Party Review for World Of Commodore 92

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        W O R L D   O F   C O M M O D O R E   1 9 9 2   R E P O R T


                                   By Shawn


Lou Eggebrecht, VP of Commodore
Engineering made two presentations,
one to the public and another on
Saturday night for dealers and
developers.  I had the pleasure of
sitting next to him for the Saturday
night seminar he is a fascinating man.
He designed the first IBM-PC and was
consulted by Intel on the design of
the new Pentium processor.  After the
seminar he answered a pile of
questions about the future of the
Amiga.  I asked him so many questions,
i'm sure I talked more than he did.

The presentation that he gave was much
the same one he gave at WOC Pasadena.
The most exciting part of this is the
preview of the next generation Amiga's.
Here are the features in point form:

In the future there will be two
versions of the chipset, the low and
the high end.


               LOW END

- Two 100k Transistor Chips

- 32 bit DRAM 60ns Page Mode Chip
  Memory
- 57 MHz Pixel Clock

- 100% Backwards Compatibility

- 4MB 4Mbps Floppy Controller with
  Hardware CRC

- 8x Memory Bandwidth Increase

- 2x Blitter Performance (gets twice
  as many clocks as on AGA)

- 800x600x8bit Non-Interlace 72Hz
  Refresh Rate

- Larger screens at lower Refresh
  Rates

- 16 bit True Colour mode (although
  recent developments with the
  completion of the first cycle of
  chipset design indicate that this
  will actually be a 24 bit True
  Colour Mode)

- FIFO serial ports

- increased Chip Ram (8Mb)


               HIGH END

- 4 Chips (750k transistors each)

- 32/64 bit VRAM Chip Memory (could be
  DRAM for mid range machines)

- 57/114 MHz pixel clock

- Chunky Pixel Mode as well as Bit
  Planes Modes (Blitter works with
  both)

- Special CD-ROM Port (4 Mbps Very
  High Speed Serial Port)

- Built in Frame Grabber

- 1280 x 1024 24 bit colour 72 Hz
  Refresh Rate

- 16 bit 8 channel 100KHz sampling
  rate Audio ports

- New "On-Demand" DMA Architecture for
  Balanced DMA Usage

- All Clocks are Independent and Each
  Section is Asynchronous to Each
  Other

- 12 to 20 x Memory Bandwidth Increase
  (mostly from VRAM)

- 32 bit blitter (instead of word
  blitter) 8x Performance Increase
- 24 bit True Colour Mode

- Video Upgrade module (You can add
  more chips for parallel processing
  chip set i.e. multiple blitters and
  Higher Resolution Display Modes)

- Hardware Graphics Decompression
  Modes

- ECS and AGA compatibility

- 32 bit Processor Independent
  Processor Bus (hinted at RISC by
  calling the bus "RISC ready")


     FUTURE RELEASES OF AMIGADOS

- 3.1 Device Independent Network

- Support File and Printer Sharing DSP
  Support

- 4.0 Retargetable Graphics Full
  Support for Postscript Printers

He also fielded many good questions,
and he indicated:

- The only reason that the A600 and
  A1200 do not have the dual speed
  floppies is that the current model
  is simply too big.  There is lower
  profile versions on the way but
  there are not here now and will not
  be for a while.

- There are no plans for virtual
  memory.

- Commodore will release a series of
  Quad-Syncing monitors in February to
  replace their current series.
- New Bridgeboards will be on the way,
  including new software VGA support
  and a new bridgeboard for the A1200.

- AGA will be put into all models of
  the Amiga, including the CDTV.  Also
  CDTV technology will be brought to
  the entire Amiga line.

- Full motion video support is well on
  its way.  The feature is here now,
  but the development systems for this
  technology is not.

- Prime goal with the CDTV is to cost
  reduce it and then enhance it.

- A new design philosophy is to design
  all hardware with modules to allow
  upgradability.

- A main goal of his is to use the
  current state of the art development
  systems and design tools to enable
  Commodore to reduce their design
  times.  Much of it is already in
  place and the AGA chipset is the
  first result of that process.
  Instead of being last to bring
  something out, Commodore is going to
  be first or second.

- DSP technology will be available for
  the A4000 this summer.  DSP will
  feature the AT&T 32000 series DSP
  and a 68040 processor module for the
  A4000.  A Personality board will
  attach to this board and will allow
  the DSP to perform useful functions.
  Most of the DSP Personality boards
  will be produced by third parties.
  There will be extensive information
  on this product at the next DevCon.

- The A3090 will be shipping at the
  end of January and will feature a
  10MB/s transfer rate as well as WIDE
  and FAST SCSI.

- A new, higher performance Ethernet
  card will be available soon, after
  the release of 3.1 and the new
  TCP/IP and Novell software.

- The chipset is still too power
  hungry for a laptop.  Maybe there
  will be one when there is a fully
  CMOS chipset.

- No hardware memory protection plans
  for Motorola Architecture (the way
  he said it implied that it might be
  on other architectures.)

- Retargetablity is a major goal and
  Audio will merge with DSP (this
  didn't make sense to me since audio
  is built into the chip set.)

- Processor Upgrade cards for the
  A1200 will be left for 3rd Parties.

- They are going to be replacing the
  2000 very soon.  The only reason
  they still make the 2000 is so that
  they don't abandon the only machine
  the Video Toaster runs on out of the
  box.  The NewTek people are very
  difficult to work with and are
  resistant to change.

- Some early 4000's shipped with the
  fan installed backwards and this
  caused many overheating problems.  I
  believe he said that if you had one,
  you can have it fixed on your
  warrantee.

- He could not give any release dates
  for machines with the low and high
  end chip sets.  He did say it would
  be more than a year.  The high end
  chipset development is father along
  than the low end.  Both have
  completed a first design cycle.  The
  results of this cycle are better
  than expected and they are ahead of
  their development plan.

One thing that was heavily implied was
that the Amiga will be migrated over
to a RISC CPU in the future.  While he
did mention that the exact CPU has not
been decided, the high-end models are
being designed to accommodate a RISC
CPU.  I overheard him talking about
being excited that a RISC Amiga will
be able to run not only UNIX, but
Windows NT.

The timetables for the new stuff were
not made clear.  He did mention that
the DSP CPU module for the 4000 would
be out in the summer.  This implies
that 3.1 would be out at the same
time.  Further, since 3.1 includes
device independent networking built
into the operating system, the new
Ethernet hardware and software should
be out shortly after that.  Other
products, like the 3090 disk
controller and the new monitors, will
be released during the next few
months.

The crowd attending the two seminars
that Lou gave seemed overwhelmed at
the features of the future chipset.
The loudest cheers came with the
mention of the larger chip ram
feature.

I am very excited about the future of
the Amiga.  The new features are nice,
but the best part is that, clearly,
Commodore has a plan.  This plan is
not just a short term plan, but a
visionary plan to create a series of
Amiga's that will meet future market
demands.  This plan would not be
reassuring if it was presented by
anyone other that Mr. Eggesbrecht.  He
is very capable and has had much
success in the industry.


         EXHIBITOR'S DISPLAYS

First let me tell you that i've never
been to a Amiga show of this size.  My
first reaction was "Wow!".  There was
about 48 separate exhibitors.

When I wandered into the area I was
struck by the demo at the ICD booth.
It was a 4.5 minute full screen clip
from Star Wars with stereo.  It ran at
24 frames/second on a stock 2000 with
an ICD SCSI controller.  A ICD
spokesperson said that it was captured
with a PP&S frame grabber from a video
disk.  I talked with the a ICD person
at the booth about this demo and he
said that he could not distribute it
and they had no plans to market the
software that was used to create or
play the animation.  This animation
was apparently at WOC Toronto last
year as well.  The animation makes
MPEG and CDXL animations look awful.

The second most impressive thing on
the exhibition floor was the
Virtuality Concepts display.  This was
the Dactyl Nightmare virtual reality
game that has appeared on CNN and in
magazines.  The line ups were too
long.  On Sunday, I decided to endure
the hour and a half lineup.  When I
finally tried it, I was disappointed.
The big flaw with this game is its
lack of resolution.  There is a
monitor that sits in front of your
cage which shows the public what the
player is seeing.  This looks to be a
640 by 200 16 colour screen.  What you
see with the headset is what that
screen would look like through a
magnifying glass.  You can see each
distinct pixel and the black space
around it.  Don't get me wrong, I
liked it, and once you got the hang of
it, it was a playable game.  But they
have to work on the resolution.

There were other interactive video
displays in the Commodore booth.
These were two Mandala systems.  One a
Star Trek Transporter sequence.  The
voice of the Enterprise's computer
would prompt you to enter the
transporter room.  You would then
stand in front of a camera and watch
yourself on a large television screen.
Your image is superimposed on top of a
picture of a transported room.  The
computer would then say "Prepare to
beam out" and you would watch yourself
dissolve.  The scene on the TV would
then change and you would dissolve
back in.  Computer generated rocks
would then fall and as soon as they
touched you they would bounce off.

There was also a Commodore history
display, with some of their past
machines.  These included adding
machines, calculators, watches, the
KIM-1 and the PET, the Vic-20 and the
various 64's, 128's, the original Amiga
1000 and just about everything else.
Along the sides of the Commodore
Booth, there was a CDTV with a video
upgrade, with what seemed to be a high
colour, 1/3 screen smooth animation.
This CDTV had a hard drive and a DCTV
style external graphics upgrade
module.

Another thing that amazed me was the
great deals offered by the retailers.
All the computers were going at cost.
My dealer friends felt quite ripped
off since people were walking away
with 1200's and they had not even
got firm prices for it yet.  The deals
on 3000's were especially good and for
a while we watched a 3000 leave the
building once every ten minutes.  Gold
Disk probably had the best software
prices and they had a whole pile of
upgrade options.  ProCalc was going
for $115 and the ProPage/ProDraw
bundle was going for $250.  Everything
else that they make was going for
similarly good prices.
Keep in mind that these are Canadian
prices.  If you multiply them by .75
you get the equivalent US prices.

My dealer friend bought a 20"
Electrohome Multisync monitor for
$1000.  This monitor is regular $2300
here.  It syncs down to 15KHz and has
a separate horizontal and vertical
centring for 6 different sync rates.
If you've had a AGA machine for a
while, you would find this feature to
be a blessing.

Video Toaster User Magazine had a
booth there and was giving away free
issues.  The magazine answered many
questions I had about video equipment,
so if your looking for a magazine that
concentrates on video, then is it.

Another magazine caught my eye.  Amiga
News is a grassroots, newspaper style
publication.  It caries some very good
articles and reviews.   It is a
bargain at 95 cents and issue.

A magazine of a different sort is
Toast and Coffee.  This is a video
magazine that focuses on Amiga video.
This is a great way to see all those
toys that you can't afford buy.

Migraph was there with their new PS-
400 Wand full-page scanner.  It is a
monochrome, 400dpi sheet-fed scanner.
There are two versions, one with their
Touch-Up and OCR software and one with
just the Touch-Up software.  You need
an accelerated Amiga with at lease 4.5
MB of memory.  It retails at $899 US
with OCR and $799 US without.  But at
these prices I thought that a person
could easily get a colour Epson
Scanner for a few hundred more.

Comspec was there with some very
capable vinyl sign cutting system by
Parallel Motion Graphics and Roland.

Electronic Arts was showing off Deluxe
Paint IV Version 4.5.  Its new
features are AGA support of all
graphics modes, including Productivity
mode.  It reads 24-bit IFF files.
There is smoother gradients,
translucency and tinting.  But it
paled in comparison to Digital
Creations' Brilliance!  Unless
Electronic Arts can pull off a major
upgrade soon, I figure Deluxe Paint
has been dethroned as the King of
Amiga Paint Programs.  Both DPaint and
Brilliance start shipping in late
January.

I think that my favourite booth in the
whole show was the Toronto Commodore
User's Group.  I liked it because it
was strange and unusual.  They were
demonstrating a pile of old computers
like SuperPets and 128's.  These
people still loved their old computers
and are still having a pile of fun
with them.  They also served to remind
everyone that Commodore makes more
than just Amiga's.

Although Commodore does not sell their
MS-DOS line in the States, they do
just about everywhere else.  They have
a very nifty new 486 colour laptop & a
new 486 Tower.  They did seem a little
out of place surrounded by Amiga's.
            SHOW SEMINARS

    COMMODORE NEW PRODUCT SEMINAR

When I finally got to the show, it was
2:10 PM Friday and the new products
demonstration seminar was just
beginning.  Luckily, the seminars were
running a bit behind.  This seminar
was very disappointing.  The presenter
was very personable, but there was no
demo of the AGA machines, only a slide
show of the features that we have all
heard.  He did not have a A1200 to
demonstrate.  In fact, he was not
prepared for the demonstration at all.
None of the recently announced
Commodore products were actually
demonstrated.

He did mention that there would be a
hardcard available that works on both
the CDTV and the A570.  I guess the
connector inside the A570 and the CDTV
are compatible.

Some light was shed on the new SCSI
card from Commodore.  The A3090 SCSI-
II Zorro-III card has been in beta
testing stage for about two weeks, and
the expected shipping date was around
the end of January.


       GOLD DISK'S PROPAGE 4.0
           AND PRODRAW 3.0

The second seminar I went to was a
Desktop publishing seminar by Gold
disk featuring ProPage 4.0 and ProDraw
3.0.  This demonstrator was
fascinating, but again he was not
prepared.  He brought along a Syquest
drive with the software on it.  But
the 4000 that was there for
demonstrations doesn't have a SCSI
port.  He was forced to use the 3000.
This hurt his demonstration of ProPage
4.0 since the major new feature is the
new AGA support.

There are some other improvements
including user definable zoom and a
font preview gadget when selecting
fonts.  A page sorting window which
gives you a thumbnail sketch of your
pages and allows you to reorder pages
by just dragging them to a new
position.  A new Pair Kerning feature
allows the kerning of a pair of
letters to be defined throughout a
document.  A Post-It Note feature
allows you to attach non-printing
notes for yourself and others who see
the document.  The text editor has
been improved and a bitmap graphics
editor has been added.  ProPage 4.0
can hotlink to ProDraw and ProCalc.

If you buy ProPage 3.0 between the
beginning of December 1992 and the end
of February 1993 you get version 4.0
free.  Also the new AGA version of
ProDraw is coming, but a release date
has not been set.


         SOFT-LOGIK'S SEMINAR

The Art Expression seminar was next.
This is a neat little structured
drawing program.  It has many of
ProDraw's features.  I think it
handles EPS drawing better that
ProDraw.  It can output to any
Preferences printer as long as you
have a minimum 1 Meg of Chip Ram.  It
does not support Compugraphic Fonts,
only Postscript Type 1.

Softlogic is also bringing out a font
editor called TypeSmith, which is an
adaptation of a European program
called Font Designer.  It can load,
edit and save Pagestream, Compugraphic
and Postscript Type 1 fonts.


 GREAT VALLEY PRODUCT'S IV24 SEMINAR

The IV24 seminar was impressive.  Paul
Higgenbottom demonstrated this GVP
product, which makes it easy to
capture and edit video images.
Included with this hardware is a
program called ImageFX.  The effects
that this program can perform are very
fast, and include masking effects like
those on the Quanta Paintbox.  These
masks can use edge blending to produce
soft edges.

Macropaint is a paint program included
with the IV24.  It is also very fast
and is fully AREXX compatible.  It
also allows for the playback of ANIMs
directly from the hard disk.  You can
work in fewer colours to conserve the
Chip RAM that the program uses.
MacroPaint can also edit bitmaps as
large as 1280 by 1024 and you can
autoscroll to all regions of the
bitmap.

MyLAD is a switcher for the IV24.  It
can perform about 50 transitions, but
no dissolves.

He also talked about the new G-Lock
genlock from GVP.  It is a small
external box that is software
controlled.  It has dual composite
inputs and there is some provision for
some switching effects.  It also has
dual audio inputs for audio mixing.
It is compatible with all Amiga's and
the hardware takes advantage of the
new AGA chipset for some additional
chroma keying effects.


       GREAT VALLEY PRODUCTS'S
           PHONEPAK SEMINAR

GVP gave a presentation on the
PhonePak.  This is a new and
revolutionary product for the Amiga
market.  It is a multiple line,
Centrex compatible Voice Mail system.
You can use as many PhonePak boards as
you have Zorro-II slot, with each card
handling one phone line.  It is
completely programmable.   Also, the
system can handle facsimile
transmission and reception.  There are
multiple mailboxes for multiple users.
You can also access your mailboxes
from a remote phone by touch tones.
There is no caller ID yet, but GVP is
planning it for the future.  Just to
avoid any confusion, there is no data
modem in the unit nor do you require
one.

There are two programs that come with
the package.  The first, Line Manager,
watches the phone line for incoming
calls, figure out if it is a FAX or
voice and take the proper action.  It
is also AREXX compatible.  The other
program is PhonePAK.  It defines the
operation of the unit, mailboxes, the
viewing of received FAX's.  There is a
preferences printer driver that you
can print to from any program that
will send out FAXes.
 COMMODORE'S AMIGAVISION PROFESSIONAL

I also attended the AmigaVision
Professional seminar.  The whole
package has been improved.  There are
more transitions, and there are now
two groups of transitions: bitmap and
screen.  Screen transitions are
independent of screen and palette so
you don't have to worry about things
changing colour or resizing when
performing transitions.  There is now
4 transition speed selections instead
of 3.

Even though the presentation of AVPro
was on a 3000, there is AGA support.

A new feature is streaming, a process
where you can play sound and
animations directly from the disk
using a user defined memory buffer.
You can now slow down animations if
they go too fast by inserting a number
of jiffies.

There are many features that support a
AmigaVision Flow running on a CDTV.
CDXL is supported, although you can't
create them with AVPro and you can
only play them back on a CDTV.  If you
want to create them, CDTV Developers
can buy a device called CTRACK. This
is a special SCSI drive controller
emulates the CDTV CD-ROM drive.
However this device costs more than
$5000.  AVPro can now read back the
CDTV preferences.  A memory limitation
preference allows you to run your flow
in a simulated CDTV environment, so
that you can test your flow to see
if it has enough memory to run on a
CDTV without running it on one.

You can now choose small icons when
viewing your AmigaVision flows.  This
allows you to see more of your flow at
once.  Printing of flows has been
expanded, allowing more that just
graphic dumps.  It presents the flow
in an all text form at which you can
print to a printer or file.  A memory
reporter will tell you how much memory
you are using when your flow is
running.  A freely distributable
runtime version is now available and
it is only about 260k in size.  This
runtime version can runs flows from
all versions of AmigaVision.

An upgrade policy from older versions
of AmigaVision is not final, but it
looks like it will come in about $90
US.


DIGITAL CREATIONS'S BRILLIANCE SEMINAR

Brilliance is better than DeluxePaint
in every way.  It will use every
graphics mode, has multiple undo
capability and is very fast.  Menus
and palettes are on separate screens
and will not change colours when you
change them.  The menus are stackable
and you can tailor what menus are
displayed.  It has better overscan
control.  It has multiple buffers (in
DPaint it would be more than one swap
screen).  Also, it has Bezier curves.
The air brush tool is much more
flexible.  You can alter the brush
size and pattern, the statistical
distribution of pixels, you can
airbrush multi-colour brushes and also
now you can airbrush gradients.  There
are all the drawing modes that are in
DeluxePaint and new ones including two
colour dithering, translucency,
brighten and darken.

Animation is enhanced by better frame
control with a VCR style toolbox.
Ease in and out can be defined for
each axis.  It supports Compugraphic
fonts.  No 3D brush mapping is
supported, but you can simulate 3D
light distributions with gradient
fills.  Morphing uses an enhanced
algorithm which moves pixels with
equal preference to all directions.

Brilliance works on a virtual 24bit
buffer, and then translates to
whatever display mode you have chosen.
It is also memory efficient and you
can run it well in 512k of memory.



   WILL VINTON'S PLAYMATION SEMINAR

Playmation allows you to create very
realistic organic objects and
manoeuvre them around in their scenes
very easily.  Each module of the
package uses the same interface and
sets of keyboard command equivalents.
But it is crippled by a very slow and
inflexible rendering module.  An
animation was shown displaying what
the package can do and while lacking a
good plot, it demonstrated a very
good organic morphing technique called
muscle deformations.  This is
excellent for doing moving mouth
effects.  The bad part of the
animation was that it was rendered on
a PC.  There is also a Mac version.