World of Commodore Amiga Show Report Part 8, Interviews on Show Floor by Dan Zerkle This is part 8 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 until I finish. CORRECTIONS First, a couple notes about my last report. In my report about Anti-Gravity Products' Humanoid, I failed to mention what sort of 3D format this package used. It comes in either LightWave 3D or Imagine format. Neil MacMullen of U.S. Cybernetics writes to let me know that I managed to foul up his e-mail address. His correct address is neil@powerstor.cuc.ab.ca. I apologize for these errors. FARGO ELECTRONICS Fargo Electronics is a new entry into the Amiga marketplace. They had out several of their Primera color printers. These are wax thermal transfer devices that produce output at 203 dots per inch. The printer is fairly small (5.8" x 13.8" x 10.2"), and easily fits on a desk top. It lists for just less than $1000. I had a close look at some printouts. They were very sharp with vibrant color. I was impressed. They had the highest quality color I've seen on a consumer-priced printer. It sure beats ink jets. It gets better. You can get a "Photo-Realistic" upgrade kit which lets the printer use something called "dye sublimation." I'm not familiar with this technique, but it apparently is as good as anything short of commercial devices. You pay for it, though. The refill kit, which gives you the supplies for 25 prints, costs about $90. The kit itself (with supplies for 10 prints) costs about $250. Fargo genuinely seems interested in the Amiga marketplace. To prove it, they've released an Amiga printer driver for their hardware. It's free. Just call the number listed below. The driver requires version 1.3 (or newer) of the operating system and at least two megabytes of memory. Oh, yeah. Fargo's printer also supports the Macintosh and Windows 3.1. UTILITIES UNLIMITED Utilities Unlimited was showing their Emplant emulator system. Well, actually, very few people seemed to be paying attention to the emulator. It was displaying a Macintosh screen. We've all seen that. What actually seemed to be on display was the president of the company, Jim Drew. During the entire show, he was surrounded by a semi-circle of people three deep. I never got close to him. I did manage to talk with one of the other employees (Brian Walz) and pick up a little literature, though. Emplant, of course, is a hardware/software system that lets an Amiga emulate a different kind of computer. For now, it can emulate a color Macintosh as a task. This means that the Mac emulator multitasks with the other Amiga programs. To emulate a Mac, Emplant needs the Macintosh operating system, including the ROMs. Walz explained that updates to the Emplant system are being released steadily. The next update (possibly out by now) will allow stereo sound. Use of the Amiga's parallel and serial ports are coming soon. Emulation of the IBM-PC will come at the end of the year. Walz said that by pre-translating the Intel code as a program is loaded, the Emplant will enable the Amiga's Motorola CPU to run the code as fast as an Intel chip. The Emplant system comes in various configurations, ranging in price from $280 to $400. MIGRAPH Migraph was plugging yet another scanner. This one was the ColorBurst Color Hand Scanner. It can handle a wide variety of color, gray-scale, and monochrome resolutions, from 50 to 400 dots per inch and up to 18 bits per pixel. It can scan a graphic up to 4.13 inches wide. Migraph also sells some software. Migraph OCR is optical character recognition software. It takes an image of text either from a file or directly from a scanner (Migraph, AlfaData or Golden Image) and outputs the text. Migraph Touch-Up is an image-editing program for modifying scanned images. It can import and export several different file formats. The demonstration wasn't all that exciting. The Migraph employee had a collection of colorful pictures (on paper) that looked like they had been clipped from magazines. He ran the sleek, black scanner over a picture, and it appeared on the screen of a nearby Amiga. The colors were fine, and the image didn't show any obvious signs of distortion. I did notice that the scanner had a transparent "window" near the scanning area, so you could see the picture and get a pretty good idea of what part you were scanning. EXPERT SERVICES Expert Services was promoting the Picasso II card of Germany's Village Tronic. Picasso II is a Zorro 2 card which can display one-bit to eight-bit video in resolutions up to 1280x1024, and 24-bit video in resolutions up toe 800x600. Compared to other high-resolution graphics cards, the Picasso II takes a different approach to integrating itself with the rest of the system. Instead of requiring special drivers for each different program, it uses normal Intuition calls. The software adds screen modes (such as PICASSO:800x600) to the standard screen mode preferences requester. Any system-friendly program that uses this requester will already work with the Picasso II. The Picasso II comes with some nice features. It switches back and forth between its signal and the standard Amiga video signal automatically. It has 16-bit color modes in resolutions up to 1024x768. It stores graphics in normal system RAM, so there is no CHIP RAM limitation. It has an on-board blitter for high- speed screen updates. I found the Picasso II displaying ASDG's Art Department Pro. It looked pretty sharp with all that resolution. An employee demonstrated that he could slide screens up and down on the Picasso display, just like you can with the normal Amiga display. He scrolled some text on a high-resolution Workbench screen. It was noticeably faster than the same thing on a standard Amiga display. Quite a lot of the Picasso II literature mentions that it gives you RTG (Retargetable Graphics). Please note that this does not refer to Commodore's RTG. Rather, it just means that programs using Commdodore's ScreenMode requester can work with the Picasso II card. One thing to note with the Picasso II and all high-performance graphics cards: Displaying the output from these devices properly requires a large, fancy monitor. Of course, Expert Services had some wonderful monitors and the pictures looked great. Just remember that if you want to do the same, your new monitor is going to cost much more than your new graphics card. Expect to pay $1400 and up. ADDRESSES Expert Services 7559 Mall Road Florence, KY 40142 PHONE: 606/371-9690 FAX : 606/282-5942 Fargo Electronics, Inc. 7901 Flying Cloud Drive Eden Prairie, MN 55344 PHONE: 800/258-2974 612/941-9470 FAX : 612/941-7836 Migraph, Inc. 32700 Pacific Highway South, #14 Federal Way, WA 98003 PHONE: 800/223-3729 : 206/838-4677 Utilities Unlimited, Inc. 1641 McCulloch Blvd., Suite 25-124 Lake Havasu City, AZ 86403 PHONE: 602/680-9004 (Orders only) : 602/689-9006 (Tech calls) FAX : 602/453-6407 BBS : 602/453-9767 Village Tronic Braunstrasse 14 D-30169 Hanover-Germany PHONE: +49/(0)511/13841 FAX : +49/(0)511/1612606