Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucbcad!zen!ingres.Berkeley.EDU!hatcher From: hatcher@ingres.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Amiga news (genlock & lots more, *long* but juicy) Message-ID: <1272@zen.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: Wed, 10-Dec-86 05:20:28 EST Article-I.D.: zen.1272 Posted: Wed Dec 10 05:20:28 1986 Date-Received: Sun, 14-Dec-86 00:11:37 EST Sender: news@zen.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: hatcher@ingres.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Doug Merritt) Organization: CAD Group, U.C. Berkeley Lines: 120 Keywords: news,ray trace,genlock,light pen,animation,music Genlock is being shipped. This was announced at the First Amiga User's Group tonight (Dec 9) in Palo Alto (California). Retailers aren't supposed to sell it until Dec 15, but if they've got 'em I bet some will slip out. In the San Francisco Bay Area you'll be able to get them at Federated Electronics. Price: $280 (or less [$217] to F.A.U.G. members--join!). This was announced by FAUG, not by C/A, but it was certainly said very authoritatively. Only a few thousand will be available nationwide in December. As to other news, I didn't think to take careful notes, so I can't report in full about everything, but there was a *lot* of interesting stuff going on. My apologies to those that I don't mention in this "brief" (ha!) overview: Alan Hastings, who made a really impressive film on the Amiga, shown at the local annual SIGGRAPH "electronic theater" (and at national SIGGRAPH too? Not sure...), has been hired by Aegis. Anyone who has seen his films will know that means good things in store. My speculation is that they are going to transform his privately developed graphics technique into a product. For those who haven't seen his stuff, the original film was a 3-5 minute sequence of a shaded 3-d world with the camera zooming in and around houses, trees, "flying" through a fractal (?) landscape, a car zipping past, etc. The sort of thing that people usually do on Crays, but he made the whole film "in one weekend" on a 512K Amiga with 2 floppy drives!!! His software generates each frame in seconds or fractions of a second (depending on complexity) which he recorded on 8 millimeter one frame at a time, later transfered to video. If Aegis gives us exactly that in a new product, I'll stand in line to buy it! Deluxe Music Construction Set was demo'd and it looks fabulous and well worth the wait. When can you get it? Direct quote: "I know you've all been waiting a long time, and...it'll be available real soon! No really, I mean it! The diskettes are now being duplicated and the manuals are all printed and so are the cardboard covers". They also showed a *** 3-D ray-traced smooth-motion animation *** showing a clown juggling 3 reflecting balls!!!!!! Extraordinary. The absolute best by 2 orders of magnitude that anyone has yet seen on an Amiga. This was done by one Eric Graham, and Commodore/Amiga apparently is *very* interested in his work. This animation is a loop of 24 frames running continuously, on a 512K machine with no disk accesses after the program starts up and no other upgrade hardware. The frames were precomputed but I don't know how he fit them all in 512K. There's that CCC compression technique...hmmm...This demo will be available as a FAUG public domain diskette next month. Intuitive Technologies (formerly MaxiSoft) talked about V1.5 of their MaxiPlan spreadsheet and gave a live demo. I was very impressed with the blinding speed and vast array of features, including creation of macro functions by capturing mouse/keyboard--in other words, they have added programming by example! I am usually very bored about spreadsheets, but this one looks different...I was thinking of getting it just to see all the things they did right with the Amiga. They also have Encore, which runs in the background and can be told to record mouse/keyboard keystrokes as a macro no matter what else you're doing. They brought up D.Paint and ran a macro previously recorded which made D.Paint think someone was drawing; this made it look like quite an interesting general-purpose product. They showed the video from the 2nd annual Monterey Amiga Developers conference last month, wherein the old robo-city demo intermixed with, then faded via genlock into an identical video but enacted with real people and a painted backdrop complete with male & female robots and uppity fire hydrant. First time I've heard of a video game being turned into a play! R.J. Mical had starred as the blue Robot; he came into the meeting in this costume immediately after the video for a brief interview with Dale Luck, complete with a robot-ized voice built into his robot-head. These FAUG meetings are something else! Dale Luck and R.J. starred in a series of silly videos they made, mostly commercials that should have been done for the Amiga: satires on Bartles and James (thanks for your support), Apple announces "a new, uh, computer, yeah, that's it, and it'll have, uh, super-ultra-high 320 by 200 resolution! Yeah. And, uh, color, yeah, that's the ticket! :-)" And more... Laser Gamesmanship demo'd their light pen. Can also be used with projection TV (which is what we saw all the live Amiga demos on). Had problems with noise picked up from microphone...might be nice if it works when not being demo'd! Available January. Applications for handicapped, since headband and footpedals are available (might want that myself to free my hands for the keyboard...) They're at (415) 891-9968 (thought the phone number might be hard to find). Aegis showed Draw Plus for the first time ("I shouldn't" and didn't really show many features, did announce cheap upgrade policy). Also showed Diga, yet another terminal emulator. But has many unusual features, including "doubletalk" which allows simultaneous download/upload while still browsing the remote system...presumably only if they, too, are running Diga. Sounds like a feature to add to Vt100! Mindscape showed slides of screens from upcoming cinemaware SDI game, which features a beautiful Russian laser satellite commander who loves you but you gotta shoot-em-up with lasers to avoid world war three, or avoid the shootout, or something vaguely like that. Graphics were nice. Also demo'd the existing Balance of Power and Deja Vu. They sent a marketing rep who was cute but was so new to the machine she had trouble clicking on icons, tried to put Workbench in df1:, and rebooted to quit programs that had obvious quits. This didn't come across well and was A) neither fair to her nor to the audience, and B) did not compare well with the representation from other companies. I do like Defender of the Crown, though, so what can I say. My overall guess based on sorting many wild rumors is that the Amiga 1000 is going to continue going strong: won't be canceled, new machines will be much higher-end and expensive and so won't obsolete it, BUT I get the strong impression that *something* funny is about to be announced with the hardware, along the lines of a zorro bus change that will cause compatibility problems for 3rd party manufacturers. I would guess that Commodore is going to come out with a new standard IBM compatible bus (yukkk!!!!) to allow lots of available hardware. Hope not! This is just wild speculation, you understand; I just can't help but wonder at the news that the cogniscenti so obviously bite their tongues over. There was much other interesting stuff at the meeting; in ten minutes I'll doubtless remember the other people, companies, and products that I should also have mentioned. My apologies for leaving them out. Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher