@database "ar322.guide" @Node MAIN "Amiga Report Online Magazine #3.22 -- December 18, 1995" =========================================================================== December 18, 1995 @{" Turn the Page " link MENU} Issue No. 3.22 =========================================================================== ,a c4%&; 1%%%b 9%=~ " m; mmmm; nmm mmmmm .,pmq,. m; j#6 ##6 j### ### ,#'~ ~`g, j#6 ##&; ##&; #### ### ,#f `# ##&; jP##6 ###6 jP### ### .##' " jP##6 #'$#&; #$#&; #'### ### i## #'$#&; jP l##6 #l##6 jP ### ### &## jP l##6 #' $#&; # $#&;#' ### ### &## #' $#&; j#mmmd##6 # l##6P ### ### ?## mmmw j#mmmd##6 #' $#&; # $##' ### ### ##; $#$ #' $#&; jP l##6 # l#P ### ### `#l ,&#'jP l##6 #' ###mm # $' mm###mm mm###mm `#q,.,p#' #' ###mm (R) "~^~" &&&&q, , ,P `b d' tm d' ,P d&&&P ;P .,d' ,c&&q, &&&&q, ,c&&q, q&,e&q ;P' d&&&P ;P' `& d' `b ;P' `b dP~ `P d' ;P'`&; dB&&&&P ;P ,P d' P ;P ;P d' `&; &, , d' .,d' &, .,d' d' d' , &&& &&'`&&&P' ;B&&&P' `&&&P' &&& `&P' d' ;P &&& "THE Online Source for Amiga Information!" Copyright 1995 FS Publications All Rights Reserved @endnode @node MENU "Amiga Report Main Menu" @toc MAIN =========================================================================== == Main Menu == =========================================================================== @{" Editorial and Opinion " link OPINION} @{" Featured Articles " link FEATURE} @{" Reviews " link REVIEW} @{" News & Press Releases " link NEWS} @{" Aminet Charts " link FTP} @{" Reader Mail " link MAIL} --------------------------------- @{" About AMIGA REPORT " link ABOUT} @{" Dealer Directory " link DEALER} Contact Information and Copyrights Amiga Dealer Addresses and Numbers @{" Where to Get AR " link WHERE} @{" Advertisements " link COMMERCIAL} Mailing List & Distribution Sites Online Services, Dealers, Ordering ______________________________________________ // | | // ========//====| Amiga Report International Online Magazine |======//===== == \\// | Issue No. 3.22 December 18, 1995 | \\// == ==============| "THE Online Source for Amiga Information!" |============= |______________________________________________| @endnode @node JASON "Editor" @toc STAFF =========================================================================== EDITOR =========================================================================== Jason Compton ============= Internet Address -------- ------- jcompton@shell.portal.com 1203 Alexander Ave jcompton@xnet.com Streamwood, IL 60107-3003 USA Fax Phone --- ----- 708/741-0689 708/289-7047 @endnode @node KATIE "Assistant Editor" @toc STAFF =========================================================================== == ASSISTANT EDITOR == =========================================================================== Katherine Nelson ================ Internet -------- Kati@cup.portal.com @endnode @node ROBERT "Senior Editor" @toc STAFF =========================================================================== SENIOR EDITOR =========================================================================== Robert Niles ============ Internet Address -------- ------- rniles@Wolfe.NET 506 W. Orchard Selah, WA 98942 FidoNet Fax ------- --- 1:3407/103 509/697-5064 @endnode @node WILLIAM "Contributing Editor" @toc STAFF =========================================================================== CONTRIBUTING EDITOR =========================================================================== William Near ============ Internet -------- wnear@epix.net @endnode @node ADDISON "Contributing Editor" @toc STAFF =========================================================================== CONTRIBUTING EDITOR =========================================================================== Addison Laurent =============== Internet -------- addison@jobe.shell.portal.com @endnode @node EDITORIAL "compt.sys.editor.desk" @toc OPINION =========================================================================== compt.sys.editor.desk By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== I'm not sure I'd want to spend all of my weekends this way, but every now and then it would really be nice. WOA Toronto brought thousands of Amiga fans and users together over three days, in what was a very positively charged atmosphere. Some veterans of the '93 show pointed to the considerably more upbeat mood. In December '93, Commodore was well on the road to collapse and many were simply hoping the shoe wouldn't drop. Now, the dismal times are behind us and the focus is on creating a better marketplace for the Amiga and Amiga products. We (Katie and I) apparently brought the bad weather of Chicago with us to Toronto, ruining everyone's beautiful Thursday with bitter cold and snow Friday night. But the show went on anyway. Here we are, December 1995. Last year at this time, we'd already missed several "deadlines" for the Commodore resolution and were shaking our heads at the "missed Christmas season." This year, the Christmas season has Amiga 1200s being sold in quantity throughout Europe, as 4000Ts ship from SMG to dealers across North America. A much merrier Christmas, indeed. Nope, Amiga Technologies won't break any Commodore sales records this year, excepting the 4000T, a product Commodore never actually sold in appreciable quantities. But they have done what many thought was impossible. They've rescued the Amiga from Commodore and are taking it to a new processor. Sure, people will continue to be critical of some of their policies. But the opportunity never presented itself for me to shake the CEO of Commodore's hand. But I've met Petro. The look in his eyes told me he really does care about this Amiga thing that is important enough, for whatever reason, for all of us to still be here, making a difference, rather than a rank-and-file member of The Rest Of Computing. After all, it had to take considerable courage to leave a job as head of production for a large PC manufacturer to take on the Amiga gamble, but he did it. Amiga Tech deserves to be told when they're making mistakes. But they also deserve to be encouraged for what goes right, as do the other companies in the Amiga market who make it the place it is. For this Christmas season, why not call up your favorite Amiga dealer, manufacturer, or distributor and thank them for their support? I'd like to thank all of you thousands upon thousands of readers for yours. Without your support and interest, there would be no Amiga Report worth speaking of. Thanks for letting us make a difference. Jason @endnode @node COMMERCIAL "Commercial Products" @toc MENU =========================================================================== Commercial Products =========================================================================== @{" Editor's Choice " link EDITORCHOICE} Jason's picks @{" Portal Information Systems " link PORTAL} A great place for Amiga users. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- @{" Opinion " link OPINION} @{" News " link NEWS} @{" Articles " link FEATURE} @{" Reviews " link REVIEW} @{" Charts " link FTP} @endnode @node MAIL "Reader Mail" @toc MENU =========================================================================== Reader Mail =========================================================================== From mlanza@southern.co.nz Wed Dec 13 23:45 CST 1995 Since writing the Amiga POP Client "GetMail" and the SMTP Client "PutMail" I have been swamped with "thank you" EMail messages. Unfortunately due to my occupation in the DP field and the pressures of work I have had to drop my after hours hobby, namely playing with the Amiga. I simply did not have enough time to play with two (some times three) different hardware & OS combinations. However, I have not as yet sold my Amiga 3000 and I am getting quite a large number of requests for enhancements, additionally GetMail often crashes A1200's when exiting. I have therefore decided to do some more work on these utilities over the Xmas period (I have to reinstall the OS, AmiTCP and my Compiler which will impose a slight delay). I would very much appreciate it if you could communicate a few points to your readers. 1) I welcome bug reports and enhancement requests for the next three/four weeks. 1) New releases of PutMail & GetMail will be available in the third week of January. Modifications planned are as follows. - New parameter to include local host name in From: address, Yes/No. - Optional progress indicator (in a window) for large UUEncoded files. - Fix the GetMail Exit Crash on A1200's running WB3. - More robust initial HELO handshake with the host. - More robust message header processing. - PutMail to process multiple files (maybe). Known problems, unsure of details and how to resolve them. - Can't find the ENV:HostName variable ? (Not very common) - Incompatible with Net3 ? (Dunno anything about Net3) 2) GetMail & PutMail are in the public domain. The full source code can be obtained from; ftp.netnet.net/pub/aminet/tcp/mail PutMailSRC.lha and GetMailSRC.lha 3) The next release of these programs will be my final release. (Hopefully other people will support and maintain them though) Many thanks to all those who sent me EMail thankyou messages. Many thanks to Jason and his staff for doing such a great job! Best Regards to the Amiga Community, Martin V Lanza, mlanza@southern.co.nz. --- --- --- --- --- --- --- From: Ryan Paque Date: Mon, 11 Dec 95 13:09:11 -800 To: jcompton@xnet.com I would just like to thank all the writers of Amiga Report for providing the Amiga community with a reliable and consistant source of information. Without you guys, I'd be stuck out in limbo and probably would have ended up jumping ship. Being the sysop of the only public Amiga-run BBS left here in Milwaukee, WI sort of cuts me off from the rest of the world. I'm probably one of the few Amiga users in the United States that has "local" access to an Amiga dealer (Safe Harbor Computers) but so far, Amiga Report is the only place that I have heard anything about the Power Amiga systems (well, here and the AT home page, but that's besides the point...). I truly hope that Amiga Tech. can bring the Amiga back to some power again. I don't have delusions of masses of humanity throwing off the shackles of Microsoft and converting to Amiga, but I think that it definately deserves much more position in the market than it currently has. Hopefully the base configurations for the Power machines will be comparable to what the PC world has to offer. I'm sure this would never happen, but I think the best ploy AT could come up with to sell the machines would be to somehow include a fast harware IBM emulater and a fast hardware Macintosh emulator and then write some code into the OS so that you can run anything you stick in the drive without even knowing what it is (besides maybe a telltale light on the menu bar or something similar). Fantasy, I know... But isn't that what makes most Amiga users unique? Not to slight anybody else in computer world, but it takes a certain mindset to go out and buy a computer that isn't among those pushed on you from every direction. Despite what everyone keeps telling me, the only thing that I use these IBMs and Macs at school for (besides my classwork) is NetScape. The Amiga needs something like this all nice and bundled in one package. Hunting around for 500 billion seperate programs and then trying to get them to talk to each other is not only time consuming, but also nerve wracking. (Hint Hint, Amiga Tech). Well, this was a bit longer than I originally intended, but its not often that I get to communicate with Amiga users who actually know something, besides the few regulars on FidoNet. Lately all I've been doing is arguing with some rich guy about why I don't need to change the BBS from an Amiga to an IBM... If it dies, I'll obviously have to, but until then, my trusty A500 and the BBS' A2000 will have the place of honor. Keep up the good work guys! @endnode @node OPINION1 "The Amiga in Luxembourg" @toc OPINION =========================================================================== The Amiga in Luxembourg (alternative title: Am I the only fool?) Christian Kemp ckemp@innet.lu =========================================================================== Please excuse my bad English, but it's the fourth language I (have to) learn. So the Amiga is on sale again. This is, of course, very nice for Germany and other big countries. But small countries are, just like in the bad old Commodore times, ignored. Okay, I admit that the weekly Amiga sales in Germany are higher than yearly sales in a small country, IF Amigas were sold there. Yes, you understood the above correctly, at the time of writing this text there is NO Amiga dealer in Luxembourg. The nearest store is over 200 kilometres away! There is absolutely no support for the Amiga, anytime I mention that I'm (still) using an Amiga I get reactions like "oh yeah, that game computer" or simply puzzlement, because they can't imagine that someone here is still using an Amiga. The domination of the clones is nearly perfect, but I think that the Amiga wouldn't sell that bad here either. A lot of people are still using a 286 or 386 and they are thinking of buying a new computer. This would be *the* chance for Amiga Technologies to make the Amiga more well-known (and respected) again by selling a medium-range Amiga with built-in Internet access and some good advertising, stating that the Amiga is far easier to use and much better for the Internet... However advertising is, as it seems, completely out of question. If Amiga Technologies don't want to invest money in small countries, the least they could do would be to give the remaining Amiga users here in Luxembourg, or other small countries, the chance to have their favorite computer repaired by qualified technicians and they could give them the possibility to order from a local shop, or through a local telephone number a new model or product information. Do not hesitate to contact me at the E-Mail address mentioned above if you have more questions or if you are from Luxembourg. @endnode @node NEWS1 "Aminet Set 2" @toc NEWS TITLE Aminet Set 2 - The complete Aminet since Set 1 on four new CDs AUTHOR Urban D. Mueller (umueller@wuarchive.wustl.edu) CONTENTS Aminet Set 2 contains close to 4 gigabytes (when uncompressed) of freely distributable Amiga software on 4 newly mastered CDs. There are more than 12.000 archives from the following categories: 3000 Mods (directly playable) 2000 Demos (directly startable) 2000 Images (directly viewable) 800 Documents (directly readable) 500 Games (directly startable) 1000 Communications programs 2000 Utilities and applications ...and more. Aminet Set 2 contains all the Aminet data found on Aminet CD 5 to 8 plus 750M of software that was on none of these. 280M of the software are newer than Aminet 8 and 200M of electronic books were included. Only 150M were already found on Aminet Set 1. USER INTERFACE As an alternative to the well known Amigaguide based user interface you can now use the directory utility 'Filer' which comes in a registered version on the CD. As usual, an index of all 4 CDs is found on each of the CDs, and a fast facility to search all readmes on all disks exists. A registered version of DeliTracker is used to play the modules. PRICES The CD can be ordered from the following addresses: (credit cards OK) Germany: Stefan Ossowski (English spoken) Tel: +49-201-788778 Fax: +49-201-798447 Email: stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de Price: DM 59 USA: Fred Fish Tel: +1-602-491-0442 Email: orders@amigalib.com Price: $39.95 Prices exclude shipping. A complete index of Set 2 can be found in the file docs/lists/Aminet-Set-2.lha on any Aminet site. Aminet Set 1 (the complete Aminet as of Jan 95 on 4 CDs) is still available and forms, together with Set 2, a complete snapshot of Aminet. @endnode @node NEWS2 "RevUp v1.3" @toc NEWS TITLE RevUp VERSION 1.3 (17.11.95) PROXITY SOFTWORKS Proxity Engineering and Technical Support Usenet: pets@amiuni.tynet.sub.org Fidonet: 2:246/1416.0 (pets) AUTHOR Boris Folgmann Address: Friedrichstrasse 7 71546 Aspach Germany Usenet: Internet: WWW: Fidonet: 2:246/1416.41 (Boris) IRC: PRX PGP Fingerprint: 82 84 70 38 26 5E 50 5A 9C DB CA CA 62 0A 31 52 Phone: ++49-(0)7191-23439 Fax: ++49-(0)7191-2604 DESCRIPTION RevUp manages version strings following the Amiga standard for including in own programs, e.g. '$VER: YourTool 2.4 (11.9.95)'. It's a must for every serious C, Oberon or Assembler programmer, so have a look at it! Your makefiles together with RevUp will do all the work for you. RevUp {} [REV ] [BETA] [C] [ASM] [OBERON] [LOG] [EXTRA] [ENVVAR] [TINY] Required: VERSION : Version number. PROJECTNAME : Basename to use for all RevUp files. DEPENDENCIES: Files which dates are checked. Optional: REV : Explicit revision number. BETA : Generate beta information. C : Generate C headerfile (default). ASM : Generate Assembly includefile. OBERON: Generate Oberon definition module. LOG : Interactively add history info to logfile. EXTRA : Generate extra information. ENVVAR: Set envvar for archive naming. TINY : Don't print credits. EXAMPLE > RevUp 1 SuperTool EXTRA generates SuperTool_rev.h: /* C headerfile generated by RevUp 1.3 */ #define VERSION 1 #define REVISION 1 #define DATE "12.7.95" #define VERS "SuperTool 1.1" #define VSTRING "SuperTool 1.1 (12.7.95)\\r\\n" #define VERSTAG "\\0$VER: SuperTool 1.1 (12.7.95)" #define TIME "14:57:51" #define PRGNAME "SuperTool" #define BASENAME "SUPERTOOL" #define VSTR "SuperTool 1.1 (12.7.95)" #define USER "boris" #define HOST "prox" User and Host are imported from environment variables. FEATURES o RevUp generates and maintains include and header files with revision information. o Basically RevUp is similar to the developer tool BumpRev, but it offers a lot of additional features. o ANSI-C, Oberon and Assembly language supported. o Multiple dependency files. o Beta count management for beta versions included. o Interactive logfile generation. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS Kickstart 2.04 Workbench 2.0 Workbench 2.1 for localized DOS error messages. AVAILABILITY PRICE Free DISTRIBUTABILITY Freeware (C) 1994-1995 by Proxity Softworks @endnode @node FEATURE7 "BLAZEMONGER Port" @toc FEATURE FOR IMMODERATE RELEASE ESCOM AND BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED TO PORT FAMED COMPUTER GAME TO POWERPC PLATFORM MUI 3.1-Based Port Shocks Computer World Chickenmilk, WI -- December 1, 1995 -- BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED, creator of the ultra-violent BLAZEMONGER (TM) series of games, announced today that the next version will run on the Power Amiga, Escom's upcoming PowerPC-based computer. "Yes, we're aware that the computer doesn't exist yet," said Bobby Blazebleeder, First Programmer and Death Lord of BLAZEMONGER INC. "That's never stopped us before. We'll be finished in about three hours. Then it will be Amiga Technologies' job to catch up." The updated program, "BLAZEMONGER 961" (subtitled "Return of the Skin-Peeling Kitchen Utensils of Fate") will feature the company's trademarked cataract-inducing graphics, eardrum-piercing sound, and the latest new development, "ScentSurround." Loosely based on the similarly-named movie theater gimmick from the 1970's ("Sensurround" would shake movie viewers' chairs at appropriate moments), the "ScentSurround" system connects a thin tube from the Amiga's external floppy port to the user's nose and mouth. At crucial points in the game, top-secret chemicals are sprayed into the user's nasal passages. "You should see what people do when they inhale dragon pheremones," said Blazebleeder. "No, on second thought, you shouldn't." Even stranger is BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED's announcement that the next version of BLAZEMONGER will be based on MUI 3.1. "I can't believe it," said a stunned Harv Laser, Emperor-For-Life of the Amiga Zone on Portal. "Who... who would have suspected that BLAZEMONGER's ultimate programmers needed a GUI builder to help them code? Sigh. I have lost all my faith in life and will probably sell my body to Atari for spare parts." Jim Drew of Utilities Unlimited was quick to confirm that BLAZEMONGER would definitely run under the "Q" operating system as well. (Rumor has it that "Q" is based, at least in part, on disassembled BLAZEMONGER code.) Other industry pundits take a harsher view. "I predicted over twelve billion years ago that this would happen," chortled Mork Bannett, editor-in-chief of "The Rag-On-Commodore Rag." "Blazemonger is a big phony. I don't even think it exists, and here is proof." Unfortunately, our interview was cut short by the timely arrival of the BLAZEMONGER "Customer Service" department. But it appears that BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED may have the last thousand-decibel laugh after all. "Those WIMPFACE industry 'pundits' are scared of their own 3-D shadows," said Blazebleeder. "'MUI' is really the code name for our own, homebrew user-interface builder, MUTILATION USER INTERFACE. It is far more powerful and MUCH more violent than the 'other' MUI, MagicUserInterface by Stefan Stuntz. You want configurability? MUTILATION USER INTERFACE lets you configure not only the appearance, size, and location of every monster in BLAZEMONGER, but also the speed, memory size, and number of processors in your computer! Just set the tooltype 'PROCESSORS=64000' and you basically have a Connection Machine supercomputer for under a thousand dollars." Escom is reportedly "pleased" about its new association with BLAZEMONGER INCORPORATED. "They're pretty clever d00dz," said Dr. Peter Kittel, Vice-President of Small, Furry Mammals at Amiga Technologies. "Their developers located a serious bug that we'd missed in our beta version of AmigaDOS 4.0. Rather than fix it, though, they actually rewrote the REST of the operating system to turn the bug into a feature! That takes GUTS, not to mention serious mental derangement." Watch for "BLAZEMONGER 961" coming soon to a dealer near you! Dan //////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Dan Barrett -- Computer Science Dept, University of MA, Amherst, MA 01003 | | http://www.cs.umass.edu/~barrett/public.html -- barrett@cs.umass.edu | \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\///////////////////////////////////// --- Copyright 1995 by Daniel J. Barrett. All rights reserved. This article may be freely distributed as long as it is distributed in its entirety. It may not be included in any publication without the written permission of the author. So nyaaah. @endnode @node NEWS4 "Datastore 2.0" @toc NEWS DIGITA AND SOFT-LOGIK ANNOUNCE DATASTORE 2.0 (St. Louis) Soft-Logik Publishing is pleased to announce the North American release of Digita Datastore 2.0. This is a feature update to Datastore 1.1 and will be available in December. Datastore is a personal non-relational database manager. It comes with EasyStart Templates(tm) to get users started quickly, and also has extensive online help. Datastore features mail-merge with Wordworth, forms with text and graphics, sophisticated queries and a Navigator with VCR-style controls. The new features in 2.0 are: Non-editable list view (allowing a screen full of records to be viewed) with disjointed selection of records; Manual selective queries with Hide Current Record, Switch Hidden Records, and Show All Records menu commands; Modeless Find requester; Print on-screen records; Print Setup requester; Improved speed; Wordworth label templates and instructions for easy mail merging with Wordworth. Datastore 2.0 is available as a disk upgrade for $25 directly from Soft-Logik. The suggested retail price is $140. Owners of other Soft-Logik programs may order it directly from Soft-Logik for $75. Owners of Softwood's Final Data may order it directly from Soft-Logik for only $65. Soft-Logik Publishing today released Datastore 1.1. This maintenance update to Datastore 1.0 includes minor bug fixes. It is intended for those customers who choose not to upgrade to Datastore 2.0. An online patch from the 1.0 North American version to the 1.1 North American version will be available soon. Updates via disk are also available on request for a nominal disk charge of $10. Datastore 1.0 was awarded 88%% by Amiga Format and 91%% by Amiga Shopper. Digita International is the leading publisher of Amiga productivity software in Europe and Soft-Logik Publishing is the leading publisher of Amiga productivity software in North America. Soft-Logik sells and supports Digita's Wordworth, Datastore and Organizer in the United States and Canada, while Digita International(R) sells them in other countries. @endnode @node NEWS5 "Olaf Barthel Hired By Amiga Technologies" @toc NEWS From: c621412@gold.missouri.edu (Russ 'Argel' LeBar) Subject: Olaf Barthel hired by AT!! Date: 4 Dec 1995 04:53:26 GMT [Originally posted to comp.sys.amiga.misc, one of Term's betatesters explains some of the details of Olaf Barthel's employment by Amiga Technologies. -Jason] Olaf Barthel was hired as some type of programming consultant to AT about 2-3 weeks ago to, I believe, work on the new AmigaOS. I knew about this, but really didn't know if he wanted it public knowledge, but, well, he said that he not only didn't care if al of you found out about it, but that since AT isn't collecting opinions, he just might... Now, don't go flooding his mailbox (especially not with "use MUI" stuff). To anyone who's worried because 'term' is a huge monster, Olaf Barthel has learned A LOT from making term - he won't make the same mistake twice. (Think of it this way - he's gotten most of the mistakes out of the way already :-) In my opinion, this is a very good thing - I *know* Olaf knows the OS inside/out and he listens to ideas. A very good combination for what will hopefully be a very bright future for the amiga. Olaf, if you're reading this, good luck, and remember, you asked for it! ;-) --- --- --- --- --- --- --- From: "Olaf Barthel" Date: Sun, 10 Dec 95 12:43:51 +0100 [After the announcement of his hiring, Olaf Barthel publicly cleared up the details of his employment with Amiga Technologies. -Jason] Thank you for the many friendly comments following Russell's announcement. I do not want to burst a bubble, regarding my position please do not expect too much too soon. I am an `external' programmer with a consulting contract. In this context `external' means that I am not based in Bensheim, home of Amiga Technologies GmbH. Specifically, a few development projects were handed over to me and other programmers (yes, I am not alone), but these did not yet cover designing a new operating system, let alone applying changes or fixing bugs. Mark the "not yet" well, please. Since I do my work at home I do not have as much insight into the development at Bensheim and thus am not as well- informed as I would want to be. All this boils down to that I am not in a decision-making position (some apparently were lead to be believe that I now occupy Dr. Peter Kittel's position ;) nor doing operating system development at the moment. As for the AmigOS project, I used to sign up with it as a design coordinator. Due to my own fault, I lost this position due to lack of presence. I regret that I could not devote the time to it that would have been appropriate. As far as I can tell, there exists no connection between the project and the AT department responsible for R&D. Russell mentioned that I would be collecting bug reports and enhancement requests for the operating system and Workbench contents. Amiga Technologies is not yet doing this via electronic mail, but services to take care of this are bound to be established as soon as the new Amiga Developer Support Program is in operation. Until then, I offer to collect your suggestions and bug reports via electronic mail on my private home site. This will be tough, as I am receiving mail and news via modem, sourcery is not directly hooked up to the Internet, so please be as brief as possible. Please send your enhancement requests and bug reports regarding the Amiga operating system releases v2.04 through v3.1 to the following address: bugs@sourcery.han.de Please be as brief as possible, sourcery is a private site which is not directly connected to the Internet. The information collected will be handed over to the R&D department at Amiga Technologies GmbH. In the near future, this service will be replaced by a similar service offered by Amiga Technologies GmbH, please monitor comp.sys.amiga.announce to know about it. When you send your requests and reports, please use the tool "Report" to generate report forms. You can find this tool on Aminet under "util/misc/Report.lha" or in the 3.1 Native Developer Kit on the "3.1_SWToolkit" disk. Oh dear, I hope I am not going to regret this. -- Home: Olaf Barthel, Brabeckstrasse 35, D-30559 Hannover Net: olsen@sourcery.han.de @endnode @node NEWS6 "Nova Design Launches WWW Site" @toc NEWS Nova Design, Inc. Launches World Wide Web Site For Immediate Release Friday, December 08, 1995 Contact: Bob Fisher Nova Design, Inc. 804-282-5868 Richmond, VA - December, 95. Nova Design, Inc. has now increased their presence on the Internet dramatically with the opening of their World Wide Web site to the public. This exciting new web site gives users, and future users, of Nova Design's products a totally new and interactive access for product information, press releases, and product support. In keeping with Nova Design's position as a cutting-edge graphics software company, the web page features a state-of-the-art graphical interface, while retaining full access capabilities for those limited to text based interfaces. The site is compatible with Netscape(tm), yet retains backwards compatibility to Mosaic(tm)-style browsers. Information currently available online includes all of Nova Design's recent press releases, complete product information, ImageFX(tm) generated graphics demonstrating many astounding special effects, information and tips on using ImageFX, interactive areas for the press and end users to post questions and comments, as well as links to Amiga web sites and other web sites throughout the world. To reach and enjoy the web page site, use the following URL (Universal Resource Locator): http://www.portal.com/~kermit If you have additional questions or information, you may use the email links on the Web site to reach Nova Design, or you may contact us at our real-world address shown below. Nova Design, Inc., 1910 Byrd Avenue, Suite 214, Richmond, VA 23230. For customer support or information call (804) 282-6528, or fax us at; (804) 282-3768. ImageFX, PaintFX, AutoFX, CineMorph and Cinematte are trademarks of Nova Design, Inc. All other trademarks are held by their respective owners. @endnode @node NEWS7 "Personal Paint 6.4" @toc NEWS PRESS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE December 8, 1995 PRESS CONTACT: Ellen Kazmaier tel: 314-256-9595; fax: 314-256-9595 SOFT-LOGIK ANNOUNCES PERSONAL PAINT FOR NORTH AMERICA (St. Louis) Soft-Logik Publishing is pleased to announce the North American release of Personal Paint 6.4. This is the first Soft-Logik release of Personal Paint. Personal Paint 6.4 is an easy-to-use paint program that comes with stunning effects and animation capabilities. It has the paint features Amiga users have come to expect including line, ellipse, rectangle, polygon, freehand, Bezier curve, fill and spray tools. Personal Paint also features multiple clipboards, multiple undo and redo, built-in virtual memory, gradient fills, and alpha channel. It has special effects including emboss, water colors, and stereograms. In contrast to competing programs, Personal Paint supports AmigaOS datatypes, JPEG, PCX, PNG and other image formats. Its animation features include a storyboard, frame timing, multiple palettes, and animbrushes. Personal Paint supports Anim5 (Deluxe Paint), Anim7 (Adorage) and Anim8 formats. It requires at least 1MB of memory and AmigaOS 1.3 or later, but does not require a hard drive. All screen modes are supported, and it can quickly convert 24 bit, HAM and HAM8 to 256 colors for easy editing. It is compatible with many graphic cards, including EGS, Picasso, Piccolo, Retina and Rainbow. Personal Paint was developed by Cloanto of Italy, and is now published worldwide by Digita International. As with other Digita products, Soft-Logik is distributing Personal Paint 6.4 in North America. The suggested retail price is $140. Owners of other Soft-Logik programs may order it directly from Soft-Logik for $75. Personal Paint 6.1 was awarded 88%% by Amiga Format and 87%% by Amiga Shopper. Digita International is the leading publisher of Amiga productivity software in Europe and Soft-Logik Publishing is the leading publisher of Amiga productivity software in North America. Soft-Logik Soft-Logik is also the worldwide publisher of PageStream and TypeSmith, and sells and supports Digita(R) International's Wordworth, Datastore, Personal Paint and Organizer in the United States and Canada. @endnode @node NEWS8 "Sysmon v0.12b" @toc NEWS TITLE Sysmon V0.12 public beta release. AUTHOR Etienne Vogt (Etienne.Vogt@obspm.fr) DESCRIPTION Sysmon is a system monitoring package based on a shared library and Shell based support commands. Main features are : - Precise CPU usage timing for all tasks with very low overhead. - System message logging daemon like UNIX syslogd (useful for debugging). - Safe System shutdown script (useful for BBS's and networked machines). SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS AmigaOS 2.04 or higher (V37). Hard disk and Fast RAM recommended. AVAILABILITY On any aminet site. It was uploaded to : ftp://ftp.cnam.fr/pub/aminet/util/moni/Sysmon012c.lha (73181) PRICE Free. DISTRIBUTABILITY Freeware (C) Copyright 1995 by Etienne Vogt. The sysmon.library can be used freely by freeware software, requires a free registration to me for shareware software and a written license agreement from me for commercial software. OTHER This is a public BETA release, so I would like people to report any crashes/gurus/incompatibilities or other unexpected behaviour back to me. This is particularly intended at owners of 68060 based Amigas as I had no opportunity to test it under such a configuration. @endnode @node NEWS9 "AmigaBase v2.2" @toc NEWS TITLE AmigaBase V2.2 VERSION 2.2, update to Version 2.1 AUTHOR Steffen Gutmann Wiesentalstr. 30 73312 Geislingen/Eybach GERMANY Fax: +49/7331/69142 Email: gutmann@informatik.uni-ulm.de DESCRIPTION AmigaBase is a powerful programmable database with its own graphical user interface. AmigaBase is not a relational database with SQL interface or something like this. Nevertheless, or just because, AmigaBase is ideal for managing music cassettes, videos, addresses, etc. Complex applications like a finance manager with automatic printing of transfer forms and writing client accounts is no problem for AmigaBase, too. AmigaBase knows of the following data types: BOOLEAN (boolean values), CHOICE (one item out of many items), INTEGER (integer values), REAL (floating point values), STRING (any text), DATE (date values), TIME (time values), and MEMO (unlimited multi line text). For more information see the ReadMe file in the archive. NEW FEATURES V2.1 - V2.2 o New program types: PostOpenProject and PreQuitProject. o New functions for programming. o New menu item to print a listing of all records and variables. o New ARexx functions. o New escape code: "\e". o Small improvement for opening requesters. o Small improvement when using the external editor for programming. o Small improvement when searching for data. o Changed menu item "Paste buffer". o Support of the Spanish and Dutch language. o Several bug fixes. SPECIAL REQUIREMENYS 1 MByte RAM, more recommended. AVAILABILITY AmigaBase V2.2 can be found on any aminet site, e.g. ftp://ftp.uni-kl.de/pub/aminet/biz/dbase/AmigaBase22.lha (472997) PRICE DM 70,-- (US $50) DISTRIBUTABILITY AmigaBase is shareware, (c) Steffen Gutmann 1989 - 1995. @endnode @node NEWS10 "Executive v1.30" @toc NEWS TITLE Executive VERSION 1.30 AUTHOR Petri Nordlund (petrin@megabaud.fi) (http://www.megabaud.fi/~petrin) DESCRIPTION Executive is a UNIX-like task scheduler for Amiga. It also has plenty of other features previously available only in larger operating systems. Executive improves the responsiveness of your Amiga. No longer running a CPU intensive program causes the whole machine to slow down. You can start many CPU intensive programs and the machine still feels as fast as before. Executive also includes many useful client programs which let you control tasks and monitor what's going on in your system. The core of Executive is a scheduler that recalculates task priorities based on system load average and task's recent CPU usage. The scheduler will give high priority to interactive tasks and low priority to CPU intensive tasks. Executive is similar to Job Manager or Spy System, but it has more features than these two together, for example: - highly accurate (1/1000 seconds) CPU usage timing - 6 different scheduling algorithms - load averages - process identifiers - process group identifiers - accounting - focus - task with active window gets more CPU time - support for MultiUser Executive consists of a server and clients. The server is run in the background and it takes care of scheduling, CPU usage calculations and many other things. The client programs are: Acct Accounting daemon ALoad Display load average or CPU usage ALoad3D Display load averages in 3D Commander General task manager Ctp Extended ChangeTaskPri Kill Extended Break Lastcomm List last commands executed Meter Display system information Nice Run programs with lower scheduling priority Ps Process status displayer Pstree Display child-parent relationships Renice Renice a task Sa Display accounting statistics Stat Display some misc. information Timer Time CLI and Workbench programs Top Display information about top CPU tasks Uptime Display system uptime and load averages Executive doesn't use any illegal programming, it is fully compatible with all Amiga computers running AmigaDos release 2.04 or newer. Executive has been carefully designed to work with all kinds of configurations and care has been taken not to break any programming rules. It's not possible to give a full description of all Executive features here, so try it out. You don't want to use your Amiga without it. Executive is the highest rated item of shareware CU Amiga magazine has ever awarded at 98%. NEW FEATURES - Preliminary MUI V3 support - A couple of very important bug fixes - The Meter-client can now draw graphs - Many other improvements and bugfixes. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS AmigaDos 2.04 or newer is required to run Executive. AVAILABILITY Any Aminet site, for example: ftp://ftp.luth.se/pub/aminet/util/misc/Executive.lha Executive has a WWW-page which has links to several Aminet sites and also some nice screenshots. The page URL is: http://www.megabaud.fi/~petrin/Executive.html PRICE The freely redistributable version doesn't lack any crucial features so it can be used without registering. Registered users get process accounting, ALoad3D and Meter clients and 5 additional scheduling algorithms. Registration fee is $15 and it's also accepted in various other currencies (10 GBP, 20 DEM, 70 FIM, ...). DISTRIBUTABILITY Copyright © 1995 Petri Nordlund, freely redistributable. @endnode @node NEWS11 "Ensemble Verbes v1.5" @toc NEWS TITLE Ensemble Verbes VERSION Version 1.5 (14/11/95) AUTHOR Peter E. Janes E-mail: peter_janes@cableshare.ccmail.compuserve.com Regular mail: 6868 Egremont Road R. R. #8 Watford, Ontario, Canada N0M 2S0 DESCRIPTION Ensemble Verbes is a program to help students practise and master French verbs in the most common tenses of the language. It is designed to support classroom work, not to replace it. The shareware version contains only -er verbs and present, subjunctive past and present participle. The registered version of Ensemble Verbes features: * Over 75 verbs, including -er, -ir, -re, reflexive and irregular conjugations * Seven tenses: present, compound past, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive present and present participle * Full online, context-sensitive help via AmigaGuide tm * Close adherence to Amiga User Interface Style Guide * Sound support * Support for international keyboards * Locale support (English, French, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish catalogs included) Registered users can also obtain The French Student's Dictionary & Guide, Second Edition, a 158-page book featuring: * French/English and English/French sections * Most commonly used vocabulary, in context * Many easy-to-understand examples to help in selection of vocabulary * Many idiomatic expressions * Regular and irregular verb charts * Reference grammar guide * Over 5700 entries NEW FEATURES This is an update to Ensemble Verbes 1.4. It contains a new Italian catalog and fixes a bug that caused Enforcer hits when Prop3D is installed. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS Any Amiga running AmigaOS 2.04 or above. AmigaGuide/MultiView and Installer are recommended. AVAILABILITY All files can be found on any Aminet site. The unregistered version of Ensemble Verbes may be found at: ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/edu/Verbes.lha (70594 bytes) Patch files for registered versions may be found at: ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/edu/VerbesRegPch15.lha (44418 bytes) ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/edu/VerbesRegPch14.lha (45813 bytes) ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/edu/VerbesRegPch13.lha (77599 bytes) ftp://ftp.wustl.edu/pub/aminet/misc/edu/VerbesRegPch12.lha (21241 bytes) NOTE: Each file is relative to the previous version. For example, to upgrade Verbes 1.3 to Verbes 1.5 you will need both VerbesRegPch14.lha and VerbesRegPch15.lha. PRICE Ensemble Verbes: CAN $25.00 The French Student's Dictionary & Guide: CAN $10.00 Ensemble Verbes *and* The French Student's Dictionary & Guide: CAN $30.00 Add CAN $3.00 for shipping inside North America; outside North America, add CAN $8.00. User groups should contact the author for a group registration fee. DISTRIBUTABILITY Shareware. The unregistered version of Ensemble Verbes may be included in the CD-ROM or floppy collections compiled by Fred Fish and the Aminet moderators; all others should contact Peter Janes before including the program. Both registered and unregistered versions are Copyright (C) 1995 by Peter E. Janes. Peter_Janes@cableshare.ccmail.compuserve.com | "And so, here we are, victims of Network Administrator, Cableshare Inc. // | Mathematics." --Londo Mollari ex-Certified Amiga Developer \X/ | *** SUPPORT CANADIAN MUSIC *** @endnode @node NEWS12 "Digita Press Releases" @toc NEWS WORDWORTH 5 To be released in January 1996 New features from Wordworth 3.1 include: - Footnotes - Drag-and-drop Style-sheets - ARexx support - 24-bit graphics support - Automatic bullet points - Automatic hanging indents - System clipboard support - Background printing - Font Effects (Stretch, Variable oblique, Drop Caps, etc.) - Improved Tables - Increased speed - Macros - Wizards ORGANISER 2 Available now New features from version 1.1 include: - Linkable items - Scrollable Diary page - Auto Capitalisation of Postcodes - More General Settings - Speed improvements - Better implemented Diary Themes - Navigation buttons for Supplements DATASTORE 2 Available now New features from version 1.1 include: - Spreadsheet style List View - Ability to hide records to create a subset of records, and switch between the two sets - Queries are now performed on the current subset rather than the whole database - You can now print individual records graphically - The Find requester is modeless - Increased speed - Print requesters have Setup buttons to display Workbench Printer and PrinterGfx preference requesters on Datastore screen - Datastore screen is now Public, and supports opening Datastore on other Public screens MONEY MATTERS 4 Available now New features from version 3.05 include: - Completely new interface, same as other Digita products - On-line Amigaguide help system - Insurance inventory - Loan calculator - Currency Calculator - Amiga clipboard support - Digisense (completes dates for you, etc.) Digita International are now also distributing Personal Paint 6.4 in the U.K. and the English version of TurboCalc 3.5 worldwide. For more information on any of these products, or to order any of them, you contact our Sales department using one of the following methods: E-MAIL: sales@digita.demon.co.uk TEL: (England) 01 395 270 273 FAX: (England) 01 395 268 893 WRITE: Digita International Ltd. Black Horse House Exmouth EX8 1JL ENGLAND @endnode @node NEWS13 "Quarterback v6.1" @toc NEWS TITLE Quarterback VERSION 6.1 PUBLISHER Quasar Distribution P.O. Box 188 Southland Victoria 3192 Australia Phone +61 3 9583 8806 Fax +61 3 9585 1074 BBS +61 3 9584 8590 DESCRIPTION Quarterback 6.1 Advanced Backup and Archiving Program for the Amiga While hard drives represent some of the highest technology that exists in the computer industry, all hard drives will eventually fail. It is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when. If you've invested hours creating pictures, manuscripts, 3-D ray-traces, or spreadsheets, then you need some way to protect your investment. Quarterback gives you that protection by safeguarding your work against any possible loss. Features: · Backup to or restore from floppy disks, high density floppies, hard disks, hard disk partitions, AmigaDOS files, removable media, tape drives, and any AmigaDOS compatible devices. · Support for special features of newer, more advanced tape drives. There is support for hardware-based compression, fast tape advance, and quick erase features. · Support for multiple tapes per backup session. This means that you can back up the entire contents of very large hard disks onto several smaller-sized tapes. · Automatically formats floppies as it writes. · Complete or Selective backups and restores. A powerful Tag Filter allows you to include or exclude files by name (with wild cards), date, or archive bit. · Full macro and ARexx support, allowing you total control over the Quarterback program. · Optional password protection and encryption, to give you the best in security. · Fast compression during backups. In many cases, Quarterback can compress the data as fast as it can be written to your floppy drive. · Innovative "Interrogator" retrieves device information from SCSI devices. · Save to a file or print catalogs or session logs. · Can verify data as it is written. · Automatically detects and warns about bad media during backup and restore. · Writes file catalog to both first and last disks for extra data protection. · Supports unlimited file lengths, any number of subdirectories, and any number of files per subdirectory. · Supports both hard and soft links. · Includes Schedule Pro - a program which allows you to set up Quarterback for unattended backup sessions! Not only can you use Schedule Pro to set up Quarterback to automatically back up your hard disk at any time, or on any schedule, but you can use it to automatically start any program or ARexx script at a particular time or on a particular schedule. You can even use it to automatically dsiplay reminders when you need them. AVAILABILITY Quarterback is available now in English versions. DISTRIBUTORS Australia & New Zealand (and anywhere else not listed) Quasar Distribution P.O. Box 188 Southland Victoria 3192 Australia Phone +61 3 9583 8806 Fax +61 3 9585 1074 BBS +61 3 9584 8590 U.S.A. & Canada Wonder Computers Inc. 1301 Richmond Road Ottawa, Ontario Canada K2B 7Y4 Phone +1 613 596 2542 Fax +1 613 596 9349 U.K. Gordon Harwood Computers New Street, Alfreton Derbyshire England DE55 7BP Phone +44 1773 836781 Fax +44 1773 831040 Germany Casablanca Multimedia Wielmelhauser Straße 247a 44799 Bochum 1 Germany Phone +49 (0)234 7 20 35 Fax +49 (0)234 7 20 60 France France-Festival-Distribution 3 Rue Anatole France FR 13220 Chateauneuf-Les-Martigues France Fax +33 42-76-18-70 Belgium FC Systems Bruul 82 2800 Mechelen Belgium Phone +32 (0)15 21.78.67 Fax +32 (0)15 21.76.55 All distribution enquiries should be directed to Quasar Distribution. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS An Amiga computer with KS 1.2 or greater and 512 K of RAM or greater Some functions are only available under KS2.x or KS3.x. PRICE Please contact your local distributor for pricing and availability. @endnode @node NEWS14 "Quarterback Tools Deluxe v2.0.2" @toc NEWS TITLE Quarterback Tools Deluxe VERSION 2.0.2 PUBLISHER Quasar Distribution P.O. Box 188 Southland Victoria 3192 Australia Phone +61 3 9583 8806 Fax +61 3 9585 1074 BBS +61 3 9584 8590 DESCRIPTION Quarterback Tools Deluxe Advanced Disk Recovery and File Management Tools for the Amiga Quarterback Tools Deluxe is a complete package of disk and file management tools that can help you recover from disk problems, speed up your disk access, and manage your files and disks better. Quarterback Tools Deluxe consists of the following programs: ·Quarterback Tools - A program to help you find and correct disks errors, recover files that have been accidentally deleted, and optimize your disk acess. In addition, for advanced users, Quarterback Tools includes a disk editor, which lets you directly examine and modify the information contained on your disks. Quarterback Tools also includes a macro capability, a complete ARexx port for advanced users, and is completely customizable to your way of working. ·Replicator - A program to quickly and easily duplicate a large number of floppy disks. You can duplicate to multiple floppy drives at the same time, and even save an entire disk image as a file on your hard disk to use later. ·Locator - A program that helps you quickly locate files on your disks. You simply provide any part of a file name, and Locator will search the entire disk (or just a sub-drawer of the disk) and find all files that match that name. For each file found, Locator can tell you the location of the file, information about the file, and show you a portion of the file's contents. ·Encryptor - A program to encrypt and decrypt files. You can use this program to keep others from seeing the contents of your files; only those people who have the file's password will be able to decrypt and use the file. ·File Eraser - A program that irretrievably erases a file's contents, and then deletes the file. File Eraser includes an option to erase a file using the US Department of Defense approved method for permanently erasing files. You can use this program to permanently remove sensitive information from your disk; no file recovery program, not even Quarterback Tools, will be able to recover the file's contents. ·Disk Eraser - A program that irretrievably erases either the unused portions of a disk, or the entire disk itself. Like File Eraser, Disk Eraser includes an option to erase a file using the US Department of Defense approved method for permanently erasing files. You can use this program to permanently erase files which you have already deleted, or to permanently erase all files from a disk. ·Keystroke Finder - A program that shows you the appropriate keystroke combination to type any character on your Amiga. For example, Keystroke Finder can show you how to type accented characters like è and â, and special characters like ®. Keystroke Finder works with any keyboard and any "keymap" setting. ·System Mover - A program that simplifies moving system files - such as fonts, printer drivers, and system libraries - from one disk to another. ·Brain Cloud - A program that renders a floppy disk temporarily unusable by the system, without affecting any of the disks contents. A disk that has a "brain cloud" cannot even be formatted by the Amiga! AVAILABILITY Quarterback Tools Deluxe is available now in English versions. DISTRIBUTORS Australia & New Zealand (and anywhere else not listed) Quasar Distribution P.O. Box 188 Southland Victoria 3192 Australia Phone +61 (0)3 9583 8806 Fax +61 (0)3 9585 1074 BBS +61 (0)3 9584 8590 U.S.A. & Canada Wonder Computers Inc. 1301 Richmond Road Ottawa, Ontario Canada K2B 7Y4 Phone +1 613 596 2542 Fax +1 613 596 9349 U.K. Gordon Harwood Computers New Street, Alfreton Derbyshire England DE55 7BP Phone +44 1773 836781 Fax +44 1773 831040 Germany Casablanca Multimedia Wielmelhauser Straße 247a 44799 Bochum 1 Germany Phone +49 (0)234 7 20 35 Fax +49 (0)234 7 20 60 France France-Festival-Distribution 3 Rue Anatole France FR 13220 Chateauneuf-Les-Martigues France Fax +33 42-76-18-70 Belgium FC Systems Bruul 82 2800 Mechelen Belgium Phone +32 (0)15 21.78.67 Fax +32 (0)15 21.76.55 All distribution enquiries should be directed to Quasar Distribution. SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS An Amiga computer with KS 1.2 or greater and 512 K of RAM or greater Some functions are only available under KS2.x or KS3.x. PRICE Please contact your local distributor for pricing and availability. @endnode @node NEWS15 "Digital Universe Patches" @toc NEWS The patches for V1.02 of "The Digital Universe" are now available. The executable patches implement the following changes: Changes since version 1.01: =========================== New features ------------ - Now, numerical reports can be output to the screen as well as the printer, or saved to disk. - A few useful keyboard shortcuts dealing with time were added: 'a' - toggles to automatic time advancement 'm' - toggles to manual time advancement 't' - sets "The Digital Universe" to use the current time - 10 more user-settable fields of view were added, bringing the total to 20. The first ten are used by pressing a number key (above the 'querty' keyboard. The last ten are used by holding down the SHIFT key while doing so. Since the preferences file format had to change as a result of this modification, you'll have to re-initialize the file when running "The Digital Universe" for the first time after upgrading. Type "DigitalUniverse init" at a shell prompt to do this. - The string gadget in "Find Star", "Find Galaxy", and "Search Hypertext" is automatically activated when their respective windows are opened. Bug fixes --------- - MUI 2.3 and 3.1 have problems in dealing with >V34 amigaguide.library (it can only deal with a single amigaguide file, and "The Digital Universe" requires 9 separate flies. To get around this problem, "The Digital Universe" pre-loads V34 amigaguide.library, regardless of the version of amigaguide.library normally used on your system. This works fine, but has one small problem - V34 amigaguide.library was never meant to deal with screens having more than 32 colors, and caused the system to crash if a hypertext window was brought up on such a screen. The interim solution is to restrict screen depths to 32 colors, and this modification was made to V1.02. Of course, when a future version of MUI and amigaguide.library >V34 are happy with one another, we'll be removing the temporary restriction. - If you'd accidentally deleted your Mode_Names icon from your WBStartup drawer, your Amiga would not know the names for different screen modes. "The Digital Universe" previously never anticipated this scenario, and crashed if it couldn't find any valid screen mode names. V1.02 has fixed this problem, providing the system with a screen even if there is not a valid name for it. This stops the program from crashing, but of course the best solution is to restore the Mode_Names icon from your original Workbench disks. - Western Australia Daylight Time and Western Australia Standard Time offsets were wrong. They've been fixed from their previous values of +8 and +7 respectively to the correct values of +9 and +8. - Animations generated on overscanned screens with WB3.1 would sometimes be corrupted. We believe we've found and fixed the problem (special thanks to Chris Gray for his incredible patience in helping us track it down). Of course, if you purchased V1.00 of our package, you will have to upgrade to V1.01 before applying the patches for V1.02. Updates to the hypertext are also available. The following changes have been made: - Product information sheet added to the online help, to provide users with a quick reference of the software's features - Help for the FOVs was expanded to describe the 20 fields instead of just the original 10. - Help for "View Report" option of report generator was added - HST observations of the Eagle Nebula have been added - description of planetary discoveries around 51 Pegasi added - possible third companion to Sirius (Sirius C) mentioned - Updated information from HST observations about planetary disk around Beta Pictoris added. - Info about asteroid 4 Vesta from HST added - a few bad links in Apollo 11 were repaired - expansion on the description of the black hole discovery in NGC 4261 added. - Galileo spacecraft mission description expanded to include recent successes during its December 7th closest approach and probe entry. Of course, this item will likely be updated further when we start to get probe data back from the spacecraft. As well, three new pictures for the encyclopedia have been made available. Two of them are updates - images for Beta Pictoris and M16 (The Eagle Nebula). The third (of 4 Vesta) is a new image. The most straightforward way to obtain the patches is to connect to our Web site with the URL http://www.syz.com/support But since some users have been having difficulty obtaining binary files with their Web browsers, we are temporarily making the updates available via FTP. We are *not* really set up to deal with FTP properly, so we ask that you excuse the mess you'll see if you need to get the files this way. First of all, our Internet provider's welcome message will appear instead of our own - don't let that throw you! :-) In addition, you'll see all of our HTML files (for the Web service) mixed in with everything else. Just ignore all of that and go straight for the support/patches directory to get the files you need. The site to connect to is ftp.syz.com. Of course, it's quite helpful to read the Web documentation concerning the files first so that you know which ones you require. There's a lot of downloading and patching for everyone to do to bring their version up to date. We hope that these changes fix some of the problems observed in the past, and add a few small features that you'll find useful. If you have any problems with V1.02 of the software, please let us know. If all appears to be going well, in a few days we'll release a new demo version of the package to Aminet, and start shipping V1.02 with new orders. Thanks again for your continued support of "The Digital Universe!". -- Syzygy Research & Technology Ltd. | Creators of "The Digital Universe" Box 75, Legal, AB, T0G 1L0, CANADA | for Amiga computers WWW: http://www.syz.com | email: sales@syz.com, support@syz.com | 113 deg 35' 28" W, 53 deg 56' 50" N @endnode @node NEWS16 "OTM Release Schedule" @toc NEWS LOOKOUT FOR A STUNNING RANGE OF NEW SOFTWARE FROM ... OTM Big News : The signing of Intersect Developments new shooter ATROPHY! :)) -------------------------------- Release Schedule till March '96. -------------------------------- December '95 ------------ PowerBase v3.5 Amiga 19.95 5th Dec OTM in-house Friendly, powerful flat-file database system FSP PC 34.95 15th Dec Craig Smith Football application for following leagues or individual teams February '96 ------------ Piranha PC 29.95 - D-Designs Frenetic 360' shoot'em up with attitude, 3 players, league and deathmatch games WatchTower Amiga AGA 29.95 - CyberArts Ltd. Addictive Top down view 'Commando' style arcade war-game Atrophy Amiga AGA 29.95 - Intersect Development Hi-res overscan 256 colour shoot'em up! March '96 --------- Account Master PC-Win'95 49.95 - Friendly full-blown accounts package for Windows'95 - set to rival Quickbooks XP8 Amiga AGA 29.95 - Weathermine Software Vertically scrolling shoot'em up with some unique multiplayer features Starfighter Amiga AGA 29.95 - Fabio Bizzetti Epic, 5 disk 3D space shoot'em up with stunningly detailed texture mapping and realtime rendering OTM Publications & Promotions Ltd 1st Floor 11 Aldergate Tamworth Staffordshire B79 7DL UK Telephone: +44 (0)1827 - 312 302 Facsimile: +44 (0)1827 - 67010 EMail: OTM@OTMltd.demon.co.uk @endnode @node NEWS17 "OTM Press Release" @toc NEWS OTM Press Release 2 December, 1995 -------------------- MONTHLY PRESS REPORT -------------------- Lots of exciting new developments this month including the signing of a number of top new titles and their respective development teams... CyberArts Ltd., Weathermine and D-Designs. February will see the release of two incredibly exciting new games, for the Amiga a top down view 'Commando' style arcade war game as previewed in Amiga Format (issue 79).... WatchTower and for the PC on CD-ROM a frenetic 360 shoot'em up ... Piranha. Both titles are being developed by top Finnish teams, CyberArts and D-Designs respectively and are set to thrill and excite games players everywhere. There are a number of seriously dangerous coding teams in Finland at the moment, whether its the cold, the snow, the long dark evenings, or something in the water we don't know, but one things for sure , they will continue to thrill and excite games players everywhere with their skills. We are extremely pleased to have established strong links with them and are looking forward as the publisher of these titles to releasing them on an unsuspecting world! We have a long line up of top quality Amiga titles in development, our support for the Amiga is assured and stronger than ever. We now have a wide range of Amiga and PC titles, and are looking forward to also publishing and developing for other platforms, hopefully in '96, such as the Playstation and 3DO. We've moved! Part of our operation has now moved to new offices in order to accommodate further expansion, so please take note of our new address. Screenshots, work in progress reports, playable demos, full product info... on all other titles will be released v.shortly. Forthcoming Titles include: WatchTower, XP8, Starfighter, Virtual Rally, Banzai Frog, QP Tennis ---------- WATCHTOWER ---------- developed by top Finnish Development team CyberArts Ltd. comes... W A T C H T O W E R A top down 'Commando' style arcade war-game +Simultaneous two player mode +Seven military weapons to pick up +Three different terrain types: desert, jungle and city +Six long and challenging missions +Adjustable skill level +Massively armed enemy vehicles and aircraft +Intelligent kill or be killed enemies +Vicious end of level guardians +Hard disk installable Formats: A1200/A4000, CD32 RRP: 29.95 Release Date: February '96 Screenshots available ------------- P I R A N H A ------------- A seriously vicious 360 shoot'em with attitude! - 1-3 Players simultaneously - 2-3 Players deathmatch mode - 2-3 Players league mode - 10-20 Backgrounds - 100-200 Levels - Lots of animated enemies + asteroids + more... - Lots of CD quality music and sound effects - 10+ channels of music and 6+ channels of sound effects - Lots of different bonus stages and hidden levels - Equipment screen (for buying new weapons etc) - Lots of different weapons + other equipments - Stunning visual effects - 256 color graphics - Intelligent enemies - 60fps screen update, 30fps on slow machines ( <486 VLB) - Supports every major soundcard available - Tons of playability - Zillions of exciting atmosphere - 8 weeks of hard work .. So far - 100% Protected Mode 32-Bit Code and Music system FORMATS : PC CDROM - recommended (486/66 VLB) , 4MB memory RRP : 29.95 RELEASE DATE : February '96 Screenshots & demo available ---------------------------------------------------------------------- OTM 11 Aldergate, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 7DL, UK Tel. 01827 312 302 Fax. 01827 670 10 Email. OTM@OTMltd.demon.co.uk @endnode @node NEWS18 "A.N.G.L.E." @toc NEWS From: werther@karunko.nervous.com (Werther Pirani) INTRODUCING A.N.G.L.E. (Amiga Net Games for Light Entertainment) A.N.G.L.E. is a brand new, non-profit team comprised by a bunch of Amiga devotees that don't expect to make money out of this venture. Our focus is more on providing games for an area that has not been explored very well on the Amiga and our intention is to provide the first few efforts as a "gift" to game players. A.N.G.L.E.'s MAIN GOAL Produce multi-player games to be played over the Internet rather than across a serial link. To proceed at a reasonable pace, we need more programmers, gfx artists, muscians and designers -- any takers? A.N.G.L.E.'s RELATED GOALS Help other individuals and teams writing their own TCP/IP based software, whether games or "serious" applications. Help end-users struggling with AmiTCP/IP, SLIP/CSLIP/PPP and the likes to get on-line *properly* with the minimum of fuss. A.N.G.L.E.'s WEB SITE Detailed info, including a little questionnaire to help us shaping up our first game, are available at: http://www.iper.net/angle ...and before you ask, it's actually "iper", not "hyper"! :) A.N.G.L.E.'s EMAIL CONTACT Plain e-mail works as well: ANGLE-admin@karunko.nervous.com Thank you for your time and patience! Sincerely, Werther 'Mircko' Pirani -- e-mail: werther@karunko.nervous.com A.N.G.L.E. Amiga Net Games for Light Entertainment http://www.iper.net/angle @endnode @node NEWS19 "Amiga Atlanta Invitation" @toc NEWS Amiga Atlanta, Inc. cordially invites computer enthusiasts to the Amiga Atlanta 10th Anniversary Celebration Banquet, Saturday, January 20, 1996 at 7 p.m. at the Terrace Garden Inn, 3405 Lenox Rd.(across from the Lenox Square Mall) in Atlanta, GA. This is not only the 10th anniversary of one of America's oldest Amiga user groups, it is also the 10th anniversary of the Amiga platform. It is anticipated that Amiga users, developers and retailers from all over the United States - and possibly abroad - will be in attendance. Amiga legends such as Dave Haynie, Fred Fish, R.J. Mical and Jason Compton are expected to attend. A representative from The Governor's office will be on hand to issue a special proclamation. And, the new owners of the Amiga platform, Amiga Technologies - all the way from Germany - are expected to give the keynote address. This is an event that should be of interest to any computer enthusiast - regardless of their platform of choice. Why? Because it brings more competition to the computer marketplace and thus lower prices. There is more to do on Saturday, January 20,1996 in Atlanta than go to a history-making banquet, however. Many of those coming to Atlanta for the banquet should also take the Grey Line Bus Tour of Olympic Venues. Yes, see all the Olympic venues and see where Olympic history will be made before the crowds come to town. Space is limited. Banquet reservations are just $28/person. So, make your banquet reservations now. Local reservations can be made by calling Lamar Morgan at (404)365-0670. For those traveling to Atlanta from within the United States and in need of flight and hotel reservations as well as banquet reservations, call Bear Stearns Travel at 1-800-915-2327 and ask for Cindy Benson. For those traveling to Atlanta from overseas for the banquet, call Bear Stearns Travel collect at 1-816-880-3108 and ask for Cindy Benson. For more specific information regarding the banquet, check out the AAi Home Page: http://www.mindspring.com/~amigaatl; or, send email to: lamar@mindspring.com Believe me, this is one banquet computer enthusiasts should not miss. Lamar Morgan President Amiga Atlanta, Inc. @endnode @node NEWS20 "Digital Universe Mailing List" @toc NEWS Digital Universe Mailing List Hi there everyone. This is a message to the Digital Universe mailing list. For those newcomers to the list, welcome! The purpose of the list is to provide registered users of the software with information relating to "The Digital Universe". When you bought our product, customer support didn't stop there. We're hoping to be able to demonstrate to other software companies what customer support should be like! If we received your email address with your order, you were automatically added to our mail list. Traffic is expected to be generally quite low, but if you would like to be removed, just send email to support@syz.com and let us know. Anyway, on to the news: 1. THIS MAILING LIST We've received a number of messages from people wanting to know the details of how to send messages to this mailing list. Unfortunately, our Internet service provider is not yet set up to provide "public access" messaging - which means that you can't send messages to a central site to have them immediately broadcast amongst all members of the list. But if you have anything you would like to tell or ask your fellow "Digital Universe" ousers, just send the message on to us at support@syz.com, instructing us to post it to the list. Within a day or two, we should be able to get your message out. 2. OUR WEB PAGE Our Web page has undergone fairly significant changes in the last few weeks. If you haven't been there for awhile, we have a section devoted to new discoveries relating to astronomy. You'll be able to access information there much faster than waiting for it to make its way into patches to the hypertext (since we wait for a significant number of changes to the hypertext before releasing a new version... otherwise we'd be swamped in an endless sea of versions).. We're quite excited about another new addition. The Internet puts a wealth of astronomical information at your fingertips - if you only know where to look. Many people are interested in obtaining images of astronomical objects, but have no idea where they might find them. We're currently in the process of putting together a huge database of URLs to astronomy images around the net. This index is searchable - which means you can ask it to find something like "NGC 3214", or "Saturn" and it will return links to all the pictures that it knows about. Compiling this database will take a long time (and we don't plan on ever really being done :-), but in the meantime we're off to a good start with about 15000 images indexed so far. Much of this is due to our linking directly with the Digitized Sky Survey Web pages... giving you direct access to images of all NGC and IC objects. We still have a long way to go, and plan on announcing the service publicly to various astronomy newsgroups when we have it set up a bit better. In the meantime, feel free to test the service, and send us any comments that you might have on it. Links to additional URLs not yet indexed (believe me, there are LOTS of those :-) are also greatly appreciated. We hope to make the service the definitive guide to finding astronomical images on the Web. You can reach it via links on our home page http://www.syz.com/ or directly with the URL http://www.syz.com/images/ Just a word of warning - some of the images, though freely accessible on the Web, may be copywritten by various individuals or organizations. Just because we at Syzygy provide links to these images does not mean that you've bought the rights to these images when you bought our product. We don't own the copyright on these images any more than you do - so be sure to check with the original sources if you want to use them in any publications. One last thing to check out - Galileo will be reaching Jupiter in just 4 days - December 7th! Until its encounter, we feature images on our home page obtained directly from JPL that show the current position and orientation of the spacecraft. At the moment, they're updated daily.. .but on arrival day, they'll be updated every 5 minutes. It's interesting to connect to the pages periodically to see how fast that Galileo is approaching its target. Obviously, when Galileo arrives and the probe data finally relayed back to Earth, we'll have to do a lot of hypertext editing .. :-) 3. DIGITAL UNIVERSE V1.02 Two releases of Digital Universe are currently out - the initial V1.00 and V1.01. (you can get patches on our Web site to upgrade V1.00 to V1.01 if you don't already own the latest version). We've been working on V1.02 for quite some time, adding a few more minor features and eliminating a few more bugs (persistent little things :-) We just have one or two things left to straighten out and we'll be able to release V1.02, along with the patches. But we're after your advice before going ahead with one of our patches. It only affects users using Workbench 3.0 or greater (or anyone capable of opening a screen of more than 32 colors), so WB 2.0 owners can feel free to skip this section. As for the rest of you, bear with us a bit on a technical discussion. As you're probably quite well aware, "The Digital Universe" has an awful lot of hypertext. As such, it's split up into 9 files. Unfortunately, MUI has a bug when dealing with more than one hypertext file when using a version of amigaguide.library > 34.... it can really only deal properly with a single file. Luckily, amigaguide.library V34 (the WB 2.0 version) and MUI get along just fine. So "The Digital Universe" pre-loads its own copy of V34 amigaguide.library, irregardless of the version you normally use on your system. That way, MUI is forced to using V34 and the hypertext normally works okay. However, there is one potential problem that got past us in bug testing. If you're using a screen with more than 32 colors and open up an amigaguide window (either through pressing HELP, getting More Info on an object, etc.) amigaguide.library will cause your computer to promptly crash. This appears to be due to the fact that V34 amigaguide.library assumes that you can't have more than 32 colors on a screen at once.... reasonable, since with WB2.0, for which it was written, you couldn't. "The Digital Universe" only uses 16 colors on a screen at a time, so we were tempted to restrict the depth of a screen to 4 (16 colors). But some users have wanted to modify the "showpic" script to use their own IFF ILBM viewer to display images directly on the DU screen. For this, they would appreciate more colors so that the pictures turn out alright. But since all the pictures (except a few HAM images here and there) are 16 colors anyway, restricting the user to a 32 color palette might serve the bill perfectly... and luckily amigaguide.library seems happy with 32 colors. We're after your input on this decision, if it affects you. Do you think that restricting the palette to 32 colors would be reasonable? (for that matter, does amigaguide.library V34 crash for anyone using a 32 color screen? Most of our testing was done on a 16 color screen...) If not, do you have any alternate suggestions? We were hoping that the problem would have been fixed with the recent release of MUI 3.1... but unfortunately it doesn't appear to have been. When we can safely use versions of amigaguide.library greater than 34, we'll remove the pre-loaded library and any screen depth restrictions that we might impose at this time. Comments are more than welcome. 4. SOFTWARE PIRACY We've learned that at least one individual has managed to circumvent our copy protection (the user's registered name encoded into a keyfile), and has started to circulate pirated copies of "The Digital Universe". We realize that cracking our protection scheme is not a very difficult thing to do, and it was never intended to deter dedicated software pirates. But the reason that we're bring this up is to ask you to protect your investment. If you learn of anyone spreading illegal versions of "The Digital Universe", please either try to discourage them from doing so, or notify us. Obviously, the best support for the software will come from a company which has been financially compensated for all of the versions in use. And that's about it for this message. I hope your local weather's been good for observations lately - we've been getting nothing but snow for the past several weeks... :-) Dan Charrois -- Syzygy Research & Technology Ltd. | Creators of "The Digital Universe" Box 75, Legal, AB, T0G 1L0, CANADA | for Amiga computers WWW: http://www.syz.com | email: sales@syz.com, support@syz.com | 113 deg 35' 28" W, 53 deg 56' 50" N @endnode @node NEWS21 "Excelsior! Purchased by AmiCom!" @toc NEWS Excelsior! Professional BBS has been Purchased by AmiCom! (Amiga Communications!) So, who is AmiCom! ? AmiCom is a team of dedicated Excelsior! Sysops who wanted to do everything in their power to keep Excelsior! BBS alive and competitive with this ever changing BBS world. AmiCom! has put together a Team of Support and Registration sites all around the world to make it easier for Sysops to get assistance. This support effort is also backed by Excelsior's own support network. (E!Net) With this network, and the enthusiastic support members, This will prove to be the Best support that Excelsior! BBS has ever seen. And possibly any other BBS package for the Amiga as well. (IMHO) Excelsior! 2.0 will be sold in 2 packages. Excelsior! (Full package) - Excelsior registered TrapDoor. - Excelsior registered QSilver / Mercury Excelsior lite! (WITHOUT TrapDoor, QSilver / Mercury). This allows those who already own a Frontdoor mailer (TrapDoor, GMS, Etc...) to purchase Excelsior! at a lower rate than those who need the mailer package. The QSilver / Mercury that is included with E!, are Excelsior! Specific versions of their Multi-BBS counterparts. These versions are faster, and with the Co-ordinated efforts between AmiCom! and Bitplane enterprises, will have more flexibility. Other things for the Future of Excelsior... Well, We're open for suggestions. Currently, We've been taking Excelsior! and making it Modular by converting many of the internal functions and putting them into "External" libraries. We feel this will have several benefits. = Smaller Executables. (Of course) ;) = Greater speed. = Less memory usage. = Third party utilities would have easier access to functions. = Easier Updates. (Just release the new Libraries.) Some new additions to Excelsior! include: - Sysop definable menus using GUI Menu editor. - Sysop definable HOTKEYS. ;) - Screen Definable. - RIP-II support. The Excelsior! project is turning out to be a Bigger project than ANYONE out there may have thought. But we are working hard to make it what everyone expects. And possibly throw in a Few surprises as well... :) I think everyone will be VERY happy with it when it's released. For more information, Please send E-Mail to one of the Below listed AmiCom!/Excelsior! Development Sites: The Hidden Pyramid: 1-315-433-5398 Sysop: Jay Britton Fidonet: 1:260/346 E!Net: 312:1200/0 Internet: jbritton@dreamscape.com The Factory BBS: 1-918-687-1750 Sysop: Larry Bowers Fidonet: 1:3813/308 1:3813/318 E!Net: 312:4100/0 Internet: amicom@galstar.com Total MeltDown!: 1-309-862-0857 Sysop: Jeff Fink Fidonet: 1:232/316 1:232/315 E!Net: 312:2000/0 For Voice support, Call: 1-918-682-4897 AmiCom Postal address: AmiCom! P.O. Box 2785 Muskogee, OK. 74401 @endnode @node NEWS22 "Upcoming C-16/+4 Emulator" @toc NEWS A short list of features for an upcoming Commodore 16/+4 emulator... Name: A4 (great eh? :-) ) Prozessor: needs 68020 (sorry for A500/600/2000 users) OS-version: 2.0 or later Features: * emulates the Commodore C-16/Plus4 OS (Basic 3.5 + Ass. monitor) * allows data storage in Amiga directories (LOAD and SAVE) (a floppy-drive emulation) * real Floppy (C=1541) access (par. port) is worked on, but is still very buggy * 32K of memory are availible ( 64K is worked on) * V1.0 written in C * current V2.0 written in assembler * runs on a Workbench window or on its own customscreen * VIC emulation is very raw (but uses the build in charater set which can be customised. Only standart colors are supported now. The first public release will be V 0.1! The 64 KB version allready works :-) ==========-"-========== Thomas Koenig ==========-_-========== @endnode @node NEWS23 "ftp.amigalib.com goes Aminet!" @toc NEWS Fred Fish's Amiga Library Services has generously turned ftp.amigalib.com into a full Aminet mirror for anonymous FTP. This brings the total of full North American mirrors back to 3, replacing ftp.cdrom.com which terminated Aminet support in the summer. @endnode @node NEWS24 "PowerManager 2.0 Contest" @toc NEWS POWERMANAGER SCREEN SAVER DESIGN CONTEST WCi Lazarus Engineering Division is pleased to announce its first PowerManager screen saver contest. WHAT IS POWERMANAGER During the Calgary AmiJam Amiga show in July 1995, Lazarus Engineering revealed a special edition of it's PowerManger software complete with a flaming AmiJam logo screen saver. The software never went into full production and is a rare commodity currently owned by only a few select people. The PowerManager software contains the following: * A DPMS monitor controlling module. DPMS stands for Display Power Management System and is a standard defined by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) in the U.S. DPMS allows a computer to control the amount of power a monitor is using through video signals. Most monitors displaying the "Energy Star" logo have DPMS ability (there are over 500 models currently available with this ability) * A screen saver controlling module. Included with PowerManger in Calgary were five screen savers and their source code. Two of them displayed a logo and then burst it into flame, one was a multi-coloured star field (with accurate star colors), something called curvo which has to be seen, and a simple black-screen module for shutting down older monitors which looked for this before they would go into power- saving mode. * A disk cacheing module. Lazarus Engineering purchased the cacheing engine found in Steve Tibbett's CacheX software, enhanced it to work with all amiga disk devices including removable media like CD-ROM drives, iomega ZIP drives, floppies, etc., added support for multiple devices, and a stats window that lets you know how useful it's been. * A hard drive power management module. During a period of inactivity you can let PowerManager spin down your hard drive(s). The internal IDE hard drive controllers found in A4000s, A1200s, and A600s are supported as well as any SCSI HD controller which supports the SCSI spin-down command (most new controllers do). CONTEST DETAILS Lazarus Engineering is looking for interesting, entertaining, and functional screen saver modules for it's upcoming (Q1 1996) release of PowerManager 2.0. A total of 30 entries will be chosen and included (without source). Entries will be judged on the following criteria: - Compatibility (systems and display adapters) - Originality - Entertainment value (coolness factor) The following rules apply to entries received: - Code must be original and free from any copyrights - Source code must be provided with entry - Code must conform to the spec outlined at the bottom of this doc. - Employees of WCi and it's divisions (Wonder Computers, WCi Distribution, Lazarus Engineering, Information Technology) are not eligible PRIZES Top 30 Entries -------------- Every blanker selected for inclusion in PowerManager will receive an Amiga Technologies "Back for the Future" black polo shirt as well as a copy of PowerManager 2.0. Top 10 Entries -------------- The top 10 entries will receive a Wizard 560 dpi 3-button mouse (your choice of beige or black), as well as the AT polo shirt and PowerManager 2.0. Winning Entry ------------- The single winning entry will receive either a Cybervision 64 2Meg graphics card by Phase-5 or a Picasso II 2Meg graphics card from Village Tronic (your choice), as well as a 16-bit Toccata sound card from MacroSystems. A Wizard 560 dpi 3-button mouse, an AT polo shirt, and a copy of PowerManager 2.0 are also included in this package. Only modules selected for inclusion with PowerManager become the property of WCi and Lazarus Engineering. Entries must be uuencoded files containing executable and source sent to: lazarus@wonder.ca This address can also be used for general inquiries. Sample blanker code is available on the ftp site: ftp.wonder.ca /pub/powermanger/devkit.lha The text of which is also included below. ============================================================================= PowerManager Compliant Screen Savers ------------------------------------ The control system for a screen blanker is fairly simple. PowerManager will send one of four signals to the blanker process. The signals tell the screen blanker to quit, start blanking, stop blanking, or show it's interface for preferences. Since only four operations are needed the DOS signals CTRL-C, CTRL-D, CTRL-E, and CTRL-F are used. The means you don't need to allocate any signals, and the programs can be tested as standalone programs from a CLI window, pressing CTRL-keys to switch from mode to mode. Upon startup, PowerManager will need to know if the blanker module was able to launch and initialize correctly. This is done by sending a message to the public PowerManagerBlank port. The message should have the node name field pointing to the task base of your blanker. If you must quit at some time, sending a message with a name of null will inform the PowerManager that this blanker process has exited. You do not need a reply port. The mn_length field should contain the correct size of the message and PowerManager will free the RAM for the message once it is received. This of course means you cannot place the message as a structure inside your code, as freeing that will cause problems when you try to quit the blanker. Quick Overview of steps required: --------------------------------- - Initialize everything you need - Find Port "PowerManagerBlank" - Send a message to the port with mn_Length set up, and ln_Name is your task base. (FindTask(NULL)) - Wait for four DOS signals plus any internal signals you need On CTRL-C, QUIT On CTRL-D, Start Blanking On CTRL-E, Stop Blanking On CTRL-F, Set preferences - On exit, Send a message to the PowerManagerBlank port with ln_Name as null. How to get in touch with us: ---------------------------- If you have any questions about writing a blanker for PowerManager or the supplied examples, please contact: davide@wonder.ca @endnode @node NEWS25 "DesignWorks 2.0" @toc NEWS DESIGNWORKS 2.0 (North Hollywood, CA - Video Toaster User Expo '95) WCi Lazarus Engineering Division announces the immediate availability of DesignWorks 2.0 for the Amiga. DesignWorks 2.0 is an updated and re-engineered version of the DesignWorks structured drawing software formerly developed and sold by New Horizons. DesignWorks 2.0 features such improvements as a new user interface, updated operating system and graphics support, DR2D and EPS exporting, improved ARexx macros, multiple and selective undo and redo levels, extensive bitmap import support, improved drawing speed and accuracy, enhanced object manipulation, freehand object rotation, and improved document magnification. The product's design philosophy according to Steve Cockwell, the Lazarus Engineering Division Head, is "providing superior products through proper engineering and design." As a result, DesignWorks 2.0 combines ease of use with features found in more expensive drawing packages. DesignWorks gives both professional and home users what they need to produce quality drawings. The minimum system requirements for DesignWorks 2.0 is an A500 or better, running Workbench 2.0 or higher, and at least 1MB of RAM. A hard drive is recommended, but not required. MSRP for DesignWorks 2.0 is $119.99 U.S./$149.99 Canadian. Dealers may sell for less. For more information, please contact WCi Distribution, at 613-226-0000, or by EMail at distrib@wonder.ca Upgrades are available for $99.95 Canadian from any previous DW version. The front cover of your DW manual must accompany your order. Contact 613-226-0000 or sales@wonder.ca for more information. @endnode @node FEATURE6 "1995 World of Amiga, Toronto, Canada" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== 1995 World of Amiga, Toronto, Canada By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== Calgary's AmiJAM broke the North American Amiga show ice and showed that an Amiga show could be well organized. Montreal's Amiga Convention showed that you really could bring a decent amount of exhibitors out for the machine. WOA Toronto showed that you could do both. The bitter cold of the WOA weekend still drew thousands to the Toronto International Centre for the first show to call itself World of Amiga in two years. (WOA New York '94 was cancelled shortly before Commodore bit the dust.) Organized by Wonder Computers, Inc., launched by a speech from Petro Tyschtschenko, chief of Amiga Technologies, and spanning three days, the show brought together an impressive mix of retailers, developers, and presenters. The Show -------- No, really. I was impressed. @{"Katie" link KATIE} and I arrived in Toronto late Friday night, after the show had closed, so we missed Petro's speech. Hopefully, we'll get a transcript soon but I'm told it was very similar to the Cologne speech we published in AR 3.20. But when I walked into the show on Saturday morning, I had to smile. Nothing but Amiga set up in three aisles across a very long show floor, significantly larger than Calgary and Montreal. It was Wonder's party, so to speak, and as such they took a prime positition in the middle of the room for a large retail display, capstoned by what I called the "Pyramid 'o Softwood", with Final Writer, Data, and Calc stacked high off the table. (They were selling the three as a bundle, something Softwood needs to look into doing.) Even though the retail areas were pretty much always busy (the little A600 that tracked the sales got a good workout), they were hardly the only attraction. I have to apologize in advance--I didn't even get a chance to visit every booth, something I can only look at as a good thing, since I was there for two entire days. I also don't have a full list of exhibitors here, but hope to obtain one soon. That said...what was new at the show? Well, the A4000T and A1200s drew a good deal of attention at the far end, middle aisle, of the show floor. SMG and Amiga Technologies were set up here (until Petro's departure midway through Saturday). The 4000Ts were shown off both in action and with the case off, and it's clear that Amiga Tech hasn't changed the board screens at all, since the memorable "Haynie Kludge" jumper is still labeled. The machine case was rather uninspiring, visibly a stock PC part (given the Turbo button which disables the 4000T's internal speaker) but it was still nice to see. The machine in operation was marked up with some sort of black substance. Oops. The A1200s spent most of their time sitting there and playing Pinball Mania or running Wordworth, both pack-in items. Rick Stine of SMG was the big man on the scene, and did not seem to enjoy himself excessively--apparently, one too many people gave him a hard time over the 880k floppy issue and the price. He told me that both he and Amiga Tech did a lot of work to try to get floppies built, but the only offers they were made called for more floppies than they were willing to buy, and even that wasn't a definite. My major issue with the 880k floppy is that it makes the Amiga useless in a disk-sharing environment, since it can't read any Mac floppies and can only read 720k DOS floppies, a format in which virtually no new PC software is delivered. The 4000Ts were using old Commodore-badged keyboards, but Stine told me the shipping 4000Ts had their own, new keyboards. This remains to be seen. SMG's not the kind of company to discuss future speculation. So the issues open to discussion were simply the shipping of units and filling of orders, something they feel they're doing quite well at right now. On a side note, SMG's corporate information made it quite clear that they are not a company that will live or die by the Amiga. While both their old corporate profile and newer color information sheet speak proudly of the work they did, providing all of North America's service for Commodore, they're a multi-service corporation and most of what they do is NOT product distribution. PreSpect Technics had much the same display they did at AC '95, showcasing their MultiFace IV serial/parallel card and Oktagon SCSI controller. One of these days, we'll get a MultiFace for review... National Amiga sat right next to PreSpect. The small Amiga mail-order business, which does 90% of its business over the 'net, did so well at the show that Greg Scott, the president and owner, bought the first round of drinks after the show Saturday night. AmiTrix, manufacturers of the SCSI-TV and A570-TV products as well as North American distributors for the Amiga Link SANA-II floppy port networking system, had their wares on display. Amiga Link now ships with IAM's Envoy 2.0. Speaking of IAM, Dale Larson won an AT&T contest and is vacationing in Australia as we speak. In his place, he sent Hal Greenlee, formerly with NASA, and Steve [something I can't remember] to represent the company. I didn't have a chance to discuss sales with them, but they had the entire IAM line on display, including so many Deathbed Vigil tapes that they actually ran out of cases and had the tapes shrinkwrapped individually. One of the highlights of Sunday afternoon was Hal Greenlee walking pensively through the show crowds with a makeshift placard taped to his shirt. Bruce Smith, Amiga book publisher, was at the JCV booth showing off his recent titles. We should be receiving the newest 3 for review in AR shortly. My attempt to get him to do a book on the World League (In addition to Amiga books, Smith also publishes seasonal sports books) didn't meet with much success, however. Legendary Design Technologies (and Distribution, and Entertainment) were on hand with their Link-It! product, designed for high-speed parallel port networking between the PC and Amiga. They also were blowing out old Psygnosis games (and I missed Walker!) and showing off a new game from their Entertainment division. Upcoming products promised in their flyer include dataTAX 95, which on CD-ROM will include all US and Canadian tax forms, a new MOD CD which promises over 4,000 unique tunes, and a PC serial mouse-to-Amiga serial port adapter kit. CineReal Pro-Video Productions was on hand displaying the Broadcaster Elite non-linear editing system. I was unable to stay for the entire demonstration, but what I saw was impressive enough that I will pursue having a review done for AR, despite all being shown on a very very small monitor. The system is PAL/NTSC compatible, so could very well give V-Lab Motion a run for its money (and be a viable product in markets where the Flyer is not.) Speaking of V-Lab Motion, NoahJi's had the Draco on display. The real thing, running on an 060 in its full glory. Two words: Nice machine. Extremely quick and responsive, and with an impressive suite of Amiga software included. The system is of course all designed around the Macrosystem V-Lab Motion non-linear editor, which is currently a Zorro II card but will be available as a "Draco Direct" 32-bit version capable of really high throughput levels. The machine ships in a tower case (much more attractive than the 4000T's), with Zorro II and Draco Direct custom slots and a number of drive bays. Eric Kloor and Rick Sulpizio had a very impressive demo area set up with a camera and monitors, and were joined by Amiga Report's video columnist and NoahJi's East Coast Sales Manager and Creative Director Bohus Blahut, who dresses nicer than they do, on Saturday. Phantom Development sat near to NoahJi's, showing off their ClassAct BOOPSI toolkit, largely through showing off Amiga Report Tech Journal editor Osma Ahvenlampi's new Amiga mail reader, Voodoo. They also had Digital Quill, the new text editor, for sale in a complete package (At AC '95 they were selling disks with vouchers for manuals, awaiting their completion.) Right next door was the WCi (Wonder) Distribution table, showing the product line available to dealers through the WCi net. SoftLogik, the publishers of the popular PageStream DTP package as well as Digita's North American distributors, were on hand with PageStream 3.0something and a very large monitor. They also had gobs of Digita newsletters and press releases for the taking. Nice people, too bad they're going to be selling the package for the Mac and PC now. Village Tronic was on hand, showing off their aging but still popular Picasso II video card and promoting their entire line of products, including AmiTCP, now published through them. Hubert Neumeier spoke with me about the upcoming Picasso IV, a card that promises high performance for the Amiga. He also seemed concerned when I informed him AR had a tough time contacting VT's North American distributors for information, so I expect we'll be able to bring news and reviews of VT products much more quickly in the future. If there was one product (aside from the 4000T and Draco) that people walked away from WOA Toronto, shaking their heads and saying "God, I wish I could afford that, it's so neat!", it was the MicroScribe. Put simply, the Microscribe is a very slick looking piece of metal swing arm that digitizes 3D objects. Using Lightwave for the Amiga or PC, you touch the pen end to vertex points of a grid you draw on your object, and the VertiSketch software and Lightwave translate these points into an object. VERY clever and seemingly very easy to use, but it doesn't come cheap. The product was demoed both on an Amiga and on a PC laptop system. Lazarus Engineering, Wonder's R&D arm, was showing off Designworks 2.0, the revamped New Horizons structured drawing program, and the KB-10, a PC-AT keyboard adapter for Amiga 2000/3000/4000/CD32 (the latter two require a $5 adapter to change the 6 pin port on the machine to a 5 pin). I was promised that a new 64-bit graphics card would be started after the show and completed by Thursday, but apparently they were just kidding. Oregon Research was proudly displaying Cinema 4D, the new low-cost rendering package for the Amiga. They also had a number of HiSoft imported products on display, as well as their own Termite and On the Ball standbys. Bob Luneski and I discussed Cinema 4D (which is apparently doing very well considering its recent introduction to non-German markets) and the Atari ST market, which they still do quite well in. Retailer Zipperware, from Seattle, was on hand to sell product, with an interesting free gift to customers--a random PC CD-ROM (very popular were Windows 95 demos and CompuServe samplers) with a universal "No" stamp (the circle and a line through it, you know what I mean) and a badge on the back saying "Merry Christmas from Zipperware." Some came with paper clip hooks, allowing them to be used as ornaments. Veteran hardware developers DKB were there, with their entire product line on display, including the new WildFire 2000/060 card, WildFire SCSI hardcard, and Link UP serial/parallel card. Good news for A3000 owners--the demand for a WildFire 3000 has convinced Dean Brown to go ahead with the design, meaning that the WildFire 060 will be available in the fullness of time to 2/3/4000 owners. We will, of course, endeavor to bring you reviews... A bit of a surprise was the new educational title for the CD32 entitled Robokeet, an introductory spelling program with an arcade sequence interspersed between the learning sections. Very clever, even if the arcade sequence was not up to Team17 standards--that wasn't the point. Wonder's IT division had a booth set up demonstrating various Amiga Internet tools and applications on a really huge monitor. I didn't hang out here much except when I was frantically downloading Emplant software before my talk. The Toronto Pet User Group was promoting themselves and the various Commodore computers they support, including the C= 65 they had in their booth. The Amiga Based User Group and Valleysoft were both there--I distinctly remember their presence, but I didn't get a chance to speak with either of them. I suppose I should feel guilty for not talking with the Newtek folks. But their major display seemed to be a few video monitors showing a looping demo tape of Lightwave's real-world accomplishments and capabilities, with lots of Babylon 5 clips. In the far corner of the show floor sat a local TV production class. They put together a film of highlights from the Friday show in time for Saturday evening's official wine and cheese, which all of the show VIPs and exhibitors were invited to. But many of the teenage students spent their time at another booth... ...one of the most successful, from my perspective, booths at the show. That was the clickBOOM booth, displaying Capital Punishment, a new beat-em-up game almost ready for publication. The head of the clickBOOM team, Alexander Petrovic, was set up with three demo A1200s, running a beta of the game that, even though only one warrior was implemented, was drawing the attention of a number of attendees, including the aforementioned students. More importantly, it caught Mr. Tyschtschenko's eye, and he spent a half hour meeting with Alex. Quite simply, I don't think anybody was really expecting to see new games at a North American show, even one of a WOA scope. And even though they saw more than one (remember, Legendary had their own work-in-development), they weren't expecting to see one with some serious promotional material behind it. Large, full-color posters with a professionally-designed logo adorned the walls of their booth, and the sounds of combat drew people in. Capital Punishment is a very smooth and engrossing game in the Mortal Kombat genre. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to run the demo on anything but a stock A1200...hopefully this will change before release. clickBOOM is actively seeking publishers and apparently received at least two offers at the show alone, but is still considering its options. But the booth that, despite selling only one product (and a demo unit at that), was in my opinion the most gripping of the show was the Phase5 booth. In a sense, it shouldn't have been all that impressive. Only the company's general manager, Wolf Dietrich, staffed the booth full-time (although Wade Evans, Manager of MIS for Wonder, helped out). There was nothing for sale, and he even forgot his demo A1200 card. But he had THE BOARD, a prototype PowerUP 604 card, in a glass case, a shelf above Phase5's other offerings. People also got a lot of enjoyment playing with the CyberStorm 060 and CyberVision 64 cards on display, but the real talk of the town was the PowerUP card, and it was rare that Wolf had less than 3 or 4 people at a time clamoring for his attention. But he handled it all very well, encouraging people to take their product brochures and PowerUP information booklet and to send in the coupon for information. The CyberStorm Mark II, 060 for the 4000 and 3000, is promised soon, as is an upgrade path to PowerPC for those people who have bought CyberStorms after September 1995. I had a chance to speak with Dietrich about his company's concept for "Zorro IV", which would represent a high-power bus system for the Amiga but allowing for the use of industry standard PCI parts. This entire PowerPC movement has re-captured the imagination and dreams of a number of embittered Amiga users. If you're one that is still embittered, I think a number of your doubts would have been alleviated after a look at the PowerUP card. Mine were. Seminars -------- The seminars at the show seemed to be very successful. My emulation talk, as usual, was fraught with technical difficulties. It took the combined effort of Wade Evans and Bishop Wong ("The Self-Proclaimed Healthiest Amiga Technician Alive") from Wonder 45 minutes to get the A4000 up and running Emplant Mac in 15khz NTSC for the projector screen, and that was 30 minutes into my talk. But I was somehow able to entertain a sitting-room-only crowd without a screen for 20 minutes, giving them a rundown on emulators of the past and present. I unfortunately didn't get in to see any others, but the talks seemed to draw enough to fill the room they were in (40-50 seats) without taking too many people off of the show floor, something that detracted from sales at AmiJAM, where two talks ran at once, which is great for the attendees but bad for exhibitors. People ------ Where to start? Amiga celebs, bigwigs, and long-time users were all on hand. I was able to meet with Petro...for about 30 seconds. He had been hounded the entire time he was there by countless people hoping for an audience, so I barely had time to shake his hand, give him my card, and thank him for his work for the Amiga before he had to leave for the airport. Hopefully we'll have more time to talk at the Amiga Atlanta banquet on January 20th, which he and Gilles Bourdin will be attending, in addition to Dave Haynie and Wonder Computers, and hopefully other sponsors. Eric Schwartz was there as well, modeling what should be the next Big Thing for Amiga users who want to show their allegiance. A self-designed T-shirt featuring a maniacally grinning Amiga 4000 and monitor peering from atop a hill, with the very catchy--and accurate--motto, "Amiga: We're Back, And We're Pissed." Amiga Convention '95 organizers Frederik Tessier and Yannick Koehler made the trek from Quebec to check out the show. Katie and I had a great talk with Steve [some other last name I've forgotten] who was there reporting for the Lightwave mailing list. For some reason, I can't remember the last name of any of the Steves I met at the show, and for that I'm truly sorry. But Steve pointed out that even though other computer systems work for video production, the Amiga is the one that is the most flexible for the budding video producer, allowing a system to be built $1000 or $2000 at a time, rather than an outlay of $10,000 at once just to have a usable machine. Doug Cotton, editor of Commodore World, was the only print magazine editor at the show. Creative Micro Designs had considered setting up a booth but the plans never materialized. Still, Doug flew out to see the sights and have a Guiness or two. He was accompanied on Saturday by Jim Butterfield, but I didn't get a chance to meet him. CMD's plans to start an Amiga magazine haven't gone beyond the idea stage, unfortunately. Hopefully, the presence at the show will give him enough material to push the idea a bit more to the CMD purseholders. Giorgio Gomelsky and Livingston Hinckley of the AMUSE NY user group came out for the show. Giorgio is the AMUSE TV producer, and Livingston is the president of the group. They conducted interviews and generally tried to cover as much of the show as possible, including being involved in some behind-the-scenes meetings with Wonder after the show. Those Side Notes... ------------------- Without Dave Haynie or Dale Larson on hand to cause trouble, the after-hours scenes were a bit tamer than other trips this year. But... Karaoke in Toronto? Forget it. All we could find was a Japanese restaurant in a hotel, where all of the karaoke we saw in there was sung and subtitled in Japanese. Katie and I couldn't escape the Amiga people. On Monday, we went to the Toronto Science Center and ran into AmiTrix. We found a number of Amigas driving the displays, including the "Land Like a Cat" display. I won our mini-contest, landing with a force only 1.7 times my weight. Not quite as rewarding as beating Dave Haynie at Galaga, but... At each Amiga show this year, one person has enjoyed a Guiness or two while another said it was a repulsive substance. I finally decided to find out for myself. It's actually pretty good, as beer goes. Wolf Dietrich of Phase5 has a voice very reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger's. He's also got a similar build. What Came From All This? ------------------------ As Sunday wound down, I didn't see any unhappy faces. In fact, the mood of both the participants and exhibitors was upbeat, even if everyone was dead tired by 6 pm Sunday. I don't have exact attendance figures, but the day-to-day estimates put it somewhere around 3,000. Saturday was by far the busiest day, and it did my heart good to realize that I just couldn't tell what was going on in the booth 15 feet away, because too many people were in the way. I don't have each exhibitors sales figures, of course, but a happy face is a face that's made a profit. I have to admit that I had my doubts coming into the show if it would really draw a significant amount of people--AmiJAM and AC '95 combined brought in around 1,000. But Toronto in December was a prospect enticing enough to pull out thousands of Amiga fans to the show to see what was happening. Walking away from the show, it has to be said that the mood is positive. The show floor had old faces with the strength and courage to support the Amiga market: DKB and Newtek spring to mind. New industry leaders such as Phase5 stunned the floor. New Amiga strongholds like Zipperware and Legendary kept the spirit up. In the face of it all, new Amiga machines were on the SMG tables. A company that was a lone dealership in Ottawa a few short years ago pulled it all together. WOA Vancouver, June '96, and WOA Toronto, December '96, are already in planning by Wonder's IT division. I hope AMUC in Calgary and the Montreal AC '95 convention organizers take this to heart and go forward with their own shows next year. I hope the Gateway St. Louis organizers are inspired. This show was a real milestone for the Amiga in North America, and globally. Already, I've received a request from a general-interest computer magazine for a reprint of this article--and I'm not done with it yet! Let the momentum grow. @endnode @node FEATURE1 "1995 World of Amiga" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== 1995 World Of Amiga By: C. Edward Stewart =========================================================================== Patience is a virtue, they say; Amigans must be truly virtuous. After what can only be described as a farcical bankruptcy procedure, the Amiga was left adrift, holed below the waterline by those that were supposed to be sailing her. We watched, aghast, as the fair-weather-Amigans jumped ship in droves, quoting Gatesian drivel all the way. Now, over a year later, we stand once again on the deck of the best boat in the computer fleet. Amiga Technologies has run the flag back up the flagpole and set sail into the future (or back for the future!). First, the drawbacks The show was held in one of the smaller rooms of the International Centre. While that wasn't a major drawback, it was a noticeable difference from previous shows. There were a lot more `look what we can do' booths than in previous years. I always like to see new technology, but it bugs me when the people showing it neglect to bring any for sale! A lot of the display machines were either not working or were running demos that remained stuck at the final credits screen for far too long. The show certainly gave a good indication of what is coming in the future, but was a bit shaky in the here and now. Who was there I won't pretend to remember everything that went on, but here's some of the notable companies and exhibits. TPUG (Toronto Pet User's Group), still showing the C64 (though it was in a very minor position - finally), had a fair-sized booth and some Amiga stuff for sale. ABUG (Amiga Based User Group) also had a booth, though they were a bit less flashy than the TPUG. Also, ABUG had a huge pile of games, peripherals, computers and other Amiga paraphernalia for sale. Most of it was used, but all in good shape. Valley Soft had flyers with price listings for a bunch of Amiga games and some hardware. Newtek's Video Toaster and all the related hardware was there, of course. The best news? This year, it wasn't just a `toaster show' like the last WOC was. As usual, Newtek's flyers were slick and their presentation made me glad I had an Amiga. Legendary Entertainment was there with their Psygnosis game blowout. Not a lot of titles, but at $2 per game, there were a lot of people walking out with stacks of Psygnosis boxes. PageStream was shown there, PageStream 3, that is. Their big boast was cross platform compatibility. Right near the door was the MicroScribe 3D device. It looked like a robot arm and it was used to digitize real world objects into the computer. It was quite a neat toy, but way out of my price range. If you are a toaster nut, you might want to check this one out. DKB was at the show, still supporting the Amiga. They had displays of their line of products and some very slick information packages. Wonder Computers, the show sponsors, had the biggest booth, right in your face as you walked in. Unfortunately, the dearth of new hard/software extended to them as well. There was a lot of hype, but no new stuff! AMIGA Technologies GmbH had what could have been a very impressive booth. It was open and they had both 1200's and 4000T's there, as well as the new M1438S monitor (PAL version). The problem was, there were no staff there to talk to. I wandered around, looking at the innards of the 4000T and fiddling with the 1200, but no one seemed interested in telling me about them. The spec sheets are quite impressive, though I think that, if they are going to put one out, they should get someone to proofread it. There were other booths there but I was not impressed. I liked the corner where a TV place had set up a number of Amigas for people to play with, running digitizers, trackers and such like. All things considered, it was a good show. The overall impression I got was one of hope for the future. If AmigaTech gets the North American advertising going, they may be able to put the Amiga on top of the heap. If they follow the example set by Commodore, the Amiga will remain a computer that gets `Amiga? What's that?' from everyone you tell about it. That about wraps up my coverage of the World Of Amiga show in Toronto in 1995. Now I can hardly wait for the one in 1996! You can reach me at: CyberSpace BBS (519)579-0072 28.8 (519)579-0173 14.4 Online Games AMOS Support Free FAX service Users validated within 24 hours @endnode @node FEATURE2 "1993 World of Commodore" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== 1993 World of Commodore Greg Scott gscott@gold.interlog.com =========================================================================== [Greg and I thought it would be interesting to get some historical perception on this year's WOA Toronto, compared to the last one Commodore put on in 1993. -Jason] Here's a review I did of the last WORLD OF COMMODORE in Toronto 1993. I was working for a dealer in my city (London) called MusicMart at the time and I did the review for our local user group. I was walking around with the new (at the time) Sharp ViewCAM's (the ones with the 4" LCD screen colour screen as your viewfinder) and everyone though it was neat. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I hit the World Of Commodore Amiga show on the last day (the Sunday) armed with my Sharp ViewCAM VL-E40 (on sale for $1779 at MusicMart!) and came up with some pseudo interviews with the demonstrators there. Here is my transcript: The almighty British Magazine Distributors were there showing off all their latest imports. One side of their display was games, and they other side was productivity. Many new and interesting titles are coming this way for AGA Amigas and look very promising in game play. I interviewed a representative from the UK division of MindScape and asked him how things are looking in the gamers market. Read this at the end. Oh yes, Mortal Monday shall arrive soon on the Amiga platform. Brilliance, A-Max 4, Vidi Digitzers and a few other things were highlighted on the productivity side. I did not spend much time there as it was kind of busy, and I wanted to hit some of the more interesting people. (besides I was negotiating getting an Alien Breed II poster) The colour output I saw coming off the new Fargo Primera Colour Printer looked almost as good as the girls showing it off. It uses a wax-thermal transfer to make up colour on the page, AND it's upgradable to a dye-sublimation process that uses clay-impregnated paper to give an even better output. It only does 203 dots per inch, but the pictures I saw looked like photographs. Cost per copy is about $0.45 for wax and $2.79 for dye-sublimation. They were unable to comment on what this would translate into Canadian funds, but the printer itself would sell for about $1500 with the dye-sublimation kit. Quite a bargain for the colour quality. Another nice feature is the fact that it comes with drivers for the Amiga. It got the cover of January's issue of Amazing Computing. Lotsa people from London there. I talked to this weeks editor of Amiga World, Tim Walsh, and first thing I asked was why the change to the terrible binding. He faintly replied with "Not my department". A nicer and more helpful lady, Lisa Jaillet, who does Desktop Video World explained that since Amiga World dipped down to under 85 pages during the summer, that they had to go with the different binding. Well, I reminded her that this was no longer summer and she just smiled and asked to play with the camera. After about a 5 minute sales pitch on the camera I also told Lisa about the British invasion of Amiga magazines. Surprisingly she knew nothing about them. I explained the possibility of bad reviews whether or not they advertised in the magazine, and got another smile and received a large shopping bag with 2 complentary issues of Amiga World and the current Desktop Video World. Tim was still sitting there, patentiently reading a magazine and waiting for the show to end. I saw Emplant. That was about it. I wanted to talk to Jim Drew and see if he's the same sort of asshole he is on the nets, but he was too busy entertaining people with System 7. I did look for the chick that accompanies the ads, she was no where to be found. Oh well. Next door to Emplant was a dealer selling CD32... $485 show price. Wow. Expect it to be regularly sold for just over $500. The Video Toaster 4000 was shown off at a big booth with lots of room for an audience. It was demonstrated by some frenchies with a Jean Cretien accent. Kinda funny to listen to. There were some great scenes from upcoming Babylon 5 and SeaQuest DSV shows. ASIMWare Innovations was showing off both AsimVTR and ASIM-CDFS. AsimVTR was playing back an animation with scenes from a movie. DCTV was used to give a nice colour output along with a fast Maxtor hard-drive and a 4000 and 4091 SCSI-II interface. No other hardware was used to play back the 50 frames per second animation. Very impressive to watch. Paul Reeves the programmer says it will do 30 frames per second on an unaccelerated Amiga 2000. And ASIM-CDFS is a CD-ROM filing system for your Amiga and CD-ROM drive. It's needed to properly read CD-ROM discs on your Amiga. It also comes with an audio CD playing program and if your drive is capable, a PhotoCD decoder. Know where the name ASIM came from? Took a bit to get it out of him, but Paul is a student at McMaster University in Hamilton. ASIM is the last name of his favourite professor. Touring around Commodore's booth I saw many A1200's, some 4000's, some 3000's, even a CDTV. Most prevelant was a Video Toaster editing suite. I even saw some Commodore employees! CD32 was everywhere. It was playing games, playing audio CD's, and playing movies. Yes, movies. Movies are now coming on regular 5 inch CD discs. They are MPEG compressed on the disc and played back through a compatable Full Motion Video player. CD32 just happens to be one of these with the FMV option. There is great potential for this as all the game playing kids can also watch movies. It's also on CD, so it'll last longer, be cheaper to produce, randomly accessable, and you will not have to rewind it when you return it to the rental store. It was playing Star Trek 9 (?) The Undiscovered Country, and it looked incredible. There were a few pixelized chunks here and there, but only if you looked hard. When I was looking at CD32 I talked with Carolyn Scheppner, Technical Director for Amiga Technical Support. I asked her odd questions such as 'Just how big is the West Chester building, and is it really big enough to drive your car around in the halls ?' and 'What kind of guy really is Dave Haynie?' and finally, 'How do you say Lew's last name?' I got in reply, 'Yes it's very large down there.', 'Oh he's a fun guy.' and 'Eggebrecht' (a lot of help in print eh?) A small compact unit with a reset button, a headphone jack, and two indicator lights on the front. The controller has a four position directional pad, 4 individual fire buttons and a play button for CD's. Soft Logik Publishing was there with PageStream 3.0. 95% of Soft Logic is Amiga. NO PC products have been annouced, planned or even thought of by them. Good to hear that. They are a 13 person company based in St. Louis. Nice people there and very informative. I even got their marketing director on tape with her tounge sticking out at me. Oh, the other 5% of their product line? The Atari version of PageStream, they are supporting it, but not developing for it anymore... so sell your ST now! Warm and Fuzzy Logic was showing off their one and only product. LightRAVE. It allows you to use LightWAVE 3d without a Video Toaster. They say theyhave heard nothing from Newtek. Oh yes, they have 4 other products in development, should be interesting to see. The name of the company was developed from a deep involved thought process to come up with something that people would not forget, and no they were not drunk. Warm and Fuzzy Logic is a small 4 manned (no womened) company with 600 square feet of office space in an office building in Richmond Vigina. Very nice (and tolerating) guys and I am eager to see what they come out with next. Oh yes, the 'hardware module' of LightRAVE is made from silicon and not cast iron as he tried to have me believe. Amazing Computing were great to talk to. The Editor, Don Hicks, helped me joke along about their competitor Amiga World and how many editors they have had in the last year. He told me how they are going to put the Guide To The Amiga on a CD32 disc with demos of software. They would be great for dealers to get ahold of. This way they could have the computer search through the database for products for customers and in some cases load up demos of that software. Excellent idea and I know I will be one of the first to purchase it. Oh, and he loved my ViewCAM. Legendary Software, based right up here in Brantford have taken over DataTAX. DataTAX was the only income tax return software for Canada. The author unfortunately dropped the product last year and left Canadian Amiga owners hgh and dry without any computerized income tax software. Legendary is redeveloping the product and also allowing previous owners to upgrade at the regular cost. In addition Legendary has other products, Address-It and Invoice-It. Two programs that can help automate your home office. Address-It is a more comercialized (and more reliable) version of Addresser. It allows you to export your databse to Invoice-It which is an on-the-fly invoicing program that will allow you to keep track of any incoming cash and accounts. No it does not handle stock, but they are working on Account-It which is a complete accounting package for the Amiga. And lastly, Link-It, based on ParNET will allow you to connect an Amiga and an IBM-PC and share files quickly and easily between the two machines. It will even convert picture and sound files into a compatable format for the destination machine. TPUG was there. With 64's. Oh ah. Hot damn. Sell your Amiga's quick! Degrade! Amiga On-Line Reference Manual is a complete AmigaGuide document with offer 600 pages of catagorized text. It covers, most major Amiga programs, references on all Amiga models, some A-Rexx, a list of people who use the Amiga, and other helpful hints and tips on your machine. Also in the works is a Video Toaster On-Line referenc manual. Axiom Software was showing off Anim Workshop and Wavelink. Anim Workshop is a program that allows you to edit and combine animations in ANIM5 through 8 format. It also interfaces with Art Department or ImageF/X. Wavelink is a version of ParNET that allows you to network two Toaster machines together and use them both to render the same scene. It comes with a 10 foot ParNET cable and software to get you up and going. Tammy W. Gray, a former Newtek girl (she can be seen in the later DigiView ads and on the back of the original toaster box, as well as many of the original Video Toaster demonstrations and trade shows) now works for Axiom software as of last May. She quit Newtek saying they are now too big, too pig headed, and were not paying enough. This just confirms the earlier information I had about disgruntled Newtek employees. I did get her on camera a little, but she shyed away because she was wearing a retainer. She did grab the camera and point it at me though... Good-bye Amber, hello Tammy. I ran out of battery power and had to resort to plugging into the game display at BMD for my last interview. I talked with Mark, a representative from MindScape in the United Kingdom. Mark told me about the new titles that are coming out for the Amiga and highlighted Captive II: Liberation all along the way. He mentioned how it was 2 years in development and how the CD32 version has 640 megabytes packed on to a disc. There are 8 cities all with different people, and over 4000 missions. Biggest game I have heard of yet. They are re-releasing some titles, such as Chaos Engine with better graphics and sound for AGA and CD32 machines. MindScape goes by reviews. If one of their products do not receive a good review, they do the best they can to make it up in the next game. This is good, it shows MindScape listens to their users and tries to provide an excellent product. I was also told about the gaming platform statistics in the UK. Approximate figures include 20-25% for the Amiga, 25% for Sega Genesis, 16-18% for Nintendo, 8% for IBM-PC and 2-3% for the Sega CD. Seems the Amiga has Sega to compete with over there. Mark also mentioned how cruddy the Sega-CD system is and favours the Nintendo equivalent. Right now MindScape develops for Amiga, Amiga AGA, CD32, IBM-PC, IBM-PC-CDROM. They are considering 3D0 and CD-I. CD-I has been looked at heavily but may be ruled out due to high development costs. MindScape perfers Amiga platforms because it is easy to develop for. Just buy a machine and away you go. Piracy is aparently policed quite well over there. Mark has found that it is more widely known about in the UK than it is in North America. Now software publishers are looking towards CD-ROM format. It's cheaper to produce, and incredibly hard to copy. If it is copied, you would have to have either enough hard-drive space to store it, or a CD-ROM mastering system. Both fashions requiring a lot of money. That's all the battery power I had in the camera. If you want to see the tape, it should be at the December meeting for people to view. I took a rather off-key approach to the people at the boothes. Most of them plan on attending the New York show, and well, so do I. I hate the city, but it'd be nice to see Tammy again.. ;) @endnode @node FEATURE3 "Interview with Pieter van Lieven" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== Interview With Pieter van Leuven, Author of the Vic-20 Emulator George Lui GEORGE-MW_LUI@HP-Singapore-om1.om.hp.com =========================================================================== [George Lui is a big fan of the Vic 20 emulator for the Amiga. He decided to interview the author via e-mail. Here's what he got. -Jason] > 1) Did you have a VIC 20 and why ? Yes, I still have it. This was the first computer that I owned (and used). I was interrested in computers and I had the choise between buying a ZX-80 or a vic-20. > 2) What did you do with it ? Write very simple programs on it. I learned programming in machine language on it. And ofcourse playing games on it. > 3) What led to the creation of your VIC 20 emulator ? I wanted to do something with my amiga. So making an emulator was a nice project. I choose the VIC-20 because that was the computer I owned for I bought an Amiga. I knew allmost all the details of the VIC's hardware. > 4) How long did it take ? 1/2 Year (with a lof help from friends) > 5) What programs/hardware did you use ? DevPac asembler and debugger, SAS C-compiler, an Amiga 2000 and a terminal to display debugging information. > 6) What were the difficult parts in writing it ? The 6502 emulator. When VIC program didn't worked it is often a wrong implemented 6502 instruction. To find out whihc instruction causes the problems can take some time. Especialy when the faults are not in the emulator but in the vic-program. I was looking for a fault for months and the problem was that I initiated all the addresses with the value 0. In the real vic it has random values. Cosmic Cruncher forgot to initialise on variable. When it was not equal to zero the program worked (most of the time on a real vic). On the emulator it was always going wrong. > 7) Did the graphics and sound emulation proved to be trickey ? It's implemented trickey. But is was very easy to findout how it worked. > 8) What are the main steps in writing an emulator ? Find out a smart way how to emulate the hardware. The processor is not that difficult. > 9) Do you think that BASIC should be popular again ? Nope, there are much better languages. I prefere C because it's gives you the possibility do some dirty programing. But one of the better program languages is modula or other kind of languages that looks like modula. > 10) Did you have fun writing it ? Yes, it kept me from the street :-) > 11) Are there any plans for a future update on the emulator ? When I buy a new kind of computer. > 12) Will you port the program to other platform ? See above question. (Probably on a PPC-platform) > 13) 80's micro emulation seems to be popular these days. Why do you think > that this is so ? Just sentiment. A lot of people started with computers from the 80's. Now you need a lot of computer power for programs but some of the old games where more enjoyable then the games from now. > 14) What are your thoughts on the present state of the Amiga ? Not that many improvements the last years, but still a lot better then the PC's. > 15) What do you think of Amiga Technology ? I hope they can continue the Amiga-line with a lot of new hardware/software. > 16) What do you think of 'The Amiga Report' ? Sorry, I don't know 'The Amiga Report' > 17) What do you think of Jason Compton ? Who?? [Oh well. -Jason] > 18) What would be your dream Amiga machine ? A multi processor system with a flexable Operating System. And ofcourse nice graphics and sounds for games. Regards, Pieter @endnode @node FEATURE4 "IPISA '95 Show Report" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== IPISA '95 Show Report Manuel Lemos etmall@ua.pt =========================================================================== WHAT? IPISA is an annual meeting of Amiga developers. In Italian, IPISA means 'Incontro dei Programmatori Italiani per lo Sviluppo su Amiga.' In English, this means exactly, meeting of Italian programmers for development under the Amiga. WHERE? IPISA 95 took place in Milan that is a large city the north of Italy with around 5 million inhabitants. WHEN? This year, IPISA took the morning and the afternoon of Saturday, 18 of November. WHO? A group of Italian enthusiasts of Amiga programming organised IPISA. Many of them are students at Milan's university. They worked hard on their free time for many months before the meeting day to organise this event. Almost 400 Amiga developers and enthusiasts attended the meeting this year. Some of them bothered to travel during all night from the south of Italy, just to arrive in time to the meeting day morning. Italian developers held most of the talks and presentations, but the main guest star was definitely Dr. Peter Kittel. Dr. Peter Kittel came from Germany to bring several good news to all the amigans. Angela Schmidt came also from Germany to talk about the story and the latest release of Meeting Pearls, and Haage and Partner came to talk about Storm C/C++ development environment. Oh, and I (Manuel Lemos) came from Portugal to talk about Objection that is a portable Object Oriented programming support system. HOW? As a non-Italian speaker, everybody kindly treated me as a guest. I arrived in the morning of the day before the meeting day. Many thanks to Fabrizio and his mother (I hope I have spelt the name right) that bothered to pick me up at the Milan-Linate airport. I stayed all the afternoon at the home of Paolo Silvera where I meet the well-known Amiga E language Dutch developer Wouter van Oortmerssen. It was with a great pleasure that I got the news that such a qualified software engineer as Wouter will most likely to join the Amiga Technologies engineering team. Depending on Wouter, the incoming version of AmigaDOS will feature a co-operative system of protected memory and the executable binary files stored in portable CPU independent format like for instance under TAOS. By night I met with everybody of the IPISA organisation for dinner. The dinner took at an internationally award winning 'pizzeria.' There, I could confirm that what I heard about Italy being the worst place on earth to eat pizza could only be a joke. The pizza's that I tried were very tasty. They are thin but so large that you can make a whole meal just with one pizza. Anyway, I think I would get sick very quickly if keep eating pizza every day just as I ate in all the three days that I stayed in Milan. Well, let's just get back to IPISA. The meeting day was very long for everybody that participated. Although the meeting started at 10 in the morning many people, mostly of organisation, arrived much sooner to make sure that everything will start on schedule. The conference hall was quite large and seemed to be almost full by the time the conference started. Sergio Ruocco welcomed everybody present. A short but smooth ray-traced IPISA logo animation was projected on a large screen of maybe around 4x3 meters. An Amiga 4000 connected to a professional video system that fed the images to a large RGB projector. The persons that had anything to show to support their presentations used this A4000. Like most of the persons that were going to present their work, I had to arrive sooner to install the stuff I brought to the show. Unfortunately I had been very busy in the weeks before the conference day and I was not able to prepare a better presentation as I wished. I had to carry my hard-disk to the conference and plug it in another Amiga 4000 supplied by the organisation to install some stuff that remained to the last hour. This took me quite some time to work out and so I was not able to pay proper attention to all the morning presentations. I am not going to describe in detail all the talks because they were too many and I was not able to pay proper attention to everyone. This is mostly because I do not understand enough Italian worthy to mention, although my mother language (Portuguese) is quite similar to Italian. Here follows a summary of the talks by order of appearance. I hope I have not forgotten any of the presentations. o Angela Schmidt talked about the story and the latest release of Meeting Pearls. o Michele Battilana presented a talk with reflections about the future. He made allusions to other systems and trends that he believes Amiga should follow. Many thanks for the beta version of Cloanto's personal suite that he gave away in a CD to every IPISA participant. o Paolo Canali presented a PCI 2.0 solution for the current Amiga architecture. o Maurizio Ciccione presented the current developments of is Audio Lab 16 version 2 program. This program is still under development but it looked very impressive. It seems to a complete solution for professional audio engineers. A version will available later in Aminet. o Gabriele Falconi and Stefano Guarnieri presented a visual environment to simulate neural networks. The theme is very interesting but it is not very well known for the generality of the programmers. The program looked simple but very effective. Future developments may turn the application into a very useful tool for programmers that want to use the fuzzy logic technology in their applications. o Vicenzo Gervasi presented an integrated environment to support Object Oriented Programming under the language E. The seemed to be a very good looking and complete system. It features visual support for class browsing, automatic tool building and revision control. o Giuseppe Ghibo presented a library to support recursive paths for TeX. He also described a complete TeX installation that he worked out for the IPISA CD. o Giuseppe Ligorio presented an improved compression scheme for sound and image IFF files based on variant of Huffman algorithms. Too bad he had not much time to do more than introducing the theme due to time restrictions. o Alberto Longo presented a complete analysis on the viability of writing smooth texture mapping games under Amiga. He demoed Breathless, which is a doom-like game, to show how fluid this kind of games can turn out using his technology. In a few words: it looked impressive! o Michele Puccini presented a library to manage high speed animation. Unfortunately, I was to busy by the time of this presentation and I was not able to pay proper attention. o Alessandro Tasora made one of the most spectacular presentations. He presented several modules for Real 3D that support particle based 3D animations. He had some wire frame based animations ready to show. The animations looked very impressive and Alessandro was very applauded. o Federico Zuccollo presented a BOOPSI class based solution for improving the AMIGA file system access. This was a very technical and detailed presentation. o Manuel Lemos (myself) presented an Object Oriented Programming support system to develop portable applications named Objection. Unfortunately, I was not able to talk much about my system due to time restrictions. My system consists of a library that implements OOP support in very similar way to BOOPSI but in truly a portable fashion. Objection was completely developed in ANSI C. About 80% of all the code that was developed for all the classes and the system kernel is system independent. This means only about 20% of the code need to be rewritten to port the Objection to another environment. The system currently supports Amiga under Intuition and POSIX (UNIX) compliant platforms under X-Windows. Many base classes needed to write applications were already developed. Some application specific classes are under active development, like for instance a PostScript export class and RTF (Rich Text Format) export and import classes. I demoed an application that was my graduation project. It is a visual editor to design Finite State Machines. This is a high level tool to model for instance microchip hardware. Both AMIGA - Intuition and POSIX - X-Windows where shown running at the same time on the AMIGA. The X-Windows version was running under DaggeX X-Windows server. I was not able to put a version running under AmiWin X-Windows server on time for IPISA. Objection will be freely available to non-commercial AMIGA software developers. Commercial software developers will have to pay licence. o Haage and Partner presented the new C/C++ development environment. It looked great but it felt as it needs to mature a lot to support Amiga specific programming up to the level of SAS C. despite this, it features visual automatic tool building support. This is an important feature that lacks on SAS C. The C++ compiler was claimed to be a fast although the generated code was not as good as it could be due to the lack of a global optimiser. They are considering making the compiler full ANSI C++ 3.0 compliant. The debugger seemed visually good looking but nothing was said about its abilities to debug multi-thread or shared library based applications as SAS CPR is able. AMIGA TECHNOLOGY SPEAKS Dr. Peter Kittel was the most wanted speaker in the afternoon. He divided his talk in three parts: what AT has done so far, what they are doing now and they plan for the future of the Amiga. The reintroduction of the Amiga in the market was what he talked about concerning what AT has done so far. So, this is not worthy to mention it again. Now, AT is working on the restart of ADSP planned for 1 of December (a bit late now). Commercial developers will pay more (300 USD) than non-commercial developers (100 USD) as usual. Commercial developers will get phone support. I wonder what does this means exactly because any serious developer uses Internet to communicate. From now on, the access to the developer program will be restricted to real AMIGA developers. Non-commercial developers have to show at least one public domain program for the Amiga and commercial developers have to show at least one commercial application. AT plans small enhancements and bug fixes to the Amiga OS and the current Amiga models in early 96. There will be no more beta versions of the operating system circulating around like in the past. It is to be hoped that this will prevent the OS being pirated in the BBSes. Dr. Kittel mentioned Windows 95 beta versions as a joke. AT is going to introduce a PCMCIA based Quad speed CD-ROM drive named Q-Drive some time very soon. They are also going to release an Internet surfer package for the Amiga. No mention on the WWW browser that will be supplied. AT is talking to several companies to discuss strategic alliances and to bring back new and old AMIGA developers to support the AMIGA with their products. Motorola was mentioned regarding the future Power PC based Amiga. In a more distant future, AT will be working on hardware independent version of the AmigaDOS. Low end and high end Power PC based Amigas will be the first to run the new version of AmigaDOS. High end Power AMIGAs will be most likely CHRP compliant. Power AMIGAs will feature a proprietary chip set. It will not be AAA, but will be something that will have many of its features. This chip set will feature 24 bit video and 16 bit audio. Power AMIGAs will be definitely PCI based. Dr. Kittel then tried to answer almost every question that was posed by the audience. He apologised for the things that he could not talk about. Most of the questions are related with topics described above. Dr. Kittel was not able to answer a particular question that claimed my attention. It was about the differences of prices of the AMIGA computers in each country. He said that AMIGAs are sold to every distributor at the same price. The answer is simple and it scares me that AT either ignores or pretends to ignore the real reason for this. The reason is that in many countries there is only one company that buys all the Amigas that arrive to that country. That company resells the AMIGA to any other local distributor but with their own 'tax' added to the original local distributor price. This is what it seems to be why the AMIGA was so overpriced in many countries. It's a shame if AT will continue to close their eyes to this situation because this seriously hurts the AMIGA chances of being more popular in the future. In the end Dr. Kittel encouraged developers to write only OS legal software. He also encouraged every AMIGA user to advocate for the AMIGA spreading the good news about the AMIGA that is back for the future. Dr. Kittel was very applauded before and after a question and answer period. Almost everybody stood up to applaud him. LIKES In a few words, IPISA was impressively very well organised. The number of attendants was very high (almost 400). DISLIKES The arrival of some late hour guests, like for instance Dr. Peter Kittel, forced the organisation to rearrange the time and the duration of all the other presentations. This was a bit frustrating for many of the speakers like myself as we were not able to talk about many aspects of our work in such shortened periods of time as we wished. In compensation Dr. Kittel's talk was in my opinion the most interesting for everybody. Anyway, I understood that the organisation will probably split next year IPISA meeting in more days if the number of speakers keeps increasing like for this year's meeting. Milan's weather by mid-November is already too cold. Probably it would be a good idea to reschedule IPISA for some time earlier in the year when the weather is warmer. Maybe a month earlier would be warmer enough to encourage more non-Italian's developers to attend to IPISA and take the chance to visit the beautiful historical side of Milan. Almost all the conferences were in Italian. Fair enough because before everything this is an Italian developer meeting held in Italy. It would be great if English versions of the papers related with the talks could be made available to the Amiga community through the IPISA WWW pages. I am sure this would encourage many more non-Italian developers to attend IPISA in the future. CONCLUSIONS IPISA is yet another proof that AMIGA is back for the future. If there is an international meeting that AMIGA developer should not miss, IPISA is the one. Even Dr. Kittel admitted that in Germany there no developers meeting of this quality. Do not miss IPISA 96 if you are a serious AMIGA developer. Congratulations to the whole staff of the IPISA organisation. Copyright Manuel Lemos 1995 Internet : UpperDesign@zeus.ci.ua.pt FidoNet : 2:361/9.1 BIX : mlemos (@bix.com) @endnode @node FEATURE5 "WOA '95 Show" @toc FEATURE =========================================================================== WOA Show Review Jason Eyre eyrej@limestone.kosone.com =========================================================================== To date I have attended 4 WOA shows over the past 5 years and have enjoyed them all for the most part. My friends and I piled into a mini-van in Kingston Ontario and struck out for Toronto. We decided it would be best to go up on the second day of the show, more time to see everything. After braving the harsh weather during our trip we finally arrived at the convention centre. To my surprise the parking lot was practically empty! Which in the past was quite full and usually with people directing traffic. Well I thought to myself that it was still quite early, around 11:30 or so, and figured more would come later in the day. I was looking forward to seeing the displays and finding all the good bargains. Well we bought our $8 dollar tickets, filled in the ballots to possibly win the Amiga 1200 system and went in. Thats when my excitment for this show was knocked down a peg or two.. The convention room was smaller and not nearly as nice as the one where the show had been held in the past. I pulled out my list of goodies that I wanted to purchase and started on my marry way hunting for them. First on my list was AmiTCP 4.0 I've been wanting to purchase it for awhile and thought that I would wait for the WOA show to do it since they would probably have some special show price.. WRONG! I found it at a couple of boothes and the price tag on them read $149! I couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing. The least they could have done was offer a special show price! Well I quickly scratched that off my list of things I wanted to buy and went looking for a new mouse. I found what I was looking for at the Wonder Computers table which took up most of the floor space in the centre of the room. There was alot of hussle bussle around Wonder's table and rightly so--they had quite alot of software and hardware for sale. I bought my new mouse (EK1000 Eklipse $22.98) which made me feel better knowing that I was able to find one at a fairly decent price. I spotted the Amiga Technologies booth and headed right over to have a look at the new 4000T. It was a modest booth with some nice colour brochures of the Amiga 1200 and the 4000T. I went right up to the 4000T to have a look at the future of Amiga only to be shocked at what I saw. The machine was filthy! There was dirt and grime on the interior front panel and not just a little bit. I couldn't believe no one had taken the extra 5 minutes and wipe the machine down with a damp cloth. The 4000T has an impressive looking case and is quite large, maybe a bit smaller than the 3000T. When I saw the 4000T it wasn't running anything impressive that I could remember. None of the machines seemed to have been configured for display. The 1200 (Dirty aswell) had a plain out of the box workbench displayed and only had the stock 2 megs of chip ram. If I was somone interested in buying an Amiga these machines definatly weren't going to help to sell me one. The old labels on the 1200 had been pried off and replaced with paper labels. After being totally disappointed with what I saw at the AT booth I went roaming around checking out the other displays. NewTek had some nice televisions on display playing fighter scenes. In shows past they have had alot of floor space to put on a good demonstration. But this year they were relegated to a small area which made it hard for people to see the demos playing and listen to the guy talking about the capabilities of the machine and software. Phase 5 was there showing off its accelarators and had a nice glass display with the new PowerPC accelarator with the 604 CPU. Their brochure says they plan on selling them in mid 1996 in a price range of $700-$1500 depending on what configuration of board you get and for which machine. I'll definatly be sending away for more info about the Phase 5 boards. These boards in my opinion are going to help breathe new life into our beloved machines by bringing new software developers to the platform and possibly taking the Amiga into new areas not previously ventured into. I spent maybe 3 hours wandering around. The company that had bought Psygnosis inventory was selling off the old companies software by the truckload at $2 a game and giving a free game with every purchase. I saw many people walking away with arm loads of games. They made for excellent Christmas gifts at that price! One of my friends was interviewed for a cable show down in the US that is dedicated to the Amiga, his name is Stev Cole if you happen to catch the show. In hind sight the show was a sucess. Many people are still dedicated to the Amiga and companies are still willing to support the machine if there is money to be made and judging from this show there is. Hopfully the things I have mentioned in this small "review" will be noticed by the people responsible for setting up the show and will take note for the future. @endnode @node REVIEW1 "ZIP Review Clarification" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== ZIP Review Clarification Wolfram Gottfried gottfrie@acca.nmsu.edu =========================================================================== I received a letter from Rask Lambertsen about a potential error in my ZIP drive submission that was published in AR321. Since you received a copy too, I am sending you a copy of the response I sent back. I was the one who wrote the article in AR321 about the ZIP drive and the Amiga. I didn't take into account the LOCK command in Amiga OS because it's not the same kind of write protect. The LOCK command write protects a device, not a disk. The Mac and IBM ZIP tools software provides for a write protect of the disk itself, something written to the disk that acts like the write protect tab on a floppy drive. If you LOCK the ZIP: drive with the Amiga OS and then change disks, it still won't let you write to the drive, even though there is another disk in the drive. What I meant in the AR article is that there is no way to write protect an individual disk, either with a physical sensor trigger (IE write protect slide on a floppy) or via software (Mac/IBM software write protect). Sorry for the confusion...I didn't realize people woudl get confused over that. @endnode @node REVIEW2 "Review: Maple V Release 3" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Maple V Release 3 for the Amiga. Stephen Judd sjudd@nwu.edu =========================================================================== Chances are good that you have heard of Maple, and wondered about it a little. It doesn't change colors in Autumn. And although I haven't tried it, I don't think it tastes very good on pancakes. What Maple is and what it is useful for is something that will hopefully be addressed in the text which follows. This review is going to be at a semi-highbrow level. It seems to me that if you think an eigenvalue is some kind of German bargain price, that a phase portrait is used for identification purposes on Star Trek, or maybe think that the only people interested in natural logs would be Greenpeace, then this software will probably not be very eigenvaluable to you. (On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time doing problem solving in science and mathematics, you will probably find this to be one of the more powerful tools in your arsenal.) Accordingly, I am not going to spend time explaining mathematics; I assume that you either understand or at least can appreciate my examples. This review will be in three parts. First is a brief introduction to and overview of Maple and symbolic mathematics in general. The next part will be some more detailed examples of using Maple to analyze and solve problems. The final part will deal with the Amiga-specific aspects of the implementation. I should also point out that I am an Applied Mathematician, and that the examples I give reflect the kinds of things I personally use Maple for; other disciplines may find Maple useful for other things, and this review will barely scratch the surface of Maple's capabilities (the quick-reference guide is over 500 pages long). There are a number of books available on Maple which will of course give much more detail about its various capabilities. Finally, since Applied Mathematicians are universally recognized as being the most handsome, witty, brilliant, literate, and downright humble examples of God's grandeur, I, well... I forget what else I was going to say. So without further ado about nothing: What in the world _is_ Maple? ----------------------------- Although Maple is capable of a wide variety of numeric computations, the real power of Maple is it's ability to deal with things symbolically. Simply put, it can do calculations in the abstract, much as you or I can. For example, how would you factor x^2 - 4? Even a juror knows that it factors into (x-2)*(x+2). Let's see what Maple has to say about it: > factor(x^2-4); (x-2)(x+2) What is the derivative of sin(x)? > diff(sin(x),x); cos(x) How about the integral of cos(x), from some number a to pi/2? > int(cos(x), x=a..Pi/2); 1 - sin(a) Neat, huh? Maple is of course useful for things besides doing Calculus homework: > readlib(fourier); > fourier(t/(1+t^2), t, w); I Pi (e^w Heaviside(-w) - e^(-w) Heaviside(w)) Maple knows about many special functions: > assume(n>0); > int(exp(-t) * t^n, t=0..infinity); GAMMA(n~) n~ i.e. n*gamma(n). Maple knows plenty about most of the common special functions (Bessel, Gamma, Dirac Delta, etc.), and knows quite a few others besides! Maple can solve large sets of equations, algebraic as well as differential. Maple also has powerful routines for generating plots in 2D and 3D, even animations. Maple has a programming language associated with it, so you can write large programs to perform more complicated calculations with Maple (e.g. write a program to perform a Center Manifold reduction); in fact, many such programs are included with Maple. Maple knows sequences and series (asymptotic series, power series, etc.), number theory, graph theory, statistics... and on, and on, and on. Finally, Maple can save output in many ways. It can save it to a file. Maple can save it in LaTeX form (the double quote " is shorthand for the previous expression, e.g. GAMMA(n) n).: > latex("); \Gamma (\mbox {{\tt `n`}})\mbox {{\tt `n`}} You can even save stuff as FORTRAN or C code: > f:= sin(x^2 + y^2): > g:= cos(x^3 + y^3): > J:= jacobian([f,g],[x,y]): > fortran(J, optimized); t1 = x**2 t2 = y**2 t4 = cos(t1+t2) t10 = sin(t1*x + t2*y) J(1,1) = 2*t4*x J(1,2) = 2*t4*y J(2,1) = -3*t10*t1 J(2,2) = -3*t10*t2 Very cool. Maple is the cutting edge of symbolic mathematical programs. Yeah, okay, fine; what is it Good For? -------------------------------------- Maple, like computers in general, will not solve your problems for you. Maple is a very powerful tool when you already know what you are doing, e.g. what kind of answer to expect, etc. I use it in two ways: first, as a program for doing massive amounts of grunt work, and second, as a tool for analyzing various aspects of a problem. That is, it may not solve my problem, but I can use it to look at various specific parts of the problem, to gain further insight into the problem. Maple can tell you what happens, but not why it happens. The best way to demonstrate this is to work through some problems where I have personally found Maple helpful. Consider the following differential equation: du/dt = f(u,v) dv/dt = g(u,v) Now let's say we can Taylor-expand f and g about the origin, to cubic order: f(u,v) = au + bv + cu^2 + duv + ev^2 + ju^3 + ku^2v + luv^2 + mv^3 g(u,v) = pu + qv + ... Now let's expand u and v as a Fourier sine and cosine series. u = a_0 + a_1 cos(t) + b_1 sin(t) + a_2 cos(2t) + ... v = c_0 + c_1 cos(t) + d_1 sin(t) + ... Now we need to substitute these expressions into the Taylor expanded f(u,v) and g(u,v), and simplify all of the trigonometric expressions, e.g. cos^2 (t) = (1 + cos(2t))/2. Now, I am certainly capable of doing this, but it is quite a tedious process, and doing it doesn't give me any great insight into the problem. Maple on the other hand is more than happy to chug through something like this. Maple is also happy to solve the sets of algebraic equations which will result. I am currently solving a problem similar to this one, but my equations involve various x-derivatives as well, so my expansions are Fourier expansions in space with time-dependent amplitudes. Interestingly, by writing a large Maple code to solve some things for me, I realized that I could calculate things by hand, very simply. So my big Maple code is now just a check of my hand calculations. But it does have an important moral: using Maple helped me to gain some insight into solving the problem as a whole. There is another important moral: Maple will solve things as it sees fit. In the example of my program, when I first saved my results to a file, the resulting file was some 6000 lines long! So I had to reorganize the code to make Maple calculate things in a different order, so that I could interperet the resulting expressions. In the process I realized that I could write them in a fairly compact way. Unfortunately there was no way for me to trick Maple into writing them in that particular way! So, as always, a brain and a pencil still play the most important role. To stress the point, I once wrote a program to perform a center manifold reduction in Maple. At one point I ended up with a rather large matrix, which I needed to calculate the eigenvalues of. Maple got a little confused trying to calculate these symbolically; it just so happened that the matrix had a lot of structure, though, so by breaking the problem into smaller parts -- finding the eigenvalues of some small block-matrices -- I could make Maple happy once again. How about another example: d^2x/dt^2 + w^2*x + b*x^2 + c*x^3 = 0 where w,b,c > 0, i.e. a nonlinear pendulum with no damping. A regular pendulum has nice closed orbits -- it just oscillates back and forth about the origin, and trajectories in phase space are circles. What effect do the nonlinear terms have on these trajectores? This equation is pretty easy to analyze, since we can use a simple energy argument. Multiply the equation by dx/dt and integrate to get, (dx/dt)^2 + w^2*x^2 + 2/3 b*x^3 + 1/2 c x^4 = E Constant values of E represent trajectories. There is a quartic potential, so I know the trajectories are closed. Here is where Maple comes in handy: what do the trajectories look like in phase space (that is, a plot not of x versus time but of dx/dt versus x)? I know they are roughly circular. I also know that a new pair of fixed points appear when b^2/4 = c*w^2, so I should look at it in the two different cases: > with(plots): > Energy:= y^2 + x^4 + 2*x^3 + w^2*x^2; > e1:= subs(w=2, Energy); > e2:= subs(w=0.5, Energy); > contourplot(e1, x=-2..2, y=-4..4); > contourplot(e2, x=-2..2, y=-4..4); This will plot level curves of Energy, which represent solutions to the equation. Contourplot is actually a three-dimensional plot, so with a simple click and drag of the mouse I can look at it from a different perspective -- instead of a bunch of circles it now looks like a bowl, so you can really see the energy well. Now I'll stick some sort of axis on the graph. All that remains is to print it out or save it to a postscript file, publish a paper, become famous, and retire to an idyllic life of writing entertaining Commodore 64 programs. Incidentally, if you want to see Maple choke, try to look at the closed orbits of e2 near the origin. The plot routine does some pretty funky disco if, say, x=-0.001..0.001 y=-0.00001..0.00001. I could have used Maple in a few other ways as well for this problem. After all, we very often can't use an energy argument. First I write the system as a two-dimensional coupled system: dx/dt = y dy/dt = -c*x^3 - b*x^2 - w^2*x Now I can do a couple of things with these. An easy thing to do would be to plot the vector field (e.g. the tangent lines to solution curves in phase space): > u:= -2*x^3 - 3*x^2 - x; > fieldplot([y,u], x=-2..2, y=-4..4); I could just generate a (numerically generated) phase portrait directly by using the command phaseportrait(), and I really could just use the command odeplot() to calculate the solution x(t) numerically. Just for fun, let's try to get Maple to solve the equation analytically, with initial conditions x(0)=1 and dx/dt(0)=0: (the fake TeX output is by me, not Maple) > deqn:= diff(x(t), t$2) + w^2*x(t) + b*x(t)^2 + c*x(t)^3 = 0; > initcons:= x(0)=1, D(x)(0)=0; > dsolve(deqn, x(t)); t = +/- \int_0^x(t) 6 \over sqrt(-36 w^2 y^2 - 24 b y^3 - 18 c y^4 + 72 C1) dy - C2 > dsolve({deqn, initcons}, x(t), series); x(t)= 1 + (-1/2 b - 1/2 w^2 - 1/2 c) t^2 + (5/24 c b + 1/6 c w^2 + 1/8 c^2 + 1/12 b^2 + 1/8 b w^2 + 1/24 w^4) t^4 + O(t^6) > dsolve({deqn, initcons}, x(t), laplace); > In the last example, Maple does not even return an error message! It is supposed to generate a solution by using Laplace transforms, but doesn't like something about this equation. Finally, to generate a particular solution curve: > d1:= subs(c=2, b=3, w=2, deqn): > dsolve({deqn, initcons}, x(t), type=numeric): > odeplot(p, [t,x(t)], -4..4); From the earlier analysis I know that there will be very different looking solution curves based on how large w is, and also depending on what initial condition I choose, e.g. > d2:= subs(c=2, b=3, w=0.5, deqn): > ic:= x(0)=-1, D(x)(0)=0: Plots of d2 will differ greatly depending on which initial condition is used! There are now three fixed points, one of which is unstable, and the two initial conditions start near different fixed points. So, once again, Maple can say what happens, but not why it happens. In summary, I find Maple to be a very useful tool for analyzing problems which involve tedious if not downright formidable calculations, such as huge algebraic manipulations. The ability to generate various types of graphs such as vector fields is also helpful. The ability to output in LaTeX and also to write code to evaulate complicated mathematical expressions is a very powerful and useful feature as well. Finally, I find it very handy to have for checking calculations of my own, both algebraic and numerical (for instance, it provides an easy way to check if that FFT code you just wrote works like you think it does). Now, I don't even want to get started about the state of education in America, but I will once again suggest that tools like Maple are of tremendous value once you know what you are doing. The downside to tools of this sort is that there is a certain temptation to become dependent on it for many trivial calculations! Overall, though, it is a tool well worth a place in any researcher's toolbox. Hey, What Happened To The "Amiga" Part? --------------------------------------- The Amiga version of Maple comes on nine disks, and the full installation takes up around 25 Megabytes of disk space. The main Maple package consists of the disks, two hardcover Springer-Verlag books entitled "First Leaves: A Tutorial Introduction" and "Maple V Language Reference Manual", a small softcover set of Release 3 notes (about sixty pages long), a double-wire-ring bound quick reference guide (about 500 pages), a list of Maple related books, and a sheet of paper for the Amiga describing installation instructions, online documentation, getting help, etc. The rest of the Amiga-specific documentation is contained in two Amigaguide files. While some of you might have some apprehensions about this, you shouldn't. It was some time before I even got around to looking at them. Most of what you are doing is related to Maple, not the Amiga, and most of the Amiga-specific features are very natural. That said, the Amiga version has lots of really neat features. The Amiga version of Maple Vr3 was written by Willy Langeveld out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator and Tomas Rokicki of Radical Eye software. Both of these names should be familiar to any Amiga user; they have both been active in the Amiga community for many years. Willy, whose background is in particle physics, is probably best known in the Amiga community for programs such as VLT and the XPK standard, and was instrumental in getting ARexx included with the Amiga operating system. Tomas is the author of programs such as AmigaTex, dvips, and blitter Life, but is probably BEST known for his BADGE killer demo "RadBoogie", with the mysterious quote "Or I Won't Get Dressed...", which after some six years now I hope will finally be explained to me ;). What this means is that Amiga Maple was written by people who understand both the needs of the scientist and the needs of the Amiga user -- a rare treat in the Amiga world! It means that you get a 'real' Amiga program -- one which is memory and CPU efficient, OS friendly, contains Amigaish features, an ARexx port, etc. -- which is also a tremendously powerful tool for scientific research. I should probably mention my setup. I am running Maple on an Amiga 1200 with a DKB Mongoose 50MHz 030/882, 4+2M RAM, a 3.5" Maxtor IDE drive in an external (Dataflyer) housing, PanaSync C1391 monitor, and other irrelevant stuff (Supra 28.8, lame Chinon CD-ROM attached to SCSI option on the DKB board, etc.). The machine is running OS 3.0 (KS 39.106, WB39.29). Hmmmmm, where to begin? Maple can open on the workbench or on a custom (public) screen. I personally have it open up on a custom screen, Super72 interlaced. This gives me a nice large worksheet area, and keeps the workbench uncluttered. Since the screen is public, I jump my editor (ame) to that screen, so that I can work on my programs on the same screen (in case this is not clear, I edit a large file containing my Maple code, and then read the file into Maple's worksheet). Maple has a problem with stealing pens from the workbench and not giving them back, but a simple patch is available. You have a fair amount of control over things like fonts -- what kind of font to use for equations, for text entry, etc. This was very useful indeed to me, because the default font for text entry is a CG font -- too bad I don't have any CompuGraphic fonts! (I think Commodore ran out of money and deleted them from the OS distribution). I changed the font to Ruby, and everything was fine. You can customize things in other ways, but I'm that type of user that usually doesn't bother with something if I don't have to :). For instance, there is a tool bar at the top of the worksheet which you can customize, etc. Plots are pretty neat. There are lots of dither and coloring options. Plots can be saved as IFF files (in addition to PostScript etc.). Furthermore, plots can be clipped into the system clipboard, and hence pasted into other programs easily. I tried generating some 3D animations, and they ran very smoothly. Willy Langeveld et.al. went to extraordinary lengths to make the program memory and processor efficient. It won't run on a 1M 1.3 Amiga 500, but Willy tells me it will run on a 2000 with a few megs of RAM on it (and, presumably, OS2.1 or so). I was worried that with a mere six megabytes about all I could do was integrate e^x dx, but so far I have been able to do just about everything I have set out to do. Sometimes I feel the memory crunch, but I have zero complaints here: I am more surprised at how much I can do with 6M. Maple dynamically allocates memory as it needs it, but one downer is that it doesn't give it back when it doesn't need it any more. This is endemic to the Maple core program, and is not fixable at the Amiga program level. One fix is to just quit Maple and start it again. Another fix is to buy more memory. Still another is to use a program like VMM. I have not tried this, but it is supposed to work with Maple. (One place this has bitten me is in a loop, where I accidentally ended the loop with a ";" instead of a ":", which had the result of printing out each loop variable, etc. This then filled up the worksheet, which starts chomping up memory pretty quick.) The main Maple library is some 10 megabytes large; Amiga Maple searches through the library to find what it needs, so you don't want to store that library on a fragmented disk! (In fact, it is recommended that you place the library on its own partition). On the plus side, functions and such only need to be loaded once. The rather extensive interactive help facility is all done in AmigaGuide format. You can also access help from the worksheet in the usual way, i.e. >?int. Revision 3 has the nice feature that you can access just the examples, or just the calling format, etc., instead of the entire help file. Amiga Maple has an ARexx port with about 70 commands. Support is excellent: you can't beat talking to the programmer! I know they've released at least one patch to fix the WB pen allocation problem, and they are looking at the CG font issue. Willy answered all of my questions quickly, no matter how strange they were, and was quite enjoyable to talk to. Note that I am referring to Amiga specific issues here; for Maple issues Waterloo is also very accessible. So, how does this compare to similar products? There is nothing similar to it on the Amiga. Software-wise, the closest thing to Maple is Mathematica. I used Mathematica for several years before using Maple, and I greatly prefer Maple. Last time I checked, the ubiquitous, all-knowing "they" seemed to feel that the Maple algorithms were more robust, but I really have nothing to support such a claim. Universities often support one program or the other; here at Northwestern we are a "Maple School". If you are lucky and your school has a site license, you can get Maple at a very substantial discount. (It is also worth noting that programs like Matlab are now using part of the Maple kernal). Platform-wise, I use Maple on Suns and HPs (and Amigas :). I think the interactive help is better on those machines, but overall I like the Amiga version better! Manipulating plots is a snap. Speed is very comfortable (I haven't tried to do any comparisons with massive CPU- intensive calcuations though). I like having it on a separate screen. Maybe I just like having menus work in the Amiga way. Suffice to say that I find it to be entirely comparable to Maple on other platforms, to have a very comfortable feeling about it, and an excellent example of properly written Amiga software. There is, I think, a certain stigma attached to the Amiga, that in terms of serious scientific research it is not "professional". May I suggest that this is, in the words of a television censor, Bullstuff. With Maple, AmigaTeX, a good 2D plotting program like xmgr or gnuplot, and a decent X-server, the Amiga literally becomes a mini workstation. Granted, it would be nice to have things like Matlab and IDL for the Amiga, but the tools I mention above are just about "it" when it comes to tools in use around the department here at Northwestern. In short, then, with the addition of Maple to my software library, I now have a mini-workstation which runs AmigaDOS. Think about that: a workstation with screens and ARexx and MODs and ArmyMiner and all the other great things that are Amiga. The only things I really need a true workstation for are CPU-intensive tasks (and, truth be told, X-intensive tasks). While Maple is clearly not for everyone, it is a very valuable tool for any serious researcher in the sciences. It is my feeling that the mere presence of Maple for the Amiga makes the machine a very credible platform for performing scientific research, not to mention a very viable machine for the 'education' market. There isn't much scientific software for the Amiga, but the few programs that do exist are excellent. Thus I highly recommend Maple Vr3 for the Amiga. Maple is an outstanding piece of software, and the Amiga version is excellent. I exhort you to go forth and purchase, and when the price sends you into shock, remember that you are not just investing in your research, you are investing in the future of the Amiga. @endnode @node REVIEW3 "Review: Colonization" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Colonization By: @{" Katherine Nelson " link KATIE} =========================================================================== Colonization (Microprose) is a game brought to us from the makers of Civilization, as long-awaited sequel. There was some question as to whether it would be released on the Amiga, but fortunately, Microprose came through for us. Only an ECS version is available, but it could almost pass for AGA because the graphics are very well done (similar in quality to Settlers, another ECS game). Another mark in the positive column for Colonization is the fact that it runs straight from my hard drive on my 4000/040. I was never able to get Civilization to run without using its boot disk, and I tried everything. So the less hassle for me to play this game translates to a happier reviewer. Basically, Coloniztion is a game of (surprise) colonization and revolution. You are the leader of the colonial presence of one of four European powers, the English, French, German, or the Dutch. Your goal is to create colonies that prosper, and evenutally, to declare independence from your parent nation, and survive (and win) the onslaught that ensues. Three different world options appear after the playing language is selected. These are: Start a Game in NEW WORLD, Start a Game in AMERICA, and CUSTOMIZE New World. Any of these are good for play, but I prefer not to choose America, simply because in order to trade more efficiently, colonies need to have access to the ocean. There is a lot of coastline in the America version, but that is the only surface available for all four European powers. Many medium-size islands seems to work better. After selecting where you want to play, a difficulty requester appears. I am not a master strategen, so I chose the easiest: Discoverer. I'm sure some of you out there could cope with the fifth level, Viceroy, but I think this review would never have been completed if I had tried it. There is a @{" cheat " link CHEAT}, however, to make it easier. The greatest challenge of the game is to balance your manpower between food-related work, defense, and the cash crops that help put money in the coffer. Beyond that, you have to deal with the colonies and colonists of the other three nations, and you have to deal with the Indians (Native Americans) through friendship and appeasement or through force. All in all, a lot of things to manage. I have found that it is a good idea to have at least one solider or dragoon (mounted solider) in each colony. Unlike Civilization, these military units are formed from existing people, plus they do not consume any resources. In reference to goods that can be traded with the Indians or brought back to Europe, it seems best to process all raw goods except Ore. Ore is worth more money unprocessed than converted to tools or muskets. It is a good idea to stockpile the tools and muskets anyway, though, because they are needed for creating roads/plowing fields, and for fighting in the war, respectively. But with respect to cotton, furs, sugar, and tobacco, you may as well create cloth, coats, rum, and cigars. Trading with the natives can be useful, because the crown does not charge a tax on those trades. Also, sometimes a real good deal will crop up. However, sometimes the natives do not offer good prices, and refusing them can increase tension. Trading in Europe is more consistent, but prices fall if you glut the market. In Civilization, the emphasis was on creating shields to build things, including Wonders; wheat to feed the people; coins for purchases; and light bulbs for discoveries. In Colonization, in order to build things, you have to have someone working as a carpenter and possibly a blacksmith. You need trees for the carpenter and ore for the blacksmith. They create hammers and tools, which are used to create the building or item. To get food you need a farmer and/or a fisherman. The farmer will grow corn, and the fisherman (after you build Docks), will catch fish to feed the people. New colonists are available in the colony when the food reaches 200 or on the European docks when enough crosses (symbolizing religious freedom, go figure...) are generated. Crosses are generated in the Church (which you have to build), and increased by assigning someone as a priest in it. Money can only be obtained through trade, or conquest of other colonies or native settlements. Combining the ideas of Discoveries and Wonders, in Colonization you put people in the town hall to increase the generation of liberty bells. When enough have been created, you choose a new member of the Continental Congress. Each possible member has different advantages, with pluses under one of several subjects: Trade, Military, Political, Religious, or Exploration. You get extra points when you retire for each member of the Continental Congress, but it is not necessary to have all of them. Generating the liberty bells is also extremely important during the War of Independence because they keep people in the Sons of Liberty, which gives production and defense bonuses. Also, another European power will volunteer to aid you if you can create enough liberty bells, and these added forces can make a great deal of difference. On the subject of the war... You cannot declare war until there is at least 50% rebel sentiment (created by the liberty bells) in your collective colonies. You may still have individual colonies that support the crown when you declare, but this makes the war more difficult. Immediately upon declaring war, your enraged European monarch lands the troops near your colonies. This is pretty fast moving, considering they take no travel time between Europe and the New World. You always spend a few turns sailing between, but it seems that either their ships are faster, or they knew the kind of rebel scum you were, and were prepared. The british forces have many attack bonuses. They are better trained, but you have an advantage when both of you are in open terrain. These bonuses are still not stellar. The best idea is to have a large number of troops, and hope for power in numbers. Having some artillery helps a great deal, as long as it is in a colony, and not out in the open. The War can last a great deal of time, and you will need money to support it. This can be obtained either through trade with the natives (which is one reason not to wipe them out, if you don't go with the moral one), or build a Customs House, which lets you trade with the other European powers without sailing all the way out there. There are a lot of fees on this type of trade, though. At any rate, if you win the war (by fending off a great deal of troops or re-capturing all of your colonies), you see your number of points, look at some pretty screens, and then the game suddenly quits. I would prefer that it went back to the opening screen so you could play again, but I'm just lazy. Another strange "feature" of the game is that while you are at war with the crown, you can still buy ships from them. I don't know if they just assumed there would be some sympathizers in the Mother/Father country, or if they just didn't think that the Crown would mind selling weapons to the enemy. Finally, I'll end on some good points. The sound is excellent. You can turn it off, too. This is good, because although there are several good songs you can choose to play, if you're playing for hours and hours like you need to, it gets repetitive anyway... Maybe they need a sing-along version to keep my attention longer, I don't know. But it is really good for as long as you can listen. Also, a good change from Civilization, the saved games are not in the main directory. They are buried within the game directory, and that keeps them out of the way. Did I mention it ran straight from my hard drive? :) Colonization is a great game for Civilization lovers. It has a great deal of strategy involved, though, so probably is not for the light of heart unless you cheat (See the button above). It looks and sounds impressive, and is one of the better games I've seen for the Amiga. @endnode @node CHEAT "Colonization Cheat" @toc REVIEW3 To get 50,000 extra gold and reveal the entire map, name one of your cities "Charlotte". (Without the quotes, of course.) @endnode @node REVIEW4 "Review: The Global Amiga Experience CD" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: The Global Amiga Experience CD By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== I had to laugh recently. I was flipping through a 2-year old Amiga magazine, roughly when the CD32 was released, and reading an article about CD-ROMs. It essentially said that there wasn't a very good market for CD-ROMs on the Amiga, except for what looked like a lucrative CD32 game market. Oh, how the times have changed. CD32 games trickle out, due to artificially low sales of the machine (since Commodore couldn't afford to build them). At the same time, the general-purpose CD-ROM market has been gaining momentum, thanks to a great deal of available material and low production costs. The Global Amiga Experience does something that's actually a really good idea. It compiles over 200 demo versions of Amiga software along with 8 full commercial titles (aging versions, but hey, free is free.) The likes of Imagine 2.0, Scala 1.13, Vista Pro 1.0, Distant Suns 4.0, Clarissa 1.1, and Edge 1.721 are nothing to sniff at, and upgrade offers are included for all six. (We use Edge 1.721 for Amiga Report, in fact.) X-Copy and Steuerfuchs '93 are included as well, the latter being some sort of German tax program. The demo versions are by and large of commercial software packages, most of which are still readily available. This is an excellent thing for the market and something that lends itself very well to a pack-in with CD-ROM drives from dealers and Amiga + CD-ROM bundles. Oh, you mean we don't have official CD-ROM packages from Amiga Technologies? It's time to start. The CD doesn't have what I'd call a pretty layout--there isn't enough indexing, and an AmigaGuide interface to the CD would have been appreciated. As it is, you get a whole mess of assigns that should make anything runnable from CD-ROM, if you so choose. The only real problem with this CD is that you're not informed ahead of time that a great deal of the content will be in German only (including, very unfortunately, the Edge text editor you're getting the full version of), and others will be PAL-only (such as Imagine 2.0). This may not be the compiler's FAULT, but I do think it would have been nice to let everyone know. The CD is pretty recent, only released a few months ago. There have been some changes and updates to versions in that time, of course, and the rather important fact that VRLI has dropped Distant Suns and sold it to Chaocity, and the fact that Imagine 3.0 is about to become a CU Amiga coverdisk are pretty important to potential upgraders of their commercial versions. The bottom line? DM39, or US$29. True, you could get the vast majority of these demos from Aminet, but unless you already have Aminet Sets 1 and 2, it'll take you quite some time. You also won't snag 8 free commercial software packages. If you're shopping for Amiga software but don't know what you like, this CD will be a great tool. Logic Creations Rankic & Schneider GbR Prof. - Druck - Str. 38 72666 Neckartailfingen Phone: ++49 7127 22608 Fax: ++49 7127 3760 @endnode @node REVIEW5 "Review: The AGA Experience CD-ROM" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: The AGA Experience CD-ROM By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== No, there isn't a conspiracy to use the word "Experience" for CD-ROMs, it just worked out that way. Sadeness PD and NFA created The AGA Experience as both a tool to show off the capabilities of AGA Amigas, and a way to compile lots of PD disks into one small package. The fare is varied, running from AGA eye-candy demos to commercial software demos to rendered animations and slideshows (some of adult nature), and finishing off with a strong dose of Amiga online magazines, including a licensed compilation of Amiga Report. Not bad, eh? The collection, as the name implies, is targeted at AGA users, although the minimum requirements for some software (some application software such as emulators and picture files) is less, and of course you don't need a 4000/040 to read AR. A comprehensive AmigaGuide index and contents file is included, although you have to use other methods to actually access the software--generally, the icons are configured to either run or decompress the item you choose. The CD also sports a small collection of original software not for redistribution, consisting of slideshows, Klondike card sets, and NFA's Out of Space disk magazines. Complaints are few...I guess my only real complaint as far as the CD's content goes is that there are far too many versions of the NFA and Sadeness logos on the CD, to the point of being ridiculous. But they're more or less all in the same place so it's not an annoyance, just odd. The CD does what it says, and creates an "AGA Experience". I suppose if you're looking for a way to justify the purchase of that new A1200 or 4000T and CD-ROM drive, popping in this CD and playing a round of Pulp Fiction Klondike might make you feel better... Some PD disk collections have come in clumsier form, others in prettier (the Assassins CD comes to mind.) The AGA Experience is not quite what I'd call an attractively laid out CD, but the directory trees are reasonable and logical, and the necessary assigns are made for you with a click of an icon. The price is UKP 20, or roughly US$30. More than an Aminet CD, but you're paying for a planned compilation of showoff software as opposed to a collection of the newest software. I do think the Aminet AmigaGuide interface should become a standard for CD-ROMs on the Amiga, but that's not anything I expect to see soon. I never quite thought I'd see a licensed Amiga Report collection on the same CD with a "Big Girls" slideshow, but that's just me... Sadeness PD/NFA 13 Russell Terrace Mundesley Norfolk NR11 8LJ Phone: ++44 1263 722169 @endnode @node REVIEW6 "Review: Aminet 8 CD-ROM" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Aminet 8 CD-ROM By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== The Aminet series. You know it, if you've ever used one you probably haven't been disappointed, and it's a lot faster to use than even a 28.8k modem. Aminet has long been the leader in new, freely redistributable Amiga software and the Aminet CD series, by going quarterly and then bimonthly, has lead the way for CD-ROM shoppers looking for the newest software. Those with net access don't always want to run up their phone bills or hog connect time with FTPs to the Aminet network, and those without FTP access can get the latest several hundred megs of Amiga software on CD-ROM for a pretty low price. No major surprises appear in this edition, although a registered version of the very flexible mod player DeliTracker has been licensed for inclusion with the CD. Being a long standing fan of Bryan Ford's Multiplayer, Delitracker caught me off guard and is considerably more complex, with some options and features which are not completely intuitive...so you'll want to read the docs. The familiar AmigaGuide interface is back. (I think I keep saying that every time I review an Aminet CD.) So are the prefs and search tools, including one feature I've never quite taken note of before: the ability to search ALL of the CDs (in other words, the entire Aminet) for the string you're interested in, which generates an index-style report with a column telling you which CD to check. Nice. The Aminet 8 theme is mods, with some 2,000 or so on the CD. The index allows you to access them either by name or by category with the "shuffle" option (which is handy if you're lazy or bored.) One drawback is that if the mod is actually an .lha'ed pack of mods, it will only play the first mod of the pack. Perhaps in the future, this will be corrected... Aminet continues to deliver prompt access to the latest in Amiga software, and the CDs are coming out so fast that Aminet 8 (October 95) is already old news, Aminet 9 has been released. The CDs run roughly US$20 but are often discounted on one-year subscriptions. Aside from being an Aminet mirror yourself or having an extremely fast link with Aminet mounted as a device on a 24 hour basis, there isn't a more effective or convenient way of bringing the collected fruits of the Amiga share/freeware community to your home than with these CDs. One of these days there may be one that's a waste, but that hasn't happened yet. Stefan Ossowski's Schatztruhe Gesellschaft fur Software mbH Veronikastr. 33 D-45131 Essen Germany @endnode @node REVIEW7 "Review: Super Skidmarks" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Super Skidmarks By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== The premise of Skidmarks and its successor is simple enough. It almost seems as though the developers, Acid Software, brainstormed and came up with "Hey, what about a racing game where you leave marks on the track?" Thus was a legend born. Super Skidmarks is the sequel to the game that dared ask that question. It sports AGA and ECS compatibility (which dictates the prettiness of the game: AGA players can race up to 8 cars while ECS users are limited to 4. (Cut those in half if you want to haul trailers on the cars you race, which is neat but somewhat silly.) The race takes place on a large, multi-screen track, although link options and AGA's ability to display a high-res screen cuts down on the amount of scrolling necessary. With link options and split screening, you can get a considerable number of friends in the game. Lots of cars and lots of tracks are the order--two disks of cars (and you can roll your own with Imagine) and 4 disks of tracks. Unfortunately, you can't install the game to HD, as Acid claims it would encourage piracy. There was supposed to be a special installer coming, but it hasn't surfaced yet. Dual floppies are nice, but not necessary, to playing the game. The racing feels fast and smooth in Tournament mode (where you have a limited number of "replays", which you lose if you fail to finish first in a race), but is sluggish in the regular race mode, presumably as a training level for the tournaments. Having this more flexible would have been appreciated, however. One complaint is that the Skidmarks racing model prevents you from going outside of the boundaries of the track, whether or not you're in the air. This makes for some irritating "bounces" off of the track, making for a ridiculous concept when you fly through the air and your forward motion stops dead. It's all part of the game, but not a very "friendly" part. The computer players provide a challenge at first but after a few hours of racing should no longer be a serious enough threat to totally knock you out of competitions. Super Skidmarks has flexible serial link options (no TCP networking, though) so playing with friends is encouraged on several levels. Complaints? Well, the wheels on the cars don't turn. Detail counts for a lot, and Super Skidmarks does a good job of keeping it up graphically, but the static car images are a minus. Actually, the whole "disregard for physics" is a bit of a problem (sideswipe collisions actually increase the speed of both cars, which most physics students would have a problem with), but it IS a game, after all. I also found the game somewhat unstable on an A3000, with crashes during disk loading. This didn't show up on an A4000, however. Super Skidmarks is an extremely playable game for an individual, but is better suited to a party or friends environment. It's not realistic, but it's a lot of fun. @endnode @node REVIEW8 "Review: Roadkill" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Roadkill By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== Roadkill comes from Acid Software, the same developer/publisher team that put together Super Skidmarks. Instead of racing for the pure love of the sport (and the thrill of marking up the track), you race to earn money and blow up other drivers, in a futuristic (and top-down) environment. Strictly one player and strictly AGA, Roadkill is pretty and smooth (and works well on an 040, no mean feat for many games). You get a choice of 6 (remarkably similar save for color) cars to inflict Roadkill with, and can arm yourself mid-race with rocket and missile powerups, because after all, what's a game these days without powerups? Money is also there to be collected. Your car has only a certain amount of protection from the 8 or so computer drivers out there to race against you. They tend to be less aggressive than you, however, so you can take advantage of their passivity in the various "kill zones" (areas with mean metal spikes on the walls of the track) or sneak up behind them with a rocket (keyboard controlled unless you're playing the CD32 version, eek!) This makes Roadkill a bit lopsided, since you feel like you're playing with different rules than everyone else. While it's fun to blow up other cars (not to mention profitable, you get cash for each car destroyed, including Jackpots and Super Jackpots), the real goal is to place (1, 2, or 3) in the race. Fail that, and you lose a "replay", or life. The same applies if you beat your car to hell and don't make a pit stop in time to avoid your explosion. After the race, you're told how much money you've earned, and shown the next race, including the option to do a single lap, with no danger from other cars or mines or lasers--a preview. This is actually pretty nice, but never seems to help quite enough as the pressure of the real race, and the increased speed, will make you forget the preview lap. Luckily, onscreen "Radar" of a sort shows you the general layout of the track. No, it's not a bad game. In fact, it's very pretty to look at and the control system is reasonable enough, except for those keyboard-fired missiles. But why, oh why, can't you actually spend the money between races? It would make it seem like a much less hollow pursuit, but as it is it merely acts as a "score" in case you're competing for points with a friend. Roadkill has a great game engine, but is too limited to be a game to play again and again. The violence aspect of the game, which the box pays a lot of attention to, is largely overrated--cars blow up but it's certainly nothing repulsive. Those looking for blood and gore should pick up Screech on Aminet...now that's disturbing. Roadkill has good racing, but the implementation just isn't there. @endnode @node REVIEW9 "Review: Alien Breed 3D" @toc REVIEW =========================================================================== Review: Alien Breed 3D By: @{" Jason Compton " link JASON} =========================================================================== HOW long were we waiting for this game? It seems like forever ago that the demos came out, with what looked like the most complex Doomish game engine for the Amiga, if not the one with the biggest screensize. Now the real game is out. Yet another installment in the overworked Alien Breed franchise, AB3D retains the rather small viewing window of the demos but does indeed sport a gaming engine in some ways more advanced than the standard benchmark, Doom for the PC. The reflective/refractive/noise dampening water is the best example. On the other hand, AB3D has less weapon choices, no automatic mapping (the lack of which has been defended by author Andy Clitheroe as unrealistic--Would you map if you were running around shooting aliens?), and saving can only be done between levels, with a password. No, it's not perfect. But it is pretty fun to play, and has been designed for playable speed on low-end AGA Amigas, which results in lightning quickness on an 040/25 or so. The aliens are actually pretty disgusting and scary and sound like it, both when shooting at you and when dying. The game's sound effects and scarcity of resources (it's not difficult at all to run out of ammo completely) create a very claustrophobic atmosphere, which is diminished somewhat by the static border that surrounds the viewing window, which shows you which of the 4 colored keys per level you've collected. There is a human heart in the center, which presumably is supposed to do something, but doesn't. It has the look and feel of an unimplemented idea... Speaking of unimplemented ideas, Clitheroe is working on what is tentatively being called Alien Breed 3D Special Edition, a new game engine which will allow for more resolution flexibility (as it is now, you are stuck with what you are given, period), more engine features and shading advancements (right now your big choice is to decide how much texture the floor has), and new levels. Initially, there was to be a free patch for certain new features for existing owners but Team17 was encouraged enough by the brisk AB3D sales to decide to market a new product, which will include a level editor. (The original AB3D levels will apparently not be included but will be playable in the new engine provided you own AB3D.) I found AB3D quite playable with a joystick, which is in a sense a bad thing because you'll still be relying on the keyboard for such things as strafing, ducking, and looking behind you (an excellent and obvious, yet unusual, feature.) Developers really need to start supporting the CD32-style gamepads for non-CD32 machines, they're quite flexible and useful. Some might even like them to go a step further and support PC-style analog joysticks, many of which support more buttons and switches than seems reasonable. The issue and idea of future releases is all well and good (previously, AB3D was to be Team17's last Amiga release), but that's not important to the question of whether or not AB3D is fun to play. Yes. Is it frustrating to play? Well, the interesting thing is that the more machine speed you have, the more playable the game will be, yet the more you'll want to have more screen resolution and a larger viewing area. The game is good enough to stand on its own, although the engine is not quite perfect, as white pixels are noticable where some wall seams aren't rendered properly. But the satisfaction of blowing away the three red crawly things around the corner soon makes you forget about that. If there's one reason not to buy AB3D, it's the damned copy protection. Look, I don't mind document protection. But I find glossy black ink on shiny black paper to be absolutely intolerable. I'd sooner they ask me to TRANSLATE the word on Page 23 of the manual from German to English. Luckily, the game is HD installable with a minimum of fuss, but that doesn't excuse the black-on-black. It's not Doom. I'm not sure it's really captured the excitement Doom created when it was released. But it is a very playable and quite polished texture-mapped Doom-genre game with excusable flaws, a popular topic, and with promised enhancements to come... @endnode @node CHARTS1 "Aminet Charts: 3-Dec-95" @toc FTP | The most downloaded files from Aminet during the week until 3-Dec-95 | Updated weekly. Most popular file on top. | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- ar321.lha docs/mags 89K 0+Amiga Report 3.21, November 30, 1995 png_dt.lha util/dtype 79K 0+PNG DataType (68000/020) v. 43.2 + d html30gu.lha docs/hyper 99K 0+Complete HTML 3.0 reference in Amiga mn_ansitest.lha comm/mebbs 3K 23+ANSI Test Door for MEBBSNet pip_v22.lha util/misc 35K 0+View any screen in a window on anoth Reboot_1.2.lha util/misc 15K 0+Reboot utility. V1.2 DiskMonTools34.lha disk/moni 102K 0+V 3.4 of THE moni/optim/salv/cdrom t mNews0_1.lha comm/news 29K 0+MUI news group reader for AmiTCP. V0 InstallerGuide.lha docs/hyper 32K 0+Installer doc in AmigaGuide format. WWWCache.lha comm/net 12K 0+V1.8 of Arexx script for caching ima Stat36_1.lha util/sys 10K 0+An extension of C:Status. IPDialv19.lha comm/tcp 93K 0+SLIP dialer; stdin/out terminal prog VInfo36_2.lha util/sys 10K 0+An alternative to C:Info AW95BP_as.lha pix/icon 91K 0+Another Win95 Boot Pic. (AmigaStart) BangerMenu123.lha util/boot 28K 0+Startmenu activate by CAPS-Lock ReqTools23Usr.lha util/libs 156K 0+ReqTools 2.3 - the requester toolkit CGraphX214u.lha gfx/board 477K 0+CGraphX gfx extension update 2.14 Bioday.lha util/misc 28K 0+Biorythms with many comments & GUI V IBrGrab.lha pix/illu 472K 0+Screen Grabs of IBrowse WWW Amiga Br Aminet-CD-9.lha docs/lists 79K 0+Aminet CD 9 index and description | The highest rated programs during the week until 4-Dec-95 | Updated weekly. Best program on top. Please rate all the programs you | download. To do so, send to aminet-server@wuarchive.wustl.edu : | RATE | where is the file you want to judge and is a mark from 0..10 | with 10 being the best. You can rate several programs in one mail, but | don't rate your own programs. Example: RATE dev/gui/mui23usr.lha 8 | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- SmartWB.lha util/wb 4K 5+Boosts up Workbench's windows refres IPDialv19.lha comm/tcp 93K 0+SLIP dialer; stdin/out terminal prog mui31usr.lha dev/gui 771K 1+MagicUserInterface V3.1, user files hdsleep.lha disk/misc 11K 6+Turns your hard drives motor off. v1 Knights242.lha game/2play 223K 56+Two-player violent dungeon bashing Knockout.lha game/2play 190K 12+Two *very* addictive multiplayer gam Team17_Demos.dms game/demo 680K 37+Demos of Alien Breed 3D and King Pin MouseBounce.lha game/gag 5K 344+Screen hack that is also a game. scrotax2.lha game/shoot 347K 11+Scrotax Version 2.01 - BUGFIXED & UP 3D_Pro.lha gfx/3d 211K 3+The easy-to-use 3D stereogram/SIRD g RomIcons9.lha pix/icon 336K 26+New MagicWB2.0 Icons/ImageDrawers/.. DamageWolf3D_2.lha gfx/misc 292K 4+A ROTT (PC game) walkaround demo; 3D NetMail-13.lha comm/mail 130K 6+E-mail program with GUI, groups, fil Online1.4.lha comm/misc 89K 24+Ultimate Phone Call Coster/Logger OS Interplay40b.lha disk/cdrom 53K 4+CDPlayer (Archos/CD32/PowerCD/SCSI/+ ReOrg3_1.lha disk/optim 326K 117+Disk optimizer with DC-FFS support DiskSalv11_32.lha disk/salv 118K 21+Dave Haynie's DiskSalv version 11.32 ViperAGA12.lha game/2play 390K 57+Updated AGA Snake game with 6 player MagiC64N.lha misc/emu 250K 5+C64 Emulator V1.01 (A1200 Bug fixed) ShapeShift3_2a.lha misc/emu 240K 10+Macintosh II emulator, V3.2a gfft-1.12.lha misc/sci 296K 64+FFT spectrum analysis of sample file MagicMenu_1.29.lha util/cdity 106K 105+PopUp menus for OS 2.x and newer Executive.lha util/misc 527K 1+UNIX-like task scheduler (V1.30) snoopdos30.lha util/moni 128K 63+System monitor, many new features ad NewMultiView09.lha util/sys 8K 7+A frontend for MultiView VChk803.lha util/virus 199K 2+Version 8.03 of Virus_Checker. Amiga AB3Dicon.lha pix/icon 2K 4+Icon for Alien Breed 3D - MWB Style. DosMan121.lha util/wb 145K 27+Complete GUI Dos Manual @endnode @node CHARTS2 "Aminet Charts: 11-Dec-95" @toc FTP | The most downloaded files from Aminet during the week until 11-Dec-95 | Updated weekly. Most popular file on top. | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- mn_ansitest.lha comm/mebbs 3K 24+ANSI Test Door for MEBBSNet ar321.lha docs/mags 89K 1+Amiga Report 3.21, November 30, 1995 png_dt.lha util/dtype 79K 1+PNG DataType (68000/020) v. 43.2 + d html30gu.lha docs/hyper 99K 1+Complete HTML 3.0 reference in Amiga E-MailMosaic.lha comm/tcp 23K 0+To get & put E-Mail with Mosaic AESicons6.lha pix/icon 91K 0+80 NewIcons: AB3D,IBrowse,ZIPDrive,m pip_v22.lha util/misc 35K 1+View any screen in a window on anoth Knack108a.lha util/arc 66K 1+GUI for PGP, DMS, LHA, LZX, ZIP, ZOO mNews0_1.lha comm/news 29K 1+MUI news group reader for AmiTCP. V0 mcx228.lha util/cdity 51K 0+Multi Function Commodity InstallerGuide.lha docs/hyper 32K 1+Installer doc in AmigaGuide format. DiskMonTools34.lha disk/moni 102K 1+V 3.4 of THE moni/optim/salv/cdrom t AW95BP_as.lha pix/icon 91K 1+Another Win95 Boot Pic. (AmigaStart) xpkILZR.lha util/pack 24K 0+Fast (Un)Packing - Low Mem Requireme PowerUp_MPC604.lzh pix/illu 380K 0+Photo of MPC604 PowerUp board of Pha Stat36_1.lha util/sys 10K 1+An extension of C:Status. SSpeed12.lha util/moni 358K 1+SysSpeed V 1.2 added Graphical Displ speakt.lha util/misc 67K 1+A text speaking program VInfo36_2.lha util/sys 10K 1+An alternative to C:Info berzbench11.lha pix/icon 195K 1+V1.1 Probably the best patterns for | The highest rated programs during the week until 11-Dec-95 | Updated weekly. Best program on top. Please rate all the programs you | download. To do so, send to aminet-server@wuarchive.wustl.edu : | RATE | where is the file you want to judge and is a mark from 0..10 | with 10 being the best. You can rate several programs in one mail, but | don't rate your own programs. Example: RATE dev/gui/mui23usr.lha 8 | |File Dir Size Age Description |----------------- --- ---- --- ----------- SmartWB.lha util/wb 4K 6+Boosts up Workbench's windows refres IPDialv19.lha comm/tcp 93K 1+SLIP dialer; stdin/out terminal prog Knights242.lha game/2play 223K 57+Two-player violent dungeon bashing Knockout.lha game/2play 190K 13+Two *very* addictive multiplayer gam MouseBounce.lha game/gag 5K 345+Screen hack that is also a game. scrotax2.lha game/shoot 347K 12+Scrotax Version 2.01 - BUGFIXED & UP 3D_Pro.lha gfx/3d 211K 4+The easy-to-use 3D stereogram/SIRD g bs131.lha util/boot 49K 2+Try it now! No BootScreens, but sele mui31usr.lha dev/gui 771K 2+MagicUserInterface V3.1, user files Online1.4.lha comm/misc 89K 25+Ultimate Phone Call Coster/Logger OS ViperAGA12.lha game/2play 390K 58+Updated AGA Snake game with 6 player DamageWolf3D_2.lha gfx/misc 292K 5+A ROTT (PC game) walkaround demo; 3D mcx228.lha util/cdity 51K 0+Multi Function Commodity snoopdos30.lha util/moni 128K 64+System monitor, many new features ad tin130gamma.lha comm/news 182K 18+TIN 1.3 PL0 Beta 950726. UUCP/NNTP N fruitkitchen.lha demo/aga 566K 16+A new demo of the asm95 in helsinki VK_DEMO.lha game/demo 765K 5+Virtual Karting playable demo Bloodfest1.lha game/role 515K 5+Captive & HiredGuns style 3d adventu Bloodfest2.lha game/role 598K 5+Captive & HiredGuns style 3d adventu AmigaAGA-EVD12.lha misc/emu 8K 2+15bit & faster 4/8bit driver for Sha AlgoMusic1_4.lha mus/misc 103K 6+Creates and plays great algorithmic AB3Dicon.lha pix/icon 2K 5+Icon for Alien Breed 3D - MWB Style. Executive.lha util/misc 527K 2+UNIX-like task scheduler (V1.30) control1.dms demo/aga 817K 13+Control (Winning Demo From GASP `95) control2.dms demo/aga 552K 13+Control (Winning Demo From GASP `95) fear.lha demo/aga 1.4M 11+Fear 1/1 *AGA* @endnode @node MAILLIST "Amiga Report Mailing List" @toc WHERE =========================================================================== Amiga Report Mailing List =========================================================================== If you have an internet mailing address, you can receive Amiga Report in @{"UUENCODED" link UUENCODE} form each week as soon as the issue is released. To be put on the list, send Email to listserv@itesmvf1.rzs.itesm.mx. Your subject header will be ignored. In the body of the message, enter subscribe areport ie: subscribe areport A. R. Reader The system will automatically pull your e-mail address from the message header. Your account must be able to handle mail of any size to ensure an intact copy. For example, many systems have a 100K limit on incoming messages. ** IMPORTANT NOTICE: PLEASE be certain your host can accept mail over ** ** 100K! We have had a lot of bouncebacks recently from systems with a ** ** 100K size limit for incoming mail. If we get a bounceback with your ** ** address in it, it will be removed from the list. Thanks! ** *** The following is only for Australian readers! *** To circumvent the new pay-per-megabyte system for Australian Internet communication, Paul Reece has been kind enough to set up an AUSTRALIAN-ONLY mailing list, to save his fellow countrymen some money. You can join the list by sending mail to: majordomo@info.tas.gov.au with the single line (in body of message): subscribe ar Amiga Report will then be bounced to you. @endnode @node UUENCODE @toc MAILLIST =========================================================================== UUDecoding Amiga Report =========================================================================== If you receive Amiga Report from the direct mailing list, it will arrive in UUEncoded format. This format allows programs and archive files to be sent through mail by converting the binary into combinations of ASCII characters. In the message, it will basically look like a lot of trash surrounded by begin and end, followed by the size of the file. To UUDecode Amiga Report, you first need to get a UUDecoding program, such as UUxT by Asher Feldman. This program is available on Aminet in pub/aminet/arc/ Then you must download the message that it is contained in. Don't worry about message headers, the UUDecoding program will ignore them. There is a GUI interface for UUxT, which should be explained in the docs. However, the quickest method for UUDecoding the magazine is to type uuxt x ar.uu at the command prompt. You will then have to decompress the archive with lha, and you will then have Amiga Report in all of its AmigaGuide glory. If you have any questions, you can write to @{"Jason Compton" link JASON} @endnode @node AMINET "Aminet" @toc WHERE Aminet ====== To get Amiga Report from Aminet, simply FTP to any Aminet site, CD to docs/mags. All the back issues are located there as well. Sites: ftp.netnet.net, ftp.wustl.edu, ftp.tas.gov.au, ftp.doc.ic.ac.uk @endnode @node WWW "World Wide Web" @toc WHERE World Wide Web ============== AR can also be read with Mosaic (in either AmigaGuide or html form). Reading AmigaReport with Mosaic removes the necessity to download it. It can also be read using programs found in UNIX sites such as LYNX. Simply tell Mosaic to open one of the following URLs: http://www.omnipresence.com/Amiga/News/AR/ http://www.pwr.wroc.pl/AMIGA/AR/ http://mm.iit.uni-miskolc.hu/Data/AR http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/amiga/ar/ http://ramiga.cts.com/~AR http://www.sci.muni.cz/ar/ http://metro.turnpike.net/P/panther/main.html http://www.lysator.liu.se/amiga/ar/ http://ArtWorks.apana.org.au/AmigaReport.html The following AR sites also have a mailto form, allowing you to mail to Amiga Report from the web site.