April 1992 MAGazine Volume 8 Number 4

The March General Meeting of the Memphis Amiga Group will be held Saturday, March, from 1:00 pm until approximately 3:00 pm in the New Auditorium on the campus State Technical Institute at Memphis.

The Art Contest:

• June 3D animation and artwork. Can be done with Imagine, Turbo Silver, videoscape, Pagerender 3D, and other 3D softwear.
• July Program generated animation and artwork. Can be done with digitized pictures, Scenery generator, Mandelbrot, Vistapro, etc.
• August Freehand animation and artwork. Can be done with Deluxe Paint, Digipaint, Disney studio, etc. Freehand art can only contain freehand drawing. Program generated and 3D art can mixed with freehand and others combined.

From the Presidents CLI

by Brian Akey

Don't forget our clubs "Art Contest" starting next June; we will be judging 3D animation and artwork. Mike Wallace has already showed us some unfinished but remarkable animation done in Image 2.0, I can't wait to see the final product.

This month we are showing "Productivity Programs". Top on the list is Final Copy and ProWrite; two promising word processors that everyone should take a good look at. Next month we will look at structured graphics programs, such as DynaCadd, XCad, Design Works, and Prodraw. In the following months to come, we will be showing how to use Deluxe Video III and AmigaVision; to help you with your own animations.

This month I am going to try my hand out at making disks for the club library. Finding stuff for the library is easy. The hard part is getting it all on stuff on one disk. This is not an easy job.

Also I have heard some rumors going around about a new machine called the Amiga 600.

Notes From the Editor:

by Larry Evans

This month I would like to talk about a few new subjects. First, If you have not already noticed, the MAGazine has started using advertisements; if you have a company and would like to advertise in this publication, give me a call. Also I found and article on DTP, some may say it's Amiga Bashing however, I agree 100% with what the author says. To let you in on a little secret I use an Atari Mega ST4 to edit this magazine. The Amiga is a fine machine but it not going any were in the DTP world if the softwear developers will not take advantage of it's power. That's where you come in, accept the fact that the Amiga is weak in DTP and let the developers know you want something better. Last, I am a big fan of strategy war games and multi-player aircraft combat simulations. I suggest if you like the same kind of game playing, we start an Amiga War Game SIG. Arcade games not allowed!

Meeting Schedule

MAG Meetings

The Memphis Amiga Group (MAG) holds general meetings the second saturday of each month in the Farris Auditorium on the campus of State Technical Institute at Memphis (see map at left).

There will be an officers lunch meeting at GRIDLEYS in the formal dining room beginning at 11:00am, Saturday, April 11 (before the general meeting). For more information call Brian Akey at (901) 377-1093.

Memphis Amiga Group Officers for 1992

President
Brian Akey
(901) 278-6354

Vice President
Donnie Webb
(901) 363-8025

Secretary
Raymond Ginn
(901) 353-4504

Treasurer
Micheal Cervetti
(901) 386-2584

Librarian
Ken Winfield
(901) 382-3339

MAGazine Editor
Larry Evans
(901) 383-1828

MAGazine Printing & Distribution
Terry A. Campbell
(601) 393-4864

Hardware Rentals

FutureSound audio digitizer kit - $1 per day
FrameGrabber OR SuperGen - $4 per day
(Hardware rentals are for Members Only)
A variety of Amiga specific videotapes are also available
from the club's hardware library.

Disk Sales

MAG library and Fred FISH disks are $2 each.
($5 each for non-members)
Quality blank disks with labels are 65¢ each.
($1 each for non-members)
For all this and more contact club librarian
Ken Winfield (901) 382-3339
OR see Ken at the next MAG general meeting.

Changes or Corrections

Please help me get accurate information on all members. If you know someone on the members list that we don't have complete information for, please let me know. Send full name and address information, updates, or changes to:

Larry Evans
5754 Riverhead Ave
Memphis TN. 38135

For Sale

Amiga 500 with Add Ram 540, RS1280 Modem, Panasonic 9 Pin printer, Color Monitor and RGB Converter. Will sale all for $500.00. Call 872-1831, ask for lenore.

Your Classified AD Here

Free of charge to members call,
write, or see in person

Larry Evans
MAGazine editor
5754 Riverhead Ave.
Memphis TN. 38135
(901) 383-1828

Classified Ads will run for one issue of MAGazine and then, if you want your AD to run again, you will need to get in touch with the MAGazine editor either at the meeting, by phone, or by mail. Thank you for your continued support.

Rumors and stuff

by Larry Evans

The following rumors ar just that ... rumors. Some say that I just make most of it up, but in fact, most of it comes from messages on GEnie. I often lift entire sentences and weave it all together, so that you get the most up-to-date, if not the most accurate of Amiga rumors. I would like to add that I will not be responsible for inaccuracies or mistakes. After all, this isn't Newsweek magazine you're reading.

Commodore will not verifiy the existence of the new high density disk drive (1.76meg capactiy) in a few select Amiga 3000 models. It gives you twice as much room as a normal disk drive and seems to work in all models. Someone with one of those select 3000's took the drive out and installed it in his 500 and the drive worked as it did in the 3000. So it seems that all that has to be replaced is the drive; that's one thing I wouldn't mind having. For those interested the drive part number, it is "Chinon FB-357A" and the Commodore model number is A3015.

At the Cebit show Commodore showed a new machine and the CD-Rom adapter for the 500. The CD-Rom adapter called the A570 turns your Amiga 500 into a CDTV. For those who don't know about the CDTV it allows you to play music just like your stereo CD player but it also acts as CD drive that holds 500+meg of data. That is enough room for an encyclopedia, reference library, some really cool games or anything else you can think of. The new machine is the Amiga 600 it is a down sized 500 without the number pad and it's a whole lot smaller. It is somewhere around the size of the old Commodore 64 and should sell for about $200.00 or so. It has all the same ports as the 500 and it comes with the new chip set, workbench 2.1, and RF and video composite output. It comes standard with 1meg installed and can be upgraded to 10meg total. There is a small slot on the back of the computer for a thing called a Flash-Ram; which is a credit card shaped device that works like a disk but has no moving parts. It can also be used as a cartridge port for instant loading of a program. It also has an IDE hard drive interface and room behind the 3.5" floppy disk drive for a 2.5" hard drive that you can currently get in sizes from 20-80meg. Not to shabby for a small computer.

Invotronics is shipping CanDo 1.6. I haven't gotten mine yet but some people out there have gotten theirs.

Checkmate is advertising a thing called the Avideo board that will allow any model Amiga to display 16million colors on all screen sizes up to 768 x 488, for about $600.00 or so.

Amiga BBS Boards

Changes or Corrections

Please help me get the accurate information on all BBS's. IF you know of a BBS that we don't have complete information for, or a BBS you would like to add to our list, please let me know. Send full name of BBS, location, phone number, baud rate, updates, or changes to:

Larry Evans
5754 Riverhead Ave.
Memphis TN. 38135

Fellow DTP-ers,

by John Wesley Starling

In reading the diatribe below, please bare in mind that I, it's author, have owned an Amiga 2000 for three years. These are not the railings of an outsider. Instead it is the plaintive cry of one who has been sorely abused, sorely abused by his so-called user-friendly Amiga. For those three years I've been complacent. I've telephoned and written polite letters to no avail. So now I strike back. And so should you! Remember that the Amiga is not an island market. Our machine must compete head to head against the Mac and PC. The Amiga may have the edge in video, but it really sucks for DTP. Dare you deny it? Read on. I defy one and all to refute the awful truths revealed below.

Wise up Amigans! You've grown complacent. Your knee jerk patriotism for the Amiga has left you mired in the mud with third-rate DTP software! Rise up! Write letters! Complain! Force the inbred Amiga DTP software companies to admit their shortcomings and make immediate reparations. Do you fear to alert the other guy's (Mac & PC'ers) to the Amiga's deficiencies? No fear there! They are all well aware of them. They laugh at us. They sneer at the Amiga. And who can blame them. We cannot hide our shame with denial. Instead, let us rise up and pound on the doors of Gold Disk and the rest and demand full featured DTP software. Only then will they take notice.

So you thought that Professional Page was full featured. Hah! Far from it. Compared to similar programs available for the Mac, PPage is like a stone ax beside a gleaming cutlass of Solingen steel. By no means does it merit the name 'Professional.' How professional can it be when it forbids access to the full Adobe Type 1 character set. How professional can it be when it forbids access to the full Adobe Type 1 character set. How professional can it be when you can't even make it give you balanced left and right quotation marks? Want to give your neighborhood typographer a really good laugh? Just show him a copy of .INFO magazine, which boasts of being typeset on the Amiga. See him laugh, see him cry. "How crude!", he'll say. "Where they ought to use en dashes and em dashes, the Amiga forces them to accpet hyphens!" Is this professional? Clearly not.

And let us not forget PDraw. Compare it to Adobe Illustrator, and you'll quickly learn just how much you've missed while sitting idle and complacent in Amiga's little corner of the DTP market. Just try and get a gradient fill out of Professional Page 2.0! Go ahead and try. Try this: run PDraw's auto-trace on a medium sized bitmap. Then save the trace as an EPS file. Then try to print it out on a PostScript printer. It will crash! Want to know why? It's because PDraw doesn't even know enough to limit the number of bezier points on any given object to PostScript's well published upper limit. Is this professional? No, it is not.

Is SaxonScript Pro a professional PostScript interpreter? Hardly. This one is a real looser. It packs some otherwise very high end features together with a truly ugly major flaw. SaxonScript Pro is forever stuck using ONLY virtual memory. It has no capacity to sense the availability of extend RAM. Even if you have 9 MB of fast RAM and 32MB of static RAM, SaxonScript Pro doesn't care, it will still insist on thrashing your hard disk for a full ten to fifteen minutes just to print a single page of orinary text! Most unprofessional.

Lastly, and most importantly, let us compare font utilities. Below is a list of just the actual FONT EDITING programs available for other platforms as listed in the January issue of Publish magazine, a magazine dedicated solely and only to DTP and without any great single-platform loyalties. Remember, this is a list of the font editing programs only. Not included are the many ones for special effects or family management.

For the Mac:

ATF Type Designer 1, Fontastic Plus, Fontographer, Fontliner, FontMonger, FontStudio 2.0, Ikarus M, KernData Premade Kerning Tables, KernEdit Kerning Pair Editor, LetraStudio 2.0, LetrTuck+, Linus M, Metamorphosis Professional.

For the PC:

AllType, Digi-edit!, Digi-kern!, ElixiFont, FontGen Five, FontMonger, FonTrix, PC MetaFont, Publisher's Powerpack for Windows, Publisher's Type Fountdry, Softcraft Fonty Editor, Text Appeal for Windows 1.0, The EXP Font Development Kit.

You will note that several of these programs will create and edit whole new PostScript Type 1 outline fonts from scratch. How sad, how embarrassing that nothing like these are available for the Amiga, not at any price. What do we get instead? All we get is Personal Fonts Designer for old fashioned obsolete bitmap fonts! That and MIfont, that tiny little utility for one-way conversion which only lets us beg a few worn-out public domain font castoffs from the lucky Macintosh crowd. How sad indeed. Is this all that we Amigans deserve? Is that the most that we can expect from our oh-so-lauded high-tech graphics-oriented machine? I think not. The reason why professional journals of electronic imaging and typography ignore the Amiga is because it truly is not worthy of their attention. Their bias comes not out of ignorance, but of knowledge.

What do you think? Are you satisfied with the meagre offerings doled out to us DTP Amigans. Is the Amiga just for vidiots? Are you willing to keep on using the Amiga's third-rate DTP software without ever voicing a complaint? I'm not. I'd like to say that the Amiga is the shining star of the DTP world. I'd like to; but I can't. The sad truth is that our beloved game machine is a joke when it comes to really professional DTP work.

Well, I'll tell you. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more! I'm going to write every single computer related publication, be it for the Amiga, Mac, PC, DTP, you name it. I'm going to write and complain for all I'm worth until the stone age Amiga DTP software companies do right by us. Don't let me do it alone. Embarrass them publicly until they give in. Don't stand still for mediocrity.

DON'T SETTLE FOR LESS. DEMAND THE BEST.

Allow no complacency in Amigaland. If you know a complacent Amigan, rub his nose in the awful truth. Show him something from the Macintosh. Make him weep with despair. Make him feel like I do. Make him green with envy for the lucky Macintoshers. Make him see the truth. It'll do him good.

Read my hate-letter in the January edition of Publish magazine. This shall be the first in but a long series of Amiga-bashing articles which I shall make it my hobby to fire off monthly to computer magazines around the world. Join my crusade. How else shall we get what we deserve. Rise up Amigans. Rise up and wise up! Let us not be silenced until we get full satisfaction. I am Amigan, hear me whine. Give me the breve character or give me a Macintosh.

Unhappily,
John Wesley Starling
CompuServe 70642,736

FIGHTER DUEL Corsair vs. Zero

If you are tired of mindless Shot'em-up games, you may what to try the latest technological breakthrough in amiga flight simulation, from Jaeger Software, Inc. Fighter Duel is a true flight simulator with accurate and complete aerodynamic modelling. The flight performances of both the Corsair and Zero are realistic whether you pilot the aircraft or fly against them. The two player mode (1200, 2400 baud modem or direct connection) performs at full speed. Figher Duel features technological breakthroughs in frame rate, screen resolution and playability. At a fast 28 frames/sec, FD flies circles around its competition. Making this rate even more astonishing is the fact that its only display mode is high resolution INTERLACED, which means each frame contains four times the amount of screen information displayed in other simulators. This adds clarity and smoothness to the outside view and instrumentation. Plus, FD draws aircraft with bitmaps rather than polygons for precise rendering, even down to the smallest image. FD has been tested successfully on the entire Amiga line through the 3000T and representative accelerator boards through the 68040 and is AmigaDos 2.0 compatible.

Final Copy

This is the newest wordprocessor on the market and it is some kind of great. I've always liked the Amiga because it did more then just productivity programs, it had graphics. Final Copy lets you include graphics with yours words and it has all kinds of modes; it even allows you to contour text around an odd shaped graphic. The amiga has always worked wonders on video titles, I use saveiff to grab final copy screens and transfer them into Deluxe Paint where I take the text out of the menus. (Looks great). Next, Final copy uses only it's own outlined fonts. The fonts are fast and smooth, however, the fonts must be designed for final copy. Final copy works on an Amiga 500 with 1meg and 2 disk drives and it gives you all the wordprocessing of any wordprocessors on any computer. I must admit that on other wordprocessor on any computer has really excited me as much, as Final copy has.

"FROM THE SECRETARIAL POOL"

by Raymond Ginn

Welcome to the premier article of "From the Secretarial Pool". In this article I will tell you what happened at the last meeting. Sort of like MAG trivia. Well I hope you enjoy this "trivia" and if you do miss a meeting, you won't miss the highlights. The March meeting went real well, we had 38 members present and 3 new members join us. Disk sales reached $190.00. Which reminds me what our librarian said and I paraphrase his quote "your support on disk sales and hardware rentals support the club in that it gives the club money to purchase the hardware and upgrades that we need". Your input will help us decide what purchases are made: remember this is YOUR club, support it! Our March meeting was on GAMES. I know we Amigans are trying to drop our association as just a game machine. But don't we have the greastest computer for graphics, sound, speed, and overall performance that comes on a "stock" computer? So why not enjoy this superior ability for having fun. I know that every Amiga owner has at least one game in their library! We had three games reviewed at last months meeting, they were "Fantastic Voyage", "Leander", and "Greens". It is great to see these 3rd party developers pushing the Amiga to its limits and using every part of this computer to produce the top quality programs that we Amigans have come to enjoy and expect. Not only in games, but in productivity as well. The theme of our April meeting will be on PRODUCTIVITY, we will even see a demo on "final Copy". So bring your questions and comments to this months meeting. We'll see ya there! Don't forget the art contests coming up in the next couple of months. These will include 2D and 3D stills, and 2D and 3D animations. So boot up your favorite drawing program, put on your thinking cap, and let your totally awesome computer do the rest. Good luck and happy computing. This is your secretary, sunning and swimming in "The Secretarial Pool".

FROM THE MIDNIGHT REVIEWER....

Out of this World is one of the most unusual games I have seen in a long time. Interplay has developed a system that use polygraph figures to make entire games. The graphics have very realistic movements and are very smooth. However, the graphics are flat 2-D with very little detail. The game revolves around a scientist (you) working on an experiment when something goes wrong. The result of this mishap is that you are thrown to another planet just full of creatures wanting to kill you. The gameplay is simple, just survive as long as you can. You have only one life and no option to save. There is however, codes to help you go back to the general area where you last died. And die you will, many times, in most cases death is the only way to find out the correct way to clear a screen. This game has many of the characteristics of The Dragon's lair series, in that a certain set of moves at the correct time is the only way to clear a level. However, it does give you a few more options than did the DL series. After reading the reviews in some of the major magazines and how much they loved this game I went back to check if we were talking about the same game. The games graphics are flat and almost have no color, the gameplay is limited and very difficult to control. Not being able to save means you are forced to go back to where that level or section begins. Also, make sure you load the game about 10 minutes before you want to play because there is no way to bypass the intro, and the code wheel protection is frustrating and difficult to figure out. Still the look of the game is new, the movement of the charters is smooth, and it will run under 2.0 and from a hard drive. Some of the puzzles to get off screens are interesting and require you to use the thought process. This is a game you need to see before you buy, some will think it is a great game others will think it is awful.

Midnight has spoken....

Midnight rating....76

Dues Notice

Dues must be paid at or before the General Meeting of your EXPIRE date. If paid on or before this time, the renewal rate is $15 for the year. If you wait past the General Meeting (second saturday of each month), you will be dropped and must renew at the new member rate of $20 for the year.

Please pay at the General Meeting or send dues to:

MAG Dues
c/o Michael Cervetti
(901) 386-2584

Financial Report for the Memphis Amiga Group April, 1992

MEMPHIS AMIGA GROUP APRIL 11, 1992