World of Commodore Amiga Show Report Part 7, Interviews on Show Floor by Dan Zerkle This is part 7 of my report from the World of Commodore Amiga show held in Pasadena, California, on September 10th, 11th, and 12th. This section details interviews I conducted at the booths on the show floor. I will continue to post sections each night or so until I finish. DIGITAL CREATIONS The folks at Digital creations had three new products and seemed quite proud of themselves. First and foremost, of course, was Brilliance, their paint program. This program works in all of the Amiga's graphics modes, including HAM-8. It has a wealth of features, including considerable animation abilities. Most of you have probably seen the advertising for this program, which shows a magnificent painted lagoon scene. Now that the program is shipping, Digital Creations shows the entire picture, including the fish swimming about under water. The promotional material opens up to form a big poster of this picture. Digital Creations has another genlock. This one is called the SuperGen SX. It is a high-performance tool designed to handle the more sophisticated graphics modes available on the newer Amigas. It has one slider apiece for the background and the graphics, plus a switch to quickly disable itself for when it is not needed. It has both S-Video and composite inputs and outputs. Their most interesting piece of hardware was their video slot box, available in late October. This is a mini-tower case with a 230 watt power supply containing four video slots! Once you hook it up to your Amiga, you'll be able to use up to four devices that make use of the video slot. Some video slot boards are "active." Only one of these may function at a time. The slot box will turn off all but the one you select. "Passive" boards, which just listen to the signals on the video slot, may operate at the same time as other boards. The box also holds three ISA slots (PC-AT style) with power and ground only available. Some time base corrector cards can be placed in these slots. It also has room for extra tape and disk drives, which may be connected to the power supply. It should list for about $895. VIDEOPOLIS R&D Pat Keith and his son were showing off Videopolis' new product, called the Video Palace. This is another mini-tower case, but this one holds an Opalvision card. You can use it with any Amiga, including those with no regular internal slots. On display was a 1200 showing an animation running on the Opalvision card. The case has a 200-watt power supply and can be used to hold other things, such as a hard drive. Mr. Keith said that he planned to add a lot more features to the product. The Video Palace was on sale for the show for $1200 and included the Opalvision card. Mr. Keith said that it was shipping and would be sent out within 48 hours of receiving an order. U.S. CYBERNETICS RISC technology is clearly on the way to the Amiga, and it's not going to wait for Commodore to figure out how to do it. U.S. Cybernetics was showing off their prototype processor cards carrying Inmos chips. One model uses the T805 processor for 4.3 MFLOPS performance, while the other uses the T9000, for 50 MFLOPS. The chips are designed to operate in parallel, to work in conjunction with each other and with the Amiga's main processor. With an external box, up to 40 processors may be installed. If used properly, in parallel, this will give full- blown supercomputer performance. Programs have to be especially written to take advantage of this technology. U.S. Cybernetics has a development system to let programmers write programs in Parallel C. The programs currently being ported to the system include Pegger, Vista Pro, ImageFX, TV Paint, Real 3D, and Cinemorph. I happen to have a minor in computer graphics and extensive experience in parallel processing, so this is quite interesting to me. For many applications, having multiple processors does not speed up computation much. However, ray tracing can be tremendously accellerated with good parallel processing. For instance, with well-written software, a scene that takes 2 hours to ray-trace on an Amiga 4000 could be completed in about seven minutes by a box with ten of these processors. Maybe faster. At this time, U.S. Cybernetics is not selling their RISC boards. It is only interested in talking to developers who will port software to the system. Unless you are a developer, please don't contact them yet. The low-end version should be available around the end of November. It will list for about $750. AVID PUBLICATIONS Avid Publications were giving away free copies of their Video Toaster User magazine, of course. A subcription to this will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about how to produce neat stuff with NewTek's Video Toaster. In addition to the regular magazine, they are coming out with a 16-page newsletter called LightWave Pro. This is full of advice for people using NewTek's 3-D graphics animation program, LightWave. If you contact Avid, they will send you a free sample copy. I had a particularly infuriating exchange with one of the people behind the counter. She saw my press badge and properly recognized a fellow in the media: "Have you heard any big announcements?" No, why? "We've got a big scoop!" What? "If you don't know, I'm not going to tell you. You're competition." Aw, c'mon.... "No way." I was ready to chew tacks in frustration after that. I think I know what it was now, though. ADDRESSES Avid Publications 21611 Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014 PHONE: 408/366-8220 FAX : 408/725-8035 Digital Creations P.O. Box 97 Folsom, CA 95763-0097 PHONE: 916/344-4825 FAX : 916/635-0475 U.S. Cybernetics DEVELOPERS ONLY (no address given) PHONE: 403/269-1090 (Ron Henry) FAX : 403/246-8478 EMAIL: John@quark.powerstar.cuc.ab.ca Videopolis R&D 107 Park Avenue, Suite 106 Santa Maria, CA 93454 PHONE: 805/925-0970