--------------------- MORTON'S MUSINGS By Morton A. Kevelson --------------------- POSITIVELY ACCELERATING Well, I have finally done it: purchased the Commodore A 2630 accelerator card with a 25 MHZ 68030 with a 68882 math coprocessor and four megabytes of 32 bit RAM for my Amiga 2000. There were several items that motivated me into taking the plunge at this time. First there is the never-to-be-satisfied desire for more powerful hardware. Then there was a developing interest in a variety of calculation- intensive, graphic-based applications that I was playing with. Although I was able to get along with my unaccelerated Amiga, I was starting to experience a noticeable temporal sluggishness as the software crunched along. The real incentive was the bargain basement price Commodore placed on the fully equipped A2630 for registered developers. Although my non- disclosure agreement prevents me from mentioning the exact figure, the price was low enough that a slight push from a possible tax incentive was enough to make me reach for my credit card. Buying direct from Commodore, even as a developer, is not as smooth as it could be. The documentation supplied with the Kickstart 2.0.4 ROM specifically mentions the A2630 must have at least a set of version -06 ROMS installed to work with AmigaDOS 2.0. When I inquired into the version of the ROMs supplied with the A2630, I was told that I would have to pay extra for the ROMs I would need. One of my editors felt I was fortunate to be able to obtain the correct ROMs at all. After waiting two months for a second Kickstart ROM, I could not disagree. In any event, a five percent surcharge was a small price to pay to make sure I had the proper product in hand. The extra five percent did result in a set of version -07 ROMs along with the - 06 ROMs that were already installed on the board. The -07 ROMs add some new features to the A2630. Holding down both mouse buttons when the Amiga boots up invokes a new Boot Menu screen which lets you select the hard drive partition or floppy disk from which to boot. You can also go to the Advanced Options screen from the Boot Menu. Advanced Options lets you disable any any or all of the hard drive partitions and floppy drives. It's sort of a brute force method for eliminating the annoying click an empty floppy drive makes. Holding down just the right mouse button brings up the A2630's original screen, which lets you choose between the 68030 or the plain vanilla 68000 microprocessors. When the system is booted into 68000 mode it is also unable to access any 32 bit RAM on the A2630. The functions of the mouse buttons were discovered by a trial-and-error process as the A2630's manual still referred to only the original microprocessor option screen. If the A2630 is installed in one of the early German-made A2000 motherboards, the 68000 microprocessor will have to be removed. The A2630 is not the most up-to-date 68030 accelerator board. Based on previously published reviews, neither is it the fastest. It is possible to speed up the A2630 by installing a 33 MHz 68882 math coprocessor and a 33 Mhz clock circuit, however, I do not think I will bother with this upgrade. For my purposes, the five to ten times speed improvement I am experiencing is still rather exhilarating. If you are interested in upgrading your system, this may be a good time to start shopping around. Now that the 68040 boards are shipping, I expect prices to drop on the 68030 based accelerators. Although developer pricing is not available to everyone, you may be able to find a bargain on your own. CD-I IN F.A.O. SCHWARTZ. I recently took a lunch hour jaunt to F.A.O. Schwartz, an eminent toy store, to obtain an Erector Set for my daughter and to take a look at CD-I. The Erector Sets were sold out. However, CD-I was in full demo. Unfortunately, the titles being demonstrated looked quite good, making heavy use of digitized graphics and some full-screen animation. I was not surprised to find the salesperson running the demo to be ignorant of any technical details and to have only minimal knowledge on how to use the machine. On the other hand, it took me no more than 30 seconds to figure out how to access the scrolling text display on the Smithsonian disk. I do not know what Commodore's game plan is at this time. In any case, it seems to me that if Commodore wants to sell some CDTVS, they better come up with some good demonstration software and get some units out to where the public can see them. CDTV UPDATE Although CDTV is still a rare commodity in the New York City area, Commodore has already sent out samples of a CDTV upgrade package to reviewers. The package includes an infra-red remote mouse, a wired keyboard, a floppy disk drive, the AmigaDOS 1.3 software package with an Amiga 500 manual, and the Gold Disk Appetizer package which includes word processing and paint software. I have managed to resolve last month's problem with "The Night Before Christmas" from Discis. I am not completely satisfied with the solution. After talking to Xetec about the failure of this CDTV title, I was contacted by Discis' technical support. All of Discis' titles are designed to run directly from the Workbench on any Amiga that has been equipped with a CD-ROM drive. Just click on the program's icon to start it. Discis mentioned they had successfully tested their programs using the CDROM-FS file system software from Canadian Prototype Replicas. Although I do have CDROM-FS and have successfully worked with it, I have not been using it, as its developer does not claim to support the Xetec Mini FastCard host adapter I am using with the CD-ROM drive. A few moments effort was all it took to disable the Xetec CD-ROM driver and then install CDROM-FS in its place. Success! Discis' "The Night Before Christmas" now runs without any problems. Discis also provided the Macintosh version of "The Paper Bag Princess" on CD ROM. It ran well on the CD-ROM drive using the AmaxII Macintosh emulator, but I found that I could not exit the program without rebooting the system. I have spent some additional time with "The Hound of the Baskervilles" and Eadweard Muybridge's "Women in Motion" CDTV titles from On-Line Entertainment Ltd. On-Line utilizes the standard CD audio tracks for all of the narration and instructions on its CDTV titles, while some of the background sound effects are reproduced via the Amiga's own sampled sound system. This does not make any difference if you are running an On-Line CDTV disk on a CDTV system, since both Amiga and CD audio are sent to the same output jacks. On a stand-alone CD ROM drive, the CD audio output on the CD- ROM player is separate from the Amiga's audio output jacks. My normal mode of operation is to select either Amiga audio or CD audio but not both. As a result I missed all of the narration on the On-Line titles when I first tried them.out. I was rather disappointed with "The Hound of The Baskervilles". The program is essentially a condensed version of the original Arthur Conan Doyle story. In fact, one of the ways of interacting with the program is to read through the entire text, which has been condensed from the original. The program does enhance the text in several ways, such as newspaper articles, telegrams, ticket stubs and so forth as "clues" to help illustrate the plot. However, these illustrations are no more than what is available in many of the illustrated editions of the Conan Doyle stories that you would find at any major bookseller. You can also opt for a condensed narrative of the story and even mix the detailed and condensed versions. The narrative version of the story is presented against a simple digitized image of Watson hunched over his writing desk. There is virtually no animation. You also have the option of rummaging around the screen representation of Watson's cluttered desktop. Doing so presents the segments of the story in a more or less random sequence. On-Line Entertainment's "The Hound of the Baskervilles" fails to tap the true interactive multimedia capabilities of the CDTV medium. There is very little in the program that you could not get from a good illustrated copy of original story in book form. In fact, for the price of the CDTV title, you should be able to pick up a set of all of the Conan Doyle mysteries. Why settle for less? NTSC VS. PAL DISPLAY MODES Now that the majority of the world's Amigas are in Europe, the conflicting requirements of the American NTSC video display format versus the European PAL display format are more likely to become a concern of American users. The NTSC display format is based on a video frame rate of about 30 images a second. Each frame is composed of a pair of interlaced fields. An NTSC frame is built of 525 horizontal lines which are progressively scanned across the face of the picture tube from the top to the bottom. Interlacing is the process whereby the scan lines that compose the two fields are interwoven. The scan lines of the first field fills the screen and the lines of the second field are scanned between the lines of the first. The PAL display format differs from the NTSC format in that it is based on a video frame rate of about 50 images a second. Each PAL frame is built up of 625 horizontal lines. For both the NTSC and PAL display modes, a portion of the scan lines are overscanned off the top and the bottom of the screen. The overscanned lines insure the screen will remain filled as the size of the scanned area changes when the display monitor ages. Since the amount of overscan built into a monitor is not a fixed value, the active display area is normally used by NTSC Amigas is only 200 scan lines for a non-interlaced display and 400 scan lines for an interlaced display. For PAL Amigas the values are 240 and 480 scan lines respectively. The difference in the number of scan lines is of interest to those who use the Amiga to create graphical hardcopy with page layout or desktop publishing applications. The NTSC pixels of the 320 by 200 and 640 by 400 display modes are slightly rectangular. The exact ratio of pixel width to height is about 44 to 52. Since the shape of the picture tube does not differ between NTSC and PAL systems, the PAL pixel turns out to be perfectly square. This is ideal for page layout applications where the hardcopy output device also has square pixels as for 300 dpi laser printers. If you are using commercial software that is locally distributed, the conflict between NTSC and PAL display modes should be of no concern. If you are importing your own software, or if you are trying to run some of the increasing number of public domain or shareware programs that originate in Europe, then you may run into problems. Firstly, a PAL display format program is apt to lose an appreciable part of the useful image off the top and bottom on an NTSC screen. Second, although the ECS display chips in the newer Amigas can be soft-switched to either NTSC or PAL modes, not all display monitors can handle the change. If you feed a PAL signal into an NTSC television, the usual result is a garbled display. The problem was literally brought home with me when I received a copy of a European demo containing digitized sounds and images. It includes the Nosboot program which lets you reboot the Amiga in either the NTSC or PAL display modes. The demo requires the ECS Agnus with one megabyte of chip RAM in order to run. The computer also needs two floppy drives. However, the demo would not recognize the second internal disk drive on my Amiga 2000. I had to hook up a third external floppy before the program would run. The demo runs in the PAL display mode. I have been aware for some time the Amiga 1080 monitor connected to my Amiga 2000 seemed to be able to handle the PAL display mode, but I had not fully investigated the ramifications of the phenomenon. Since the demo ran in overscanned display mode, which resulted in the loss of the scrolling text portion of the program off the bottom of the screen, I had to do something. A quick examination of the front and back panels of the 1080 turned up a small hole on its back panel which was labeled Vertical Height. A moment's effort located a suitable screwdriver and in just a few seconds I had perfect PAL display. At this point I finally saw the light. My aging 1080 monitor, which was manufactured in April of 1986, was actually able to multisync between the NTSC and PAL display modes. To verify my discovery, I commandeered the August 1985 vintage 1080 monitor from my Amiga 1000 system and after adjusting both the Vertical Height control on the back panel and the Vertical Hold control on the front panel, I once again obtained a stable PAL display. Although I cannot generalize based upon the tests with just two monitors, it seems likely that many of Commodore's Amiga monitors can multisync between the NTSC and PAL display modes. If anyone has any additional information on the multisync capabilities of 1080 or 1084 monitors, please let me know. If you have the ECS Agnus and are running AmigaDOS 2.0 it is very easy to check. Just run up Preferences and choose the ScreenMode option. Change to PAL mode and select use. Do not save the setting as you may have to reboot if your display breaks up. Remember to copy the Pal monitor file, from the MonitorStore drawer that is located on the Extras 2.0 disk, into the Monitors drawer on your boot partition or Preferences will not be able to offer the PAL display option. AREXX BOOK FROM ABACUS "Using ARexx on the Amiga" by Chris Zamara and Nick Sullivan, $34.95, is the latest addition to the Abacus line of Amiga reference works. This 425- page volume is divided into four sections designed for both novice and advanced ARexx programmers. The first section, 45 pages, introduces the basic concepts, including the installation of ARexx and how it relates to the Amiga's operating environment. The second section, 130 pages, is a detailed, hands-on tutorial on using ARexx. The tutorial's emphasis is on direct interaction with the computer with numerous suggestions on additional ways to explore. The third section, 65 pages, deals with AREXX'S primary purpose, controlling other applications. The chapter covers general information as well as specific examples of how ARexx interacts with a number of Amiga products. The fourth section, 160 pages, is a detailed reference to every ARexx instruction and function. Each ARexx command is fully described with a detailed example of its use. A direct comparison with the ARexx reference section included with the official Amiga Release 2 package from Commodore reveals the reference entries in "Using ARexx on the Amiga" are about twice as long. Overall quality of the book is excellent. The text is very readable with enough pertinent anecdotal material thrown in to keep the reader's interest. This is not surprising, as Zamara and Sullivan were the founding editors of Transactor for the Amiga, a technical magazine which was highly respected by the Amiga community. Their present company, AHA! Software, has been developing for the Amiga since 1986. Some of AHA!'s recent products include TransWrite, the word processor with which this document was written, and HyperBook. Both programs are published by Gold Disk. "Using ARexx on the Amiga" includes a companion disk which contains all the longer programming examples listed in the book. The disk also contains additional examples of ARexx programming and as a guide and index of related public domain and shareware programs that use ARexx. Several HyperBook examples, one of which is the guide to the program disk, are also included. If you have any interest in learning about ARexx then getting a copy of this work should be high on your list of priorities. AMIGA PRICES UP, DOWN? Commodore's Power Up program is now over and the list price of the Amiga 2000 is up to a suggested $1,937, though I have seen it priced as low as $1,299. The cost of the basic Amiga 500 is still $399. I am not about to try to set Commodore's marketing strategy. Still, it seems to me Commodore has decided not to compete with the Amiga 2000. Commodore appears to be under the impression that anyone purchasing an Amiga 2000 will get it for a specific reason, such as a Video Toaster workstation. Under the circumstances, the prospective A2000 buyer should be willing to pay whatever is necessary for the machine. On the other hand, with a $399 street price for the Amiga 500, Commodore seems to still be trying for the home computer market. In my opinion this is a sad set of circumstances. After carefully examining the physical hardware of both the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000, I can only conclude there is plenty of fat in the A2000 price structure. An examination of the pricing for comparable hardware on other systems, such as 200-watt power supplies, multi-slot mother boards, disk drives and physical enclosures, followed by a comparison of the hardware common to the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000 leads me to believe the Amiga 2000 could easily sell for less than half its current street price. DEVELOPERS MENTIONED Canadian Prototype Replicas P.O. Box 8 Breslau, Ontario Canada N0B 1M0 Discis Knowledge Research Inc. NYCCPO Box #4509 5150 Yonge Street Toronto, Ontario Canada M2N 6N2 Online Entertainment Ltd. 7d Kings Yard Carpenters Road London, England E15 2HD U.S. distributer: Michtron 3201 Drummond Plaza Newark, DE 19711 302-454-7946. Abacus 5370 52nd Street SE Grand Rapids, MI 49512 800-451-4319 END OF TEXT