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