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%% compt.sys.amiga                                    by  Jason Compton  %%
%% Optimism or Insanity?                           jcompton@bbs.xnet.com %%
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Maybe it's the strain.  Week after week, day after day, wondering whether 
or not Commodore will wake up the next morning as a company.  Wondering 
what will become of the Amiga line of computers.

Maybe it's just gotten to be too much for me and I've snapped.

Then again, maybe not.

Maybe I'm just looking at the more positive things.

Maybe it's that a friend just sold her 486/66 for an Amiga 4000/040. (Ok,
yeah, she is getting a bridgeboard, but I'll take my victories where I 
can get them.)

Maybe it's that the UK Top Ten CD games chart has 8 slots, including #1,
filled by CD32 games.

Maybe it's that the CD32 is RSN in the US, and is actually being given a
fighting chance by some game magazines and Commodore advertising.

Maybe it's that Commodore may just have made it through the worst of 
times, what with their life being spared to date and all.

Or maybe it's things like this:  Yesterday, I took a friend of mine, Dave
Alexander, to MicroTech Solutions, my local Amiga store.  I'd been meaning
to for a long time: He's been a Mac user for years and has done video 
production and the like on them: nothing incredibly intense, but he's 
used video-out boards and presentation/titling software.

The biggest disappointment of the day was that the entire suite of Toaster
equipment was gone, off at a show.  That wasn't really the most important
part, though: I knew the Toaster was out of the range of money he was 
willing to spend.  It DID leave Scala, which is what I intended to be the
main attraction.  For a good 20 minutes, he watched Scala demos as the 
sales guy (trivia note: the same one who sold me the 2000 I had when I 
began writing for AR) demonstrated how the program worked.  He was 
transfixed.

"This is MUCH better than Persuasion." -Dave Alexander

Scala MM300 was running on the A4000 they had there, which was decked to 
the gills...EtherNet, an EGS Spectrum, Emplant, 14 megs of memory, some 
ungodly huge hard drive, 040/25, etc.  MM200 was running on the 1200, and
it was that computer that we wound up focusing on: after all, everything 
was still running at an awfully comparable speed in those demo scripts. 
He asked me about prices and we set up a few theoretical systems.

Yeah, we left without him buying anything other than a Video Toaster User.
Still, though, it was a moral victory, and he punctuated the trip by 
saying this: "Why is Commodore not doing well?"

I really couldn't answer.  Why not?