4]------------------------ 3]AmiEXPO: A Personal Look 3]By Tom Krotchko 4]------------------------ I'm fond of AmiEXPOs. This was the third annual East Coast Expo, and I went to it just as excited as I was at the first. This year it was a special treat because of the location, just a few minutes from my home. Not only did I get to see the latest goods for the Amiga, I was only a subway ride away. Something I was particularly interested in this year was MIDI software. I'd recently acquired a MIDI keyboard and drum machine, and so I was eager to see the state of Amiga music software. I spent much time with the people making the software that helps make the music. Rather than force you to wade through an entire article looking for the announcement of something big, I'll let you know this AmiEXPO didn't differ from the others: interesting products but nothing earthshaking. Finding the best material required some detective work. My first stop was at the booth of Checkpoint Technologies to visit an old friend, Richard Krehbiel. Richard, along with his two partners, produce a board called "The Serial Solution" ($200). This board plugs into an Amiga 2000 slot and adds two serial ports. Although similar products are offered by other vendors, the Serial Solution is being supported by a new MIDI sequencer, Bars & Pipes. Using Bars & Pipes together with The Serial Solution allows a musician to control up to 32 MIDI channels at once, double the normal 16 channels. MicroIllusions, maker of Music-X, is reportedly working with Checkpoint to offer the same MIDI capabilities as Bars & Pipes. Checkpoint officials said they were recently contacted by Commodore about their device. The Pointer Sisters (the singing group in the recent Amiga commercials) called Commodore looking for an Amiga music program to control more than 16 MIDI channels. Bars & Pipes, together with the Serial Solution, provided the singers with a "Serial Solution" on stage. At this point, I thought it worth my while to wander over to the Blue Ribbon Bakery booth to see the creators of Bars & Pipes ($300), Melissa Jordan and Todor Fay. This booth gets my vote for Most Enthusiastic Exhibitors. Everyone was dressed in baker's caps. Chocolate chip cookies were being handed out at astonishing rate Session musicians from New York were playing music and attracting crowds four to five people deep around the smallish booth. With all of this going on, it was easy to forget what all the excitement was about, Bars & Pipes. The program is a MIDI sequencer that uses on-screen pipes to indicate flows of music. Although it sounds silly, its really an interesting new way to represent MIDI sequence data. You should take a look if you're using MIDI equipment. Since I seemed to be following a MIDI path around the room, I went over to Commodore's unofficial music company, Dr. T's Music Software, where I spoke with Gary Karlsiud. In contrast to the Blue Ribbon Bakery booth, the Dr. T's booth had a relaxed, confident atmosphere. Gary had plenty of exciting things to say, however. As you may have heard, Commodore is at work developing MIDI standards to allow easy exchange of MIDI information among different programs. Gary indicated their MPE technology will form the heart of this standard. The standard is said to include support for more than 16 MIDI channels, so Dr. T's would not be supporting the Serial Solution board. You may expect more news on the Commodore MIDI standard at the NAMM music show later this year. In other news, Tiger Cub and Tiger should ship sometime in April. Both these programs are designed to allow graphic editing of music sequences, something users of Dr. T's KCS will appreciate. Tiger Cub is an all-in-one graphic editor and sequencer for the entry level MIDI musician; Tiger is a graphic editor only, and is intended for use with Dr. T's KCS. All Copyist users should be getting a letter from Dr. T's shortly. The Professional version is being replaced with the Desk Top Publishing version. Gary showed me some output produced with the DTP version using a Hewlett-Packard Laser Jet II with 512K. The results are impressive, approaching professionally printed music. There is an upgrade fee for the new version. Dr. T's has purchased Intelligent Music, maker of "M". All questions regarding this product can be directed to Dr. T's. X-OR, the universal MIDI patch librarian for the Amiga, has not been canceled but has been delayed until this summer. Finally, Dr. T's will drop copy protection from its software sometime this year. Although MIDI stuff is fun, there is a limit to what I wanted to know, and so I decided to move on to more technical material. For the past several month, the Amiga bulletin boards have been buzzing with rumors of products that would allow the Amiga 1000 to use the one megabyte Agnus chip, get rid of the Kickstart disk, and generally do all sorts of good things for the Amiga 1000. At the AmiEXPO, there were two such devices being shown, the Rejuvenator from Expert Services (priced from $350 for a partial kit to $500 fully assembled), and the DVS-Wonder from Delaware Valley Software ($125 for a bare circuit board to $400 for a fully assembled kit). Both these devices not only do essentially the same thing, they even look the same. They replace the small WCS board that is positioned just above the motherboard on the A1000. The Rejuvenator contains 1 megabyte of RAM and the latest Agnus chip, a battery-backed clock, and a video slot for use with the flickerFixer. It doesn't include the 1.3 ROM, the Denise or Paula chips. The DVS-Wonder is essentially the same device and it does allow several Kickstart ROMs to be mounted on the board allowing the user a choice among up to four ROMs. It was difficult to get an impression of the boards. Both were shown operating in an Amiga 1000. They seemed to function as claimed. Both were to start shipping immediately after the show, However, both boards looked like prototypes produced for the show. Performance of these products has yet to be proved. The Great Valley Products (GVP) booth was impressive. As in previous years, the emphasis was on accelerator boards. GVP has earned a reputation as the Cadillac of accelerator boards, and its latest offerings won't do anything to hurt that reputation. Since the booth was crowded, I waited until after the show to speak with Bart Casiello of GVP. Bart talked about GVP's latest offering, a full 33 mhz version of their 68030 accelerator. Prices range from $3,400 for a 4 megabyte 33 mhz 68030/68882 board to $4,200 for the same board with an 80 MB hard drive. Clearly, these are not meant for people with a casual interest in ray-tracing. At a dealer meeting, GVP announced a 40 mhz version of its 68030 accelerator selling for $4,300 to $5,100 (available sometime in May 1990). This ultra-fast version of the board is on the cutting edge of processor technology. I was intrigued by the uses of such a board. I asked Bart if the boards were being purchased primarily for professional video/multimedia applications. Surprisingly, he said a great many were bought for use in desktop publishing. He said GVP is interested in attracting the business and engineering community with its newest hardware, noting the 40 mhz version in particular would be well suited to these types of applications. GVP's boards use processors only at their rated speed. The practice of running a processor faster than its rated speed is called "over oscillation" and is considered harmful to chip life, and not recommended by the maker of the processor. Part of what has made GVP so popular is its customer service. GVP is committed to keeping owners of older accelerators current and is offering an upgrade path for all buyers of GVP accelerators. Also, a 50 mhz co-processor option is currently available. More information on these upgrades is available directly from the manufacturer. Without much fanfare, Xetec was displaying two very impressive pieces of hardware. The first was its hard drive controller, DMAx. This controller produces some of the fastest transfer times I've ever seen on a PC. Reading directly from a hard disk, a Xetec-equipped A2000 was displaying pictures at a rate of about one per second while at the same time playing digitized music. There was never a delay in either pictures or music. This sort of speed makes the Xetec controller ideal for multimedia applications where a large amount of data must be quickly retrieved from the hard drive. The other part of the Xetec booth had a machine that looked like an arcade game. Below a color screen there was a track ball and button at hand level. The machine, identified only by its maker, "Colorvision," is meant for use in retail paint stores. A paint buyer can select from digitized pictures of houses and then, using the trackball, can "paint" the exterior of the house on screen. Users may also select from various digitized interiors of houses as well, changing colors of anything on screen. Colors can be changed until a color scheme suits the buyer. The colors selected are then displayed so the paint can be mixed to match the on-screen colors. According to John Shoultys of Xetec, the system is currently in use by Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams and Pittsburgh Paints. I liked this gadget so much I hated to leave the booth. This product gets my vote for most innovative use of an Amiga. As I walked from booth to booth, I marvelled at how blase I've become in dealing with new hardware and software. For example, Centaur Software offered an add-on card for the A2090 hard drive controller to allow autobooting (similar to the A2090A). Price is $120. It wasn't attracting any attention. Last year, a crowd would have been attracted to the device. It makes me wonder what's going to attract attention next year. Canon (makers of copiers and cameras) had a booth showing off its Xapshot still video camera. They were using a frame grabber to take the image from the Xapshot and transfer it directly to the Amiga. I got the impression the booth personnel weren't quite comfortable at an Amiga computer show. Still, it was nice of Canon to make an appearance, though it had nothing new to show. At the Spirit Technology booth, the AX-S system was being shown. The AX-S system allows IBM PC peripherals to be used as Amiga peripherals. It doesn't allow you to run IBM software, but the idea is to use peripherals unavailable for the Amiga. Unfortunately, the AX-S system was turned off, and the Spirit personnel didn't seemed inclined to demonstrate it. Of course, no Expo is complete without games, and my vote for best game shown, although not for sale quite yet, goes to Electronic Zoo for its new game Treasure Trap. Rather than go into detail, I will say it's an underwater, 3-D, Pacman type game. It looks like fun. Price will be $40. The word processing wars have cooled somewhat. WordPerfect and excellence! were there, although nothing new was shown at these booths. The big news was Prowrite 3.0 from New Horizons Software. This $175 word processor features a true WYSIWYG display and an interface reminiscent of Microsoft Word. Typing speed seemed adequate on an A2000, although for complex documents in high resolution with many columns and fonts, scrolling was on the slow side. I used the beta software for about 10 minutes and I couldn't make it crash, so I suppose the early May 1990 release date seems reasonable. The upgrade price for Prowrite 2.5 owners will be $50. The rest of the show seemed to be odds and ends. As usual, there were user groups selling PD disks. Mail order companies were busy charging more at the show for software than their regular price. Guy Wright, formerly AmigaWorld editor, was selling issues of Amiga Plus. DigiFeX was there, selling the product line of the now defunct CMI. There was the usual assortment of disk copying tools, video products and cartridges. Nordic Power (from Data & Electronics) offered a "freeze" cartridge that allows you to freeze an Amiga and then dump the contents of RAM to a disk. Ah ha! Now there's finally a way to beat Shadow of the Beast! It was interesting to see who didn't exhibit: Gold Disk, MicroIllusion, NewTek, Oxxi/Aegis, and Progressive, to name a few. In all fairness, the World of Amiga show is scheduled in late April, and its a lot to ask a small developer to go to both shows. My overall impression of the show was very favorable. Though there were fewer exhibitors than in other years, the show still had the same excitement as in New York, and the large Washington D.C. Amiga community kept the hall filled to capacity. In the end, I'm sure I missed a couple of goodies at the show, but the demands of my feet said I couldn't go on any longer. Travel to and from the show was very convenient, since the Metro (subway, underground, whatever you wish to call it) stop was directly in front of the hotel. To the organizers of AmiEXPO: Come back again next year. 3]ADDRESSED OF EXHIBITORS MENTIONED Antic's Amiga Plus 544 Second St. San Francisco, CA 94107 (415) 957-0886 Blue Ribbon Bakery, Inc. 1248 Clairmont Road, Suite 3D Atlanta, Georgia 30030 (404) 377-1514 Canon USA, Inc. One Canon Plaza Lake Success, NY 11042 (516) 488-6700 Centaur Software, Inc. PO Box 4400 Redondo Beach, CA 90278 (213) 542-2226 FAX (213) 542-9998 Checkpoint Technologies PO Box 2035 Manassas, VA 22110 (703) 330-5353 Data & Electronics PO Box 3153 NL-5092 RD Venlo/Holland Delaware Valley Software PO Box 2007 Upper Darby, PA 19082-0507 (215) 446-9227 DigiFeX Corporation 610 Main Street Oregon City, Oregon 97045 (503) 656-8818 FAX (503) 656-8903 Dr. T's Music Software 220 Boylston Street, Suite 206 Chestnut Hill, MA 02167 (617) 244-6954 Electronic Zoo 3431-A Benson Avenue Baltimore, MD 21227-9877 Expert Services 5912 Centennial Circle Florence, KY. 41042 (606) 371-9690 Great Valley Products, Inc. 225 Plank Ave. Paoli, Pa 19301 (215) 889-9411 FAX (215) 889-9416 New Horizons Software, Inc. 206 Wild Basin Road, Suite 109 Austin, TX 78746 (512) 328-6650 Spirit Technology Corporation Orders and Information: (800) 433-7572 Corporate Headquarters 220 West 2950 South Salt Lake City, Utah 84115 Phone: (801) 485-4233 FAX (801) 485-6957 USA Sales 8345 East 5th Place Tulsa, Oklahoma 74112 (918) 834-2059 Canada 2133 Royal Windsor Drive, Unit #47 Mississuaga, Ontario L5J 1K5 (416) 823-4821 U.K. 44-253-734218 FAX 44-253-714141 France 33-56-37-4378 FAX 33-56-04-0895 Australia 61-3-369-7020 FAX 61-3-369-7020 Xetec, Inc. Computer Products Division 2804 Arnold Rd. Salina, KS 67401 (913) 827-0685 FAX (913) 827-6023 Telex 5106012914