November 1990 MAGazine Volume 6 Number 11

Rumors and Stuff

By CHARLES WILLIAMS

Some people are having trouble with the speech capabilities of AmigaVision. Is appears that speech becomes very poor when used at the same time as a hi-res screen because the DMA cycles required to keep the screen refreshed eat into the DMA cycles required for effective speech. The solution is to switch to a medium or low-res screen when using speech. The latest version of AmigaVision is 1.53G and is being distributed with the A3000 packages. The first version (the one I have) is 1.31. It seems that the earlier version had some compatibility problems with AmigaDOS 2.0. Also, other improvements were made, including an improved Application Diskette Creator. There are also rumors of an AmigaVision 2.0, perhaps to come with the eventual release of AmigaDOS 2.0.

Commodore recently released the Amiga 3000 workstation running the new AT&T Unix version 5.4. Initial impressions are favorable. It seems adequately fast, and the package they are offering universities is an excellent one. The basic system seems to be an A3000/25, a 100M hard disk and 4M of RAM onboard is needed. Although XWindows will run in 4M (virtual memory), the performance is poor and 8M is really needed (including 2M chip RAM. Free upgrades will be provided for a least a year. Amiga Unix will be an everchanging thing, constantly being changed and improved.

In AmiEXPO news, AmiEXPO will become AmigaWorld EXPO and has announced their third annual Art and Video Contest. At the latest Expo, Progressive Peripherals & Software (PP&S) was showing their 68040 board, which offers an option of hardware compression of disk files. This could effectively more than double the storage capacity of ALL disk drives. In some instances, a speed advantage is gained using the compressed files which means that compression and decompression is FAST. This board is supposedly finished (just waiting on Motorola to deliver more stable 040's). Expect these by Christmas and the price will be about $1300 with the data compression option board.

Although not yet shipping (maybe by the time you read this) is the much acclaimed 24 bit color gadget DCTV by Digital Creations. DCTV will cost about $400, includes a slick paint program and will allow you to paint in full NTSC 16 million colors. DCTV reports to do 24 bit digitizing or 8 bit gray scale in 6 seconds. This could be the club's new DigiView. I'm going to recommend a serious look at DCTV for a future club hardware purchase, but first we should immediately upgrade the club's A500 to include a 1 meg agnus chip and a total of 5 megs of RAM. Then we look at DCTV. Let the officers know what you think, else we'll be spending your money without any input from you.

I've heard hints of a new little gadget from Germany that amounts to three or four chips mounted on a 68000 which replaces your original 68000. It's a 286 mounted on a 68000, runs at 8MHz, and runs on its own screen. Price is under $400. The price sounds just right to be a BrigdeBoard killer.

This is for all of you Amiga 3000 users out there. If you've been having trouble with Tiger Cub or Falcon, try the command "setcpu nocache noburst".

From Ed Bilson, this report of Amigas in the September issue of Computer- Aided Engineering magazine. Pennsylvania State University located Rob Fisher, an MIT graduate in Humanities and Engineering, environmental sculptor, and a pioneer in CAD application to large-scale sculpture. School officials felt Fisher was ideally suited to bridge what they felt was a cultural gap between art and engineering. He uses a Commodore Amiga 2500 to rotate designs and visualize perspectives.

For Fisher the sculptor, computer graphics simulation replaces the need for costly and time-consuming scale models. For Fisher the engineer, this technology speeds the long process between idea-generation and customer approval.

Penn State students learn to digitize still images on the computer as preproduction design. By connecting the computer to a video camera, students capture a photo or slide of an image and render a proposed design on that image, print it, and present it.

Penn State computer labs house 14 Amiga 500, 2000, and 2500 computers - some with up to five megabytes of RAM. Thanks for this information, Ed.

MAGazine

MAGazine is published monthly by the Memphis Amiga Group (MAG), a non-profit organization offering assistance to fellow Amiga owners and those interested in the Amiga. Membership in MAG is available for an annual fee of $20 per family.

Please submit all news, reviews, ads, articles, complaints, suggestions, and loose change to:

MAGazine
c/o Charles Williams
13 Lake Drive
Wilson, AR 72395

MAG Meetings

The November general meeting of the Memphis Amiga Group will be held Saturday, Nov. 10 from 1 P.M. until approximately 3 P.M. in the New Auditorium on the campus of State Technical Institute of Memphis (see map at left).

The Memphis Amiga Group (MAG) holds general meetings the second Saturday of each month in the New Auditorium.

Details on the November disk-of-the-month were unavailable at press time. If you are interested or even have any software requests, just give Bill a call at the number listed below.

There is an officers meeting scheduled during the half hour before the meeting. Come join the fun!

Hardware Rentals

FutureSound audio digitizer kit - $1 per day
DigiView video digitizer kit - $2 per day
A variety of Amiga specific videotapes are also available.

Disk Sales

MAG library and Fred FISH disks are $2 - members ($5 - nonmembers)
Quality blank disks with labels are $.75 - members ($1 - nonmembers)
For all this and more contact club Librarian Bill
Bowers at (901) 360-0003 or see Bill at the next meeting.

Memphis Amiga Group Officers for 1990

President
Todd Rooks
(901) 373-0198

Vice President
Brian Akey
(901) 278-3654

Secretary & Treasurer
Raymond Ginn
(901) 353-4504

Librarian
Bill Bowers
(901) 360-0003

MAGazine Editor
Charles Williams
(501) 655-8777

MAGazine Advertisement Prices

MAG members may place classified ADS in the newsletter at no charge.

MAG CLASSIFIED ADS

FOR SALE

PageStream 2.0 with all disks and manual; also includes 2 extra PageStream font disks - $75.

Helvetica ASCII font cartridge for HP Deskjet - $20. Call Charles Williams at (501) 655-8777

Amiga 500 package. Includes A500 with 501 internal memory expansion, A1010 external disk drive, 1084 monitor, HP+ laser printer, and City Desk 2.0. All for $1500.

Action Replay cartridge, as advertised in AmigaWorld and other Amiga magazines. Only $45. For details call Ken Winfield at (901) 382-3339.

New Fish Disks

DISK 371

Fractals A Fractal generator that generates many different types of fractals based on the iteration of complex-valued formulas. LockDevice A package to protect filing devices from being accidentally formatted. Port2 Sample C programs showing how to control a mouse connected to the second mouse/joystick port. PPLib A shared, runtime library to aid in the development of programs that need to decrunch files crunched with Power-Packer. PPMore A "more" replacement program that reads normal ascii text files as well files crunched with Power-Packer. PPShow A "show" program for normal IFF ILBM files or ILBM files crunched with Power-Packer. PPType A "print" program that will print normal ascii files or files crunched with Power-Packer.

DISK 372

Magnetic Pages A software package that allows you to create and display a disk-based magazine. Features a full intuition driven interface. PLW Phone-Line-Watcher. For users of Hayes compatible modems. Monitors the serial port and records all incoming calls. Allows a remote user to login, receive and leave a message, and transfer files via Zmodem in either direction. RemapIcon A utility to remap icons to be exchanged between Kickstart 2.0 and Kickstart 1.2/1.3 Workbench environments.

DISK 373

Multiplot An intuitive data plotting program featuring flexible input options, arbitrary tect addition, automatic scaling, zoom and slide with clipping at boundaries, a range of output file formats and publication quality printed output.

DISK 374

IPDevice A pipe-like DOS device the passes data immediately rather than waiting until buffer is full. Mat A comprehensive String-Search/Pattern-Match Utility for both text files and directories. PopArt Intuition based image data generator and animator. SoftSpan Soft Span BBS program.

DISK 375

BI A brush to C code image converter. CardMaker A programmer's aid for creating card image data that can be used in any card game that uses the standard 52 card deck. ParM Parameterable Menu. ParM allows you to build menus to run programs in either the CLI or WorkBench environment. TextPlus A word processor for the Amiga, with both German and English versions.

DISK 376

AztecArp An Arp package fixed to work with the 5.0 release of the Aztec 'C' compiler. Matrix Solves systems of linear equations. Plotter A two-dimensional mathematical function plotting program. ToolLibrary A shared library for the Amiga. Contains some mathematical (evaluation of strings) and Intuition (menus, requester) functions.

DISK 377

AnsiRead2 Bridges the gap between IBM and Amiga ANSI by displaying IBM ANSI text and graphic animations (as usually captured from bulletin boards) in their full intended colors and motion. Formatter A disk formatting program with an intuition interface which supports write verification, disk installation, fast formatting and automatic start. Icon2C A simple tool to turn any Workbench icon file into 'C' sourcecode. IE An icon editor which can create and modify icons up to 640x200 pixels in size (also dual render). IntuitionEd Intuition based utility that creates C source code for screen, window, border and text structures. PowerLOGO An experimental programming language based on Lisp and LOGO.

DISK 378

Adapt CLI utility that converts special German characters in files imported from MS-DOS systems intor the right Amiga codes. ANSI-Master ANSI editor that provides the full IBM font set and color capability. DevRen A DEVice RENamer, originally designed to allow the renaming of an external drive on an A2000 (always recognized as DF2:) to be DF1:. JoyLib Both a linktime version and a shared library of Joystick routines. MachIII A "mouse accelerator" program that also includes hotkeys, the features of sun mouse, clicktofront, popcli, title bar clock with a bbs online charge accumulator, Arexx support and much more. MuchMore Another program like "more", "less", "pg", etc. MuchMorePoPa Extended version of MuchMore V2.7. Displays texts that have been packed with PowerPacker. Observer Working example for a Lattice LSR-program. Opens a small window and displays volume names of all inserted disks (DFO: through DF3:). TheGuru A program to bring the Guru back into Kickstart 2.0.

DISK 379

Append CLI utility that allows you to directly append one or more files to another. FileEncrypt Another intuition based file encryptor. LLSort Replacement for the AmigaDOS SORT command. TheA64Package A comprehensive emulator/utility package. According to the author, this package compares to or surpasses the commercially available packages of the same nature. Many of the utilities require a hardware interface that allow the Amiga to access C64 peripherals such as disk drives and printers. The hardware interface is free with a shareware donation to the author. Xnum A useful CLI conversion utility that takes a decimal, binary, octal or hex number as input and displays the number in all four formats. Yawn! A small WorkBench sliding block puzzle.

DISK 380

Oberon A freely distributable demo version of a powerful Oberon compiler. Oberon is modern, object oriented language.

Video Special Interest Group Report

by Brian Akey
vice president & SIG coordinator

I have recently found out that we have a new Amiga dealer in town. Pro Video has been selling high end video equipment for year and now they are going to carry the whole Amiga line. They are set up as a VAR dealer (Value Added Retailer). They are expecting to be a full service center and educational dealer. Since they are a VAR dealer they will mainly be selling solutions. An example of a solution will be a Amiga 2500 with monitor, Video Toaster, cameras, and various software. I talked to John Cox as Pro Video and he said he would like to help the user group by offering discounts and they would like to host some of the meetings. If any one would like to talk to they, Pro Video is located on Poplar close to East High School. The Amiga is being sold in Software Etc. stores, McDuffs, Compterlab, and now Pro Video.

Pro Video hosted the october Video SIG meeting. The meeting was helf at Pro Video on Friday the 19th of October at 7:00 PM. They had a Amiga 2500 with a Magni Genlock for use that night. The meeting was on Raytracing.

For the artists in the group, AmigaWorld is having a graphics contest. Amiga Resource is now combined into Compute. Compute will pay for the Artwork and Programs that are published in the magazine each month. Info magazine is now monthly and they have dropped all other Commodore news except for Amiga news.

There is a new version of PageRender 3D out; version 2.0. Dougs Math Aquarium has a new name and a new version; it is now called MathVISION and is going to retail for $197.00, but for people with Doug's Math Aquarium, MathVISION will be a $30.00 upgrade. Impulse is getting ready to release Imagine. Imagine is a completely new 3D raytracing program that was developed from all the suggestions from Turbo Silver. If you have any questions call me at 278-6354.

Memory Expansion

I was recently looking for a way of adding 2 megabytes of memory to my Amiga 500 and here is what I found out. There are basically two types of memory expansion. The first type is the A501 replacement; it uses the trap door port for expansion from 2 to 8 Meg. There are a few problems. It requires a circuit board to be fitted under the gary chip. Pulling chips is no fun. Some expansion cards only require you do this when you need over 2 Meg. The board itself is connected to the Chip Memory bus. If the computer is doing fancy animation or overscan your speed will not be as high as if you have true Fast memory (memory of the external expansion port). The other problem is that the memory has to be fitted into memory locations that the Amiga 500 was not designed for. You can have 8 Meg of expansion but your biggest block of memory will be no bigger than 2 Meg. This is the biggest problem since I do animation work and you need as big a block of memory. So even if you have 8 Meg of expansion you can only have a 2 meg animation. The other memory expansion is the external type. The usual way of getting this type is by buying a hard drive interface. I did find one company, BriWall that will sell either Xetec Fasttrak with FastRam or IVS with Meta4. Both types can be purchased without the hard drive interface. The IVS board can only go to 4 Meg while the Xetec can go up to 8 Meg. Both are true fast memory. For a small price both can be upgraded which the hard drive controller and you have a complete system. I am running an Amiga 500 with 2 disk drives and the Xetec FastRam with 2 Meg installed. It works great so far and I can't wait until I have enough money to buy a Hard Drive. If I get a chance I will bring it to the meeting.

MAGmembers Newsletter Insert

After going over past newsletters and speaking with Raymond Ginn, our secretary and treasurer, I have pieced together the above membership list. I'm afraid that there will be errors in it and I enlist your help in getting everything correct. As our past newsletter editor has vanished without a trace, there are some gaps. Please let me know if you can help fill in any of the gaps on this list OR if I made any mistakes in the information that is listed. Pay particular attention to the expiration dates. I will begin to delete delinquent memberships after the November meeting.

Thank you,
Charles Williams
Stand-In Newsletter Editor

Treasurer's Report

No report was received from the treasurer for this issue of MAGazine