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From: richr@pogo.UUCP (Rich Rodgers)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: COMDEX
Message-ID: <2488@pogo.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-May-86 14:31:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: pogo.2488
Posted: Thu May  1 14:31:13 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 3-May-86 21:04:39 EDT
Reply-To: richr@pogo.UUCP (Rich Rodgers)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Wilsonville, OR.
Lines: 101
Keywords: Comdex, amiga, software, hardware

I was at Comdex on Monday, and since I have seen nothing posted to the net
about it, here is my brief summary.

The Amiga booth was **crowded**  I do not think any other booth got this much
foot traffic.  You could walk through the IBM booth and not see anyone but
the marketing reps (lots of those though!)  Here is a brief summary of what
I saw.

Hardware:

The big news here was the "sidecar", a box with an 8088 and an 8087 and three
IBM expansion slots.  They had a hard card installed and were using part
of it for MS-DOS and part of it for Amiga-DOS.  You opened a window as either
monochrome or color, and could still multitask on the Amiga.  They were 
running Flight Simulator in a window, shrunk it down, and ran other tasks.

Genlock was shown and worked very well.  They ran the boing demo with the
crowd in the background, instead of the regular boing background.

DigiView showed their digitizer, it was slow, needed three passes, and gave
an unbelievable color digitized image.  A must have at $199.

Live! was there also, digitizing in real time.  Really amazing, but poor
color quality.  For what I need, I'll stick with DigiView.

There was a really good audio digitizer that I did not get the name of, but
they are supposed to offer programmers routines.

Tecmar was showing their hard disk. Does not auto-config, does not pass the
bus, the memory was not working, cost $2200.  Give me a break.

Micro Forge had their expansion box.  Big as ever.  They say they will offer
a combination auto config 4 slot, and their current box 3 slots.  Stay away
if possible.

CardCo was showing a 1 megabyte expansion module that sits on the side, and
passes the bus.  It auto-configs, and works with addmem.

High persistant phosphor monitors were shown with interlace mode.  Animation
looked fine (no streaking) and so did the monitor.  Great deal if you can
part with $1K!

Software:

Version 1.2 kickstart and workbench.  Sooo much faster.  The icons loaded on
the workbench at least twice as fast.  Much more professional look and feel.
Preferences lets you set true interlace workbench, and serial parameters.
Very good job by the folks at C-A.

			Entertainment

Mind ???
	A new game from C-A shipping in one week.  A must have for every 
gamer.  Perfect mix of adventure and arcade.  GREAT graphics. must see to
believe.  Worth any price.

Marble Madness
	As good as arcade version. Nuff said. ship June 1.

Lots of music programs, the one from activision looked best, did not get
to play with any of them.  One was using MIDI.

			Productivity/Utilities

Gizmoz
	A little of everything.  The programmers calculator is worth the
price to me.  Must see.  May or may not be for you.

VIP Proffesional
	Very well done Lotus 1-2-3 clone.  Works best with extra memory > 512K.
THE spread sheet for the Amiga.

PCLO - a Printed Circuit board LayOut package.  They said the CardCo board was
layed out using this package.  It looked very nice.  Now shipping. 

Aegis Draw
	Puts Mac Draw to shame.  Very nice, powerful tool.  Version was 0.7
Shipping real soon now.

Aegis Animator/Images
	Good for what it is.  Good complement to DPaint.  Has some features
DPaint doesn't have that I need.  Ex: Pattern fill.

A few kids learning games.

A data base manager.  (Sorry I have no use for this, so I didn't analyze it.)

MegaSoft terminal package and filer.

Manx and Lattice C

TDI Modula II

There was lots more, but these were the things I was interested in.  Sorry
it is not more complete.

Happy Amiga-ing
-- 
				Rich Rodgers

				tektronix!pogo!richr