4]--------------------- 3]MORTON'S MUSINGS 3]By Morton A. Kevelson 4]--------------------- 3]MARKET MADNESS Some of the market strategies being deployed for the coming holiday season border on the bizarre. Here are some recent announcement which have come my way: Electronic Arts has teamed with Sony from Oct. 1 to March 1, 1991, for the "Save on Sony" promotion. In brief, the purchase of one Electronic Arts title entitles you to buy a Sony Walkman for $15. The purchase of two EA titles qualifies for an $85 for a Sony Walkman, three titles for a $125 Sony Discman. Model numbers of the Sony products were not specified. Eligible software consists of eight packages for the Amiga and 10 for IBM. The Amiga packages are DeluxePaint III, DeluxeVideo III, Populous, 688 Attack Sub, Budokan, Powermonger, The Immortal, and Chuck Yeager's Advanced Trainer 2.0. Some major retailers, which have already signed up for the promotion are Egghead Discount Software, Walden Software, Electronics Boutique and Software Etc. 3]MORE ON WARRANTY In a earlier column I covered Commodore's new one-year warranty, with round-trip Federal Express shipping for the Amiga 500. Commodore has now extended this warranty policy to, of all things, the Commodore 64. Consider: It probably costs more to round trip ship a 64 by Federal Express than it does to build one. The C-64 still continues to sell very well --I'm told more than 300,000 last year. C-64 sales are actually expanding rapidly in the newly opened markets in Eastern Europe, where it is considered an affordable computer. 3]500 DIFFERENCES Some clarification is in order regarding the differences between the Amiga 500C and the Amiga 500P. The C in the A500C stands for consumer, as in mass market. The A500C is the basic, 512 kilobyte, Amiga 500 with an RF modulator, for use in hooking up to a television, included with the package. If nothing else, this should help prove once and for all that color TVs don't make good computer monitors. The A500C will be sold by major retail chains such as Sears, Montgomery Ward, Macy's of California, VideoConcepts, McDuff, Highland Appliance, Sun TV and Famous-Barr as well as Software Etc. and Walden Software. The P in the A500P stands for professional, as in sold by an authorized dealer. This one-meg version includes Amiga Vision and is intended to be the low-end machine sold by the official Amiga dealers. After checking some local prices, I believe the A500P is definitely the better buy. 3]SOAPBOX In his October 1990 editorial, RUN magazine editor-in chief Dennis Brisson advocated the promotion by Commodore of the C-64 instead of the Amiga as the classroom computer of choice. The reasoning behind this selection is the low cost of the C-64 would allow many more students to get their hands on a computer than would be otherwise possible. According to Brisson, the $800 Amiga 500 educator package is too expensive to bring a sufficient number of computers into the classroom. The same editorial states the education market is now dominated by Apple and IBM. I strongly disagree. Computers sold by both Apple and IBM are more expensive than the Amiga 500. A functional C-64 package still costs between $400 and $500 --more than half the cost of the Amiga 500. For this money you get a 64 kilobyte, 8 bit computer with a slow, single sided, low capacity disk drive, which uses the rather vulnerable 5-1/4 inch floppy disks, and a low resolution color monitor. By today's standards, the C-64 is slow, clumsy and difficult to use. In fact, it takes considerable time and effort for an instructor to become proficient enough with the C-64 to be able to teach effectively with one. By comparison, the $800 Amiga 500 package consists of a 16/32 bit, high- speed, one meg computer, two high-capacity 3-1/2 inch floppy disk drives, a high-resolution RGB color monitor, an advanced version of BASIC with built-in graphic and sound commands, and an easy to use graphic user interface. Even at $800, the A500 is considerably cheaper than the Apples and IBMs which are finding their way into the schools. The concept of trying to pit the C-64 against the Apples or IBMs will only convince educators and students that Commodore computers are just not up to date. On the other hand the Amiga 500 is able to run rings around any Apple or IBM computer that is being brought into the schools. 3]VIDEO TOASTER A recent press release from NewTek states that after "four years of development, the Video Toaster is in final testing and will begin quantity shipments this fall." The $1,595 Toaster package will include LightWave 3D and ToasterPaint. LightWave 3D is a modeling, animation and rendering package with an intuitive point-and-click interface. ToasterPaint offers broadcast resolution and full NTSC (24 bit) palette with over 16 million colors. It seems NewTek may actually meet this shipping date. The October issue of AmigaWorld contains a hands-on feature on the Toaster. I also came across a Toaster article in AVideo magazine, a professional video trade publication. However, it was written by a NewTek staff member. 3]MORE ON THE ART DEPARTMENT Perry Kivolowitz of ASDG showed the Art Department Professional ($199.95) at an AMUSE meeting in mid-August. It supports ARexx, imports and saves to both Amiga and non-Amiga image formats (the original could only save in Amiga format), and provides control of scanners and other imaging hardware. Kivolowitz said ASDG will develop the control software and interface hardware for any imaging device of your choice within 30 days if a unit is provided on loan for that interval. In addition to a preliminary version of the Art Department Professional, Kivolowitz showed a collection of 35-millimeter slide images created with Art Department Professional driving a Polaroid CI-3000 digital palette film recorder. The CI-3000 can generate images with a resolution as high as 2,000 by 1,500 pixels with a full NTSC color palette. The slide pictures were made up of four or more Amiga HAM images which were composed by the Art Department into a single super bitmap for use with the CI-3000. These images promptly sent my socks to the laundry. Art Department Professional comes with loader and saver modules for DigiView 21-bit, Sculpt, Silver, GIF, PCX, DeluxePaint II Enhanced and MacPaint formats. The included Super-IFF loader supports EHB, HAM, AHAM, SHAM, Dynamic HAM, ARES and Dynamic HIRES as well as all standard IFF formats. The separate Conversion Pack ($89.95) will include modules for Targa, TIFF Pict2 and Rendition formats. Existing users of the Art Department may upgrade for $75. It may even be possible to save some money by buying Art Department at a discount and then taking advantage of the upgrade offer. If your business includes creation of high quality color images, Art Department Professional should be on your shopping list. 3]HARD STUFF Great Valley Products (GVP) dropped in on an AMUSE meeting in early September to show its new line of Series II HardCards. Based on a newly developed Motorola custom large-scale integrated circuit, the Series II features a clean, uncluttered design. The new chip has reduced the component count to the point that the Series HardCard + RAM features up to eight megabytes of RAM, using one megabit by eight SIMMs, as well as a hard drive on a single Amiga 2000 card without any crowding. The GVP rep also showed its new A-Net, local area Ethernet network controller for the Amiga. Not to be outdone, Supra recently announced its new SupraDrive 500XP hard disk/RAM system for the Amiga 500. The 500XP uses micro-power drive mechanisms which eliminate the need for an external power supply. Up to 2 megabytes of RAM with 1 megabit chips or 8 megabytes with 4 megabit chips can be installed in the 500XP. Prices start at $679 for a 20 megabyte hard drive and a 1/2 megabyte of RAM. 3]A-MAX II A-Max II, which arrived in early September, now includes hard drive support for GVP, the IVS TrumpCard, and the Commodore A2090 and A2091/A590. Hard drive support is handled in the Amiga fashion by a device driver in the devs directory. The hard drive is formatted in the conventional fashion with one partition put aside for A-Max. The Macintosh then reformats this partition when running under A-Max. Although the list of supported hard drives is short, new interfaces can be added by creating a suitable A-Max driver for the devs directory. A-Max II has been tested with Macintosh system versions up to version 6.0.5. A-Max II now supports most Macintosh digitized sounds. Problems may occur with those applications that directly drive the Macintosh sound hardware. 3]IS THIS REALLY NECESSARY? Software Support International, known in the C-64 market for its parameter-based copy programs, has announced a similar product for the Amiga. Maverick ($40) comes with more than 200 parameters and will include a high- speed data copier as well as the parameter copier. Maverick is supposed to remove copy protection to the level that programs can be installed on a hard disk drive. 3]GAMES --Pinball Construction Set was one of my favorite games on the C-64. Unfortunately, an announced Amiga version never materialized from Electronic Arts. After five years, a suitable substitute is available. Judging from the sample games on the distribution disk, Power Pinball from Karmasoft looks like what I have been waiting for. The game uses lo-res, 32 color IFF images for the game backgrounds. Sound effects and background music are based on 8SVX IFF sample files which you can create with any Amiga sound digitizer. You can customize sample games, create your own from scratch or just play the ones that come with the program. Unfortunately, the program does not create freely distributable stand-alone versions of games. A copy of Power Pinball is needed to play the games. --Air combat simulators seem to be the latest thing. I just received a copy of Wings, Cinemaware's first offering along this line. The setting is World War I, in which you are the pilot of a vintage biplane. Since the flight controls were nothing more than a joystick, I found myself up and in the thick of it only minutes after booting up. Like all of the Cinemaware products, Wings' opening sequences are superb although the graphics which make up the scenery of the actual flying sequences are bit sketchy. On the other hand, the details of your aircraft's and its pilot are excellent. Your viewpoint is from behind the pilot, who always looks in the direction of the enemy aircraft. The game encompasses over 230 missions on which to build the skills of your character. Missions include such diverse activities as patrol, balloon busting, escort duty, strafing runs and bombing. Messages from your commander help maintain a sense of realism. Wings also maintains performance statistics on your character and squadron. The package comes with a 14-page instruction manual and a 76-page, illustrated, aviator's briefing manual historical details on World War I. I found Wings to be interesting, informative and fun to play. 3]PAGESTREAM 2.0 I finally received my copy of PageStream 2.0 and have barely had enough time to merge the 60 revised pages into the manual. More on PageStream 2.0 the next time. 3]WORLD OF COMMODORE AND AMIGA I was supposed to report on this Sept. 15-16 Valley Forge, PA, show. After driving 110 miles to the Valley Forge Convention Center, I discovered the show had been downgraded to a Commodore User's Fair, and the Hunter Group had not even bothered to print up a list of exhibitors. Most of the booths were occupied by user groups and special interest support groups, with a smattering of Commodore 64/128 developers. New Amiga products were virtually non-existent. The most interesting booth was occupied by Pulsar, whose Dr. Oxide made long complaint about the shipment of the numerous 4096-color hand scanners lost between Germany and the show. He did have a working prototype of this $995 scanner at the fair. The color scanner has 64 mm wide scan at 90 dots per inch translates to about 226 dots - less than the 320-dot width of a low resolution Amiga screen. It does scan a full 4096 colors in single pass. The interface to the computer is by the Amiga 500's expansion port. A plug-in version is for the A2000. The color scanner comes with its own scanning software Electronic Art's Deluxe Photolab. Production quantities are expected to be available in November. Pulsar will also be importing a $495, 200/300/400 dot per inch, black- and-white hand scanner with a 105-mm wide scan head. The scanner will have a true 16-level gray scale mode and optical character recognition (OCR) software. 3]COMPUTE'S BIG ISSUE Compute magazine made an appearance at the fair with its 264-page newsstand version of the October issue. It includes sections for MS/DOS, Amiga, C-64 and Macintosh computers. The main section ran about 120 pages with 48 pages for the MS/DOS and Amiga sections, 40 pages for C-64 and only 8 pages for the Macintosh section. Subscribers to the old versions of Compute will receive a copies which containing only the main and specific sections that interested you. 3]COMPANIES MENTIONED KarmaSoft, P. O. Box 1034, Golden, CO 80402,, Tel: (303) 277-1241. Software Support International, 2700 NE Andresen Road, Suite A-10, Vancouver, WA 98661, Tel: (800) 356-1393, 206-695-1393. Supra Corp., 1133 Commercial Way, Albany, OR 97321, Tel: (800) 727-8772, (503) 967-9075. Great Valley Products, 600 Clark Ave., King of Prussia, PA 19406, Tel: (215) 337-8770. ASDG, 925 Stewart St., Madison, WI 53713, Tel: (608) 273-6585. NewTek, 215 East 8th St., Topeka, KS 66603, Tel: (800) 843-8934, (913) 354-1146. Electronic Arts, 1820 Gateway Drive, San Mateo, CA 94404, Tel: (415) 571-7171. Cinemaware Corp., 4165 Thousand Oaks Blvd., Westlake Village, CA 91362, Tel: (805) 495-6515. Pulsar, 410 Maple Ave., Westbury, NY 11590, Tel: (516) 997-6903. 4]END OF TEXT