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From: hatcher@INGRES.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Commodore Show News Report
Message-ID: <8702230649.AA29610@ingres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Mon, 23-Feb-87 01:49:41 EST
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Posted: Mon Feb 23 01:49:41 1987
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Commodore show
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Reply-To: hatcher@ingres.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Doug Merritt)
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I went to the Commodore Show in San Francisco Saturday, thought I'd
mention some highlights. First off, the new Amiga's are not announced
yet. I heard speculation that they won't arrive until June at the very
earliest, and that the early announcement was designed to combat the
recent Atari Mega ST announcement, as well as Apple's upcoming (two weeks?)
announcement of a super?/low-end?/workstation?/MacIntosh?/Color?/Unix option
machine. Actually, I guess Commodore hasn't formally announced yet, but
with all the magazine coverage they might as well have.

Hardware manufacturers were quite displeased with the AMiga 2000. "It
screws everybody indiscriminately, not just a few peripheral makers.
You can't plug *any* old products into it, not even the Mimetics digitizer.
Even the video cables are incompatible!" Oh, well. Not that I doubt it,
but keep in mind that this quote is a rumor. In fact, it is a hybrid of
two different people's remarks, one of them not a h/w manufacturer.

Aegis previewd Alan Hasting's (of Infinite Loop film fame) videoscape 3d
solid object modeling system. It will be released "within 60 days max,
perhaps sooner" depending wholly on how long documentation takes. Since
Alan had working software before he even joined Aegis in December, I am
inclined to believe this. It looks pretty nice. They showed the sports
car from the film: give a command to rotate the image, and the screen
was updated in about 1 second. Not bad for solid images. You can do nifty
things like specify the direction of the light source. Initial applications
are apparently intended to be used for simple 3d CAD, since few people
will have the frame-by-frame video recorder or film camera necessary to
produce animation like Alan did. But if you have such equipment, that'd
work fine. Also mentioned was a discussion on BIX of "splat" files, an
addition to the IFF format which is currently being designed. They contain
a sequence of compressed images, suitable for short animation sequences.
The compression format is a simple XOR delta from one frame to the next.
If anybody out there uses BIX, it'd be nice to see some of the current
work on the subject posted to the net. If any of you are participating
in the discussion, I suggest that you look into adding a second format
as well, the CCC compression technique (Tom DeFanti, et al, 1986 SIGGRAPH
proceedings) which has some unique benefits.

Genlocks were in abundance at the show. Yes, they've finally arrived,
as of just a few days ago. Presumably some distributors will have lots
of them while others have none, as usual. I saw many being *sold*,
not just demoed, by the way. Still no sidecar, still no AmigaLIVE!

The new DigiView as demoed (availability: "in a few weeks"; sigh). It
is really beatiful. You know the little rainbow fringes you see in HAM
pictures? The new software eliminates them completely. The images are
*fantastic*; better than a lot of broadcast TV. Whether DigiPaint is as
far along as DigiView 2 is unclear; I didn't see it demoed. The new
DigiView does allow you to pick any arbitrary number of colors for the
palette, in addition to regular HAM mode display, so you can convert to
a form suitable for, say, Dpaint. The result of converting to 640 x 400
with 16 colors is unbelievable; it is so much better than I would've thought.
Easily the best non-HAM pictures you've ever seen (I thought it *was* HAM
when I first saw it). Hope the above isn't confusing, the basic idea is
that DigiView supports *all* screen formats, not just HAM, and the results
are superb. You can either have it calculate a palette in non-HAM modes,
or adjust the palette and it'll fit the picture to it. A lot of fun!

There was, of course, Commodore 64/128 stuff displayed, but less than I'd
expected. Dropping my elitist attitude for the briefest moment, the current
products are really quite impressive, considering the hardware. Better than
I've ever seen in the past. One company was offering a speech recognizer,
and overheard them chatting with Augment user group folks about whether
they might offer an Amiga version. It'd be nice to have speech recognition,
eh?

Unusual product preview: "Analytic Art" by Crystal Rose Software. This
is a mandelbrot/julia set generator. Why buy one when there are public
domain versions? Answer: it generates full screen mandelbrots in 45 sec.
(forty five seconds!!!!). This is an astounding feat of programming.
I chatted with the author, and this is for real, not done with mirrors.
(I've done mandelbrot programs, so I knew what to ask about to double-
check). There is an upper limit to zooms, but I saw some very nice images
with a zoom factor of 128,000 or thereabouts. It supports all screen formats,
including HAM mode. For anyone with a serious interest in mandelbrot sets,
this is a must (if and when it changes from vaporware to real, and if he
lowers the price he quoted me). Vital stats: Crystal Rose Software,
Pasedena CA 91101; (818) 795-6664. Call 'em and tell them what you'd be
willing to pay for it; they'll respond to demand, but there won't be any
if they are idiotic enough to charge too high for it. This vaporware, as
usual, is claimed to be available "shortly; probably April 1".

Byte by Byte had a very interesting demo: a forthcoming ("few weeks", sigh)
version of Infominder that handled a laser disk. The subject was a disk
full of Impressionist art. When I walked up it was flipping up a new
image a few times per second (the fast way to get cultured). Looks like
fun; hold your breath and wait for it :-) The laser disk, by the way,
was an off-the-shelf product from another company. I'd like to get a
catalogue of what laser disk products are available so I could see how
*generally* useful a laser disk would be. As an aside, the cheapest
Write Once Read Many laser disk I've heard of is still at $7500.
(just in case anyone wondered). I don't know prices for regular laser disks
of the sort that Infominder will support, but keep in mind that they are
NOT writable at all by the end user.

Tidbits: Maxiplan, the spreadsheet developed by MaxiSoft, and now being
supported by Intuitive Technologies, is being marketed by Oxxi Inc
1835-A/Dawns Way, Fullerton CA 92631; (714) 996-6710. They say that
the primary difference between their "Wow" product and the "addbuffers"
command is that "wow" does not allocate memory, it just borrows it,
and gives it up when there is other demand. Addbuffers, of course, allocates
it so that it is unavailable. It runs under 1.1 and 1.2.

I didn't check it out, but FYI there was a digital circuit design tool
called Circuit Maker; made by Elias Engineering at 4614 Morris Court East,
Santa Rosa CA 95405; (707) 539-4111.

Neither did I look at DynamiCad, but a disgruntled friend of mine did,
and he said that the new release appears to clear up the problems that
he had with the previous version (he hated the previous version). He was
also impressed with Aegis Draw Plus.
	Doug Merritt      ucbvax!ingres!hatcher