Article 48 of comp.sys.amiga.announce: Path: leela!orstcs!rutgers!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucdavis!toadflax!zerkle From: zerkle@toadflax.cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Subject: World of Commodore show report, part 1 Message-ID: <17094@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> Date: 16 Sep 92 18:42:45 GMT Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu Reply-To: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis Lines: 148 Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu INTRODUCTION ============ Well, yes. I went to that circus in Pasadena. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post a series of articles detailing what I saw there. I went to the World of Commodore Amiga show on Saturday afternoon. In the five hours or so that I was there, I was not able to get to all the booths, or attend all the seminars. In addition, I had to miss NewTek's presentation that night at the Hyatt. If you would like to write a report on the show about something I missed, please do so. Mail your report to announce@cs.ucdavis.edu. I will post anything of high journalistic quality that does not overlap with the material I cover. The hardest part of the show was getting there. I drove in from Santa Barbara, figuring that I could stop at the first offramp in Pasadena and buy a map at a gas station. Well, there are no gas stations in Pasadena. I got a very nice look at the Rose Bowl, and nearly toured the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but eventually found the convention center. I was very surprised to find a needlepoint convention and a cat show. There were some other confused Amigoids there, so we got together and eventually found the WOC show. Once I got to the show, I went over to the badge booth and conned myself into a press badge. There are about 28,000 of you readers, which is about the circulation of a medium-sized magazine, so I figured that I count as press. The press badge was a tremendous help, even though most people never heard of the comp.sys.amiga.announce publication. I went to the various booths with a notepad in hand and interviewed the vendors. Over the next couple weeks, I will give you the summaries of those interviews. I also collected a very large stack of press kits, containing even more press releases. I will give you the appropriate press releases as I write about the interviews. Anybody in the Santa Barbara or Davis areas is free to help me type in the press releases. Send me mail. Due to the time constraints, I was not able to go to all the booths. In particular, I spent very little time at the GVP and ICD booths. If you spent any time at either of those booths, I would appreciate it if you would send me a report. COMMODORE ========= Let's get the urgent stuff out of the way first. Yes, the A4000 was there. No, you can not use the capabilities of the new chip set in currently owned Amigas. Commodore had by far the largest booth. It was probably also the busiest. Although it was rather tricky to count, there were four 4000's, five 600's, a 3000UX, a 3000T, seven plain 3000's, nine CDTV's, and two 500's. They were also showing off their new A570 CD-ROM reader. All sorts of tasty software was running on the various machines. I even saw CDTV running Defender of the Crown. Commodore is now clearly pushing multimedia. They have a program (announced right here last week) where you can get a CDTV with your A3000 for free. They had a couple of educational programs running on the CDTV systems. The (very nice) press kit they gave me includes a fancy booklet describing the multimedia capabilities of the whole Amiga line. Another little pamphlet contains quotes a bunch of Amiga users saying how wonderful the Amiga is for developing multimedia presentations. It also suggests several complete systems, and shows how much pricier competing computers (Mac, IBM) are when all the extra hardware and software is included. I found an engineering type from Commodore hanging out by a 3000UX running some flavor of X-windows. He mentioned three interesting things: They are very interested in getting Amiga Unix to run on a 68040 (they're working on it). They aren't sure whether to try to continue working with the current AT&T kernel, or wait until the next one becomes available. Finally, they have "encouraged" their employees from posting anything about their ongoing work to Usenet. This is because they are never sure if something they're working on will ever actually make it to the product stage, and they don't want to disappoint their customers (and have them gripe, gripe, gripe). AMIGA 4000 ===== ==== I got a good look at the A4000, but didn't get to interview anyone about it. The booth was just too busy. Here are some interesting things I picked up, though: It is slightly larger than the 3000, with a light cream and gray case. It has a 5 1/4" drive bay right in front, perfect for a CD-ROM reader or a tape drive. It also has a lock on the front, presumably so you can keep people from opening the case. The joystick ports are on the left side (will Commodore _ever_ decide where to put those?), and the keyboard port is in back. And, it's ugly. Yes, I'm afraid so. The 1000 is one of the slickest looking computers out there, and the 3000 is pretty neat, too. The rest of the Amiga line is fairly handsome (although the 2000 is marginal). The 4000, though, is a real dog. It's blocky, boring, and _ugly_. Fortunately, looks aren't everything. Inside the case are some very nice things. The 4000, as might be expected, runs from a 25 megahertz Motorola 68040 CPU chip. This CPU is not on the motherboard, but on a card in a CPU slot, to allow for easy upgrading. The 4000 has four Zorro III slots in line with three PC/AT slots and one video slot. The standard hard drive is 120 megabyte IDE, although you will eventually be able to get a SCSI adapter, and even a 32-bit SCSI- II card. The floppy drive is high density, giving 1.76 megs of storage. It comes standard with 6 megs of RAM (two chip), expandable to 18 on the motherboard via SIMM (thank God) modules. A video de-interlacer/scan doubler is included, to give flicker- free displays. It has four 3.5" drive bays (two external) in addition to the 5 1/4" external drive bay. The most interesting feature of the 4000 is the new AA (or AGA) chip set. The new Alice and Lisa chips provide 8-bit color, with a 24-bit pallete. All of the ECS resolutions are available, plus an 800x600 mode. In each of these modes, the 4000 can either display 256 colors from a set of 16 million, or 256,000 colors in a special 8-bit HAM (hold and modify) mode. The chips are, of course, backward compatible with all ECS modes. The suggested list price for the 4000 is $3699. Creative Computers was at the show, taking orders for the new machine for less than $3000. As far as I can tell, they were planning to mail the computers out. This is very interesting, since the last I heard, Commodore does not permit its dealers to make mail order sales on the 3000. I would expect a similar policy for the 4000. I suppose we'll just have to wait to see what becomes of this. Creative might just become a grey-market dealer. Tomorrow: The keynote address by V.P. of Engineering, Lewis C. Eggebrecht. For more information: Commodore Business Machines, Inc. 1200 Wilson Drive West Chester, PA 19380 1-800-66-AMIGA -- Please see monthly postings for the disclaimer, the introduction, the charter, and submission instructions. Comments to zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu. MAIL ALL SUBMISSIONS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu (don't auto-post).