@database 002bef60-0 @master Alink:Temp/AL @$VER: 1.0 @remark Created with Heddley v1.1 (c) Edd Dumbill 1994 @node "Main" "Amiga Link #2, April 1, 1995" @next "Editorials" Welcome to @{fg shine}Amiga Link@{fg text} Issue 2 on this fine April 1, 1995! Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Li Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Ami Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link A Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Li Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Ami Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link A Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Li Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Amiga Link Amiga Link Ami Amiga Link Amiga Link A Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Link Amiga Li Amiga Link Amiga Amiga Link Ami Amiga Link A @{bg highlight}Amiga Link@{bg back} @{"Editorial " link "Editorials" 0} This month's rant by the Editors! @{"Articles  " link "General_Menu" 0} Software and games reviews, opinions, hardware hacks, and CD32 games list! @{"Letters   " link "Letters " 0} Letters (mostly hate mail!) to Amiga Link. @{"BBS List  " link "Distribution" 0} Where to find Amiga Link. @{"Info      " link "Info" 0} Products and services that Amiga Link highly reccomends. @{"Next Issue" link "Next_Issue" 0} What's coming in issue 3 of Amiga Link! @{"Writers   " link "Writers" 0} Who wrote for Amiga Link this month, and how you can write for Amiga Link! @{"Legal Bull" link "Legal_BS" 0} Don't read this unless you're an insomniac. @endnode @node "Editorials" "Editorials" @next "General_Menu" @prev "Main" March has been an incredible --and hectic-- month at Amiga Link. We started off the month with a bang by hiring a new technical editor, Roy Millican! Roy then promptly proceeded to write two articles, set up a mailing list for Amiga Link, and placed Amiga Link on five WWW pages! Look in the distribution page of this magazine for more info. It was one week later when hell began to freeze over: the Emplant e586 module was finally released. After months of hearing claims of "Just one more month," thousands of people finally received their shiny new e586 modules. Utilities Unlimited, neglected, however, to ship the neccesary ROM BIOS with the e586, and soon the praises that had been given to Jim Drew turned to hate. As if that wasn't enough to give the Amiga community a collective heart attack, we then received some of the best news we've had in months: The C= buyout was FINALLY going to end. This is not an April Fool's joke, people, even we're not so demented as to make up something of such grand importance as this. The latest news is that on April 20, in New York City, there will be an auction for C= and all the technology and products that go with it. The starting bid will be Escom's, and all other bidders may enter bids, as long as they are at least one million dollars more than Escom's bid. Then, on April 21, also in New York City, a court hearing will take place to accept the highest bid for C=. This is not expected to take too long, and should run with relatively few problems. Once the New York courts accept the bid, it goes to the Bahamian court, where it will presumably be accepted, bringing the C= buyout to a CLOSE! I, for one, can't wait! The public court hearing will be held at: Room 610-2 of the United States Bankruptcy Court, The Old Customs House, One Bowling Green, New York, New York, on April 21, at 10:00 a.m. I, as well as a few other Amiga users, will probably be at the meeting; if you are interested in going, and would like to meet us there, please e-mail me! I'd love to see you there. Anyway, keep your chin up, have a stiff upper lip (whatever that means!) and hug and kiss your Amiga every day, telling it that you love it with all your heart. Until next month! Joshua Galun Editor-in-Chief First, I would like to thank the sysops who voluntered to distribute the magazine. We have some good news for people living in the East coast. The auction with Escom and the other bidders will take place in NYC! The other Chief Editor is planning to go to the auction! I might too. We will try to upload a textfile saying who won the auction. And last but not least I would like to thank you, the reader. John Vlachos Editor-in-Chief Note for those confused readers who are wondering who is the REAL Editor in Chief of Amiga Link. Actually, John and I are BOTH the Editors in-Chief. However, we both handle different aspects of the magazine, John more along the lines of spreading the news about the mag, uploading the mag to assorted BBSs, and handling the BBS list and letter's column, whereas I handle the content of the magazine, get the articles, and edit the magazine. @endnode @node "General_Menu" "Articles Menu" @next "Sam Report " @prev "Editorials" @{"Sam Report   " link "Sam Report " 0} Info on the end of the C= buyout and Alex Amor's thoughts. @{"e586 Module  " link "e586" 0} A complete review of the Emplant e586 PC emulator module. @{"CD32 List    " link "CD32list" 0} A list of games already out for the CD32, and of games on the way. @{"PageStream 3 " link "Pagestream3" 0} A complete review of Page Stream 3.0g. @{"Emplant      " link "Emplant_Part_2" 0} Part 2 of Amiga Link's Emplant Series. This month: How to get and install the ROMs and software. @{"CD32 Thoughts" link "CD32 " 0} Is the CD32 essential to the future of the Amiga? @{"Jim Drew     " link "Jim_Drew_Good_or_Bad" 0} A brief history of Jim Drew of Utilities Unlimited, and of his failures, successes, and his reputation with the Amiga community. @{"Don't Give Up" link "Don't_Give_Up" 0} Why you should stay with your Amiga. @{"Reunion      " link "Reunion_review" 0} A review of the new Space colonization and warfare game named Reunion. @{"Laptop       " link "Laptop" 0} The Editor in Chief dreams of laptops. @{"Pinball      " link "Pinball" 0} A review of the game Pinball Illusions, which finally has multi ball support! But will that be enough to save the game from its faults? Read on... @{"C= Story     " link "C=Story_2" 0} Part 2/3 of Some Bits of Treasure. @{"CBM Review   " link "CBM_review" 0} A hilarious review of the C= buyout; Amiga Link's comic relief for this issue! @{"C Clinic 2   " link "CC_2" 0} Part 2 of Amiga Link's ongoing Coder's Clinic. @endnode @node "CD32 " "CD32: The Future of the Amiga?" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Jim_Drew_Good_or_Bad" @prev "Emplant_Part_2" I believe that the CD32 has been the greatest product that C= ever made, with the A3000 coming a close second. I know that I have already incited thousands of A500 owners to take up their pens (or word processors!) and start writing to me, but hold on a sec. Look at what the CD32 has done for the Amiga. First of all, the CD32 is a potential cash cow. For every CD32 game that is sold, C= gets money from it. That may not seem like a lot, but how do you think Nintendo managed to get profits in the billions in the late 80s? It wasn't from selling Nintendos at $90, let me tell you that. Of course, C= won't make as much money, because they charge less in royalties, and because there were more Nintendos than there are CD32s, but it's still a start. With that money, the new owners could pay for new advertising campaigns or lower the price of Amigas and CD32s. The CD32 has already brought the Amiga one great advantage despite the low number sold. That is the boost that it has given to Amiga games. In recent months, fewer and fewer Amiga games have been made, but the CD32 games just keep on coming, and they are good (or atleast better than many normal Amiga games). This has also brought the Amiga up with the CD-ROM revolution on the PCs and Mac in a short space of time. Had the CD32 never come out, we'd have no standard Amiga CD setup, and many fewer CD titles, perhaps none at all. And finally, the CD32 has the potential to make the Amiga a household name. We've all heard of Sega and Nintendo, so why not Amiga? The CD32 was even written up at one point in Playboy (although I can't imagine how many people we're reading Playboy)! That kind of press functions even better than advertisements on TV. Sega has relatively few ads but has sold incredibly well. It's obvious that people buy based on what they read and by what the see at their friend's house, not from TV. So, to the new owners, whoever they be, get out the CD32s! Start selling them for $200 and £175 in the UK. Start selling them in every electonic's chain across the world. Start giving them to magazines free so that they can review CD32 games (hint hint!). Do everything you can. In the end, the CD32 may save the Amiga. Joshua Galun Editor-in-Chief @endnode @node "Reunion_review" "Reunion Review" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Laptop" @prev "Don't_Give_Up" PRODUCT NAME Reunion BRIEF DESCRIPTION Civilization and empire building game set in space. RELEASED BY Grandslam COPY PROTECTION Manual Hard Drive Installable MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/40 w/wb3.0 2 MB chip / 12 MB fast Seagate 130 MB HD, Conner 320 MB HD AIR 880k external drive REVIEW @{b}In the Beginning...@{ub} I love space sagas. Not that politically-correct garbage like the new Star Trek shows, where we've managed to solve all our problems with peace and love and old-fashioned American capitalism. I love the stories of vast empires, of cataclysmic battles, and of great leaders. I love Star Wars and Gundam. That's how Reunion caught my eye. It promised to go beyond simple military conflict (a la Wing Commander), and deal with exploration, trade, colonization, and an important long-term goal. It looked fantastic. I had no doubt in my mind that it would be a fantastic adventure in interstellar space. Here's the story. Earth was experiencing a period of great peace. The United Nations had successfully quelled all war, and as the world turned to peace, people looked upward. (At this point it starts to sound like ST:TNG or SeaQuest bullshit.... It gets better, read on.) Humanity's next step was obviously to the stars. Exploration vessels were sent out to map the cosmos and find other worlds on which humanity might live. Finally, two suitable planets were discovered, and two great colony ships were sent forth to claim them. One ship disappeared mysteriously and was presumed lost. The other ship encountered an errant field of asteroids and was severely damaged. The occupants escaped to the surface of their new home, without the advanced technology which lay on board the ship. Earth, unfortunately, was in no position to help. In the meantime, you see, people there became strangely hostile, and many wars ravaged the planet. Oops. All of this happened centuries ago. New Earth has crawled back from the primitive level which was forced upon it, and a great civilization has sprung forth. You are, of course, the dictator of New Earth, and it's your job to find out what the heck happened to the old one. Not a small task. @{b}At First Sight@{ub} The game starts showing you standing over a holographic projection table. This is your command room, and it is from here that you issue your orders to the forces of New Earth. A row of buttons on top and a set of "hot zones" on the screen allow you to access the other menus and displays through which you control your civilization. Initially you are alone, but in order to get anything accomplished you need to hire a set of advisors: a builder, a pilot, a warrior, and a scientist. You can choose from three different candidates for each position, a cheap and unskilled one, one with moderate skills and cost, and an expensive but powerful one. These advisors don't really offer much advice, but are needed in order to build structures, conduct research, pilot ships, and fight wars. Once you have procured them they will huddle about you, looking like the generals in Powermonger. Here's my first quip, your advisors are stupid. Very stupid. You can send them to the university, and they still come back stupid. This becomes apparent when you have a conversation with them. These "conversations" take place through a menu system of possible questions and commands. Most of them are useless. For example, if you ask them how they are they will either tell you that they have everything that they need, or they complain that they want more money. There is NO WAY to give them more money! Once you've paid their price they become your permanent slaves, no salary is needed, or possible for that matter. The only cost they incur is when you pay their tuition when you send them to the university. You can also ask them what you should do next. They NEVER EVER give ANY useful information. They only tell you to research stuff that you haven't already (duh), or they tell you everything's fine. The whole conversation aspect of the game is pointless and wasted. If you feel the need to relax, there's a pub next door. You won't be doing much there. The few people there you can talk to have very little to say, and will sometimes repeat the same thing until the end of the game. After a while a spy will show up, whom you can hire to give you information on other races' colonies and fortifications. A pirate shows up later, and you can send him on a few preset missions for small amounts of ore or weapons. At one point in the game the bar becomes incredibly useful, allowing you to halt hostilities with an entire race of aliens. Unfortunately the place is so damn boring you probably won't go there often enough to notice. @{b}Where Does the Fire Station Go?@{ub} The first display you'll probably access is the land display. This is a Sim City-esque view of your colony, showing rivers, trees, sand dunes, etc., as well as your buildings. You need to erect structures to give your colonies various abilities, and your citizens will periodically demand public works (We demand a stadium! Sound familiar?). Basic needs such as food or shelter must be supplied. Mines must be built to supply the raw materials needed to build spacecraft and weapons. New Earth's settlement comes well supplied with basic facilities, but will need upgrading periodically to cope with your expanding population. New colonies must be built from scratch. Once again, you are hit with a sense of pointlessness (just like the C= buyout! -Josh). It doesn't matter WHERE you build your buildings, it never effects how your colony functions. The map only serves to limit the number of buildings you can have, which becomes really aggravating when you're forced to fit buildings in like a jigsaw puzzle. This is supposed to be the surface of a PLANET for crissakes! What kind of planet has only 25 square kilometers of surface area??? You should be able to build ROADS and BRIDGES and CITIES! Unfortunately Reunion's surface display is little more than a fancy means of limiting your colonies to ridiculously small levels. @{b}Subliminal Learning?@{ub} Once you've built New Earth up enough to support space exploration, you need to research the technology for it. This is done by listening to compact discs. I am not kidding. Research consists of going to the research screen, pushing a CD into a player, and watching a nifty frequency analyzer display. If only real research were like this. After listening to the CD, a vector display of what you just researched pops up on your holographic projector (this is its only use). This looks cool but does not really add much to the game. The annoying thing about Reunion's R&D system is that you CANNOT research new technologies until the computer decides you can. Many technologies can't even be developed by you, but must be obtained elsewhere. Sorry, if I can develop spacecraft on my own I DAMN WELL can develop something as primitive as a tank! @{b}Keep Our Jobs at Home!@{ub} Now we hop over to the building screen, where you can see the same nifty vector graphic as well as a bitmapped image of the product. Building stuff is simply a matter of clicking on a purchase button and selecting how many you want. The amount you can build is limited by the amount of money (from taxing you citizens) and raw materials you have. Sometimes a support system must be built for you to build the item. A space station, for instance, must be built before you can build a cruiser, and each station can build only one cruiser at a time. It takes time to build each item, so don't expect stuff to just appear. It is here that you hit one of the stupidest oversights in the game. You can build things only on New Earth. No matter how advanced your colonies are, even if they have a HIGHER level of technology than your home world, they can't construct so much as a miner droid! They just can't! This means that in order to build a defense force for other colonies YOU HAVE TO BUILD IT AT HOME AND THEN SHIP IT ALL OVER! This is too much of a pain in the ass. I just left my colonies undefended. @{b}Mapping the Armada@{ub} So, we've built our spaceships; now let's sally forth into the cosmos! You first must organize your ships together into groups. You can access a screen which displays all of your groups together, from which you can select the individual group you want to work with. There are four kinds of groups that you can create - Satellite, Cargo, Combat and Defense. Once you've created the necessary type of group you can add your ships to it. Reunion gives you a limited number of groups, spread over two pages. One page is dedicated to planetary defense forces, while the other is for all other groups. As I mentioned before, building defense forces requires a LOT of work and patience. They don't even appear to be required (discussed below). Yet Reunion makes 50% of the available group slots DEDICATED to defense forces! You can't put anything else in them! No one would possibly EVER need that many groups of them! Furthermore, there is apparently NO WAY to disband a group once it's been created. If all the ships are removed or destroyed, the "group" is sent back to New Earth. The name of the group (which you can't change) sits empty in the slot it occupies. You can't get rid of it. Fortunately, Reunion gives you plenty of slots to work with; I didn't even use half of them. It's still annoying to leave all those empty groups sitting around. Having grouped your ships together, it's time to hop in the cockpit! This gives you a view of the stars, if you're in space, or of the planet you're on when you've landed. It's pretty. It's useless. I would never ever use this screen were it not for the fact that it's the only place where you can command your ships to take off or land. Every other order can be issued from the starmap. The starmap is a pretty display of the star system or planetary system that you've currently selected. It looks really similar to the map display in the multistage Psygnosis shoot-em-up Awesome. At its main level it shows an entire star system, with all known planets shown. Other known star systems can be selected from a menu on the right. Clicking on a planet zooms in to show the planet, any known moons, and any known fleets of spacecraft in the system. Most functions concerning ships, such as moving them, combat, etc. can be accessed from the menu here. This is also the only way to access a planetary view of another planet. If you hit the button in the command center you get only New Earth, nothing else. The starmap is probably the most polished of Reunion's features. It works well and allows most functions needed during the game to be executed. It's no more complex than any of the other displays, but this type of display calls for simplicity rather than complexity. Sending out your ships once they are built is relatively painless. Launch them from the cockpit, then tell them where to go. If you watch from the cockpit you can see a nifty starfield. Once you've reached another world you can drop satellites to explore and determine the mineral content and inhabitability of the world. Mineral worlds can have robotic mining stations installed, while habitable planets can have new colonies erected. It's even possible to build a mining station before the inhabitability report comes in, and then build the colony later. True to form, Reunion just doesn't go deep enough here. Mining stations are next to worthless as they can't be upgraded and can store only a tiny amount of ore. I soon abandoned them in favor of constructing colonies, which can still have mines as well as storage centers to hold the ore. While it's possible to make use of the added output of the mining stations, it requires a massive effort to collect the ore. Ship after ship must be sent in to pick up the small amount generated because if the stores get full, production stops. It's too much work. @{b}Not Alone@{ub} Not long after your first ship is sent out, you'll encounter your first alien race. They live within your OWN STAR SYSTEM. For some reason you haven't detected them until now. Oh, well. Anyway, they're a nice folk. They give you all sorts of interesting technology that you wouldn't be able to get otherwise. Your meetings with them take place in a small room where you can ask and answer questions. This is the only interaction (aside from the bar) that you can have with aliens. The only trade in the game is available here. You can't even contact the aliens, they have to contact you. If you wanna talk, tough beans. You can even send a ship laden with useful ore and equipment to an alien world and LAND on it, but to no avail. You can't trade and they won't even talk to you. You can even land on a HOSTILE planet, no attempt being made to attack your juicy, undefended cargo ship. They will, however, destroy your satellites. Even if the race is friendly, normal satellites will be destroyed when deployed. Only spy satellites and spy ships can be deployed over alien worlds. Not that they're very useful, mind you. When you drop a satellite over a supposedly densely populated alien world, the images that come back are of a BARREN SURFACE! NO BUILDINGS OR ACTIVITY! I guess all aliens must live underground or something. @{b}Just Fight, OK?@{ub} Not all aliens want to be your friends, and of course the only real way to deal with them is by blowing the crap out of 'em. For that you need a navy, an army, and weapons to arm the two. How you group them depends on whether the force is to be offensive or defensive. I got through the game with only one defensive force, stationed at New Earth. The aliens either didn't know or didn't care about my fat, juicy, undefended colonies just waiting to be invaded. All of their assault attempts were on New Earth. Aliens are dumb. Therefore you'll probably be building only offensive forces. These are similar to your peacetime groups, except they have slots for both warships and ground forces. The ships are to take out opposing navies and the tanks and jets are for mopping up on the surface. Naturally you have to take out the enemy spacecraft first. (It should be mentioned that you can actually land on enemy planets with a full complement of tanks, troop carriers, jets and warships, without the enemy so much as throwing a pebble at you...Aliens won't fire first around their own planets.) Space combat is simple, noninteractive, but cool. It's probably the prettiest part of the game. After you give the order to attack, a radar display showing your ships and the enemy's ships pops up, and the battle ensues. This is kind of like watching the space battles in Macross or Gundam from far away, with little specs of light exchanging little blossoms of fire. In the lower right corner of the screen a series of animations plays during the battle. These are reminiscent of the final battle in Return of the Jedi, and look real cool. They don't actually MEAN anything, mind you, they're just eye candy. Only the radar gives meaningful information. It would be nice to be able to issue orders and strategies during the battle, but the only option you have is to retreat. I usually didn't; the animations are so cool that I didn't care if I lost, I just watched them until the end. All in all, the whole affair basically amounts to sending out your boys and telling them to "wing it." Ground Combat is different. Before combat begins you are asked to organize you troops into divisions, deciding between concentrated strength and firepower or greater flexibility in movement. Combat takes place on a single screen of terrain, where you can issue orders to individual divsions. It all happens so fast that you can't really do much but tell them to go ahead and shoot, and it doesn't pay to have lots of them because you could never issue orders to them all. Once all the defenders are taken out the planet's yours.... And you get a colony there whether you want it or not. Invading is real expensive, not because of the cost of warfare, but because you're required to build a whole damn new colony every time you win. @{b}Summing Up@{ub} I really wanted to like Reunion. Honest. It's very pretty, even on the ECS version, the music is fantastic (you have two user-selectable tunes to choose from), and the whole concept of a civilization attempting to discover what became of its progenitors is absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, its flaws are much to great for me to recommend that someone plunk down money for it. For one thing, it's way too linear. You can't do ANYTHING out of the proscribed order. You discover each star system in a certain order, go to war in a certain order, and are at the mercy of events which you aren't allowed to change even if you could. For example, soon after you meet the nearby benevolent aliens, they tell you that an enemy race is coming and that they need your help. They give you plans for a simple space fighter and ask that you send as many as you can build to help them. You have enough time to build about THREE before the aliens attack. If you send them out you're greeted by an armada of over 500 ships (far larger than ANYTHING ELSE in the game!) which neatly destroys your little force, kills all your buddies, and generally gives you a bad time. Once your buddies are dead, the armada disappears as mysteriously as it came. The force guarding the alien HOME WORLD isn't even a fifth as big! The whole thing screams plot device. As an experiment I cheated by editing the data files to give me a massive fleet, big enough to take out the alien menace. I sent it out, and after a long, protracted, battle, managed to defeat the invaders. No sooner had I done this than I was told of how the friendly aliens' base was destroyed by the armada which I HAD JUST OBLITERATED! This defied all logic and really pissed me off. But what really kills Reunion is that is just isn't deep enough. It shows wonderful potential in its colony building and exploration sequences, but they just don't have enough complexity to make them worthwhile. Why offer me the ability to lay out my bases when the layout makes no difference? Why let me have defense forces when I can build only equipment at my home base? Why have trading ships when I can't even trade? The whole game is an exercise in astonishment giving way to dissapointment. A lot of talent clearly went into the basic design of this game, but hampered by its linearity, shallow gameplay, and incredibly stupid ending, I have to say that it was wasted. @{b}OVERALL@{ub} Sound: Excellent Graphics: Excellent Gameplay: Poor Lastability: Once you win it you'll never play it again. Value: Below average Overall: Below average @endnode @node "Pagestream3" "Pagestream 3.0g Review" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Emplant_Part_2" @prev "CD32list" PRODUCT NAME PageSteam 3.0g BRIEF DESCRIPTION The best Desk Top Publishing Program available for the Amiga. Brings the Amiga up to industry standards. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Soft-Logik Publishing Corporation Address: P.O. Box 510589 St. Louis, MO 63151-0589 Telephone: 1-800-829-8608 (sales only) FAX: 314-894-3280 (technical info) Suport BBS: 314-894-0057 E-mail: tech@slpc.com LIST PRICE About $299, can be purchased in a store for around $225. Upgrading from Page Stream 2.2 is only $125. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Needs a Hard Drive minimal installation 2.5 megs, full installation takes 12+ megs. At least 3 megs of ram required, 5-8+ megs recommended. Runs on a 68000, but a 020+ is recommended. SOFTWARE Requires Amiga Dos 2.04, Amiga Dos 2.1 or greater is recomended Operates well under 3.0. COPY PROTECTION When first installing you must type in the name and registration # of the person whom has purchased it. It is Hard Drive installable and has no other copy protection other than requiring the registration number. To patch the version of the Hard Drive the first disk is also need to be in the drive. I would rate the Copy Protection as Invisible. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000/040 40mhz, 30 megs of Fast Ram, 2 Meg Chip 2.1 Gig Segate Hawk, 540 IDE & 125 IDE Hard Drives Syquest 44meg Internal EGS Spectum Graphics Board, 17" Idek & 1084s Monitors, Work Bench 3.0. INSTALLATION Very easy to install, uses the Commodore Installation program. REVIEW Page Stream 3.0g has been greatly improved over previous versions. Many bugs have been fixed. One of the most useful additions to PS3 is the new ability to print EPS disk files. This lets you have an industry standard disk to take to print shops. The long awaited AGA support is well done. The ability to use select public screens is nice for those with Graphic Boards as well. Arexx support is probably PS3's nicest feature. Built-in arexx recording makes it easy to make your own macros. PS3 also comes with a variety of useful macros, including a nice one that creates a font list. A new feature of PS3 is the better color support, which includes many color adjustments to CMYK printing. Gradient fills are also now supported. Something of great use is the export feature. You can export or import a block text or graphic. This feature, which supports many different text and graphic formats, makes for a well rounded program. Postcript is much better supported than in Page Stream 2.2. Now, Postscript printing quality is tailored to your printer. A driver for Fargo's Primera color printer is available. This only works with the the dye-sublimation option, however. You can use the preferences driver for wax-transfer. BME is short for Bit Map Editor, a useful tool which comes with PS3. It loads in most graphic formats and allows you to edit them using different brushes and so on. It is capable of a few effects, as well as cropping and cloning. This is version 2.0a of BME, and it's also equipped with arexx, making it versitile and useful in conjunction with PS3. Page Liner, a text editor also comes with PS3. This is no ordinary editor, however. It has all the text formatting PS3 does, and you can enter text into it very quickly, and then load in the already formatted text into PS3. The current version in PS3 is 2.0c. DOCUMENTATION Page Stream 3 comes with a well-written, easy-to-read, large-printed manual that covers everything the program does in detail. On-Line documentation is also available on Page Stream 3 as a bonus. LIKES The most likable part about Page Stream 3 is that it brings the Amiga up to industry standards. It has more and better features then similar programs found on PCs and Macs. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS Page Stream 3 was released prematurely due to public pressure. Many bugs were present, and some features not working, but most have been fixed. My biggest complaint is that you have to figure out and set the screen DPI when using a graphics board. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Users of Page Stream 2.2 should seriously consider updating as Page Stream 3 has over 1000 new features over 2.2. With the additional AGA and Graphic Board support, this program is the definite winner! BUGS I personally have not found any Bugs in release 3.0g. Soft Logik is very good about releasing patches on their BBS and Aminet to fix bugs and update the program, so they have conquered most of them. However, the file from the latest patch has a few known bugs listed. Some of the bigger ones are: - You cannot apply colors to text using the Color Palette. - The Line/Fill button in the toolbar cannot be used for text - You can't copy and paste (or duplicate/transform) text frames. - Color separations don't work. VENDOR SUPPORT I myself have not used their support number, but I have heard good things from people whom have. WARRANTY Soft Logik makes no warranties regarding Page Stream 3.0. CONCLUSIONS Page Stream 3.0g is an excellent program. If you need or want a Desk Top Publishing program, you should definitely get it, and you now have no excuse not to do it on the Amiga! On a scale from 1-10, 10 being the Highest, I give it a 10 Roy Milican Technical Editor @endnode @node "Jim_Drew_Good_or_Bad" "The Voice of Reason on Jim Drew" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Don't_Give_Up" @prev "CD32 " @{i}@{fg shine}Character Analysis: Jim Drew@{ui}@{fg text} Jim Drew, President and CEO of Utilities Unlimited International gets a mixed review of criticisms from the Amiga community, from the Internet in particular. Jim, as you may know is father of EMPLANT board. He has used online services as a means of "spreading the word" about his upcoming products before they are released. One of the questions that enter the minds of Amiga owners is whether or not he can deliver the products he has promised. He has created the first multitasking Mac emulation on ANY computer, by using the Amiga's high tech chipset and OS design. However, many people still find him to be untrustworthy, as he has often announced products without ever finishing them. I will attempt to compare the good items that Jim Drew has brought to life with his failed attempts. Jim *DID* do the following: =========================== Released Emplant, the world's first multitasking Mac emulator (& supporting software) Released SYBIL (Mac disk support hardware) Released AMIA ( Replacement for SYBIL that could be used with Emplant) Released a free Multi-OS filesystem ..and just recently released the e586dx emulation module (P*ntium instruction emulation) Jim promised people a lot of things at one time or another that have never left the UU labs: ========================================================================== PCMCIA Emplant (for A1200's) 3DO emulation for CD^32's. Atari 400/800 emulator Atari ST emulator Apple IIe/II+ emulator Commodore 64/128 emulators SNES emulator Genesis emulator Free Virtual Memory program that will work with his emulations. Which leaves a lot of unreleased products, and a lot of questions to be answered about Jim's integrity. Some people think his outrageous claims are comparable to the boy who cried "Wolf!" It may be that he is too enthusiastic for a disgruntled and disbelieving Amiga community to accept him in these dark hours of the Commodore buyout. Some people have engaged in name calling, but this does not really hurt Jim's products, and is not to the general good of the Amiga community. Jim recently has stopped responding to email on the internet because of the criticisms and angst of some disgruntled Amiga owners. I sincerely hope it does not affect his efforts or his development of new products, and that the Amiga doesn't lose yet another developer supporting it. As it is, GVP's departure from the Amiga market has left him as one of the biggest developers for the Amiga. I personally believe that Amiga owners should take a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get -Josh) to his products. If you are ambitious, you may wish to buy his products and "ride out the storm." If you are not, it is safer to view his products with interest, but to wait until they have been tested first. Caveat Emptor - Let the buyer beware. @endnode @node "Don't_Give_Up" "Don't Give Up" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Reunion_review" @prev "Jim_Drew_Good_or_Bad" Don't Bail Out! I've noticed much negativity recently, due to the Amiga's situation. People are giving up because of the time it has taken to resolve the C= buyout. Many people are alarmed and have every right to be. I also have even felt a little nervous about this situation that we have been stuck with. The Amiga is a great computer. It is superior to all other PCs on the market. Yes, Commodore is gone, you must accept it. Two (or more -Josh) companies are fighting over Commodore and the Amiga, so I don't see a problem in future support. The lack of support right now is no reason to bail out on the Amiga. Once everthing is settled, we will probably have more support than we had in the past, since the company will no longer be run by idiots. Now, to anyone considering jumping ship and buying an PC or Macintosh, I suggest that you to go to the store or a friend's house and just really use one. They are not at all comparable to Amigas and you will not want to switch. Macs do not have a command line interface (e.g. DOS -Josh) included with them, and PCs have no real GUI to speak of. Consider that before you make a rash decision that you will regret. If you must have more support, buy a PC or an Emplant. The Emplant board runs Macintosh software at a very usable speed. This is on my 4000 of course, but I've been told that it also works well on other machines The Emplant is a great alternative. If you absolutely need a PC, your best bet is to buy a no-name PC as they are dirt cheap. Just don't get rid of your Amiga; you will regret it in the long run. My suggestion to every Amiga user is to give it a little more time. You will be glad that you did. The Commodore bankruptcy will get settled, When it is, the Amiga will return to its spot of greatness in the computer market and restore the confidence of the developers. Roy Milican Technical Editor Proud owner of an Amiga 4000 Embarrassed owner of a Pentium. @endnode @node "Pinball" "Pinball Illusions Review" @toc "General_Menu" @next "C=Story_2" @prev "Laptop" PRODUCT NAME Pinball Illusions AGA BRIEF DESCRIPTION Pinball simulation, featuring multiball and game modes. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Digital Illusions/21st Century Entertainment Westbrook Street, Blewbury, Oxon, OX11 9QB UK COPY PROTECTION None Hard drive installable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1200 w/WB 3.0 2 MB Chip, 4 MB GVP Fast Seagate130 MB HD Supra 880K external drive REVIEW Pinball Illusions is the third of Digital Illusions' pinball series (preceded by Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies). One of the features which players have asked for is multiball play, and Illusions is the first of the series to implement it. Dreams and Fantasies were played on a scrolling table which followed the location of one ball at all times, but multiball might have caused problems for some players if this technique had been used again. The programmers decided to use an interlaced screen mode which doubled the amount of the table displayed. The choice of colors for each table apparently reduces flicker, which is a problem on other interlaced games. Although the balls and targets are smaller, they are still recognizable and everything can be seen at once. But if the new screen mode is too hard to play on, the traditional mode can be selected instead. Another new feature is the addition of play modes. All modern pinball games now have several special scoring modes in which huge bonuses can be earned if certain targets are hit in order and within a time limit. I count 29 special scoring modes, not including random-bonus targets or normal multiball bonuses, spread across 3 tables. The variety of play options greatly enhances the life of the game, since a player can try to get huge scores many different ways. Yet another modern enhancement is the (simulated) addition of a dot-matrix video screen on the table. This really helps a player during the scoring modes by giving directions concerning the necessary targets. Sometimes it shows humorous animations when certain targets are hit. It also allows the playing of a "video mode." In the Shootout video mode, the flipper buttons guide a gunsight across the video screen. When the gunsight rests on a target, a gun fires and the player gets points. The video screen adds a little more variety to the game. All of the new features are great bells and whistles, but the tables themselves must be well-designed or they quickly become boring. Thankfully, they are... The first table, Law 'n' Justice, has a large open space in the middle so the ball can travel, yet it has several ramps, bumpers, and drop targets along the perimeter so that the ball can travel across the open area to each target and score combination bonuses. The second table, Babewatch, is somewhat crowded at the top of the table, but there are two table levels so there are still many targets to aim for beneath the second level. This table has the least play modes, but each mode has the potential for the most points. The table is also very humorous, especially during the fifth possible mode called "Babe Hunt" which has hilarious theme music. The third table, Extreme Sports, is a good table, but it has its problems. The board is crowded with walls and ramps, and the triangle-shaped bumpers near the flippers have a tendency to bounce the ball straight down the left outhole. Two walls, one above the flippers and another underneath the left ramp, tend to deflect the ball straight down the middle of the table and between the flippers. Aside from these problems, the table is exciting because many of the scoring modes have short time limits and a player struggles to make all the large-scoring shots. There are a couple of bugs in the game which hurt the gameplay. Sometimes the program loses the location of a ball when it goes into a drop target or down the drain. When this happens, the game can't go on because there's no ball on the table. This means that the current game must be aborted, which is really annoying when one has a score of 1,546,850 and is still on ball 1! The bug is more annoying if a TILT is called, because the 'ESC' key doesn't abort a game during a TILT. This means that the player must reboot the computer. I also found a bug recently which requires a restart butt has only happened once to me. On Extreme Sports, the ball went down the left outhole and got stuck. I could not move it no matter how much I 'hit' the table. Another minor bug cuts out sound if the ball is relaunched right after a TILT. The sound is usually reactivated after a while, though. I'm also a bit disappointed with the graphics. I've already complimented the almost flicker-free interlace mode, but I don't like the lifelessness of the table gadgets. The ball doesn't spin, the mushroom bumpers don't visibly 'kick,' rollovers and switches don't look like they're triggered. Pinball Illusions is a great game. It looks pretty good, sounds great, and contains a variety of different scoring opportunities. The price (in the US) is pretty good, too; it has a MSRP of $39.95 for the NTSC version so stores will probably have it for $5-$10 less. I bought the imported PAL version for $44.95. I think £19.99 is a good price in the UK, and Illusions sells for that in several magazine ads. If a pinball fan compares the price of Pinball Illusions to the price of playing real pinball games, she/he will realize that a lot of money can be saved by playing Pinball Illusions instead. Sound: 9 Graphics: 8 Gameplay: 8 Lastability: 10 Value: 9 Overall: 9 Carl Chavez @endnode @node "Emplant_Part_2" "How to set up the Emplant, part 2" @toc "General_Menu" @next "CD32 " @prev "Pagestream3" @{b}Mac In a Box, An Amiga Box That Is...@{ub} Part 2 Welcome to the second installment of this series on the EMPLANT board and software system. Before I get started on the article though, I have a correction from last month's article. I stated that the plain vanilla A2500 had a 68000 cpu. This was correctly identified by a reader as being a 68030 cpu. Sorry for the error, no slam intended against the A2500. Last month we left the EMPLANT with a fair description of all the peripheral things required to install the board and get it working. This month, let's discuss installing the EMPLANT and its software. @{i}@{u}Installing the ROMs@{ui}@{uu} Before we open the case of the computer, we should install the ROMs on the EMPLANT board. This is only necessary if you do not have a real live Mac handy. If you do, there's no reason to tear it apart and remove the ROMs. They can be dumped in place very nicely in the Mac. More about that in a minute. DO NOT TRY TO INSTALL THE ROMS WITH THE BOARD ALREADY IN THE COMPUTER! If you do, you run a very real risk of damaging the board and/or your computer. If you have to press hard enough to install the chips with the board already installed, you will likely break or crack the board as well as damage the computer's internals. Begin with your EMPLANT lying flat on a hard flat surface with the gold edge connector toward you. A helpful suggestion is to place a towel or a thickness of newspaper under the EMPLANT to prevent scratching the table surface from the back of the board. @{i}@{u}SIMMs@{ui}@{uu} If you have the ROMs on a SIMM setup, they are installed in the SIMM socket located at the top, left edge of the board. There is only one SIMM socket on the board so it should not be too hard to find. It is the long thin socket labeled "ROM SIMM SOCKET". Notice that there are also two jumpers labeled JP 1 and JP 2. JP 1 controls the address lines to the socket. The ROM dump program requires that this jumper be set to the right side. JP 2 on the other hand is set to the leftmost position. These will probably be already set correctly from the "factory". If not, use a set of needle nose pliers or your fingers to move the jumpers. Be careful not to bend the pins! Install the SIMM ROM in the socket and click it into place. The components on the SIMM ROM should be facing you (the gold edge connector) once installed. @{i}@{u}DIPs@{ui}@{uu} If you have the ROMs as individual chips (called DIP ROMs or DIPs), they are installed in the "Socket 1", "Socket 2", "Socket 3", and "Socket 4" chip sockets. Note that two different types of DIP (socketed) ROMs can be had in the 256K configuration. They can be either 28 pin or 32 pin ROMs. The 28 pin DIP ROMs are installed such that the empty pin holes are on the Pin 1 end of the socket. The Pin 1 end of the chip is indicated by the notch on the end of the chip and/or socket. The 32 pin DIP ROMs, of course, cover all the holes in the socket. Insert each of the four DIP ROMs into their respective sockets by the following procedure: 1. Make sure that all of the pins line up with the pin holes in the socket and that the notch in the chip is oriented towards the same end as the notch in the socket. 2. Gently press down on the chip until you feel the DIP pins beginning to enter the holes in the sockets. 3. Check to make sure that all of the pins and holes are properly aligned. 4. Using equal force on each end of the chip, press it until it is fully and firmly in- stalled in the Socket. 5. Check the DIP ROMs as well as you can to make sure that each pin entered the corresponding hole in the socket. If you are pressing fairly hard on the chip and it still isn't entering the socket, you more than likely have the chip pin misaligned slightly. I usually find that installing a chip requires me to align the pins slightly. Use a flat hard surface (like the unshielded table top) to lay the chip on its side and gently press the pins inward using the table surface to evenly move the pins. Try not to move the pins more than a millimeter or so on each side. It doesn't take much! The secret is to keep the pins even, hence the hard table top to press the pins against. It really doesn't matter which chip goes in which socket. The only thing to make sure of is that the serial numbers are sequential on the chips that you use. For example, the chip serial numbers should be in sequence such as ending with 105, 106, 107, and 108. If you have chips with serial numbers ending with 105, 107, 108, and 109 for example, they will not work. @{i}@{u}EMPLANT Installation@{ui}@{uu} After the SIMM or DIP installation, the board is now ready to install. Open the case of your computer as follows: 1. Locate the several small screws that hold the computer lid on. 2. Remove the screws and place them in a protected place. (I like to stick them to a piece of masking tape to keep from losing them). 3. Carefully remove the lid. 4. Locate the slot (see the books that came with your Amiga to help with this) that you wish to use and remove the metal plate at the back of the computer that matches that slot. 5. Align the card's edge connector to the connector slot (the long, thin black plastic thingy that matches the edge connector in length). The EMPLANT should be aligned so that the edge connector is away from you if you are sitting directly in front of the computer and the metal plate on the end is aligned with the back of the computer. 6. Press the EMPLANT into the empty slot selected by pressing the top of the card firmly. 7. Using the screw that came with the metal plate in the back of the computer, fasten the EMPLANT's metal plate to the back of the computer frame. 8. Reassemble the computer lid to the frame, but leave the screws out for now. 9. Fire up the computer and ensure that the startup proceeds without incident. @{i}@{u}Installing the Software@{ui}@{uu} Select the directory where you will install the software. On my hard drive, I have a partition called "Apps:" where I keep all of my applications. In the Apps: partition, I have a Directory labeled "Emulations"; under Emulations I have "Emplant". Usually the setup script will establish the directory structure for you, as is the case with the EMPLANT install script, but I'm hard headed. I like to create my own structures. MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR PROGRAM DISK. Some people don't do this and it causes them much heartache when they destroy their program disk. Others don't like having multiple copies of the same software in their inventory Get over it, diskettes are cheap. At the very least, use a diskette to make a copy and then use it for something else. Make sure that you change the name of the backup diskette to match that of its source. This will be important with the installer. MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR PARTITIONS. This includes the System and whatever you have as the applications drive/partition where the application will actually be stored. Anytime you are using an installer that makes as many profound changes as EMPLANT does to your system libraries, devices, etc. it is foolhardy to do so without a backup of the partition/drive. The EMPLANT uses the standard Amiga loader, but you have been warned! The software will have to be decompressed. The decompression can be done to either a floppy or to the RAM: device. If a floppy is to be used, format the floppy with the name Mac2. Decompress the program diskette to Mac2. If you elect to decompress to RAM. Decompress the archive to the RAM: device and then assign Mac2 to RAM: Once this is completed, open the diskette and read the "readme.first!" and "changes.txt" files. These usually contain any late breaking news and give instructions on installing the software. Actually, to install you just double click on the HardDisk_Installer icon on your decompressed diskette (Mac2:). You will of course, have to answer questions about your machine and the hard disk structure. If you are nervous, select the intermediate user switch and do a pretend installation. Actually this is a good idea for the first time installer regardless of skill level. Several things are worth mentioning here. No matter how educated you are about Amiga structures, files, etc., you will want to run the installer anyway. One of the things that it does is to create a file or two using your machine's system as a source reference. This means that the EMPLANT software custom tailors itself for your machine. Later on, you can obtain the LT version for upgrades and just copy the libs, devices, etc., where they belong. Another thing worth mentioning is how the Startup-Sequence (S-S) and user-startup (u-s) files are changed. The program adds two things to the S-S. The very first line in the S-S must be "execute >NIL: s:SetupEMPLANT". Later with other software additions, ensure that this line is always first in the file. Also, another line "RsrvMemXX >NIL: will be added to S-S. The position of this statement is not critical like the previous "execute . . ." statement. The XX in RsrvMemXX refers to the version of the RsrvMem that is current. In the u-s file, the very last line in the u-s must be "execute>NIL: s:AssignEMPLANT". This line may be frequently moved from its position as the last line in the u-s file when other software is added. Always check this after installation of other software and move the line to last if necessary. @{i}@{u}Creating a ROM Image@{ui}@{uu} First off, don't steal the ROM. If you own a Mac, it is perfectly legal to copy the ROM and use it as long as both machines (Mac and EMPLANT are not being run at the same time. If you just purchase a set of ROMs and download them as I am going to describe, and you keep the ROMs on the shelf, it is legal to use them in this manner. If you purchase a set of ROMs, download them, sell the ROMs and continue to use the EMPLANT, that is piracy. Now, having that out of the way, REMEMBER THAT ONLY 256K ROMS FROM A SE/30, IIc, IIcx, or a IIx WILL WORK WITH EMPLANT. Sorry about the yelling, but the most common problem for new users that I see reading the nets is the use of the wrong ROMs. Other Mac emulators use 128K ROMs; not the EMPLANT. Your Mac LC etc, Quadra, etc. will have 512 or 1024K ROMs. None of these ROMs will do. They must be 256K ROMs. There are three version of the 256K ROMs available for the Mac. They are versions 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3. The two earlier versions do not include High Density drive support and are usually much cheaper. The version of 256K ROMs that you have matters not one whit to the EMPLANT. It has its own custom routines for drive support anyway. Any of the three versions will work so go with the cheapest one that you can find. ROMs are available on the Internet, through Mac dealers (yeah right!), and through several computer mail order houses. Obtaining a ROM image is relatively difficult because there are no instructions on how to do it! We will deal with two cases. First is if you own a Mac. In the EMPLANT archive there is a program called "ROMINFO". This is the file to dump a ROM in a Mac computer. Getting it to the Mac can be rather tricky. (Ok, ok, it was only tricky for me!) The file cannot just be copied to a diskette (even a Mac formatted one) and placed on the Mac. The copy must be a binary copy. If you attempt to copy the file to an IBM formatted diskette and move it to the to the Mac, it will not work. The reason for this is that Mac drives have two files for each visible file. One file is called the data fork (yes, fork) and the other is called is called the resource fork. Only a binary copy from the Amiga will move both forks. Copying to a Mac formatted diskette without performing a binary copy will only give the data fork. Similarly, moving the file to an IBM diskette will only copy the data fork. There are two ways to get the ROMINFO to the Mac: 1) Hook up a modem from the Amiga to the Mac and transfer the file as a binary file. 2) Use a utility program such as CrossMac to perform a binary copy. EMPLANT does not currently provide a means of writing Mac diskettes other than within the emulator. I chose the second of my two methods above because I wanted software to transfer Mac stuff outside the emulator anyway, and so it wasn't a problem to purchase Cross-Mac. Once the ROMINFO file is transferred to a Mac-formatted diskette, it is a simple matter of double clicking the icon on a real Mac and you're off. For those of us who put the ROMs on the EMPLANT board, run the applicable program, either Dump256KSIMM or Dump256KDIPs. These are found in your first subdrawer level on the hard drive after the software install. Once you have dumped the ROMs, remove the EMPLANT card from your machine and remove the SIMM/DIPs that you installed previously. Reinstall the EMPLANT card as indicated above. Any of the methods of obtaining the ROM dump will result in a file that should be copied to the ROM_Images drawer. It is located in the Mac drawer. I guess that's all the space I have for this issue. Next issue, we'll discuss setting prefs on the emulator and hard drives. Until then, happy MACing! By William J. Jones @endnode @node "C=Story_2" "Some Bits of Treasure, Part 2/3" @toc "General_Menu" @next "CBM_review" @prev "Pinball" @{fg shine}Some Bits of Treasure Part II @{fg text} Tom handed the tablet back to John Delacroix after staring closely at the plainly visible symbol on it. Again Tom remarked, "I can't believe how that looks like the Commodore logo and nothing else even faintly looks like our alphabet!" Heading to the laptop, John replied, "We're right on the edge of something, aren't we? If the symbols are similar, then we should have a clue soon." Tom moved to sit out the wait on the rock ledge, turning his head slightly to hear faint scuffles of an insect in the tunnel. Shortly, his curiosity vanished as several robed men quickly, but quietly, moved into the chamber. They were holding large, sharp knives that looked very unhealthy to Tom. A man stepped forward and said, in clear English, "Please do not make sudden moves and put your hands out." They did as they were told. Tom was not an expert in nationalities, but the men all looked native to this region. The man spoke again, "Do you think we are fools that you could come and take away our treasures? I myself have studied at your Yale University. I learned much more than just what nice locks they make. But enough. Tie them up." Four big men obeyed. The leader continued, "And in gratitude for your efforts for us, we are leaving you your lives." He motioned to a man, "Take the tablets and their machine." A scowl replied, "But the laptop's no good, it's five months old! DOS 27.21 is out now and you need 40 meg ram." The leader glared angily, "Did we train you for nothing? We need the data in the machine," and pushed him towards it. As they left the chamber, with John and Tom well tied, the leader turned and bowed slightly, "It has been a nice transaction." Struggling against the ropes was futile. "What do we do now?" Tom moaned out. As if in response, a small shape moved out of the shadows. He was a young boy shabbily dressed in clothes of the region, no more than 14, Tom thought. "Can I help?" he asked. "Yes! Untie us, " John answered. "We have to catch those men." The boy, an orphan named Armand, said that was impossible. The men had camels and were riding into the desert. They would skirt the far end of the rock cliffs to reach an oasis on the other side by nightfall. Besides, the leader was Razsca, a man of bad reputation. "But," he said, "I know an opening in the cliffs. It is big enough for me and I will be there by dark. Will it be worth fifty dollar American to get your things?" "Yes, at least," John said after a thoughtful pause, "But will you be safe?" "Not a problem," Armand replied. "I will be less than a shadow to them. Wait here for me," he said slipping away. Tom looked questioningly at John. "I sure hope you know what you're doing." About five hours later, as night fell, the boy left a cleft on the other side of the cliffs and hid among the plants of the oasis. Razsca and the men rode up and dismounted. He turned to one, "You have the things?" "Yes, they are hidden with the meat," was the grunted reply. After drinking, the men moved to the other side to camp and Armand stole in among the camels. He lifted the sack and ran back the way he had come. But, in his haste to get up the incline to the cleft, the boy's foot caught on a rock and he fell flat, the bag sailing over rocks to the sand a few feet below. That sudden noise dislodged the largest bird he had ever seen. At first he thought it was a vulture, but it had the long legs of a secretary bird. Whatever it was circled tightly, scented the dried meat, caught up the bag, and was quickly away along the cliffs. In shock, Armand watched his fifty dollar hope and the hidden secret of the tablets slowly become a speck on the horizon and then disappear. to be continued... Brian Strayer @endnode @node "Laptop" "Laptop Dreams" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Pinball" @prev "Reunion_review" It hit me all of a sudden. There I was, walking down the cafeteria in my school, when I saw it. A laptop. I was mesmerized. All my thoughts turned to it. It was like the equivelant of a woman's biological clock telling her to have a baby. All of a sudden I couldn't live without a laptop. I thought about this urge for a while. I honestly couldn't think of many things I'd use a laptop for. The only ones that immediately came to mind were for typing notes in class, using the Internet while I was not occupied with other classwork, and writing stories as I was in the car. In reality none of these reasons was good enough to buy a laptop instead of a new A1200 with a 68030 accelerator when they finally come out. And yet it didn't seem to matter. "Oh, what can I do!" I thought. I wanted a laptop, but I didn't at all want to buy a hideous PC, and I didn't like the idea of a Mac too much either. I had heard of the hack to put your Amiga into a laptop, but I didn't trust hacks too much, and besides, I didn't have a spare Amiga to use. For days I pondered my problem, until I came upon the Amiga World Wide Web Page. I read the three articles by ex-C= employees, and read their talk of this technology and that technology, and I realized like never before how badly C= had screwed the Amiga. Not just a lot. No, Commodore did about as much to kill the Amiga as humanly possible. If you ever read these articles you'll be sick to your stomach, and vow to kill Medhi Ali and Irving Gould. And yet, these articles gave me new hope. How, you say? How could such depressing articles give me hope? They did, because I saw how incredible the Amiga technology still is. I saw that as soon as the buyout is over we can have machines that we'd never even DREAMED of before. I saw machines that would blow every PC user's mind. But more than that, I saw technology that could easily make a laptop Amiga, which could run all my favorite word pros, games, comm programs, and much, much more. And I saw that the new company that will own the Amiga can't be as bad as C=. I saw that there was no way that they could make such hideous decisions. I knew that they'd eventually make a laptop Amiga. And I saw myself calling my dealer to pre-order one as soon as they were announced... Joshua Galun Editor-in-Chief @endnode @node "CBM_review" "Commodore Liquidation Review" @toc "General_Menu" @next "CC_2" @prev "C=Story_2" PRODUCT NAME Liquidation of Commodore International, Ltd. BRIEF DESCRIPTION A product that everyone feared would eventually come, and it finally came upon us mercilessly. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Bahamian Courts, with some help from various legal eagles. LIST PRICE Anywhere from $19 million to about $100 million (US), depending on whom you ask. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Strong nerves. SOFTWARE Lots of patience. COPY PROTECTION This product is protected from successfully operating by a couple of fools named Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould. I would rate this copy protection as unacceptable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING This product has been in extensive testing on over 4 million Amigas worldwide. Many users were so exhausted from testing that they just decided to sell their machine and migrate to a different platform. INSTALLATION I never installed this on my system, honest. It just somehow made its way there. I suppose you could describe its installation as simple as, say, a computer virus. REVIEW Well, what can I say. For at least a year before it actually happened, I anticipated this product's hitting the Amiga market. During this time, I almost began regarding it as another one of those vaporware products that we Amiga users have become so accustomed to. When the liquidation finally hit the market, I must say that I was quite disappointed. The whole thing was full of bugs, and hardly ran at all. In fact, now, about 9 revisions and updates later, it still doesn't seem to deliver what was originally promised, which of course was the possibility of a capable company manufacturing and marketing the Amiga line of personal computers. Though the developers of this product still seem relatively enthusiastic about its possibilities, I am beginning to seriously doubt the liquidation's viability in the current Amiga market. In fact, I would go as far as suggesting that the market might have been better off without such a product being available in the first place. DOCUMENTATION Documentation is extremely poor. If it weren't for a few good supplements, such as Amiga Report, there wouldn't be any documentation at all. (Kudos to the editors.) LIKES I can't say that I like anything about this product. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS I dislike the lengthy, seemingly endless proceedings that never seem to end, and that every time there seems to be the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, it just turns out to be an oncoming locomotive. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS Not much to compare this thing to; but if you're interested, go to your local library and look up "Pan American Airlines." They were also a once-great company that didn't quite make it. BUGS Full of bugs. Simply doesn't work. VENDOR SUPPORT None. WARRANTY None - expressed nor implied. CONCLUSIONS I would not recommend this liquidation to anyone. It doesn't perform as promised, doesn't even work, and it costs too much. It also causes many of your fellow Amiga owners leave you for little-endian pastures. Stay away! COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review is Copyright 1995 Bo Najdrovsky. It is freeware. Do what you want with it but if you republish it in your newsletter, just let me now. My address is bn@okcforum.osrhe.edu. Thanks. @endnode @node "CD32list" "List of CD32 Games" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Pagestream3" @prev "e586" @{u}GAMES@{uu} CD32 games list. OUT = I or my agents have seen it on the shelf IMMINENT = Do I really need to explain? Date = The softco/supplier date!!! * = Decidely iffy. (Probably not in other words) Zappo NO = INCOMPATIBLE (maybe fixed in new Zappo revs.) Zappo YES = COMPATIBLE (by CD32 Gamer) Zappo YES! = COMPATIBLE, but may need an NVRAM tweak Zappo ? = Unknown, maybe you lot can help me fill in the blanks? There are titles for which the softco/supplier won't talk about, or I can't get hold of them. These are marked by !!!!! in the UK Number field. All comments and updates/info gratefully received! @{u}RELEASED@{uu} Title Release Zappo Rating Publisher UK Number ===== ======= ===== ====== ========= ========= AB II + Tower Assault OUT ? --- Team17 (01924) 201846 Alfred Chicken OUT NO 78% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Alien Breed SE OUT ? 77% Team17 (01924) 201846 Akira OUT ? --- ICE (01453) 756993 Arabian Nights OUT ? 74% Krisalis (01709) 372290 Arcade Pool OUT YES 88% Team17 (01924) 201846 All Terrain Racing (ATR)OUT YES --- Team17 (01924) 201846 Banshee OUT YES 88% Core (01332) 297797 BattleChess OUT ? 76% Interplay (01865) 390029 Battle Toads OUT ? 22% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Beavers OUT YES 75% Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Beneath a Steel Sky OUT ? --- Virgin 0181-960-2255 Brian the Lion OUT NO 65% Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Brutal Sports Football OUT YES 55% Millenium (01223) 844894 Bubba n' Stix OUT YES 89% Core (01332) 297797 Bubble 'n' Squeak OUT YES 74% Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Bump'n'Burn OUT ? 89% Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Cannon Fodder OUT NO 90% Virgin 0181-960-2255 Castles II OUT YES 39% Interplay (01865) 390029 Chambers of Shaolin OUT YES 6% Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Chaos Engine OUT YES 72% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Chuck Rock OUT ? 57% Core (01332) 297797 Chuck Rock II OUT NO 86% Core (01332) 297797 Clockwiser OUT ? 81% Rasputin (01438) 840004 Dangerous Streets OUT ? 22% Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Dark Seed OUT ? 90% CyberDreams Death Mask OUT ? --- Alternative Deep Core OUT YES 42% ICE (01453) 756993 Defender of the Crown 2OUT ? --- Sachs Entertainment Dennis OUT NO 37% Ocean 0161-832-6633 D-Generation OUT YES 90% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Diggers OUT ? 56% Millennium(01223) 844894 Disposable Hero OUT YES 85% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Dizzy Worlds(big 6) OUT ? --- Codemasters Donk OUT YES 58% Supervision0171-702-9391 F17 OUT YES 73% Team17 (01924) 201846 Fields of Glory OUT ? --- Microprose(01454) 329510 Fire Force OUT ? 34% ICE (01453) 756993 Fire & Ice OUT YES 87% Renegade 0171-481-9214 Flink OUT YES --- Psygnosis 051-709-5755 Fly Harder OUT YES 52% Krysalis (01709) 372290 Frontier OUT ? 95% GameTek Fury of the Furries OUT YES 75% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Global Effect OUT ? 55% Millenium (01223) 844894 Guardian OUT YES 92% Acid 0171-482-4066 Gunship 2000 OUT YES 92% Microprose(01454) 329510 Heimdall 2 OUT YES 90% Core (01332) 297797 Humans I + II OUT YES --- GameTek IK + OUT YES 44% System 3 0181-864-8212 Impossible Mission OUT NO 40% Microprose(01454) 329510 James Pond 2 OUT YES 80% Millenium (01223) 844894 James Pond 3 OUT NO 78% Millenium (01223) 844894 JetStrike OUT ? 94% Rasputin (01438) 840004 John Barnes Football OUT YES 32% Krisalis (01709) 372290 Jungle Strike OUT ? --- Ocean 0161-832-6633 Kid Chaos OUT ? 68% Ocean 0161-832-6633 King Pin OUT YES --- Team17 (01924) 201846 Labyrinth of Time OUT YES 70% EA (01753) 549442 Lambourghini American OUT ? --- Titus 0171-700-2119 Last Ninja III OUT ? 68% System 3 0181-864-8212 Legacy of Sorasil OUT YES 84% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Lemmings CD32 OUT YES 79% Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Liberation OUT YES 92% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Litil Divil OUT ? 90% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Lost Vikings OUT NO 90% Interplay (01865) 390029 Lotus Trilogy OUT ? 60% Gremlin (01742) 753423 LunarC OUT YES 37% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Manchester United OUT NO 73% Krisalis (01709) 372290 Marvin's Marvellous AdvOUT ? --- 21st Cent (01235) 851852 Mean Arenas OUT YES 61% ICE (01453) 756993 Microcosm OUT YES 60% Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Morph OUT YES 84% Millenium (01223) 844894 Myth OUT ? 71% System 3 0181-864-8212 Naughty Ones OUT YES 65% Kompart (01727) 868005 Nick Faldo's Golf OUT YES 90% Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Nigel Mansell OUT NO 74% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Oscar OUT ? 59% Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Out To Lunch OUT ? 78% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Overkill OUT YES 67% Mindscape (01444) 246333 PGA European Tour Golf OUT ? --- Ocean 0161-832-6633 Pinball Fantasies OUT YES 87% 21 Century(01235) 851533 Pinky OUT ? 84% Millenium (01223) 844894 Pirates! Gold OUT NO 79% MicroProse(01454) 329510 Premiere OUT ? 65% Core (01332) 297797 Prey OUT ? --- Almathera 0181-687-0040 Project X OUT NO 89% Team17 (01924) 201846 Psycho Killer OUT ? --- Online Ent Qwak OUT ? 84% Team17 (01924) 201846 Rise of the Robots OUT ? 90% Mirage (01260) 299909 RoadKill OUT YES --- Acid 0171-482-4066 Ryder Cup Golf OUT YES 68% Ocean 0161-832-6633 Sabre Team OUT NO 78% Krisalis (01709) 372290 Second Samurai OUT ? 85% Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Seek and Destroy OUT YES 62% Mindscape (01444) 246333 Sensible Socce OUT NO 91% Renegade 0171-481-9214 Sensible Soccer Int. OUT YES 92% Renegade 0171-481-9214 Seven Gates of Jambala OUT YES 8% Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Silly Putty OUT ? 70% System 3 0181-864-8212 Simon the Sorcerer OUT NO 90% PDQ 0121-625-3377 Skeleton Krew OUT ? --- Core (01332) 297797 SleepWalker OUT YES 80% Ocean 0161-832-6633 Soccer Kid OUT ? 88% Krisalis (01709) 372290 Striker OUT YES 43% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Sub War 2050 OUT ? --- Microprose(01454) 329510 Summer Olympix OUT YES 37% Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Super Frog OUT YES 85% Team17 (01924) 201846 Super Methane Bros OUT YES 83% Apache 0121-449-4464 Super Stardust OUT ? 90% Team17 (01924) 201846 Surf Ninja's OUT YES --- Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Theme Park OUT ? --- Bullfrog/MS 0753-549442 Top Gear II OUT ? 75% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Total Carnage OUT YES 45% ICE (01453) 756993 Town with no name OUT ? --- Online Ent Trivial Pursuit OUT ? --- Domark Trolls OUT YES 67% Flairsoft (01661) 860260 UFO Enemy Unknown OUT YES! 80% Microprose(01454) 329510 Ultimate Body Blows OUT YES 93% Team17 (01924) 201846 Universe OUT ? 88% Core (01332) 297797 VideoCreator OUT ? --- Almathera 0181-687-0040 Vital Light OUT ? 81% Almathera 0181-687-0040 Wembley Int Soccer OUT ? 76% Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Whales Voyage OUT YES 80% Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Wild Cup Soccer OUT ? 65% Millenium (01223) 844894 Wing Commander OUT ? 86% EA (01753) 549442 Zool OUT YES 60% Gremlin (01742) 753423 Zool 2 OUT YES 70% Gremlin (01742) 753423 @{u}IMMINENT@{uu} - (the bit you all look at! :) ) Title Release Publisher UK Number ===== ======= ========= ========= Cannon Fodder 2 APRIL Virgin 0181-960-2255 Desert Strike* MARCH Ocean 0161-832-6633 Dragonstone MARCH Core (01332) 297797 Dream Web END MARCH Empire Frontier - 1st Encounters MARCH Gametek Lost Eden APRIL Virgin 0181-960-2255 MegaRace MARCH MindScape (01444) 246333 Pinball Illusions APRIL 21st Cent (01235) 851533 PowerDrive MARCH US Gold Shadow Fighter MARCH Gremlin (01332) 297797 Simon the Sorcerer 2 APRIL PDQ 0121-625-3377 World Cup Golf MARCH US Gold @{u}STILL TO COME@{uu} Title Release Publisher UK Number ===== ======= ========= ========= Adrenaline Factor 1995 Mirage (01260) 299909 Baldy 1995 Mindscape (01444) 246333 Bazooka Sue 1995 Krisalis (01709) 372290 Benjamin and the Alien Incident 1995 Team17 (01924) 201846 The Big Engine 1995 Supervision0171-702-9391 Blood Net 1995 Gametek Bubble Trouble 1995 Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Burnin' Rubber 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 Captain Dynamo 1995 Codemasters Cecil and his Chopper 1995 21 century(01235) 851533 Club Football - The manager 1995 Software Business The Clue 1995 Kompart (01727) 868005 Cyberwar 1995 SCI Darkmere 1995 Core (01332) 297797 Dracula* 1995 Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Elfmania 1995 Renegade 0171-481-9214 Embryo 1995 Kompart (01727) 868005 Evasive Action 1995 Mindscape (01444) 246333 Exile 1995 Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Fantasy League Manager 1995 ??? Fist 1995 Supervision0171-702-9391 Flight of the Amazon Queen 1995 Renegade 0171-481-9214 Genesis 1995 Flairsoft (01661) 860260 Graham Gooch Cricket 1995 Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Gulp 1995 ICE (01453) 756993 Harry the Hairy Hermit 1995 Rasputin (01438) 840004 Herewith the Clues 1995 Domark King of Thieves 1995 Team17 (01924) 201846 Lionheart 1995 Thalion Liverpool Football 1995 Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Megamorph 1995 Psygnosis 0151-709-5755 Mental Mayhem 1995 Gremlin (01742) 753423 Micro Machines II 1995 Codemasters Mutant League Football* 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 NHL Hockey* 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 Overdrive 1995 Team17 (01924) 201846 Putty Squad 1995 System 3 0181-864-8212 Psycho Pinball 1995 Codemasters Quik 1995 Titus 0171-700-2119 Reunion 1995 Grandslam 0181-680-7044 Robinsons Reqieum 1995 Silmarils Ruff'n'Tumble 1995 Renegade 0171-481-9214 Sensible World of Soccer 1995 Renegade 0171-481-9214 Shaq Fu* 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 Skidmarks 2 1995 Acid 0171-482-4066 Skitchin* 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 Space Academy 1995 Mindscape (01444) 246333 Spherical World 1995 Kompart (01727) 868005 Star Crusader 1995 Gametek Star Trek 25th 1995 Interplay (01865) 390029 Super Loopz 1995 Audiogenic 0181-424-2244 Tickled Pink 1995 Millenium (01223) 844894 Tong Dynasty 1995 System 3 0181-864-8212 Turning Points 1995 ??? Turrican 3* 1995 Renegade 0171-481-9214 Two Towers* 1995 Interplay (01865) 390029 Urban Strike* 1995 Ocean 0161-832-6633 Ultimate Dizzy 1995 Codemasters Virtual Chess 1995 Titus 0171-700-2119 Zonked 1995 Rasputin (01438) 840004 Zool 3 1995 Gremlin (01742) 753423 @{u}PRODUCTS@{uu} Microbotics SX1 expansion features parallel, serial, floppy, IDE and through ports, with room for 8Meg of RAM. Available for 199.99 quid. Indi (01543) 419999. A keyboard is 44.99 and a floppy drive 48.99. Multimedia Machine have released an SX1 pack including A CDTV floppy drive and keyboard, they're selling it for 299 UKP. Also included are four PD CD's crammed with stuff, not a bad deal really. They have their own expansion, ARCHIE, which will feature a CDTV k/b, floppy and a parallel interface, for 200 UKP. Depends what you want really, they can be reached on (01204) 387410. If Commodore pulls through, it's own expansion which sits underneath the CD32 will be released in Spring, with the same functionality as the SX1, but including the keyboard and floppy drive (and Amiga ones too) for the same 199 UKP price tag. A professional rack mount expansion is available, but at 400 quid is a little bit of overkill. Rumours state that a small planetary system is run by one of these beasts. They have plans for a desktop unit, as yet unconfimed, they're waiting for CBM's future to emerge. Competition Pro have released a replacement joypad for 19.99 UKP. It has all the buttons colour coded, separate auto-fires for all buttons, and looks a damn sight nicer to use. Get one!! LATEST - available for 14.99 from most gaming retail outlets. @{u}MAGAZINES@{uu} CD32 Gamer No.1:- Demo's of Donk!, Alfred Chicken, Trolls, Nick Faldo's Golf, Pinball Fantasies, about 10 PD games including Scorched Tanks, Megaball AGA and Microbes. CD32 Gamer No.2:- Demo's of Cannon Fodder, Fire & Ice, Banshee, Chaos Engine, Ultimate Body Blows, and Heimdall II. A must. CD32 Gamer No.3:- Demo's of Legacy of Sorasil, Disposable Hero, Nigel Mansell's, Lotus Trilogy, and Zool. Yawn. CD32 Gamer No.4:- Demo's of Litll Divil (buggy), 2 minutes of Arcade Pool, watchable SuperStardust, a level of Superfrog, 4 levels of Jetstrike, and a load of PD, shareware, and demo's. CD32 Gamer No.5:- Demo's of Simon the Sorcerer, Marvins Marvellous Adventure, Alien Breed Tower Assault, Litll Divil (unbuggy). CD32 Gamer No.6:- Demo's of Rise of the Robots, Bubble'n'Squeak, Wembley International Soccer. CD32 Gamer No.7 has an optional full copy of Lambourghini American Challenge on the cover, for only 9.99!! Also demo's of Bump'n'Burn, Pinball Illusions (A1200 only), Super Stardust (playable), Beneath a Steel Sky, and all the other stuff. Amiga CD32 Spring :- Demo's of Donk!, Dgeneration, Alfred Chicken, Lotus Trilogy, Nigel Mansell's, Nick Faldo's, Zool, Pinball Fantasies, Pirates Gold!, Disposable Hero, Chaos Engine, Microcosm, Skidmarks, Guardian, Ultimate Body Blows, and Fire & Ice, a load of PD games, piccies, music etc etc. If you have one CD, make sure it's this one. Amiga CD32 Winter:- Demo's of Arcade Pool, Cannon Fodder, Superfrog, Bubble'n'Squeak, Banshee, Top Gear II, Wembley International Soccer, Kid Chaos, Marvin's Marvellous Adventure, a load of PD Games, MPEG demos, music, piccies etc. AmigaCD! No.1 :- Demo's of Microcosm, Pinball Fantasies, DGeneration and Whales Voyage. Collection of piccies and music. A few PD games. AmigaCD! No.2 :- Demo's of Trolls, Bubba'n'Stix, Nick Faldo's Golf, Inferno, more PD games, a couple of CDXL film clips, more piccies. Alan L.M. Buxey @endnode @node "Letters " "Letter to Amiga Link" @next "Distribution" @prev "CC_2" Hello, I just read your first issue of AmigaLink and I like it. You are doing somethings that AmigaReport should have tried long ago. Back that up? Well... Coder's Clinic, Paint Tutorial, and Emplant. This should give me away as one of those 'how to do it' people, who first turns to the "hints and tips" articles in mags. I'd really like to see more PD software reviews- all types. I really don't buy Amiga software at stores (even if I still could) because of all the good shareware and giftware titles available. Here's some examples of stuff I use now vice the store bought software: GED CED REORG guess a couple titles like QBTools could go here DISKSALV well same as above TERM 4.3 tried NComm and JrComm... tried only RO .91 This is like Dopus... many updates but is coming along quickly. MRBackup QuarterBack VMM Gigamem AmiTCP ???? Guess I could go on for awhile. I'd like to see more on this Emplant because I'm thinking of getting one. Hey, about NETBSD... it's a new life for my old Amiga, even if UNIX is a pain to learn. How about using old C= Bridge- Boards? I have a A2386-25 in my 2000 running DOS 6.22 and Windows. I have a SVGA 1meg card, I/O card (128meg IDE, Floppy, gameport, serial mouse), and Reveal Sound card w/CDROM inside. Too slow? Nope, just got the Cryix upgrade Cx486SRx2-25/50 so the A2386 is a 486SX. Lastly, (glad?) a indepth look at video cards for the Amiga... I want to use it with NETBSD and X-Windows. Well, that's all my 'I wants'. Wish you all the luck with AL. Hey I have an Amiga and an IBM... but I only use the IBM for games! Michael Greene Your point on PD/Shareware software is very true. I have been amazed in the few months that I've been on the Internet by the amount and quality of the Amiga PD software on Aminet. Because of such, I have made an announcement in this issue as to the fact that Amiga Link is now looking for a PD editor, to review and write about PD every moth for the magazine. As for writing about emulation, we will write about the Emplant, because many are interested in that, but we probably not write too much on emulation, as the audience for that is small. We'll see what other readers say about this. Dear Ed, Here are a couple of suggestions that could help to improve your magazine: 1) As the Internet is one of the worlds largest computer networks and is used by millions of people, you could start a section up on that. Not just concentrating on the internet but also e-mail facilities as well. Magazines available from shops are mainly PC and MAC orientated and don`t do the amiga justice. 2) Break your new product section up a little more, one large block of text is hard on the eyes and puts you off reading it, headings and paragraphs would be easier to read and would be better if you were searching for a particular product. I have a small problem: I have e-mail facilities, going through pipex but no internet access. On my e-mail, all I can do is send a letter with a subject title and a body of text. Nothing else. I want to subscribe to discussion groups from my e-mail terminal but don`t know quite how to go about it. Sorry if its a bit vague but I don`t know that much about e-mail. I`d just like to say that your first magazine is a tribute to you and I hope to see it grow even bigger as the readers contribute their views too. Matt Whiteley W.J.WHITELEY@UK03.wins.icl.co.uk Some article about the Internet is a good idea. We will definitely consider that for the future. As for the products listing, we may go with your suggestion. On the other hand, writing it in the way we did in issue #1 allowed for more "anaylzation." OK, the Amiga Link letter's column is NOT for techinical questions, but ... You don't use an e-mail program to view newsgroups, you use a newsgroup viewing program like rtin. @endnode @node "Distribution" "Distribution of Amiga Link" @next "Info" @prev "Letters " As mentioned before, in the last month we have added new ways to get Amiga Link. If you wish to receive Amiga Link in e-mail each month, mail the address with the message ADD Then, every time the magazine comes out, it will be mailed to you UUENcoded. The magazine is quite big, so if your e-mail address cannot accept messages of atleast 100k, don't put your name on the list. If you want to be taken off the lits, do the same thing, but subsititute DELETE for ADD. If you have the use of AMosaic or Lynx on your BBS, you can view Amiga Link online on 5 different WWW pages. Their addresses are: The Amiga home page! Check this page out! Here is a list of people who have achieved the highest accolade possible: to have an article in Amiga Link! John Vlachos is an Editor-in-Chief of this magazine. He handles the BBS list and letter's column. He can be e-mailed at Joshua Galun is the other Editor-in-Chief of Amiga Link. He handles the article submission and the style and editing of the mag. If you want to submit an article, complain about this magazine, or just flame him for no reason at all, mail him at Roy Millican, Amiga Link's Technical Editor, submitted two articles this month, the PageStream 3.0g review and the opinion piece entitle "Don't Give Up." E-Mail him at if you want information on the Amiga Link mailing list, or if you want Amiga Link on your WWW page. Chris Kemp wrote the review of the e586 module. He can be e-mailed at David Loeser of Synthesis Software writes the Coder's Clinic series. He's dying for more respnses to his articles, so please e-mail him at The informative Sam Report is put out by Sam Ormes at If you liked the Sam Report, please mail him and ask him to continue submitting it to Amiga Link. The HUGE CD32 list was compiled (with a LOT of hard work) by Alan Buxley. You can mail him about this very impressive list at William Jones, author of hundreds of technical training manuals, writes the excellent series on how to install the Emplant Mac and PC emulator. He can be found at Pinball Illusions was reviewed by Carl Chavez, the un-official Amiga Link game's master, who resides at Brian Strayer wrote Some Bits of Treasure, which is soon to be published in paperback. E-mail him at The funniest man alive, Bo Najdrovsky, wrote the CBM liquidation review. You can reach him at @endnode @node "Legal_BS" "Legal BS" @prev "Writers" The views expressed in this magazine are not neccasarily those of John Vlachos or Joshua Galun nor anyone related to them. Amiga Link and the articles in it are copyright Joshua Galun and John Vlachos. You may not reproduce Amiga Link's articles in any way, or edit the magazine, in any way without John Vlacho's and Josh Galun's express written consent. Amiga Link may be freely distributed on any BBS or online services as long as it is still in it's original archive and form. Public Domain resellers may sell Amiga Link for a maximum of $4.50 or £3.00, or in any currency as long as the amounts are equal to those, using the exchange rates of March 1, 1995. You may not use Amiga Link in any other way than putting it on BBSs and reading it, and selling it for the amounts specified. If you wish to use Amiga Link or an article in it for something else, you must first contact on of the editors. Amiga Link is not affiliated with Commodore-Amiga, Commodore Business Machines, Ltd., or any other Amiga pbulications. All items quoted in whole or in part are done so under the Fair Use Provision of the Copyright Laws of the United States Penal Code. Any electronic mail sent to the Editors may be reprinted, unless specified otherwise. @endnode @node "Sam Report " "The Sam Report!" @toc "General_Menu" @next "e586" @prev "Editorials" March 25, 1995 The Sam Report I had a nice chat with Alex Amor of CEI today. He is aware that I report for Genie so this is cleared for release. The auction will begin April 20th in New York and will last about a week. It now appears clear that the remaining interested parties are pursuing separate, non-conflicting, parts of the overall package (Commodore name, set-top technology, Amiga manufacture, etc.). It seems there is a pre-auction agreement (or at least an understanding) among the parties that whoever wins will gladly provide the others with the pieces they want. Only CEI plans to manufacture Amigas. Once again, Alex mentioned the caveat that "somebody could come out of the woodwork and surprise us all" but he seemed less concerned about this than previously. He mentioned having an excellent information network that keeps an eye out for entities that might be lurking in the shadows ready to make a last-minute grab. Those sources indicate no lurkers at present. The Gould/Ali matter is not a complication at all in the sale process. The creditors will go after them in a totally separate action that in no way affects the sale at auction. He had no comment on the report that IBM was lined up as the contract manufacturer (said he couldn't discuss that). He referred to contracts for components that are valid and would be rescinded only if CEI doesn't prevail. He confirmed my earlier report that talks have been held with Tandy (the owners of the huge Computer City and Radio Shack chains in the USA --over 6500 stores!-- Josh) and could develop into a distribution reality. Again, initial production calls for A4000Ts and A1200s. The latter will be getting a larger case for more internal expansion, but that might not happen immediately. Alex, in shorts and sneakers, went back to attending to store customers on a busy Saturday morning. As always, he appeared full of optimism. "By the 27th it will all be over!". This has been the Sam Report from Miami for GEnie and Amiga Link. Sam Ormes @endnode @node "e586" "Emplant e586 module review." @toc "General_Menu" @next "CD32list" @prev "Sam Report " PRODUCT NAME Emplant e586 emulation module BRIEF DESCRIPTION The long-awaited 586DX emulator software for the Emplant card. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Utilities Unlimited International. Inc. Address: 790 N. Lake Havasu Avenue #16 Lake Havasu City, AZ 86403 USA COPY PROTECTION Software updates are freely distributed. However, you MUST PURCHASE the 586DX module. A hardware upgrade to the Emplant card (a chip which you must replace on your card) is included with the module. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 4000 WB 3.1 40Mhz 'o4o Warp Engine Picasso II, Video Toaster 2MB Chip 16MB Fast DEC 1 Gigabyte SCSI-II hard disk REVIEW The Emplant e586DX upgrade is quite possibly one of the most sought after "Holy Grails" in Amiga history. For over a year it's feasibility and the probability that it might someday actually exist was battled over (sometimes, rather violently) in comp.sys.amiga.emulations. Supporters of Jim Drew (the creator of the Emplant) and disbelievers (who were quite vociferous) formed factions in c.s.a.e. and battled on a day-to-day basis for months and months. It would seem the e586 ranks right up there with the Video Toaster before its release and, of course, the Mac emulation before its release. With the inception of the e586 software, users were promised the ability to truly run multiple operating systems on the same computer at the same time without any additional expensive hardware. The e586 promised to be many times faster and more compatible than any other software emulation on any other platform. It was a dream come TRUE for Amiga users - we could keep our Amigas, yet still be able to run all of the popular software previously available only to users of other operating systems. In a nutshell, here is what you should expect from e586 version 1.1: -You must obtain a BIOS. The BIOS I (successfully) used was the s82.bios -The emulation recognized and formatted a partition on my SCSI-II Amiga drive. -MS-DOS installed with no problem. -Windows will not work. Don't waste your time trying at this point. After manually installing windows (as the install crashes on the second disk), Windows will attempt to run. All you will see is a nasty yellow Windows startup screen made of pixelated vertical bands. The words "Microsoft Windows" are almost not readable. The emulation will then lock. -Benchmarking programs are meaningless when run on the emulation. My opinion? The emulation feels fast. If I had to make a guess as to the equivalent machine I was running on, I'd say it was a 33Mhz 386sx. This is based solely from my (rather extensive) experience with PCs. I think the emulation has potential. However, at this point it is nothing more than a really neat toy. Without the ability to run Windows or any other application which opens up a graphics screen, it is at this point fairly useless. Here is a list of things which I have tried: Program Does it work? Comments MS-DOS 6.22 Yes Feels nice and responsive Windows No Locks on Startup DOOM No Locks on Startup WordPerfect Yes Can not preview-print Wolfenstine 3D No Locks on Startup AutoCad X No Locks when displaying model Here are some comments Jim Drew (creator of the Emplant) included with the e586DX emulation... The PC emulation was first started after the first version of EMPLANT's MAC emulation was released. Due to numerous machine incompatibilities with the MAC emulation, a large portion of our programming time was dedicated to iron out the problems. Several months later, we again resumed work with the PC emulation. Nearly a year later (and dozens of updates to the MAC emulation), the first actual test was done. Egads, was it slow. It worked, and it was faster than anything else available, but it was really not that usable... good experience. In late August of 1994, we started from scratch, now having a good understanding of how the PC architecture worked. Speed galore... beating a real 66Mhz DX2 in quite a few tests (with 40Mhz 68040 processors) made our day since we knew that there is always room for improvements. After playing with some 3rd party EMM386 clone programs, we noticed some interesting problems with the MMU setup. The problems turned out to be so severe that we were forced to start from scratch again. Now, a few days later, it is amazing to see how fast coding goes compared to the 'learning curve' we had to start with. Our first attempt took more than year; our second attempt took 6 months; and our third attempt has been 6 days so far, and it is nearly ready for testing. Our new code is about 1/4 the size and could be as much as twice as fast. A lot of this new code is due to the PowerPC version of this emulation. Since this product is being developed for both the Amiga and PowerMAC platforms, changes in one machine's code can often lead to optimizations in another machine's code... such as we have found when working with PowerPC assembly and 68K assembly. The executable code released on this disk is more than 1.75 megs (Yes, it is compressed). The source code totals more than 10 megs and even with a 40Mhz 68040 processor, it takes several minutes to assemble. There are thousands of man hours in this project, and I am sure that we are nowhere near where we want to be. But, as with the MAC emulation, upgrades will be readily available, and we welcome your suggestions to make this emulation module as productive as possible. Sincerely, Jim, Joe, & Mark CONCLUSION I think that after a few more updates this will be a fine, usable product. As it stands, it is not very useful unless all you want to run are text-based DOS programs. Chris Kemp @endnode @node "CC_2" "Coder's Clinic 2" @toc "General_Menu" @next "Letters " @prev "CBM_review" @{fg shine}Coder's Clinic 2: Let's Print! @{fg text} ****************************** * First of all let me state * * that last months code was * * mangled in the proccess of * * translating it to HTML * * (for WWW) and AmigaGuide, * * if anyone would like the * * c.source just email me * * TOPIC:need CC1.c * ****************************** This month, as promised, we will add text to our "AmigaHelloWorld" program. Programming the Amiga, can be as much fun as playing a game on your Amiga, if you have the right attitude. So if you have the tute, I'm the tutor... Printing text to the window is very simple and you have two ways of going about it. *****-------------------------------------------------- * N * I STRONGLY SUGGEST INVESTING IN THE COMPLETE | * O * SET OF AMIGA ROM KERNEL MANUALS... AT THE | * T * VERY LEAST YOU SHOULD TRY TO GET THE LIBRARIES| * E * MANUAL ...THERE ARE MANY EXAMPLES/EXPLANATIONS| *****-------------------------------------------------- ========================================================================== FIRST WAY: INTUITEXT STRUCTURE To render text using Intuition, you must fill an IntuiText structure: struct IntuiText { UBYTE FrontPen, BackPen; UBYTE DrawMode; WORD LeftEdge; WORD TopEdge; struct TextAttr *ITextFont; UBYTE *IText; struct IntuiText *NextText; }; After filling the structure you would call the PrintIText() function.... *proto* void PrintIText(struct RastPort *rp, struct IntuiText *iText, long left, long top); I won't use this method for our simple program, but we will in the future. ========================================================================== SECOND WAY: THE TEXT FUNCTION The Text() function is in the graphics.library and is the method that we will use in our example program. Since the funtion resides in the graphics.library we must open it. *proto* void Text(struct RastPort *rp, STRPTR mystring, ULONG count); ex. C CODE . . . Text(rp,"Hello World",11); . . . END OF CODE In our example we simply called Text() passed a pointer to our RastPort, passed the string to print, and the number of characters in the string. Simple? ======================================================================== With this knowledge, lets build on to our "AmigaHelloWorld" code. *****------------------------- *****------------------------- * N * ALL CODE IS INTENDED | * N * I COMPILED THIS CODE | * O * FOR VERSION 2.0 OR | * O * WITH SAS/C V6.0 AND | * T * ABOVE... | * T * HAD NO ERRORS OR | * E * | * E * WARNINGS | *****------------------------- *****------------------------- //.C..C.O.D.E.............................................................. #include /* THE INCLUDE FILES WE NEED */ #include #include #include #include #include #include #include #include #define INTUI_V36_NAMES_ONLY void handle_window_events(struct Window *window); /* FUNCTION PROTOTYPE */ struct Library *IntuitionBase , *GfxBase = NULL; VOID main (int argc, char *argv[]) { struct Window *window; /**************************************************************** * Open the intuition.library so that we can access its funtions * * in our program * ****************************************************************/ IntuitionBase = OpenLibrary ( "intuition.library",37); if (IntuitionBase != NULL) /* did intuition.library open ? */ { GfxBase = OpenLibrary ( "graphics.library",37); if (GfxBase != NULL) /* did graphics.library open ? */ { /* YES it opened ! */ window = OpenWindowTags(NULL, WA_Left, 20, WA_Top, 20, WA_Width, 400, WA_Height, 80, WA_CloseGadget, TRUE, WA_DragBar, TRUE, WA_IDCMP, IDCMP_CLOSEWINDOW, WA_Title, "Hello Amiga World", TAG_DONE); if(window == NULL) /* Window filled? */ { /* NO, Window Failure */ } else { /* YES, do somthing */ /* LIKE PRINT SOME TEXT !!!!)*/ SetAPen(window->RPort,1); Move(window->RPort,30,30); Text(window->RPort,"Hello World",11); handle_window_events(window); CloseWindow(window); /* Need an explanation? */ } CloseLibrary((struct Library *)GfxBase); } /* AllWays close the Libraries we opened */ CloseLibrary((struct Library *)IntuitionBase); } } /******************************************************************* This event loop is very simple they can get complex, but for our * purpose this works fine.... (I will explain this soon) * *******************************************************************/ void handle_window_events(struct Window *window) { WaitPort(window->UserPort); } // END OF CODE ----------------------------------------------------------- That should do it ... a nice window with a nice greeting :) NEXT MONTH: ADD A GADGET TO OUR WINDOW!! The gadget is the greatest invention known to man...at least in my book. Please let me know what you think of this column...I had one response to last month's article... one person in the whole world read the column??? David Loeser Synthesis Software @endnode @node "BBS_List" "BBS List" @next "Next_Issue" @prev "Main" Due to a hard drive crash, we have lost much of our BBS list, and we did not have enough time to recompile it all. In fact, we are not even sure if we wish to do it at all. What do you guys think? Should we include a BBS list? Please mail all reponses to @endnode