January 1989 MAGazine Volume 5 Number 1

Calendar of Events for January

Saturday, January 14, 1989 - 1:00 PM - The general meeting will be held in Jenning's Hall in Room J-2 Located the campus of State Technical Institute of Memphis. The elections of the new officers will be our first order of business. That out of the way will move to the Art Contest judging and any impromptu demo's we have time for. SEE YOU THERE!!!

ELECTIONS

January means election time for the Memphis Amiga Group. This year we are quite fortunate in that we have qualified volunteers to fill all of the offices. However this dose not mean that the nominations are closed. If you have a favorite son or maybe somebody who you think would do a bang up job then by all means lets hear from you.

Here is the list of the volunteers:

FOR PRESIDENT:

Broadus Weatherall

FOR VICE PRESIDENT:

Todd Rooks

FOR SECRETARY/TREASURER

Charles Williams

FOR MAGAZINE EDITOR

Sean & John Kiss

Andy D. Jenkins

FOR LIBRARIAN

William Bowers

As you can see from the list theirs only one contested office that of editor. Knowing how difficult this job is the candidates may wish to get together before the meeting and decide to run together, and split up the work.

GOOD LUCK TO THE NEW OFFICERS!

X-MAS PARTY

If you attended our second annual Christmas Party I don't have to tell you what a great job Todd Rooks did in setting it up. The food and drinks were good plentiful. He had a nice little puzzle to work on which also severed as a door prize entry qualifier. Find 10 computer related words in a maze of letters and your name was put into the hat for the door prize drawing.

We also need to thank the local computer stores that contributed the door prizes for the drawing. They are:

COMMODORE COMPUTER STORE
5716 Stage Road
Bartlett TN 38134

COMPUTER CONNECTION, INC.
9061 Millbranch
Southaven MS 38671

COMPUTERLAB OF MEMPHIS
4760 Polar Ave
Memphis TN 38117

The lucky winners of the door prizes were:

Victor Karpov
Scott Hudson
Broadus Weatherall
Dianne Lendennie
Elaine Williams
Sean Kiss
Edward Bilson
Tim Burford
Deborah Head
William Bowers
Colleen Hoover

If you didn't attend well maybe next year. THANKS AGAIN!!!

MAGazine

Memphis Amiga Group
Box 381462
Memphis, TN 38183-1462

MAGazine is published monthly by the Memphis Amiga Group (MAG), a nonprofit organization offering assistance to fellow Amiga owners and those interested in the Amiga. Membership in the Memphis Amiga Group is available for an annual fee of $20 par family. Memphis Amiga Group Officers for 1988 are:

President
Dr. Alan Schwartz
(901) 755-6622

Vice President
Todd Rooks
(901) 373-0198

Secretary/Treasurer
Scott Hudson
(901) 794-8914

Librarian
David Head
(901) 377-7568

MAGazine Editor
Edward Bilson
(901) 794-2936

WELCOME

Raymond Ginn
Andy D. Jenkins
Guy O. King Jr.
Joe Sanders
Kenneth Winfield

THE DUNGEON REVIEW

By Charles Williams

If finding keys, making maps, learning magic incantations, fighting monsters, collecting food, mastering weapons, and solving puzzles appeals to you, then you'll probably love Dungeon Master by FTL/Software Heaven. Originally on the Atari ST, Dungeon Master, is now available for the Amiga (one meg of memory required). An interesting story booklet comes in the package along with a single disk. The story leads into the instructions for the game and a few hints on how to best utilize your resources and magic incantation skills.

On the first level of this 14 level dungeon, you proceed through a gallery of about two dozen champions. You may select up to four of these adventurers for your party, then after collecting a few useful items, it's down into the lower levels. Don't forget to save the game as you go along. You'll need a blank aisk (formatted or not) for this, but it will only hold one save and if your party is overcome, you have to keep slugging it out until they're all dead, unless you want to reboot. After the last of your group succumbs, you get a chance to restart, which quickly gets you back to your last save.

I think the best thing about Dungeon Master, besides the excellent graphics, sound, and speed of real time play, is the interface. If you'll forgive the expression, it has the most intuitive game control I've ever used. The entire game is playable with the mouse and every control is exactly as you might guess, with no unpleasant surprises.

For the occasional dungeon goer, the 14 levels should keep you busy for the next few months, but for those with a low threshold for rebooting, there are hints and maps of every level available on networks and bulletin boards. I have copies, otherwise I might not finish Dungeon Master in time for summer vacation.

Give FTL/Software Heaven good marks for a very good game at a reasonable price (I got mine from Abel Supply for $23.50). My game came with a bad disk, but when I mailed it to FTL/Software Heaven in California, I received a new disk by return mail only six days later. A good response time in my book.

AMAX Brings Macintosh Emulation to the Amiga

By the Unpaid Amigan

A company called Readysoft is working on a MAC/MAC + emulator for the Amiga. AMAX, as it's called, is a software/hardware combination that allows Mac software to run on an Amiga. A hardware adaptor plugs into the external disk drive port. This adaptor is about 2 inches by 4 inches with a cable to connect it to the drive port. You will need to supply the MAC 64K or MAC+ 128K ROMS for this adaptor. There is a pass through for external drives. You can plug your external Amiga drive in here, but for full disk compatibility you will need to add a MAC 800K external drive. You should be able to connect both your external Amiga drive and an external MAC drive to AMAX at the same time.

AMAX runs a little faster than a MAC+. The Amiga mouse emulates the MAC mouse with no problems. Screen proportions are good in interlaced or 640 by 400 mode. Several screen formats are available, including a 512 by 342 for full video compatibility. They also support the A2024 monitor in 1008 by 800 line mode and the new chip set which gives 640 by 400 non-interlaced. The FlickerFixer should work, but overscan is not supported. Of course, the MAC and MAC + are both monochrome machines. Both parallel and serial are supported and AMAX will also work with Apple's lmagewriter II and Laserwriter printers. In this first release there will be no support for hard drives, multitasking, or AppleTalk, but they are looking at these things for future releases. Midi compatibility seems doubtful because most midi software goes directly to the hardware.

AMAX compatibility should be very good, but this may depend somewhat on the use of the new chip set from Commodore-Amiga because the MAC looks for one Meg of continuous memory. Readysoft says that they have run PageMaker 1.2 on a 512K 1000 and have devised a method to use all of the memory available on your Amiga, but with a degree of reduced compatibility. AMAX works with all of the three Amiga versions and will use whatever memory you have, but they said that they hadn't tested it with the Insider memory expansion yet.

Readysoft has used AMAX with Word 3.0, Excel, Hypercard, PageMaker, MacPaint, MacWrite and all system versions and finders. (They did not say whether or not this is with the new chip set or not, though.) They have run Megaroids and Loadrunner but say that copy protection can cause problems with AMAX.

The tentative availability dat (they are finalizing packaging and production details now) is February. The bottom line on cost is tentatively $150 for AMAX. 64K ROMS, which you must supply, can be had for about $40. This would give you an original MAC. 128K ROMS, you gotta buy 'em yourself, can be obtained for $150 to $175. This would give you a MAC+. External MAC drives go for under $200. Remember that these are discount prices. You can expect to pay more if you walk into an Apple dealer. So, to emulate a MAC+ on your Amiga you need AMAX - $150, 128K ROMS - $175, a MAC disk drive - $200, and don't forget the system software, which you can purchase from your local Apple dealer. That adds up to about $525 plus the MAC + system software and any MAC + application software you might be interested in. Sounds cheaper than a Bridgecard to me, although finding out exactly what will and will not work to your personal satisfaction will have to wait for at least a couple of months.

FALL '88 COMDEX

by Don Lockard

The tenth annual COMDEX (COMputer Dealers' EXpo) was held in Las Vegas November 14 - 18. There were over 1700 exhibitors and more than 95,000 people from around the world to see the exhibits scattered over the Las Vegas convention center, Cashman Field, and six hotels! The list of exhibitors reads like a who's who of the computer industry. Some of the exhibitors included such industry giants as IBM, WordPerfect Corp., Microsoft, Ashton Tate, Compac, NEC, Seagate, and (of course) Commodore. Comdex also offered a twenty-four hour a day TV program featuring reviews of many of the products on exhibit and a daily(!) newspaper of about 200 Computer Shopper-sized pages. All in all it was an awesome spectacle of the current trends in the computer industry.

The Commodore booth was strictly Amiga and was very busy. The centerpiece of the exhibit was an array of Sony large-screen monitors stacked about six high and ten wide with two large speakers on top. The Sonys were running a mixture of old and new demos which used the screens both individually and as one large screen. Commodore had quite a few 2000 systems in the booth which were labeled 2000, 2000HD and 2500. They also had a few 500's. They had their Amiga PVA 2350 (Professional Video Adaptor) connected to a color video camera and were using both the genlocking and frame grabbing capabilities of the card to digitize HAM pictures. The pictures were of a very high quality and compared favorably to stills done with Digi-View.

As with previous Comdex exhibitions, Commodore shared their booth with many of their best third-party software and hardware developers. was there with their Digi-View Gold digitizer on display, but there was no sign of the 'Toaster'. Aegis was there with Sonix and several companies were showing new games (e.g. Sword of Sodan and Double Dragon).

ASDG had a promo for their digitizer SpectraScan, which uses the JX-450 color scanner from Sharp Electronics and boasts a 300 DPI resolution. Supra was showing an autoboot drive for the 2000 and Phoenix Electronics has some promotional literature for their autobooting drives for the Amiga 500 and 2000. Access Technologies announced the ACAD Translator, a product that will allow the AMIGA to use AutoCAD or other .DXF objects with Sculpt-Animate 3D for modeling and animation. Octree was demoing their 3D graphics package to a large audience. Soft-Logik Publishing Corporation announced their new desktop publishing package, PageStream. It has a multitude of abilities including a built-in word processor, auto kerning, style sheets, auto flow of text around graphics, scalable fonts, and many other features. It can import text from many of the scanners and it's postscript compatible.

Over in the East Hall, Abacus software was showing off their Amiga products in their own booth. Microdeal was Also there with their games for the amiga. Terrific Software, the makers of the first HAM game for the Amiga, Pioneer Plague, had a flyer announcing two new titles, 'Crash Garrett' and 'Stir Crazy with Bobo'. Crash Garrett lets you assume the role of an ace flyer in the Hollywood of the '30s. Your mission is to rescue Cynthia Sleeze from the sinister Nazi mastermind Baron von Engel Krul and his cronies. In Stir Crazy you must help Bobo contend with life in prison and even help him escape.

Among all of the many booths directed to IBM users, there was one featuring a picture of an animated waterfall much like the classic one from the original Deluxe Paint. Across the top scrolled some text that said 'This is not an AMIGA it is a PC running ....' The display did look very good and reproduced the waterfall effect perfectly, of course I was unable to pull down a window and start any other program at the same time!

I had lots of fun at COMDEX and hope to go again, but like everything else it does have it's share of problems. You really get to know the meaning of words like WAIT and LINE with that many people present. It is also very rough on the feet!

COMMODORE INTRODUCES AMIGA WITH 68020

Downloaded from GEnie

Amiga 2500 features doubled processor speed, math-co-processor and 2 MB of 32-bit RAM for workstation-level applications.

Las Vegas, November 15, 1988 - Commodore Business Machines, Inc. today introduced the Amiga 2500 designed for the needs of graphics, animation and video professionals. Based on the original Amiga 2000 introduced a year ago, the Amiga 2500 is configured with an A2620/2 co- processor card that comes standard with the Motorola 68020 praocessor, 2 MB of 32-bit RAM (expandable to 4 MB) and a 68881 math-co-processor. These high-performance features enable the new Amiga system to perform at the workstation-level speeds required by many of the new second generation graphics based Amiga applications.

'The Amiga 2500 is a natural progression of the Amiga technology,' said Joel Shusterman, Commodore vice president of marketing. 'The Amiga 2500 has no equal in its price/ performance class and offers all of the original design benefits of the Amiga 2000 as an expandable, multi- tasking, multi-processing, multi- operating system machine.'

The advanced graphics capability of the Amiga series is ideally suited to color desktop publishing and presentation, 3-D solid modeling and professional video applications. With the additional speed of the Amiga 2500, color rendering time of 3-D graphics and re-calculation time for modifying full-color desktop publishing pages can be reduced substantially. Performance increases can be up to 400 percent.

Standard on the Commodore Amiga 2500 is a Motorola 68020-based co-processor card (A2620/2) running at 14.26 MHz with 2 MB of 32-bit RAM, (expandable to 4 MB of 32-bit RAM); a built-in 3.5 inch floppy disk drive; a pre-configured, high performance 40 MB hard disk drive and hard disk controller; custom sound, animation and graphics chips; RS232 serial and parallel connectors; and two RCA- type audio output jacks. Also available is an MS-DOS compatible bridgeboard allowing the Commodore Amiga to run MS-DOS compatible software under Amiga control.

The open architecture of the Commodore Amiga allowsd extensive internal expansion with multi-processor, multi-DOS options. Contained in the Amiga 2500 are seven full-size internal expansion slots which include a combination of Amiga standard PC XT/AT and dual purpose slots; a CPU expansion slot and a video expansion slot.

The Commodore Amiga 2500 will available through authorized Commodore Amiga dealers and has a suggested retail price of $4,699.

Amiga 2500 Preliminary Specifications

CPU Memory

Motorola 32 bit processor * Clock 14.3 MHz * 1 MB 16 bit RAM * 2 MB 32 bit RAM * Internally expandable to additional 6 MB (with AUTOCONFIG feature) * Total maximum 9 MB

ROM

256 KB (includes Kickstart 1.3)

Interfaces

Keyboard * 2 Mouse/Joystick/lightpen ports * Serial RS-232 * Parallel Centronics * Video RGB Analog or RGBI * Right & Left Audio * External disk drives * monochrome video

System Slots

Installed in CPU (86 pin) slot: MC68020 running at 14.3 MHz containing CPU, 68881 Math CoProcessor and 68851 Memory Management Unit plus 2 Mbytes of 32 bit RAM (expandable to 4 Mbytes 32 bit RAM on board). Amiga bus: S slots (100 pin) with AUTOCONFIG * PC bus: 4 slots

Video Slot

1 Video Slot for internal NTSC/PAL encoder for composite video, internal Genlock, etc.

Keyboard

Detachable * 94-keys including: 10 Function Keys * Separate numeric keypad * Separate cursor keys (reverse 'T' layout) * Help Key

Mouse

Optomechanical * Two button system

Disk Drives

Built-in 3.5 Disk Drive (880KB formatted) * 40 MB, 28ms hard drive - preformatted and pre-loaded with system software and utilities (includes autobooting hard disk controller) * AmigaDOS supports 4 floppy drives in any configuration simultaneously * Internal Options: 5.25' Half Height Drive * External Options: 2 Amiga Floppy Drives (A1010) (Third external drive is supported with A2088 Bridgeboard installed)

Video Display

400 lines/vertical frequency 60 Hz International version: 512 lines/vertical frequencey 50 Hz * Graphic co-processor with beam synced draw, fill and move modes * Maximum 512 KB video memory (chip memory) palette of 4096 colors, maximum 6 bit-planes, 8 sprites per scanline

Text Modes

Standard Modes: 80 characters/25 lines, 60 characters/25 lines * Different font sizes and font types selectable * Screen colors user definable, Graphic Modes Numerous modes from 320 x 200 to 640 x 400 (plus overscan)

Sound

4 Independent sound channels configured as right and left audio * Reproduces complex waveforms * Sound buffer up to 400 KB nominal maximum 512 KB * 8 bit D/A converter, plus 6 bit volume

Speech

Built-in English text-to-speech device * Controls for rate, pitch, volume, inflection and gender of voice

Dimensions

17 3/8' wide x 15 3/8' Deep x 6' High * Weight : 26 lbs

Power

110 volts/60 Hz 360 W Power Supply (220 watts output) for base machine and extensions

The Amiga 2500 is part of Commodore's complete line of graphics-oriented personal computers. In addition to the Amiga, Commodore also manufactures the MS-DOS compatible Professional Series III and Commodore Colt computers. The Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 have an installed user base of over ten million worldwide.

Membership list of the Memphis Amiga Group as of January 7, 1989

PLEASE PAY DUES BY THE SECOND SATURDAY OF THE MONTH ON OUR EXPIRE DATE**

MAG OFFICERS FOR 1988

Dr. Alan Schwartz--President
Todd Rooks---------Vice President
Scott Hudson-------Secretary/Treasurer
Ed Bilson----------MAGazine Editor
David Head---------Librarian

The DUCK Ponds
BBS-24 HOURS
(ask for Howard)
Memphis
(901) 761-3729
Birmingham
(205) 822-0956

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP CHAIRPERSONS

John & Sean Kiss--------------Sound
Don Lockard----------------Graphics
Keith Burns----------------Hardware
John & Sean Kiss-----------Business