Article 429 of comp.sys.amiga.announce: Path: leela!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!ogicse!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!csus.edu!ucdavis!toadflax.cs From: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Subject: WOC Toronto: Amiga's Future Message-ID: <20068@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> Date: 13 Dec 92 12:25:07 GMT Article-I.D.: ucdavis.20068 Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu Reply-To: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Lines: 182 Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu Message-Number: 294 [ Shawn attended the recent WOC show in Toronto and was your ] [ reporter for comp.sys.amiga.announce. This show report is ] [ the result of that trip. This is the first of three parts. ] [ Thanks for putting in the work, Shawn! -Dan ] World of Commodore Toronto 1992 Lou Eggebrecht tells of the Future Lou Eggebrecht, VP of Commodore Engineering made two presentations, one to the public and another on Saturday night for dealers and developers. I had the pleasure of sitting next to him for the Saturday night seminar. He is a fascinating man. He designed the first IBM-PC and was consulted by Intel on the design of the new Pentium processor. After the seminar he answered a pile of questions about the future of the Amiga. I asked him so many questions that I'm sure I did more talking that he did. The presentation that he gave was much the same one he gave at WOC Pasadena. The most exciting part of this is the preview of the next generation Amigas. Here are the features in point form: In the future there will be two versions of the chipset: i) Low End ii) High End Low End: - Two 100k Transistor Chips - 32 bit DRAM 60ns Page Mode Chip Memory - 57 MHz Pixel Clock - 100% Backwards Compatibility - 4MB 4Mbps Floppy Controller with Hardware CRC - 8x Memory Bandwidth Increase - 2x Blitter Performance ( gets twice as many clocks as on AGA ) - 800x600x8bit Non-Interlace 72Hz Refresh Rate - Larger screens at lower Refresh Rates - 16 bit True Color mode ( although recent developments with the completion of the first cycle of chipset design indicate that this will actually be a 24 bit True Color Mode ) - FIFO serial ports - increased Chip Ram ( 8Mb ) High End: - 4 Chips ( 750k transistors each ) - 32/64 bit VRAM Chip Memory ( could be DRAM for mid range machines ) - 57/114 MHz pixel clock - Chunky Pixel Mode as well as Bit Planes Modes ( Blitter works with both ) - Special CD-ROM Port ( 4 Mbps Very High Speed Serial Port ) - Built in Frame Grabber ( Cool! ) - 1280 x 1024 24 bit color 72 Hz Refresh Rate - 16 bit 8 channel 100KHz sampling rate Audio ports - New 'On-Demand' DMA Architecture for Balanced DMA Usage - All Clocks are Independent and Each Section is Asynchronous to Each Other - 12 to 20 x Memory Bandwidth Increase ( mostly from VRAM ) - 32 bit blitter ( instead of word blitter ) 8x Performance Increase - 24 bit True Color Mode - Video Upgrade module ( You can add more chips for parallel processing chip set i.e. multiple blitters, and Higher Resolution Display Modes ) - Hardware Graphics Decompression Modes - ECS & AGA compatibility - 32 bit Processor Independent Processor Bus ( hinted at RISC by calling the bus 'RISC ready' ) Future releases of AmigaDOS: - 3.1 Device Independant Network Support File and Printer Sharing DSP Support - 4.0 Retargetable Graphics Full Support for Postscript Printers He also fielded many good questions, and he indicated: - The only reason that the A600 and A1200 do not have the dual speed floppies is that the current model is simply too big. There is lower profile versions on the way but there are not here now and will not be for a while. - There are no plans for virtual memory. - Commodore will release a series of Quad-Syncing monitors in February to replace their current series. - New Bridgeboards will be on the way, including new software VGA support and a new bridgeboard for the A1200. - AGA will be put into all models of the Amiga, including the CDTV. Also CDTV technology will be brought to the entire Amiga line. - Full motion video support is well on its way. The feature is here now, but the development systems for this technology is not. - Prime goal with the CDTV is to cost reduce it and then enhance it. - A new design philosophy is to design all hardware with modules to allow upgradability. - A main goal of his is to use the current state of the art development systems and design tools to enable Commodore to reduce their design times. Much of it is already in place and the AGA chipset is the first result of that process. Instead of being last to bring something out, Commodore is going to be first or second. - DSP technology will be available for the A4000 in summer. DSP will feature the AT&T 32000 series DSP and a 68040 processor module for the A4000. A Personality board will attach to this board and will allow the DSP to perform useful functions. Most of the DSP Personality boards will be produced by third parties. There will be extensive information on this product at the next DevCon. - The A3090 will be shipping at the end of January and will feature a 10MB/s transfer rate as well as WIDE and FAST SCSI. - A new, higher performance Ethernet card will be available soon, after the release of 3.1 and the new TCP/IP and Novell software. - The chipset is still too power hungry for a laptop. Maybe there will be one when there is a fully CMOS chipset. - No hardware memory protection plans for Motorola Architecture ( the way he said it implied that it might be on other architectures. ) - Retargetablity is a major goal, and Audio will merge with DSP ( this didn't make sense to me since audio is built into the chip set. ) - Processor Upgrade cards for the A1200 will be left for 3rd Parties. - They are going to be replacing the 2000 very soon. The only reason they still make the 2000 is so that they don't abandon the only machine the Video Toaster runs on out of the box. The NewTek people are very difficult to work with and are resistant to change. - Some early 4000's shipped with the fan installed backwards and this caused many overheating problems. I believe he said that if you had one, you can have it fixed on your warrantee. - He could not give any release dates for machines with the low and high end chip sets. He did say it would be more than a year. The high end chipset development is father along than the low end. Both have completed a first design cycle. The results of this cycle are better than expected and they are ahead of their development plan. One thing that was heavily implied was that the Amiga will be migrated over to a RISC CPU in the future. While he did metion that the exact CPU has not been decided, the high-end models are being designed to accomodate a RISC CPU. I overheard him talking about being excited that a RISC Amiga will be able to run not only UNIX, but Windows NT. The timetables for the new stuff were not made clear. He did mention that the DSP CPU module for the 4000 would be out in the summer. This implies that 3.1 would be out at the same time. Futher, since 3.1 includes device independant networking built into the operating system, the new Ethernet hardware and software should be out shortly after that. Other products, like the 3090 disk controller and the new monitors, will be released during the next few months. The crowd attending the two seminars that Lou gave seemed overwhelmed at the features of the future chipset. The loudest cheers came with the mention of the larger chip ram feature. I am very excited about the future of the Amiga. The new features are nice, but the best part is that, clearly, Commodore has a plan. This plan is not just a short term plan, but a visonary plan to create a series of Amigas that will meet future market demands. This plan would not be reassuring if it was persented by anyone other that Mr. Eggesbrecht. He is very capable and has had much success in the industry. DISCLAMIER: I don't want to start any dangerous rumors here. Don't take the above as the absolute truth, since my version of what he said and what he actually said (or meant) might be different. Shawn Switenky Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu. Article 431 of comp.sys.amiga.announce: Path: leela!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!gaia.ucs.orst.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!wupost!csus.edu!ucdavis!toadflax.cs From: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Subject: WOC Toronto: Exhibitor's Booths Message-ID: <20072@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> Date: 13 Dec 92 12:36:53 GMT Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu Reply-To: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Lines: 175 Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu Message-Number: 295 [ This is part 2 of 3 of Shawn's report. -Dan ] World of Commodore Toronto 1992 Report of Exhibitor's Displays First let me tell you that I've never been to a Amiga show of this size. My first reaction was "Wow!" There was about 48 separate exhibitors. When I wandered into the area I was struck by the demo at the ICD booth. It was a 4.5 minute full screen clip from Star Wars with stereo. It ran at 24 frames/second on a stock 2000 with an ICD SCSI controller. A ICD spokesperson said that it was captured with a PP&S frame grabber from a video disk. I talked with the a ICD person at the booth about this demo, and he said that he could not distribute it, and they had no plans to market the software that was used to create or play the animation. This animation was apparently at WOC Toronto last year as well. The animation makes MPEG and CDXL animations look awful. The second most impressive thing on the exhibition floor was the Virtuality Concepts display. This was the Dactyl Nightmare virtual reality game that has appeared on CNN and in magazines. The line ups were too long. On Sunday, I decided to endure the hour and a half lineup. When I finally tried it, I was disappointed. The big flaw with this game is its lack of resolution. There is a monitor that sits in front of your cage which shows the public what the player is seeing. This looks to be a 640 by 200 16 color screen. What you see with the headset is what that screen would look like through a magnifying glass. You can see each distinct pixel and the black space around it. Don't get me wrong, I liked it, and once you got the hang of it, it was a playable game. But they have to work on the resolution. There were other interactive video displays in the Commodore booth. These were two Mandala systems. One a Star Trek Transporter sequence. The voice of the Enterprise's computer would prompt you to enter the transporter room. You would then stand in front of a camera and watch yourself on a large television screen. Your image is superimposed on top of a picture of a transported room. The computer would then say 'Prepare to beam out' and you would watch yourself dissolve. The scene on the TV would then change and you would dissolve back in. Computer generated rocks would then fall and as soon as they touched you they would bounce off. There was also a Commodore history display, with some of their past machines. These included adding machines, calculators, watches, the KIM-1 and the PET, the Vic-20 and the various 64's and 128's, the original Amiga 1000, and just about everything else. Along the sides of the Commodore Booth, there was a CDTV with a video upgrade, with what seemed to be a high color, 1/3 screen smooth animation. This CDTV had a hard drive and a DCTV style external graphics upgrade module. Another thing that amazed me was the great deals offered by the retailers. All the computers were going at cost. My dealer friends felt quite ripped off since people were walking away with 1200's and they had not even got firm prices for it yet. The deals on 3000's were especially good, and for a while we watched a 3000 leave the building once every ten minutes. Gold Disk probably had the best software prices, and they had a whole pile of upgrade options. ProCalc was going for $115 and the ProPage/ProDraw bundle was going for $250. Everything else that they make was going for similarly good prices. Keep in mind that these are Canadian prices. If you multiply them by .75 you get the equivalent US prices. My dealer friend bought a 20" Electrohome Multisync monitor for $1000. This monitor is regular $2300 here. It syncs down to 15KHz and has a separate horizontal and vertical centering for 6 different sync rates. If you've had a AGA machine for a while, you would find this feature to be a blessing. Video Toaster User Magazine had a booth there and was giving away free issues. The magazine answered many questions I had about video equipment, so if your looking for a magazine that concentrates on video, then is it. Another magazine caught my eye. Amiga News is a grassroots, newspaper style publication. It caries some very good articles and reviews. It is a bargin at 95 cents and issue. A magazine of a different sort is Toast and Coffee. This is a video magazine that focuses on Amiga video. This is a great way to see all those toys that you can't afford buy. Migraph was there with their new PS-400 Wand full-page scanner. It is a monochrome, 400dpi sheet-fed scanner. There are two versions, one with their Touch-Up and OCR software, and one with just the Touch-Up software. You need a accelerated Amiga with at lease 4.5 MB of memory. It retails at $899 US with OCR and $799 US without. But at these prices I thought that a person could easily get a color Epson Scanner for a few hundred more. Comspec was there with some very capable vinyl sign cutting system by Parallel Motion Graphics and Roland. Electronic Arts was showing off Deluxe Paint IV Version 4.5. Its new features are AGA support of all graphics modes, including Productivity mode. It reads 24-bit IFF files. There is smoother gradients, translucency and tinting. But it paled in comparison to Digital Creations' Brilliance! Unless Electronic Arts can pull off a major upgrade soon, I figure Deluxe Paint has been dethroned as the King of Amiga Paint Programs. Both DPaint and Brilliance start shipping in late January. I think that my favorite booth in the whole show was the Toronto Commodore User's Group. I liked it because it was strange and unusual. They were demonstrating a pile of old computers like SuperPets and 128's. These people still loved their old computers and are still having a pile of fun with them. They also served to remind everyone that Commodore makes more than just Amigas. Although Commodore does not sell their MS-DOS line in the States, they do just about everywhere else. They have a very nifty new 486 color laptop and a new 486 Tower. They did seem a little out of place surrounded by Amiga's. ADDRESSES OF COMPANIES MENTIONED ICD Incorporated 1220 Rock Street Rockford, IL 61101 (815) 968-8550 FAX (815) 968-6888 Commodore Business Machines, LTD. (Canada) 3470 Pharmacy Ave. Agincourt, Ontario (416) 499-4292 FAX (416) 494-9755 Gold Disk, Inc. 5155 Spectrum Way Unit 5 Mississauga, Ontario LW4 5A1 (416) 602-4000 FAX (416) 602-4001 Video Toaster User Magazine AVID Publications 21611 Stevens Creek Blvd. Cupertino, CA 95014 (408) 252-0508 FAX (408) 725-8035 Internet AVID@cup.portal.com Amiga News P.O. Box 51 Peterborough, NH 03458 (603) 924-9455 FAX (603) 924-9441 Toast and Coffee Videographix, Inc. 12219 Nicollet Ave. South Burnsville, MN 55337 Migraph Inc. 32700 Pacifix Highway s., Ste 12 Federal Way, WA 98003 (206) 838-4677 FAX (206) 838-4702 Comspec 74 Wingold Ave. Toronto, Ontario M6B 1P5 (416) 633-5605 FAX (416) 785-3668 Electronic Arts 1450 Fashion Island Blvd. San Mateo, CA 94404-2064 (415) 571-7171 FAX (415) 571-7993 Toronto Commodore User's Group 5334 Younge St #116 Willowdale, Ontario M2N 6M2 -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu. Article 430 of comp.sys.amiga.announce: Path: leela!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!ogicse!uwm.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!csus.edu!ucdavis!toadflax.cs From: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.announce Subject: WOC Toronto: The Seminars Message-ID: <20070@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> Date: 13 Dec 92 12:28:52 GMT Article-I.D.: ucdavis.20070 Sender: usenet@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu Reply-To: Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca (Shawn E Switenky) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Lines: 217 Approved: zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu Message-Number: 296 [ This is part 3 of 3 of Shawn's report. -Dan ] World of Commodore Toronto 1992 Report on Show Seminars Commodore New Product Seminar When I finally got to the show, it was 2:10 PM Friday and the new products demonstration seminar was just beginning. Luckily, the seminars were running a bit behind. This seminar was very disappointing. The presenter was very personable, but there was no demo of the AGA machines, only a slide show of the features that we have all heard. He did not have a A1200 to demonstrate. In fact, he was not prepared for the demonstration at all. None of the recently announced Commodore products were actually demonstrated. He did mention that there would be a hardcard available that works on both the CDTV and the A570. I guess the connector inside the A570 and the CDTV are compatible. Some light was shed on the new SCSI card from Commodore. The A3090 SCSI-II Zorro-III card has been in beta testing stage for about two weeks, and the expected shipping date was around the end of January. Gold Disk's ProPage 4.0 and ProDraw 3.0 The second seminar I went to was a Desktop publishing seminar by Gold disk featuring ProPage 4.0 and ProDraw 3.0. This demonstrator was fascinating, but again he was not prepared. He brought along a Syquest drive with the software on it. But the 4000 that was there for demonstrations doesn't have a SCSI port. He was forced to use the 3000. This hurt his demonstration of ProPage 4.0 since the major new feature is the new AGA support. There are some other improvements including user definable zoom and a font preview gadget when selecting fonts. A page sorting window which gives you a thumbnail sketch of your pages and allows you to reorder pages by just dragging them to a new position. A new Pair Kerning feature allows the kerning of a pair of letters to be defined throughout a document. A Post-It Note feature allows you to attach non-printing notes for yourself and others who see the document. The text editor has been improved and a bitmap graphics editor has been added. ProPage 4.0 can hotlink to ProDraw and ProCalc. If you buy ProPage 3.0 between the beginning of December 1992 and the end of February 1993 you get version 4.0 free. Also the new AGA version of ProDraw is coming, but a release date has not been set. Soft-Logik's Seminar The Art Expression seminar was next. This is a neat little structured drawing program. It has many of ProDraw's features. I think it handles EPS drawing better that ProDraw. It can output to any Preferences printer as long as you have a minimum 1 Meg of Chip Ram. It does not support Compugraphic Fonts, only Postscript Type 1. Softlogic is also bringing out a font editor called TypeSmith, which is an adaptation of a European program called Font Designer. It can load, edit and save Pagestream, Compugraphic and Postscript Type 1 fonts. Great Valley Product's IV24 Seminar The IV24 seminar was impressive. Paul Higgenbottom demonstrated this GVP product, which makes it easy to capture and edit video images. Included with this hardware is a program called ImageFX. The effects that this program can perform are very fast, and include masking effects like those on the Quanta Paintbox. These masks can use edge blending to produce soft edges. Macropaint is a paint program included with the IV24. It is also very fast and is fully AREXX compatible. It also allows for the playback of ANIMs directly from the hard disk. You can work in fewer colors to conserve the Chip RAM that the program uses. MacroPaint can also edit bitmaps as large as 1280 by 1024 and you can autoscroll to all regions of the bitmap. MyLAD is a switcher for the IV24. It can perform about 50 transitions, but no dissolves. He also talked about the new G-Lock genlock from GVP. It is a small external box that is software controlled. It has dual composite inputs and there is some provision for some switching effects. It also has dual audio inputs for audio mixing. It is compatible with all Amigas, and the hardware takes advantage of the new AGA chipset for some additional chroma keying effects. Great Valley Products's PhonePak Seminar GVP gave a presentation on the PhonePak. This is a new and revolutionary product for the Amiga market. It is a multiple line, Centrex compatible Voice Mail system. You can use as many PhonePak boards as you have Zorro-II slot, with each card handling one phone line. It is completely programmable. Also, the system can handle facsimile transmission and reception. There are multiple mailboxes for multiple users. You can also access your mailboxes from a remote phone by touch tones. There is no caller ID yet, but GVP is planning it for the future. Just to avoid any confusion, there is no data modem in the unit nor do you require one. There are two programs that come with the package. The first, Line Manager, watches the phone line for incoming calls, figure out if it is a FAX or voice, and take the proper action. It is also AREXX compatible. The other program is PhonePAK. It defines the operation of the unit, mailboxes, the viewing of received FAXes. There is a preferences printer driver that you can print to from any program that will send out FAXes. Commodore's AmigaVision Professional I also attended the AmigaVision Professional seminar. The whole package has been improved. There are more transitions, and there are now two groups of transitions: bitmap and screen. Screen transitions are independent of screen and palette so you don't have to worry about things changing color or resizing when performing transitions. There is now 4 transition speed selections instead of 3. Even though the presentation of AVPro was on a 3000, there is AGA support. A new feature is streaming, a process where you can play sound and animations directly from the disk using a user defined memory buffer. You can now slow down animations if they go too fast by inserting a number of jiffies. There are many features that support a AmigaVision Flow running on a CDTV. CDXL is supported, although you can't create them with AVPro and you can only play them back on a CDTV. If you want to create them, CDTV Developers can buy a device called CTRACK. This is a special SCSI drive controller emulates the CDTV CD-ROM drive. However this device costs more than $5000. AVPro can now read back the CDTV preferences. A memory limitation preference allows you to run your flow in a simulated CDTV environment, so that you can test your flow to see if it has enough memory to run on a CDTV without running it on one. You can now choose small icons when viewing your AmigaVision flows. This allows you to see more of your flow at once. Printing of flows has been expanded, allowing more that just graphic dumps. It presents the flow in an all text form at which you can print to a printer or file. A memory reporter will tell you how much memory you are using when your flow is running. A freely distributable runtime version is now available, and it is only about 260k in size. This runtime version can runs flows from all versions of AmigaVision. An upgrade policy from older versions of AmigaVision is not final, but it looks like it will come in about $90 US. Digital Creations's Brilliance Seminar Brilliance is better than DeluxePaint in every way. It will use every graphics mode, has multiple undo capability and is very fast. Menus and palettes are on separate screens and will not change colors when you change them. The menus are stackable and you can tailor what menus are displayed. It has better overscan control. It has multiple buffers ( in DPaint it would be more than one swap screen.) Also, it has Bezier curves. The air brush tool is much more flexible. You can alter the brush size and pattern, the statistical distribution of pixels, you can airbrush multicolor brushes and also now you can airbrush gradients. There are all the drawing modes that are in DeluxePaint and new ones including two color dithering, translucency, brighten and darken. Animation is enhanced by better frame control with a VCR style toolbox. Ease in and out can be defined for each axis. It supports Compugraphic fonts. No 3D brush mapping is supported, but you can simulate 3D light distributions with gradient fills. Morphing uses an enhanced algorithm which moves pixels with equal preference to all directions. Brilliance works on a virtual 24bit buffer, and then translates to whatever display mode you have chosen. It is also memory efficient and you can run it well in 512k of memory. Will Vinton's Playmation Seminar Playmation allows you to create very realistic organic objects, and maneuver them around in their scenes very easily. Each module of the package uses the same interface and sets of keyboard command equivalents. But it is crippled by a very slow and inflexible rendering module. An animation was shown displaying what the package can do, and while lacking a good plot, it demonstrated a very good organic morphing technique called muscle deformations. This is excellent for doing moving mouth effects. The bad part of the animation was that it was rendered on a PC. There is also a Mac version. ADDRESSES OF COMPANIES MENTIONED Commodore Business Machines, Ltd. (Canada) 3470 Pharmacy Ave. Agincourt, Ontario M1W 3G3 (416) 499-4292 FAX (416) 494-9755 Gold Disk, Inc. 5155 Spectrum Way Unit 5 Mississauga, Ontario L4W 5A1 (416) 602-4000 FAX (416) 602-4001 Soft-Logik Publishing Corp. 11131 F. South Town Square St. Louis, MO 63123 (314) 894-8608 FAX (314) 894-3280 Great Valley Products, Inc 600 Clark Avenue King Of Prussia, PA 19406 (215) 337-8770 FAX (215) 337-9922 Digital Creations P.O. Box 97 Folosom, CA 95763 (916) 344-4825 FAX (916) 635-0475 Shawn Switenky Shawn_E_Switenky@engr.usask.ca -- Read all administrative posts before putting your post up. Mailing list: announce-request@cs.ucdavis.edu. Comments to zerkle@cs.ucdavis.edu. MAIL ALL COMP.SYS.AMIGA.ANNOUNCE ANNOUNCEMENTS TO announce@cs.ucdavis.edu. Article 172 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: leela.CS.ORST.EDU!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: swithing@ic.sunysb.edu (Scott Withington) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: World of Commodore-Amiga, Toronto, December 1992 Keywords: trade show, commercial Message-ID: <1h503jINNl38@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 21 Dec 92 17:49:39 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: swithing@ic.sunysb.edu (Scott Withington) Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 249 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This is the first "review" of a trade show that has appeared in comp.sys.amiga.reviews. I welcome discussion of whether such articles are appropriate in this newsgroup. Send any comments to amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu. - Dan] NAME World of Commodore-Amiga, Toronto The International Centre Mississauga, Ontario Friday, December 4 to Sunday, December 6, 1992 BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a review a recent World of Commodore-Amiga show held in Toronto, Canada. It features demonstrations by Commodore and various 3rd-party vendors. REVIEW The World of Commodore Toronto was fascinating on Saturday (the only day I was there). First, Commodore's booth was large, with a big front area split between displays showing the A4000 & A1200 quite effectively. You then walked through a doorway to their "interactive multi-media" display. On the right were two Virtuality Cyber 1000 stand-up units linked together and two virtual reality studio environments from Mandala (one from Star Trek that caused your image on the screen to appear to go through a transporter sequence, and the other one a game that used themes similar to Nickelodeon's Nick Arcade show). Continuing on through the booth you went to the back, which had a history of Commodore presentation being run by several Amigas, each using a display generated by Scala to show a different phase of system development in C='s history: founding - 1970, 1970's, 1980's, and the Amiga. They also had on display several products from each period. These included: a Commodore manual typewriter (they started off as a typewriter repair shop and office supply store in Toronto, then bought their supplier), Commodore adding machines, hand-held calculators, digital watches, and other electronic gadgets. The next phase surrounded the purchase of companies manufacturing LCD screens and circuit boards. After Texas instruments (their supplier of integrated circuits) started manufacturing calculators (and raising their prices to competitors), they bought up a small IC manufacturing company, MOS Technologies. The next display began with the production of the first hobbyist micro computer (beginning the 6502 computer craze that created Apple and Atari computers in the garages of their respective founders) and then the first consumer microcomputer, the Personal Electronic Transactor (or PET) which grew in sales so fast that it caused CBM to cease production on almost all other products at the time. The next monitor covered the VIC-20, the Commodore 64, 16, +4 (yeah I know, enormously successful, but did you know that, except for RAM the 16 was superior to the 64 - more colours, higher resolution better sound, and so on?). On display were prototypes of the VIC-20 (painted silver) and the C= 64 (painted gold), as well as the SX-64, the Plus-4, and the C= PC-10, Commodore's entry in the IBM PC compatible market. The final monitor told the story of a little company called the Amiga Corporation and the exciting computer they were developing, C='s acquisition of it, and the history to this date. On display here... well you can guess, can't you? The final section was a TV set playing all of the TV ads from the late 70's and early to mid 80's which helped sell 13,000,000 + C= 64's (this laser disk should be mandatory viewing for C= marketing people) including hard-hitting ads showing what you would need to ad to an Apple II or an IBM PC to equal the 64 which retailed for a fifth the price. If you continued to the right, you passed C='s MS-DOS compatible systems, including a colour 486-DX laptop (grrrr......). You then went on to a small section with A500s, A3000s and CDTVs. On the other side was a DPAINT IV art contest on A4000's. SEMINARS I went to two seminars at the show, one on Amigavision Pro and a public session with Lewis Eggebrecht (VP of Engineering). I'll cover Lewis Eggebrecht's talk first. Mr. Eggebrecht began his talk telling us a little about his past experiences. Starting off at IBM, he led the team in Boca Raton which was responsible for developing the original IBM PC. He then moved to Franklin Computers where he helped to develop the 1st Apple II clone chips. After a period of serving as an independent consultant, he then moved to C= where he took over as VP in charge of the the MS-DOS clones. While there he became interested in the Amiga, and when position of VP of engineering opened up, he took it. He then covered the anatomy of C= engineering (only 200 full time employees) the Largest being CATS, followed by VLSI design (23 people), also System Hardware, System Architecture, Software Development, Product Planning, Agency Certification (FCC, etc), Publications, Product Assurance, Test Engineering, Mechanical Design (cases, etc), Component Quality, and Engineering Services. Next was an AmigaVision slideshow and address concerning engineering goals. Objectives included: - enhancing and extend the Amiga architecture - improving development tools and design methods. This will allow for faster development of new systems - producing a family of state of the art Amiga systems, from the low (sub $500) home & family systems, to high-end systems to compete with the most powerful graphics and sound workstations He then covered the VLSI chipset development strategy. Key points included: - this area is the key to new product development and therefore a top priority of the engineering department - aimed at providing a quick response to industry developments, so that C= can be the one of the first companies out with a platform incorporating new technology, This includes new processors such as the forthcoming Motorola 68060. - upgraded development methodologies, including going to an all CMOS-based system, and using the most powerful development tools available - low-end systems will be cost-effective, and retain backward compatibility as much as possible - high-end systems will cater to markets which require significant performance and extensive graphics capabilities Next he covered the current AGA chipset: - this development marked the first use of new development tools and procedures (took less time to develop than ECS) - Lisa manufactured by third party (NCR (AT&T) and HP) - 4x video bandwidth of ECS - 25 bit palette (24 bitplane colour + 1 genlock bit) - 8 bit display - sprites useable in screen border (overscan) - 2, 4-bit play fields useable in all resolutions - Scroll with 35 ns granularity - 16, 32, and 64 bit wide sprites supported independent of screen resolution FUTURE VLSI CHIP SETS CONSUMER AND LOW END SYSTEMS - 2 chips each with >100k transistors - synchronous to video clock - 160 - 280 pin packages - 32 bit DRAM or VRAM - 57 MHz pixel clock - ECS & AGA downwardly compatible. Ensuring this is one of the things that slows development - Support for 1, 2, & 4 MB floppy drives using standard technology - support for ALL 32 bit Motorola CPUs (including 680x0, and 880x0) - 8x memory bandwidth over AGA, 2x (at least) blitter performance - 800 x 600 72 hz resolution, higher at lower refresh rates. - 1 - 24 bit colour at any resolution (this was decided the week before WOCA, at Pasedena he said 16 bit) - FIFO serial port with large buffer to support very high baud rates - 8 meg chip RAM, all but unlimited fast RAM HIGH END SYSTEMS - 4 chips (750k - 1M transistors) - 32/64 bit VRAM - 57 - 114 Mhz pixel clock (asynchronous design) - chunky pixel mode (commonly used in IBM PC systems) which will be supported by the blitter (bit instead of word) - CD-ROM with 100 Mbit/sec transfer rate - frame buffer/grabber built in - screen promotion - 1k x 1k x 24 bit 72 hz screens (more at lower refresh) - 8 voice 16 bit >100Khz sound - on-demand DMA - 12 - 20 x memory bandwidth (32-64 bit memory) - 32 bit blitter (8x performance of AGA) - 24 bit true colour mode - will support multiple simultaneous chip sets working together, allowing separate displays, or drastically higher resolutions (multiprocessing) - enhanced hardware compress/decompress including JPEG/MPEG - video upgrade modularity - 100 Khz - 32 bit processor independent bus for new CPU's (multiprocessing) including RISC chips (they should announce a choice for RISC chip in less than 1 year) - asynchronous design - 1 downside is that it may not be 100% ECS/AGA compatible Immediate, and near (less than 1 year) plans - AGA and above across entire product line - modularity of all new systems to ease upgrade path (slots/motherboard swaps) - all surface mount chips - timely introduction of new processors and upgrades - Add DSP support (040-DSP board almost ready, using AT&T 25 MHz DSP & "personality" slot built in) - SCSI II 32-bit fast & wide controller, with >10 MB/s transfer rates (mid-January 1993 delivery) - move CD-ROM (CDTV) across product line. - add full-motion, full-screen video (MPEG, & better) to Amiga family - cost reduce & enhance CDTV (including upgrade (MB-swap) to existing users) - upgrade Amiga software & multimedia capabilities - accelerate deployment of VLSI - become active partnerships with other companies AmigaDOS, "THE TRUE MULTITASKING OS" Ongoing development in terms of: - compatibility - stability - flexibility - localization (international - 18 languages and growing) - retargetability - increased performance - multimedia extensions Future AmigaOS releases: - 3.1 - API networking extensions, file exchange, printershare, DSP support - 4.0 - retargetability, full postscript support (including display) Additional details from Q&A session: - intend to move high-density floppy across line - new family of monitors forthcoming (QuadSync) - new third-party bridgeboards for 4000 & 1200 (386 DX, 486) - laptop will have to wait until they finish converting from HMOS to CMOS (the models they've prototyped are < 1 hr life and HEAVY), they have not done anything to hinder 3rd parties from developing them - totally programmable resolutions at high end - full design kit for A-1200/4000 is available through CATS Amigavision Professional Well, what can I say its 100% improved, full support for AGA, CDTV, and several new formats. Much better editing and debugging tools and a freely distributable player. Price - for AV owners - $90, list $299. -Scott, the Amigavangelist --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Article 173 of comp.sys.amiga.reviews: Path: leela.CS.ORST.EDU!flop.ENGR.ORST.EDU!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (The Moderator) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: Re: REVIEW: World of Commodore-Amiga, Toronto, December 1992 Keywords: oops Message-ID: <1h509kINNl6f@menudo.uh.edu> Date: 21 Dec 92 17:52:52 GMT Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Reply-To: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 12 Approved: barrett@math.uh.edu NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu In the "Moderator's Note" I included in the original article, I said that this was the first trade show reviewed in c.s.a.reviews. I was incorrect; there have been others. So don't bother sending me the comments I asked for. :-) --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu General discussion: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu