The Retina is a damned
impressive piece of hardware. I spent a lot of time looking at the specs
for Opal-24, for the IV-24, for the  FireCracker 24 and so on, and it
looked to me as if the Retina delivered a lot more functionality for a lot
less bucks if you weren't looking for something that was pretending to be a
Toaster; so I finally decided to take a chance on it and buy one. I
haven't been disappointed for the most part, and I've noticed something
which has confirmed my decision: All the competing products have had a
significant price decrease since the Retina was announced.)

I have had two significant problems:

1: They claimed to emulate the AGA for my A2000, but I haven't been
able to find a program which admits that it exists. My best guess is that
such programs require AmigaDOS 3.0, but there lies a paradox, defined in
the manual on page 16, as follows:

   'The first setting in the menu, "AA EMULATION?", determines if RetinaEmu
   will emulate the AGA chipset or not. If the item is checked, then AGA
   emulation is turned on, otherwise if it is unchecked, RetinaEmu does not
   allow AGA emulation. Note that AGA emulation is already supported on
   machines with the AGA chipset without having to set this option. On
   machines running AmigaDos 3.0, this menu item will be ghosted.'

...which leaves a lot of us in a bind: Just how does a program allocate
8 bit planes to use AGA under AmigaDos 2.0? As far as I know, it can't.
When they allow those of us who own A2000's to upgrade to 3.1, we won't
have AGA chipset and RetinaEmu won't allow us to turn on AGA emulation
("...it is ghosted") and we're STILL screwed. The small sampling of
programs I've tried have basically said "You don't have 3.0, so #*(^ you"
and have returned to the system. Since every program I try this with costs
me $40 or more, I have obviously not tried this very many times. My only
hope is that when 3.1 finally comes out, if it actually supports the
A2000 (as rumors have suggested) that they will come out with a new
version of RetinaEmu. (Guess I better send in that registration card...)

2: They claim to support 1 "panel" screen along the lines of the
command screen for DCTV (which approach is also used for "Strip Poker 3"
among other programs) but they simply don't work correctly. They act as
separate screens, unrelated to each other, non-overlapping, and
they don't scroll. I can reach them with Control-LeftAmiga-M or equivalent
functions, but it isn't emulating the original screen behavior. I can't get
the panel to display ON TOP OF the other screen, which is what I would have
expected.

Am I doing something wrong? If anyone out there feels appreciation for
the work I've done on this program and feels like helping me out on either
of these problems, I would be most grateful. My net mail address is

denbeste@world.std.com

Don't bother answering these questions after June 1994. Either someone will
already have given me an answer by then or I will have given up trying. I don't
want to be receiving answers through the end of the century.