Well, what can I say? It was sometime early 1998, and now it's 1999, and this issue sort of got delayed a bit. As a result, you might find me referring to 'the recent announcement at WOA' or something in the odd article, but don't mind that. There's still plenty of very recent news, and hopefully you'll find lots of timeless material, including loads in the humour section this issue.
Hopefully we'll get issue 8 out a bit sooner. A big thanks to those people who contributed to this issue - sorry if you thought we had forgotten about you, but it's here now.
Meanwhile, the Amiga market seems to be shrinking away to nothing - but that doesn't seem to matter as Amiga Inc have a whole new lot of plans. Read about it more elsewhere in this issue of course. My view is that it's great that the Amiga may get to have a whole new future, rather than being stuck in AGA chipsets, 680x0 processors and old motherboards. In the meantime though, VillageTronic have announced that they will be producing a Voodoo 3D add on card for the Picasso IV - sure, as many point out, Voodoo 1 is 3 years old, and Voodoo 3 will be out sometime this year - but the important thing is that (hopefully) Amiga II will have all the latest technology, but it's good that the classic Amiga market is still viable enough to see releases of new hardware developments.
Some people are still worried about Amiga II not really being an Amiga, and things like backward compatibility, and so on. Well, consider two machines: AmigaII, and a high-powered 'classic' Amiga setup, say something like A1200T or A4000T with 68060 and 603/604 with Cyber/BlizzardVisionPPC graphics card, loads of RAM, drives, other things like Catweasel, PowerFlyer, faster serial/parallel ports, ethernet, and so on. Now consider what made / makes the Amiga what it is, and indeed, what made / makes it good. The OS is a main factor - easy to use, yet offering a lot of power too. Of course AmigaOS3.1 offers this, yet presumably OS5 will offer it at least as much (and surely be much better, being much more stabler, etc). Okay, how about a cheap, entry level price? Well the classic Amiga setup would cost loads where as the AmigaII is intended to come in a very low cost entry level version (and meanwhile, the PC is - finally - available at affordable costs in that 500-600UKP will get you something far more than most people would have a need for). Then there's being able to do all that you need without the need for add on cards. Things like true plug and play, and no need to worry about hardware conflicts, and hassles installing drivers. The PC is still plagued by such problems, but on the other hand the Amiga is straying from what things were once like. The classic Amiga setup features various add on cards, particularly the graphics card which won't work with some (admittedly old) software which still goes through AGA. Meanwhile we have problems with the 680x0/PPC combination, with most software being 680x0 only. The Amiga II, with very modern graphics chipset and other features coming as standard, looks to put things right. What else? Well, plenty of freely distributable software is still the case to a level that only Linux can beat - Windows PD is more like crippleware with expensive shareware fees. Well, one can only hope that plenty of current and past freeware Amiga programmers end up programming for Amiga II...
Of course, things aren't all bad for the classic Amiga in that it still has one professional niche in the 'real world', namely video - apparantely an Amiga and Video Toaster still offers unrivalled value for money. The problem here is a shortage of A4000s. Quikpak were unable to continue producing them for some legal reason - just when Newtek were offering cheap Amiga/Toaster bundles, they found they couldn't get hold of an Amigas. Thankfully various companies (including Randomize) have stepped in to produce Zorro-equipped A1200Ts perfectly capable of holding a Toaster, and it's cheaper than an A4000T anyway. And sholud the BoXeR ever get released, then things will be helped even better. It does seem ridiculous that in an area where people want to use Amigas for the job, it ends up that they can't get hold of any, or if they do having to pay ridiculous amounts because there are so few of them.
Well, hope you had a great Xmas and New Year, and enjoy the issue...