lha demo/file 3.3M 42 Demo by Alcatraz, ECS, 1st at TP91 mui33dev.lha dev/gui 585K 6+MagicUserInterface V3.3, developer f ar402.lha docs/mags 75K 9+Amiga Report 4.02, January 31, 1996 Angband-279v5.lha game/role 688K 3+Angband 2.7.9 (v5) voxel087.lha gfx/aga 788K 1+Voxel Engine 0.87 by Silicon Motion amiwm0.19pl29.lha gfx/x11 56K 3+X window manager WB like. DI-DrmSeq.lha mods/slow 248K 4+DI - "Dream Sequence" - 16:06 worms.jpg pix/trace 264K 4+Cinema4D rendered picture MCP110.lha util/cdity 395K 10+MAJOR UPDATE! The mother of the WB-U VMM_V3_3.lha util/misc 267K 16+Virtual memory for Amigas with MMU DragIt4.lha util/wb 48K 118+Move and size a window from anywhere YAM12.lha comm/mail 135K 4+MUI Internet mailer for AmiTCP ar404.lha docs/mags 85K 3+Amiga Report 4.04, March 14, 1996 sfx-bin_20.lha mus/edit 300K 5+V 3.31 Binary for 68020 sfx-bin_30m.lha mus/edit 285K 5+V 3.31 Binary for 68030+FPU @endnode @node MAILLIST "Amiga Report Mailing List" @toc WHERE =========================================================================== Amiga Report Mailing List =========================================================================== If you have an internet mailing address, you can receive Amiga Report in @{"UUENCODED" link UUENCODE} form each week as soon as the issue is released. To be put on the list, send Email to majordomo@amigalib.com Your subject header will be ignored. In the body of the message, enter subscribe areport The system will automatically pull your e-mail address from the message header. Your account must be able to handle mail of any size to ensure an intact copy. For example, many systems have a 100K limit on incoming messages. ** IMPORTANT NOTICE: PLEASE be certain your host can accept mail over ** ** 100K! We have had a lot of bouncebacks recently from systems with a ** ** 100K size limit for incoming mail. If we get a bounceback with your ** ** address in it, it will be removed from the list. Thanks! ** @endnode @node UUENCODE @toc MAILLIST =========================================================================== UUDecoding Amiga Report =========================================================================== If you receive Amiga Report from the direct mailing list, it will arrive in UUEncoded format. This format allows programs and archive files to be sent through mail by converting the binary into combinations of ASCII characters. In the message, it will basically look like a lot of trash surrounded by begin and end, followed by the size of the file. To UUDecode Amiga Report, you first need to get a UUDecoding program, such as UUxT by Asher Feldman. This program is available on Aminet in pub/aminet/arc/ Then you must download the message that it is contained in. Don't worry about message headers, the UUDecoding program will ignore them. There is a GUI interface for UUxT, which should be explained in the docs. However, the quickest method for UUDecoding the magazine is to type uuxt x ar.uu at the command prompt. You will then have to decompress the archive with lha, and you will then have Amiga Report in all of its AmigaGuide glory. If you have any questions, you can write to @{"Jason Compton" link JASON} @endnode @node AMINET "Aminet" @toc WHERE Aminet ====== To get Amiga Report from Aminet, simply FTP to any Aminet site, CD to docs/mags. All the back issues are located there as well. Sites: ftp.netnet.net, ftp.wustl.edu, ftp.luth.se, ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk @endnode @node WWW "World Wide Web" @toc WHERE World Wide Web ============== AR can also be read with Mosaic (in either AmigaGuide or html form). Reading AmigaReport with Mosaic removes the necessity to download it. It can also be read using programs found in UNIX sites such as LYNX. Simply tell Mosaic to open one of the following URLs: http://www.omnipresence.com/Amiga/News/AR/ http://www.pwr.wroc.pl/AMIGA/AR/ http://mm.iit.uni-miskolc.hu/Data/AR http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/amiga/ar/ http://ramiga.rnet.cgi.com/~AR http://www.sci.muni.cz/ar/ http://metro.turnpike.net/P/panther/main.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/amiga/ar/ http://ArtWorks.apana.org.au/AmigaReport.html http://www.vol.it/mirror/amiga/ http://www.cucug.org/ar/ar.html http://www.acropolis.net/clubs/amiga/amigareport/ http://www.bengala.saccii.net.au/ar/main.html The following AR sites also have a mailto form, allowing you to mail to Amiga Report from the web site.

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08/1997