|Trial of the Amiga By BullyBeef Hard though it is to believe.the Amiga has been out of production for a year.With the legal wranglings over the corpse of commodore dragging on with no real end in sight,by rights the most popular home computer ever should have long been dead and buried,it's a testament to this machines qualities,then,that support for the Amiga is still extremely vibrant. CTW ,the industry's trade magazine,found in a survey of major distri- butors that almost all were ready to support the Amiga when it makes a comeback,a few months later we found this level of commitment had not changed,this article is not intended as a `my computer's the best'spiel as that type of propaganda rings hollow when the basic Amiga is going to be compared to the latest,albeit expensive,line of PCs. However,the Amiga does have some key strengths that bode well for the future,so we decided to find out who's still rooting for the onlt true home computer around,so to get an overview of what lies ahead,we gave some of the biggest names on the Amiga scene a chance to air their views on what went wrong and what needs to be done,this is what they said. HI-SOFT For many years hi-soft have been a highly respected developer for the Amiga,however it was the release of their acclaimed squirrel SCSI inter face a few months ago that has put them firmly in the limelight,when we asked MD,david link,whether it was worthwhile to develop more new prod- ucts for the Amiga in these difficult days,his response was coutious but positive,"you have to be a small,lean company to develop for the Amiga at the moment,'he said,`and that precludes companies like micro- soft." He claimed that the squirrel was a good example of what could be achie- ved with the right product, however , with demand for the SCSI greater now than even a month ago "it just goes to show that people are still looking to expand their Amiga's and are looking to the future , if they are spending money on expansion they're obviously not thinking of dis- carding their Amiga'sin the short term." Asked who he hoped would take over the Amiga , link echoed john arundel in his support for Amiga international,"they have the best interests of the Amiga at heart , it's also important to a lesser extent that they are based in the UK which ,i believe, is at the centre of Amiga sales." if the Amiga is going to make a run of it in the future against the PC, link stressed that whoever did win the takeover must concentrate on getting a technical edge and competitive pricing,"i believe in personal computing at the black box stereo price which neither the MAC or the PC quite achieve-talk to anyone who's tried to build one up and you'll hear horror stories." TEAM 17 If you had to choose one game developer that had contributed the most to the leisure market on the Amiga,the chances are you'd pick team 17, with highly successful releases like the alien breed series to their credit, most Amiga owners will have at least one team product in their cupboards. Marcus dyson, the company's multimedia development manager, expressed fears for the industry in general should the Amiga fail to return."Con- soles like the playstation are excellent games machines, but they don't do anything for creativity, in this respect the Amiga was phenomenal catalyst, and an incredibly important machine, and what we stand to loose if the Amiga is not available for around the three hundred pounds mark is a machine that lets people realise their creative ambitions,the Amiga was a volkscomputer, it brought the power to use technology with- in the reach of most people. In the past, team 17's martin brown had expressed concern about where programming talent was going to come from if teenagers couldn't afford to get into computing. By contrast, Dyson was more concerned about com- puter artists than programmers,"what i fear ,"he said,"is that we may lose artists and musicians who often do not start of with a sense of serious purpose regarding computers, but move across from games-playing instead. Worryingly, dyson's view of what Amiga international would have to do to resurrect the platform was daunting,"whoever takes over the Amiga has a huge job ahead of them. First they must produce A1200's they can sell for two hundred pounds for christmas 1995, then they have to pro- duce a 50mhz 030 machine with a CD player in the near future, and they have to actively chase the 3D/multimedia/video user and make these businesses their territory." Most importantly of all,the new owners of the Amiga have to get themselves a presence on the internet, preferably by someone who not only knows what they're talking about, but also has some power to provoke action and change."if he's right, this is a chal- lenge and a half for any company to pull off, nevertheless, david plea- sance's team would do well to listen, for as dyson pointed out in con- clusion:"No company has ever gone bankrupt giving the people what they want." SILICA There's no point having good products on a computer if customers can't easily buy them, so the importance of keeping the presence of major distributors in the Amiga market cannot be overstressd, it's particul- arly encouraging, therefore, to see that the huge Amiga backer, SILICA, has no intention of abandoning the platform now, john arundel, the com- pany's group marketing controller, pointed out two reasons why this was "First, there's a huge user base we're not going to abandon just because the Amiga is currently out of production, second,we beleive the machine will be back."Despite silica's need to introduce PC's into all of their catalogues due to the non-availability of Amiga's, arundel's enthusiasm for a return of the Amiga sounded heartfelt, he pointed out the Amiga's strength as an entry-level home computer. "Some people won't be able to afford a PC-thats one of the reasons why we really want the Amiga to come back, with the decline of the ST the Amiga is the only hope." The lack of production has obviously led to a gap in sales at silica that they have had to try and compensate for by selling other platforms, but on the positive side, he was extremely pleased with silica's sales of the CD32 critical zone package, which has now been reduced to one hundred and ninty nine pounds,"people who would have bought Amiga's,"he said,"have been buying the CD32 because they are fully upgradable." Like many others we spoke to, arundel felt it was well worthwhile to bring out further products for the platform because of the nature of the people who use it, "they're dedicated and a lot are very technical. they're in it for the long term, so there's a long term market."he str- essed, however, that the quality of the new peripherals and products must be high,"Amiga owners are definitly becoming more discerning." Asked who he'd like to win the takeover for the Amiga, arundel replied: "I'd love dave (plesance) to get it because he's capable of doing it and he's got a heart for it-the heart of a hobbyist."when asked what the new owner of the Amiga could do to give it a fighting chance, arundel replied: " they have got to recognise the Amiga's strengths, which is graphics and to a certain extent gameplay, and build on them to establish a nlche market." To conclude arundel stated: "We're certainly very positive about the future for the Amiga." With the recent release of the mamba and the lo- ader drive, and the promise of more Amiga products in the pipe-line, thankfully, silica seems to be putting it's money where it's mouth is. PREMIER VISION When it comes to professional Amiga applications, premier visions are the people to talk to, with a strong range of multimedia tools, they've helped the Amiga make it's mark in adverts and presentations for french motorail, the national trust and kings college hospital, to name a few, andy bishop, joint MD for premier vision, was outspoken when it came to the Amiga's strengths, "The Amiga is astounding, it is the most effec- tive interface of any platform, on the PC, microsoft have struggled for years to come up with Windows'95, and even that's not as good as Amiga- DOS." Bishop pointed to a number of products that had made the Amiga such an importent player in multimedia circles including Lightwave,the PAR card Bars and Pipes Pro, and ADpro, surprisingly, however, these packages' cheapness relative to their PC counterparts was not, in Bishops view, necessarily a good thing, commenting on the price difference between AD pro and Adobe photoshop he said: "Yes,Photoshop is more expensive but the difference is that Amiga products have always been underpriced, why do you think after half a year 40-50 per cent of Amiga companies go bankrupt? it's because they're not making enough money in the first place." In short,Bishop believes the amiga market has made a rod for it's own back, and like Team 17's marcus dyson, he argues that if the amiga is to make a comeback it will need some pretty impressive spec increases. The Amiga needs an 040 (roughly six times faster than a standard A1200) on the motherboard as standard, and it needs a 060 on the motherboard with a very large cache for a higher-end machine, if the Amiga is going to make a comeback, it sounds like the boffins at amiga international are going to have to come up with the goods quicksmart. KEYS TO THE FUTURE All in all, then, the companies we approached gave an encouraging idea of the strength of feeling the Amiga provokes, however, there are obv- iously some hard lessons to be learnt from the past, everyone pointed to certain Amiga strong points, and the general concern about the ab- sence of a three hundred pound home computer on the market gives cause for hope in the future, the Amiga is undoubtedly a special machine in the eyes of all those who have been involved in the market, there are a lot of good points to build on-let's just hope the legal mess is re- solved quickly enough to let it happen.