--------------------- Morton's Musings By Morton A. Kevelson --------------------- IMAGE WORLD NEW YORK Image World New York took place Sept. 23 -27 in the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center located on mid-Manhattan's west side. Once again, some careful scheduling, combined with some creative subway riding and a comparable amount of leg work, gave me the opportunity to tear through the exhibit floor during the course of a one hour lunch break. I am pleased to report the Amiga was well represented at this show, which was geared to the high-end video professional. On entering the exhibit hall, a quick glance to the right resulted in a clear view of the massive NewTek booth. I correctly assumed this would be a good place to start my run. Once again, Kiki Stockhammer was ably demonstrating the capabilities of the Video Toaster. Carefully avoiding the minimum three deep crowd at the front of the booth, I made my way to the rear. Copies of the NewTek Video Toaster demo tape, which includes Todd Rundgren's "Change Myself" music video created entirely with the Video Toaster, were available. Video Toaster workstations presently include the $3,995, 68000-based system with five megabytes RAM and a 52-megabyte hard drive and the $8,995, 50 Mhz, 68030/68882 based system with nine megabytes RAM and an 105 megabyte hard drive. After briefly spying on the head AmiExpo show executive conversing with a NewTek representative, I dashed through the rest of the exhibits. I quickly learned two things: First, I had little or no idea what half of this very expensive, high-tech video equipment was for; second, about a third of the exhibitors included an Amiga 2000/Video Toaster as part of their equipment. The Amiga 2000-based Video Toaster workstation has gone beyond simple penetration of and has thoroughly impaled the professional video market. Dedicated Video Toaster magazines, such as Bread Box, 859 No Hollywood Way, Suite 255, Burbank, CA, 91505, 818-505-1464, $30 for 12 monthly issues, have already started to appear. RGB Computer & Video, 4152 Blue Heron Blvd. West, Suite 118, Riviera Beach, FL 33404, 407-844-3348, was showing its Amiga-based AmiLink professional video editing systems. The AmiLink video editors provide advanced machine control from an intuitive graphic user interface while retaining full compatibility with the industry standard CMX system. For professional and industrial devices AmiLink 2.0 starts at $4,300 for the cuts-only version up to $8,000 for an A-B roll system for parallel control decks. The consumer/industrial version, AmiLink/CI, sells for only $995 for the cuts-only version and $5,195 for the A-B roll system. AmiLink/CI is designed to work with high-end, prosumer, S-VHS video decks such as the Panasonic AG1960 series. AmiLink/VT, $250, for the professional version and $150 for the consumer version, is an add-on software module that provides complete control of the Video Toaster from within AmiLink. AmiLink/VT is the only production control Video Toaster editor currently available. Amigo Business Computers, Inc., 192 Laurel Road, East Northport, NY, 516-757-7334, showed Imagevision, a $21,000 Cable Market and Information System consisting of a 25 Mhz Amiga 3000-based Creation Station which includes six megabytes of RAM, Syquest removable media drive with four cartridges, DCTV and an A2065 Ethernet card, and an Amiga 2000/HD-based Display Station with nine megabytes RAM and an A2065 Ethernet card. The software provided with the package includes AmigaVision, Art Department Professional, Deluxe Paint III, Scala, DigiPaint III, Animation Station, Imagine, Pixel 3D, DiskMaster II, Image Vision Graphic, Image Vision Scheduler and Amigo-Ethernet Software. Each system also comes with 40 hours of training. Additional Image Vision Display Stations are available for $6,000 each. ALSO AT THE SHOW Other Amiga specific exhibitors at the show included: Blue Ribbon Soundworks, LTD, 1293 Briardale Lane, NE, Atlanta, GA 30306, 403-377-1514. Bars & Pipes Professional MIDI composition package. Disney Software, 500S. Buena Vista Street, Burbank, CA 91521-6740, 818- 567-5360. Animation Studio animation and paint program. Gold Disk Inc., 20675 South Western Ave., Ste. 120, Torrance, CA 90501, 213-320-5080. Showmaker multimedia package. Octree Software, 311 W. 43 Street, Suite 904, new York, NY 10036, 212- 262-3116. Caligari 3D imaging software. Digital Processing Systems, Inc., 55 Nugget Avenue, Unit 10, Scarborough, ON, M1S 3L1 Canada, 416-754-8090. Personal TBC II which now includes software controlled Proc Amp and Color Balance via the Amiga's serial port. YOU CAN'T TELL THE PLAYERS WITHOUT A PROGRAM If you have been feeling confused while trying to figure out what the various Amiga 500 packages consist of, you are not alone. Commodore currently offers five different Amiga 500 packages, two for the "professional side" available through the dealer channel and three for the "consumer side" sold through retail outlets. The following table should help clarify what side you would like to be on: Computer A500P A500DS A500C A500DC A5000DL Package Prof. Starter Bonus Discovery Deluxe Pack Price $652 $569 $599 $599 $699 Power Up $499 $399 Professional X X Consumer X X X RAM 1MB 512K 512K 512K 1MB AmigaBASIC X Gold Disk Appetizer X Joystick X RF Modulator X X X Kindwords X X X Maxiplan Plus X Infofile X FusionPaint X X Deluxe paint III X Deluxe Music X Last Crusade X F40 Pursuit X F/A 18 Interceptor X Textcraft Plus X Carmen Sandiego X X Tetris X Free AmigaWorld Issue X Ports of Call X X Zany Golf X Only the dealer versions are available under the Power Up promotion program for existing owners of Commodore computers. WHAT'S NEW ON THE HORIZONS New Horizons Software has had a busy summer. First there was the release of Flow version 3.0, $110, an update to the firm's outline or idea processor. The new features in version 3.0 include a built-in spell checker, auto- numbering, macros and Arexx support. If you use ProWrite, New Horizons' WYSIWYG word processor, you will be better off using its dictionary file instead of the one that comes with Flow. Although Flow's dictionary is substantial, ProwWrite's dictionary, with more than 100,000 words, is larger. DesignWorks has arrived. It's New Horizons' structured drawing program. My first impressions are favorable, although I reserve my final judgement. For text, DesignWorks uses of the Amiga's bitmapped font system or the built- in Agfa outline fonts that are now available with AmigaDOS 2.04. If a bitmapped font size is not available, DesignWorks will look for a larger size that it can scale down. Any size bitmaps can be generated as required from the scalable Agfa fonts. DesignWorks will not run text along a curved path. ProWrite 3.2, $175, is now shipping. If you are upgrading from version 3.0 or 3.1, the cost will be $20. From version 2.0 or 2.5 the cost will be $60 and from version 1.0 or 1.1 will have to pay $75. The upgrade offer includes a 50 percent discount on Flow. New features include built-in PostScript support, automatic high quality printing, a variety of improvements to the user interface, improved picture handling and the ability to insert text files directly into ProWrite documents. BETTER FILE MANAGEMENT Keeping track of the files on my hard drives is a never ending task. Since I loathe the CLI and Workbench is inadequate, I have come to rely upon a versatile directory utility. For the past couple of years I have been satisfied with DiskMaster from Progressive Peripherals and Software which has been recently upgraded to DiskMaster II. INOVATRONICS, the developers of CanDo, is now giving DiskMaster II some serious competition with its release of Directory Opus. The choice is not an easy one. I have been switching back and forth between the two programs for more than a fortnight and have yet to make up my mind. Both programs do an excellent job with regard to their basic function of file management. Both go beyond simple file management by, among other things, letting you automatically examine a variety of standard Amiga file formats including IFF images, IFF sounds and text files. The programs will automatically revert to a hexadecimal display for everything else. Opus goes a little further by letting you view ANIM files and play SoundTracker files. However, both programs have sufficient flexibility in terms of user-added commands and features that any functions found on one could probably be added to the other. There are some fundamental differences between the two programs. DiskMaster II'S directory windows are standard AmigaDOS windows. This lets it multitask within itself to the extent of doing things like simultaneously reading two or more directories into different windows. DiskMaster II also lets you open as many directory windows as you can comfortably keep track of. Since these are standard windows, you can size and arrange them to whatever screen configuration that you like. Directory Opus relies on two directory windows; however, it stores directory file lists in RAM buffers that can be instantaneously recalled. The buffering of file lists in RAM does save a lot of time if you are moving up and down a volume's directory tree. As far as I am concerned, the jury is still out on this pair. I will probably have to put together a feature list and a scorecard to come up with my first choice. Even then, I doubt a clear winner would emerge. CD ROM UPDATE HyperMedia concepts has shipped release 1.3 of The Fred Fish Collection on CD ROM, $74.95, which contains all of the Fred Fish discs through number 530. Updates are available to registered users for $29.95. The size of the collection now precludes the inclusion of the LHARC compressed version on the same CD ROM. The Fred Fish Collection Online CD ROM, the compressed version of the collection which will be updated three times per year, is now available on a separate CD ROM for $69.95. Purchasers of the regular version can buy the compressed version for $10. Release 1.3 includes the ExpressFish utility, a version of ExpressWay Software's ExpressCopy hard drive backup utility, which lets you quickly copy the individual library disks from CD ROM to floppy disk. The Fred Fish Collection on CD ROM is compatible with CDTV. CDTV BUNDLE Purchasers of Commodore's CDTV players will now get a bigger bundle for their bundle. For a limited time, CDTV players in the U.S. will be bundled with The New Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, $399.95 list, and Psygnosis' Lemmings, $49.95 list. The Electronic Encyclopedia was the winner of the 1991 Product of the Year award from the Optical Publishing Association. It includes the full set of 21 volumes on one disc consisting of more than 9 million words plus pictures and sound. I have found Lemmings to be a nicely done, addictive, clever game which is vaguely reminiscent of the original Jumpman for the Commodore 64. The graphics, sound effects and game play are superb. The CDTV and floppy disc versions of the game are identical, but the CDTV version does not include the two-player option. The game concept involves guiding the hordes of Lemmings to safety while avoiding their demise. These objectives are accomplished by endowing individual Lemmings with a variety of characteristics such as digging, floating, climbing or blocking. Lemmings has four levels of play with 30 screens or puzzles to solve on each level. In the two-player game, which is only available on the floppy disk version, the players compete against each other when rescuing the Lemmings. IF ITS THURSDAY IT MUST BE BOLIVIA CCS has announced the imminent release of Che' Guerilla in Bolivia, a strategic simulation with action sequences inspired by the diaries of Che Guevara. TOWER OF BOMAC The Bomac Tower, $329, is now in its second year of production. This floor-standing vertical enclosure can accommodate an entire Amiga 2000 with its cover removed. It [provides room for a babel of drives including four 3.5-inch and four 5.25-inch half height units, and an optional second 200 watt, $79.95, power supply to run all those drives. IMPACT VISION 24 Great Valley Products has started shipping its Impact Vision 24, $1,500, professional video adapter for the Amiga 3000 or the Amiga 2000 with the IV24 Adaptor, $40. Impact Vision 24 includes separate composite video and RGB+SYNC genlocks, a 24-bit frame buffer, a real time 24-bit frameggrabber, a built in de-interlacer, simultaneous RGB, composite video and S-VHS video output, and picture-in-picture display capability. The last feature lets you freeze, resize, rescale and reposition live incoming RGB video just like any Workbench window. A reverse-PIP feature lets you do the same for an Amiga Workbench or any other application screen over full screen incoming live RGB video. Software provided with Impact Vision 24 includes Caligari-IV24 3-D modeling and rendering program, SCALA-Titling video titling software, Macropaint-IV24 two-dimensional bit mapped painting program and mouse or hot key driven control software for the system. Both PAL and NTSC versions of Impact Vision 24 are Available. NEW GRAPHICS STANDARD Digital Micronics, Inc., DMI, and Progressive Peripherals & Software, Inc, PP&S, have announced a new graphics standard for the Amiga based on the Texas Instruments 340x0 Graphics Architecture, TIGA. The new standard, which uses a shared graphics library, will provide a transparent interface to high- resolution graphics on the Amiga with either DMI'S Resolver or PP&S's Rambrandt graphics coprocessor boards. The DMI Resolver Graphics Co-Processor, $1,295, uses the Texas Instrument TMS34010 16-bit processor chip to provide a 1280 x 1024 resolution display with 256 colors from a palette of over 16 million. The standard configuration includes 2MB of video RAM and 2MB of dynamic RAM. The fully configured board, $2,195, includes 5MB of VRAM. DRAM can be expanded up to 8MB. Resolver is compatible with AmigaDOS 1.3, 2.0 and UNIX System 5 release 4 operating systems. The PP&S Rambrandt graphics board, $3,995, which is based on the Texas Instruments TMS34020, 40 Mhz, 32-bit graphics processor with optional 34082 graphics coprocessor, has dual frame buffers with adjustable resolution up to 1024 x 1024 pixels per buffer in 32-bit color. Rambrandt's RGB and composite video outputs support 16.7 million color displays with a 256-color overlay. Rambrandt features genlockable RGB input and composite video in, and can digitize 24-bit color in real time. Available digital video effects include flipping, page turns, solarization, polarization, up to 8:1 zoom, and rotations. The standard configuration includes two 4MB banks of VRAM and 1MB of DRAM which is expandable up to 8MB. Both NTSC and PAL versions are available. VGA GRAPHICS DISPLAY ADAPTER GfxBase, Inc. has announced that the GDA-1 Graphics Display Adapter 2 for the Amiga will be available in the fourth quarter of this year. The GDA-1 is an 8-bit framebuffer that provides three display modes, 640 by 480 VGA, 800 by 600 E-VGA and 1024 by 768 S-VGA. The half-megabyte version, less than $500, offers 256 colors in VGA and 16 colors in the higher resolution modes. The 1MB version, less than $700, will display 256 colors in all modes with double buffering in VGA. The 2MB version, less than $1,000, will display more than 16 million colors in VGA and E-VGA and 256 colors in S-VGA with double buffering in all modes. GDA-1 is compatible with the A2000 and A3000 computers. GfxBase, Inc. has also announced the X Window System Programmer's Toolkit Version 11 Release 4 for the Amiga Computer. The Window System Programmer's Toolkit is an implementation of the Version 11 X Window System client programming interface from the MIT X Window Consortium. ELECTRONIC ARTS MOVES Electronic Arts has a new address. See the developers list at the end of this column. GOLD DISK WORKS OVERTIME No fewer than a half dozen Gold Disk press releases somehow made it through the U.S. Mail without being separated. The pile was doubly impressive due to a foulup in their mailing list that sent two copies of each release. Here they are: Professional Page 2.1, $395 This upgrade to Gold Disk's page layout program will include an interactive help disk produced with HyperBook. The latest version of Agfa Compugraphics Bullet font scaling technology has been included for an up to 100 percent speed increase over version 2.0. The upgrade is free to registered users of version 2.0. MediaShow, $129.95 MediaShow is a multimedia sequencer that lets the Amiga 500 with 1MB RAM combine and play animations, graphics, music and sound effects. Media Show includes a built-in video titler that can overlay text on top of movies with special effects such as multi-colored extrusions, shadows and outlines. MediaShow features an easily used timeline interface. PageSetter III, $129.95 This update to Gold disk's entry level page layout program includes PostScript compatibility and the color printing of bit maps and clip art. Animated Coloring Book, $39.95 Animated Coloring Book for CDTV offers children a choice of 12 animated scenes for color and play. Themes for the animated scenes include circus performers, dinosaurs and pets. Each scene is accompanied by a digitized soundtrack. Three skill levels and up to 61 colors are available. Professional Calc, $395 Professional Calc is a high-end spreadsheet and graphing package aimed at the professional business software market. Professional Calc's user interface features a graphical control panel for fast access to commonly used functions. Graphically, Professional Calc generates full-color two-and three- dimensional bar graphs, pie charts, line, column x-y scatter and area graphs, along with multiple fonts and special text effects. Spreadsheets and graphs may be output to any PostScript device or preferences printer. File import compatibility consists of Lotus 1-2-3, Maxiplan and dBase text files. Export compatibility consists of Lotus 1-2-3 files. Graphs may be saved as IFF bitmaps, Professional Draw clips, Aegis Draw Plus clips or EPS files. VideoDirector, $199.95 The VideoDirector system consists of easy to use video editing software, a universal learning infrared remote controller and a serial port interfaced for controlling VCRS or camcorders equipped with remote, Control-L or LANC inputs. Editing is accomplished by selecting any number of passages or clips which are then automatically arranged in any order under computer control. VideoDirector's support of Digital Creations SuperGen genlock allows the automatic fade in and out of computer graphics. Other supported hardware includes the Panasonic Selectra AG 1960/RS VCR and video to computer interfaces such as the Sony Vbox and the Selectra Vuport. I'M OPEN TO FEEDBACK If you have any comments or suggestions regarding this column, or if you have some particular topic you would like to discuss, drop me a note. I normally do not respond directly to individual requests, though I promise to read everything that you submit. I can be reached at: Morton Kevelson P.O. Box 336 Cooper Station New York, NY 10276-0336 DEVELOPERS MENTIONED HyperMedia Concepts, Inc. 5200 Washington Ave., Suite 226 Racine, WI 53406 414-632-3766 Digital Micronics Inc. 5674-P El Camino Real Carlsbad, CA 92008 619-431-8301 Progressive Peripherals & Software, Inc 464 Kalamath Street Denver, Colorado 80204 303-825-4144. GfxBase, Inc. 1881 Ellwell Dr. Milpitas, CA 95035 408-262-1469. Great Valley Products 600 Clark Ave. King of Prussia PA 19406 215-338-8770. Bomac, Inc. 612 webster Street Bay City, MI 48708 517-893-3848. CCS 642 Lea Bridge Road London E1O 6AP England 081-558-3420. Psygnosis Limited 29 St. Mary's Court Brookline, MA 02146 617-731-3553 Electronic Arts 1450 Fashion Island Blvd. San Mateo, CA 94404 New Horizons Software, Inc. P.O. Box 43167 Austin, TX 78745 512-328-6650 INOVAtronics 8499 Greenville Ave. #209B Dallas, TX 75231 214-340-4991 END OF TEXT