Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!WPI.BITNET!DSEAH From: DSEAH@WPI.BITNET Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple Subject: Apple IIgs Message-ID: <8803281710.AA17493@wpi.local> Date: 28 Mar 88 17:10:48 GMT Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 54 We had MegaFest, our first computer show, over the weekend. We had four Apple IIgs's, three Amigas, three Atari STs, A Mac Se, A Mac II, an AT&T PC6300, an Apple II+ and an Apple //e. For the first time, I saw all these computers go at it head-to-head. The Atari STs were astonishingly good. I hadn't expected much quality from them, perhaps Degas or some nasty music demo. They had some awesome Amiga-Killer programs. There was a ray traced, transparent bouncing ball demo in which three balls scooted around each other at high speed over a patterned Atari Logo background that scrolled off into the horizon in full 3-d perspective. Everything was shadowed and quick! It wasn't on-the-fly. Bard's Tale GS looked just like Bard's Tale ST (Or the other way around). There was a lackluster MIDI program, and a really really good Star Trek program. You had all the crew on the bridge of the Enterprise. When you clicked one of them, Uhura would pop up on the screen and ask you what you wanted to do. Spock would raise his eyebrow. You could watch the ship go into standard orbit around a nicely detailed planet, engage in 3-D manuevers around the dreaded Klingons, talk to aliens, etc. The graphics were very nice. 16 colors out of 512. The two grade-school kids that were running this program (one runs the Middle Earth BBS out here in Worcester) were kind of obnoxious about the Apple IIgs blasting out sound demos, and I heard one mutter nasally, "Oh, that's because they have it amplified". I offered them my portable box, but they lacked the cables. I loaned them a MIDI synthesizer, and it still wasn't impressive. They said that there is a 512 colors-on screen mode for the ST, but they admitted that most programs use the 16 color mode. The Amigas ran some digitized sound demos and ran Digi-View. There was one fellow with a 4 Meg Amiga 1000 plus a digitizer. He ran the Digi-View demo in 640x400 HAM mode (Hold and Modify, 4096 colors on screen at the same time). These images were animated, too! The digitized woman's face was incredible, if a little rough in places. They went from black and white to color. There was a cute little demo in which four Amiga monitors (each taking about a quarter of the screen) showed color bars, then each one showed a little segment like Betty Boop singing, some karate dudes bowing, water dripping, Simon Le Bon rising from waters, and Dino-Riders leaping across the plains. Each short had a soundtrack along with it. Then they all went at once, playing their soundtracks all at the same time. They had some digitized Rap music, some digitized Led Zeppelin, and a program from Aegis called Sonix. It had up to four instruments at the same time, and sounded pretty good. The Music couldn't scroll at the same time it was playing, though. One person had this very nice Sony Analog RGB monitor that was as goodas the GS monitor. It is also a cable-ready TV. He said it cost him only $400, but I think it is probably closer to $500. We demoed the Music Construction Set demo disk, some of Activision's Music Studio, Epyx's World Games and Winter Games, Bard's Tale GS from EOA, Broderbund's Fantavision GS matinee, Sierra On-line's Thexder, PBI's SeaStrike, and Activision's Tass Times in Tone Town. All these were amplified through a MDIdeas Supersonic stereocard through someone's fancy amplifier and Kef C40 speakers. We blew them away. Our sound turned everybody's head, and the graphics kept them