Bits and Pieces By Michael A. Sokolewicz If you are one of those members who missed the past SFCUG meeting and are not kicking yourself, you sould be. In my opinion, more Commodore news was given out there than has been passed along in months. Pete Bacsor, from Commodore, was there with the new Commodore PC-10 and tremendous amounts of information. Shortly into his descriptions and answers I realized that any self-respecting Commodore follower should have been taking notes, and so I began doing so. For those of you who missed it, here is what I was able to get down on paper: ABOUT THE PC-10 There will be two versions of Commodore's IBM-compatable, the PC-10. One of them, known as the PC-10-2, will be the top-of-the-line model from Commodore. It will include a high-resolution monochrome (black-and-green) monitor, two five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drives (360K, just like the IBM), five card-expansion slots (of which one will be taken by the color-monochrome card for the monitor), and standard 512K of memory (with a half-slot for a special memory expansion card). It will be priced somewhere around $2000. The PC-10-1, the other version of the Commodore IBM compatable, will come with one standard five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drive (360K), five card- expansion slots (with one, again, taken by a color-monochrome card), and 512K of memory (again, with the half-slot for a memory expansion card). The price of this version will be around $1000. Both computers will be bundled with the most recent version of MS-DOS (I didn't get the actual version number). Pete was quick to point out that the PC-10s, just like any PC clone, will not be guaranteed to be 100% compatable with the IBM-PCs (meaning it may not run all the software which will run on the IBMs). He said you could count on about 98-99% compatability. According to him, the only software he was unable to run on the PC-10s was MSBASIC, but that the disks which come with the computers will have their own version of BASIC which will, of course, run fine. The PC-10s are slated to go into production on November 1st, and will be released sometime near December 15th. C64 AND 128 NEWS The newest diskdrive for the 64 and 128 from Commodore, the 1581, will be a three-and-a-half-inch drive which will require no special cables to hook up to those machines. It will be able to store up to 880K of data on the smaller, micro-floppies and will mostly be for people who need large volumes of data storage. It will be available sometime around January of '87, and will sell for roughy $399. GEOS, the graphics, MacIntosh-like environment, for the 128 will be available hopefully for the Christmas '86 market. There are now available three types of ram expanders for the 64 and 128: the 1700, the 1750, and the 1764. --The 1764 is a 256K expander for the Commodore 64. It will be sold with a special power supply that will replace the C64's normal power supply. It is priced at about $199. --The 1700 is a 256K RAM expander for the 128. It is virtually the same as the 1764, but will not come with a new power supply because the 128's power supply is already made to cope with the special power demands of the RAM expander. I did not get the price down on paper, unfortunately. --The 1750 is just a 512K version of the above for the 128. It also does not need to come with a special power supply. Again, I missed the price. Pete wanted to be sure that everyone understood that they should not install the 1700 or the 1750 on the C64, or hardware damage WILL be the result! In answer to a question, Pete made clear that Commodore has no intention of dropping the 128 from production in the forseeable future. AMIGA NEWS Being the new kid on the block, the Amiga, of course, will have a slurr of new products released for it for Christmas. Pete talked about a few of those being released by Commodore, and then answered questions. SIDECAR is an expansion box which will attach to the side of the Amiga, and will, among other things, give it IBM compatability. It will be able to run IBM software as a seperate task on the Amiga, allowing Amiga users to flip between Lotus 1-2-3 and MaxiPlan, if for some reason they would ever want to do so. It will come with a five-and-a-quarter-inch diskdrive, 256K of RAM (expandable to 640K by just replacing its memory chips with newer chips), three IBM-type expansion slots, and will run at the full IBM-PC-XT rate of 4 M-Hertz. He described it as, basically, the PC-10 (described above) without the keyboard or monitor, running through the Amiga. He pointed out that an Amiga user will be able to install an IBM hard-disk drive in the Sidecar and partition off part of it for the Amiga to use and part of it for the Sidecar to use. The Amiga will not, however, be able to address any of the RAM memory in the Sidecar for its own use. Sidecar has, finally, been given FCC approval, and will be available soon at anywhere from $400 - $600. AMIGA LIVE is a real-time video frame-grabber for the Amiga. For those of you who missed A-Squared's preview of it at an SFCUG meeting about a year ago, Amiga Live actually takes a video signal from some source (such as a video camera, a VCR, or even a cable TV signal) and instantly transforms it into a memory image that the Amiga then displays on its monitor. This is not a direct video feed to the monitor, but actually a bitmapped image in the memory of the Amiga, done in real-time (no waiting 30 seconds or so). Pete was rather sketchy on information about this, but said that Commodore is finishing work on the hardware boards necessary for Live, and that prototypes will be done soon. VERSION 1.2 of the Amiga operating system is just about ready to be released. Something that will draw a great deal of chagrin from Amiga users, however, is that it will not be 100% compatable with software written under version 1.1. He said it will be called something like the "Amiga Enhancer", and will be distributed through software and hardware retailers for about $15. When asked how many Amigas have been sold, Pete said that his estimate, and he stressed the word "estimate", was roughly 100,000 world-wide, with about three-quarters of them in the USA. And, finally, Pete said that Commodore is marketing a new printer: the MPS1200. This will be a 120 characters-per-second, dot-matrix printer, with near-letter-quality mode and "Epson features" (whether that means Epson compatability or not was unclear). He said that it will not need any type of interface for the C64, the 128, the Amiga, or the PC-10. I didn't catch a price on it, but he assured us that they will be shipping very soon. Well, that's about all I was able to jot down on paper. For those of you who weren't there, and whose questions remain unasked, please don't kick yourselves too hard.