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== WOA '94 Report By: Simon ==
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Hi ALL.
What follows is my description of the World of Amiga Show in London. I
went on Saturday 10th December and stayed for 5 1/2hrs. Anyone who doesn`t
like long posts, please skip this.
[Disclaimer: what follows is entirely my own thoughts and opinions]
WORLD OF AMIGA SHOW - Wembley 9-11th December 1994
Big Thumbs up: Cybervision64, Cyberstorm060, Photogenics
Thumbs up: PC emulation on emplant
Thumbs down: PicolloSD64.
Well, what a show. At first glance the show seemed to look a little bare
but in actual fact there was quite a lot going on. My first question to be
answered was "does the PC emplant exist". I made it to the Blittersoft
stand and there was Jim Drew, a rather large CBM monitor and his emplant.
EMPLANT:
-------
Standing at the back of the crowd, I could just see the emplant up and
running on Jim`s emplant+ warp 40/040+ picasso. At this time it was
running rather nicely the MAC emulation - no big deal. After a patient
wait, Jim shutdown the Mac emulation (interestingly enough he was running
V5.0 of the emulation and when he shutdown it asked him to insert his hard
drive.....). Then came the good part - the PC emulation. Jim clicked on a
similar icon to the MAC startup icon and started up the PC emulation. The
emulation went straight into the Ami-bios (which according to Jim is
shipped with every version of PC-emplant). He showed that it recognised
every bit of PC hardware. He then moved to the dos prompt and listed
directories on the HD and then started showing bench marks and testing
programs. He showed that all the hardware test came up ok. The speed
tests varied. One said that the processor was running at 0mhz, another
showed it was a 286 running at ~20mhz (this was probably closer to the
truth). I was desperate to see Windows but alas, the version Jim had with
him didn`t have any VGA support and therefore no Windows, or anything
really good to show. I asked if he had dos apps to show but he said no and
that most people wanted to see benchmark programs. All in all the
emulation seemed to be running well and quite fast. It was on a native
Amiga screen and the updates were instant, but then the PC uses planar in
4bit colour and his machine did have a 68040/40mhz. I would say everything
seemed well. Jim pointed out that the emluation was runnning in
interpreter mode and that the one that compiles will run a lot faster. He
also said that when the PC emplant ships it will run DOOM. Now for the
best bit, Jim gave an announcement on the realease date of the PC emplant:
The PC emplant will start shipping, mid January (So Jim Drew says)!
I asked Jim whether the PC emulation would run OS2/Warp and he said yes.
I asked wether my OS2/Warp CDROM would install ok and he said yes! Oh, I
asked whether the 586 emulation contained the fp bug from the pentium :-),
"no" was the reply. I also asked whether the Cyberstorm 060 would work
with the emplant and Jim said yes.
Some other interesting bits. Jim also had an emulation called ACE (atari
console emulation) which was a Atari 400/800 emulator. He had masses of
software on his hard drive and showed of a Lucasfilm demo. I asked why
this emulation wasn`t available yet as I love the Atari 800Xl and he said
"the sprite collision isn`t working yet" and then he went on to say "oh, we
have implented sprites at all", hmmm - pretty fundemental point I think.
Anyway, it all looked good and I can`t wait to see that running on my
machine. He also had an Apple ][ emulation which was running games, the
one I saw was galaxians.
Jim also announced that they are going to release the PC emulation for the
PowerPC MACS at the same time as the Amigas one and that it would be
shipped with all new PowerMacs instead of softwindows - time will tell.
Jim seemed to impress lots of people with what his emulation could do and
rightly so. I chuckled at one point though, when he was playing with
photoshop and the MAC crashed, requiring a restart.
I never saw more than one emulation running at a time but I`ve read
another post where a guy saw the Pc and Mac running at the same time.
Overall at the end of this I got a plus on the feelgood factor for owning
an emplant.
Picollo SD64:
------------
On the same stand they had the Picollo SD64 which was running on a Warped
A4000. I don`t know why but they only had it displaying on a 14" monitor
and I had a play. The Workbench was only running in 8 colours and an
attempt to change that to 256 colours failed as there was something running
which couldn`t be quit. I was then shown a 256 colour graphics program and
had a play with that. I was very dissapointed. It was a small screen
running in 256 colours and when I moved just a small window containg a
picture it seemed very slow and I could see the redraw. I was then shown
the viewer on an EGS default screen and things seemed a lot faster.
Overall though things didn`t seem that impressive. Strangely enough
Blittersoft weren`t making a big thing of the board. Maybe the software
requires some tweaks, possibly the 256 colour screen was running in Planar
mode?
Next was on to the Gordon Harwood Stand where Phase5 were showing off two
new products the Cybervison64 and the Cyberstorm 060.
Cybervison64:
------------
Phase5 had the Cybervision running on a 040/40mhz machine with a 20" Apple
trinitron display. They were showing a Workbench screen in 1024x768 256
colours but they had the workbench set to 1024x1536 so it would annonyingly
scroll as you reached the bottom of the screen, however it scrolled with
ease. The speed of this card was very nice. I moved windows around with
ease and all in a 1024x768 - 256 colour environment. The screens were all
dragable, and at one point I had 3 screen all at the same time.
Unfortunately, the software still mucks up the palettes between screens.
It would be nice if the software could alter the palettes of background
screens to "best match" colours from the palette of the front screen. The
demonstrator loaded up ProPage4 to show me the speed of the text in that
environment. He set the screen to 256 colours, zoomed in on the text and
you could move round the document with ease, in fact the text flied by.
There was a big problem here, though. Half of the text didn`t get
displayed for some reason. The German demonstrator said that they knew
about this and it wasn`t just a problem with their boards but ProPage seems
to much up a few of the RTG boards around. I don`t use ProPage but if you
do, check out the problem before considering a purchase. The price of this
64 bit graphics card: 299 UK pounds ~=$450 US. Howeveri, if you ordered
one at the show or asked to be sent details you could get the board for 285
UK Pounds. The board will be available in Febuary and ships with 2megs of
ram, upgradeable to 4megs. It will do 1280x1024 in 8bit and 800x600 in
24bit all non interlaced. Comes with a pass through connector as well. I
filled in a form for details of the board when it is available.
Cyberstorm 060:
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The cyberstorm 060 was on display for everyone to see, there was one in
the machine and one outside. The Cyberstorm 060 is just the same as the
040 Cyberstorm except for the CPU Module part (The basic Cyberstorm comes
in 3 bits). They were just running animations which were running at high
speed. I asked to play with the workbench and that I did. Not much to see
here. They didn`t have any apps so I couldn`t really see the thing perform
in real life but they did have AIBB running and that was flying through the
tests such as the beach ball etc. Overall I think it showed the machine to
be running about 3-4 times that of the A4000/040 but it could have been
more. Obviously code written for the 060 would run a lot faster but then
the Amiga`s OS isn`t written for 060 so we can stay with the basic speed.
Overall though, the cyberstorm gave a very good impression. The machine
seemed fast and the bench marks showed the machine running extremely fast.
They have bench marking figures which show the A4000 at 15.4mips and the
060 at 82.19 mips. This is, however, for a 10million iteration program.
If it is only using the same instruction then the speed will be a little
false as this would only show the speed of execution inside the chips
cache. Sysinfo showed the board running at 39.85 mips (A4000/040- 19.1
mips). Real world tests with AdPro, Imagine and lightwave all showed the
board to run 3-4 times that of the A4000. Memory reads and writes are also
about 4X the speed of a stock A4000/040. Considering that the Cyberstorm
runs 040/40 runs about 2X the speed of a stock A4000/040 (except for memory
access which is a lot faster) you can get an idea of the speed you will
see.
The literature pointed out that Bench mark programs do not run correctly
on the 060.
Everything seemed to be running ok on the Cyberstorm and there were no
crashes.
Now for the good part. The Cyberstorm will be released in Febuary
(Motorolla willing) and will be intially released with a 50mhz part as
shown at the show (a 80mhz version will follow). The cost of this little
speed demon: 1000 UK pounds - ~=$1500 US. Now this is 200 pounds, ~=$300
less than the cost of the current Warp 040/40mhz although the board does
lack scsi-2. I was told that the scsi-2 option (basically the same
technology as the fastlane) will cost 200 UK pounds. For those ordering at
the show, the price was 950 pounds for the card.
Photogenics:
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Next was another piece of amazing software. Photogenics is a brand new
image manipulation program from Alamthera in the UK. Primarily written by
a guy called Paul Nolan (who I met) it basically takes images and you can
apply various operations to them (such as blur, tint, etc). There are
loads of operations that can be done. The program can loads a wide variety
of formats including Jpeg & gif, it can also create Plasma and ripple
images. The best part is that the program is designed to work with 2
images. You can load one as a primary and one as a secondary and then do
all sorts of weird operations to merge the two together and rub through
etc. The program primarily works in a superbly fast Ham-8 mode and all the
pictures are kept in their own windows. The speed at which this program
works is superb and the speed at which the windows dynamically resize is
quite amazing. I went to a full demonstration by Joylon Ralph and I was so
impressed with the demonstration and also when I got to play with the
program that I bought a copy. It sells for 54.95 UK Pounds ~= $83 US.
Although at the show it was available for 49.95 pounds with a free
tee-shirt. See later for my impression of the program once I got it home.
Theatre:
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I went to two sessions at the Amiga Theatre. The first was for
Photogenics and Joylon Ralph managed to impress all with this wonderful
program. His A1200 did crash when he loaded photgenics :-) the first time.
It`s never crashed for me however.
The second session I went to was a "meet the developers" thing. Jim Drew,
a guy who worked on an interesting gadget for the CD32, Joylon Ralph and a
guy from Digita. The guy from Digita didn`t impress me much as he had more
to say about the PC/Windows than he did the Amiga. He said the only
software company out there was Microsoft and that we have to face reality.
I like to think that photogenics was more reality although this will be
ported to the MAC and PC. Joylon said that a professional version of
Photogenics would be available next year. Jim was asked several questions
about the PC emplant and gave some very good answers as he always does. He
mentioned that they do have a multiprocessor accelerator board that they
will resume work on but they need more employees and they can`t seem to get
enough. He mentioned later that they only have 2 working 060 processors.
The guy who had produced a widgit was a cheery sole. He was from Canada
and his widget is used for interactive banking and other things.
Apparently his company, TVI, has sold 1,000 CD32`s to a Canadian Bank for
customer use. One of the news articles that I read said they were testing
the project with 100 of the banks customers and if this went well then it
would be offered to all 200 thousand of their customers -here`s hoping.
They were asked an interesting question. What would you do with 12
million UK Pounds. I think Joylon wanted to spend some and retire. Jim
Drew who claims he can retire a rich man now said that 12 million was a
hell of a lot and that he could make good use of it. He said that these
days you could turn hardware out in a day, make changes and have a new
board out the next day. He also mentioned that 1000 square feet pre
employee at West Chester was a waste. In fact, thinking back, Jim had a
lot to say, in fact he never stopped talking the whole time I saw him. I
think he likes the Amiga.
On thing they all seemed united on was that the Amiga has a fantastic OS
and that they love using it. The guy from TVI said that all his employees
use Amigas. Jim said that the work for the Mac PC emplant was primarily
done on the emplant MAC module.
Other Stuff:
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One other thing Jim mentioned was that they asked Adobe if they (UU) could
port Adobe Photoshop for free to which Adobe declined. UU then demaned
that they port it and Adobe refused. Adobe said that they have loads of
patents on their operations in the program and they don`t want the code
ported.
Keiron Summer? was showing an Indian guy the emplant and talking about
the Indian Government. The guy was impressed with the emplant but then I
think Jim could have done a good job at selling ZX81`s at the show.
Ramiga were at the show with lots of Amiga equipment although there stand
made it quite difficult to enter. I didn`t spend much time here. I did
notice that they had rather a lot of Super Buster Chips Rev11 for 19.95 UK
pounds.
Villiage Tronic had a big stand but as the Cybervision was on display I
didn`t spend much time looking at their products. They and many other
stands were displaying an awful lot of OS3.1 kits.
There were bargains to be had with CDROM`s. In fact there were a lot of
CDROMS to be bought. For the CD32 you could buy Guardian for 10 pounds.
Newtek were there, well sort of. There was 1 guy with a projector.
One star of the show was a video of "The Wrong Trousers" playing direct
from a hard drive with DPS and the personal animation recorder.
Hisoft had a new version of Twist, Twist 2 which is a relational database.
It looked quite good. I asked them about a C++ upgrade to SASC but they
didn`t know much about it and asked me to phone the office on Monday.
ICL were selling warranties.
Paragon had the new CD32 Gamer out with a full game on the cover -
Lamborghini Challenge - 10 UK Pounds.
White Knight seemed to have a low key stand which suprised me. They sell
a lot of products but were concentrating on the Digital Broadcaster. This
may have been due to their recent move.
Conclusion
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Well, as I said at the start, the show seemed a little bare but there was
lots of new stuff to see and drool over. The show did seem a little
unprofessional but then money is tight at the moment. From what I could
see and hear, CBM were making sure that they spoke to all the right people
e.g. Jim Drew and Phase5. They were also trying to impress what seemed
some big customers.
One thing I did pick up from the Americans at the show, that we would all
be better off if CEI did not get the Amiga. I`ve heard this before
actually from other sources and someone pointed out that we only ever hear
from Alex and that he never says no. Joylon Ralph said that they haven`t
returned any of their calls or faxes. Now I`m no fan of CBM UK but I came
away from the show not knowing what to think. I do know that at the moment
nothing is happening so whatever happens can`t be worse than nothing.
Photogenics - what is it like:
Well I got photogenics home and I couldn`t get it to run. The
registration number given was wrong. As it turned out it required an extra
digit. I must have spent about 1/2hr trying to figure it out. I tried
several combinations and discovered that the requestor would take 1 more
digit than the length of my number. I managed to get in my adding a 3 to
the end of the registration number.
I loaded the program and as I have an A4000/030/ 25mhz (the machine at the
show was a 50mhz 030) and I was running a dblpal screen (my monitor doesn`t
sync down to 15khz) the program was running quite a bit slower than the
demostration at the show. However after a few hours I was starting to have
some fun. It does appear however, that whatever resolution you goto the
images still display in a low res ham8 format. The resolution of the real
picture is kept though. It would be nice if you could display the pictures
at their real resolutions.
I had some great fun with the ascii saver although it seems to create
pictures which are twice the height they should be so you have to reduce
the height of your image before saving.
Some of the run through effects are great and there are several different
brushes such as spray can, pastel, felt tip pen and pencil. If you`re
looking for a fun image manipulation program with lots of effects than this
could be for you.
The program stores all images in 24bit in memory and dispays in ham8. I
did find that this seemed to degrade my Ham8 pictures when redisplaying
them.
The number of loaders is extensive, including jpeg, iff, gif, iff-deep,
cdxl and also Photo CD pictures :-).
If you have a stock A1200 this program will run slowly. I would start off
with at least a 25mhz 030.
At 55 pounds this program is a steal and a hell of a lot of good fun. If
you want to add some effects to your pictures easily then this is a good
tool. With the program being this good the proffessional version should be
really good.
This is Si (Simon) signing out. Please email me if you want to discuss any of
the above. I have the product sheet on the Cyberstorm 060 and Cybervision64.
Si.
___________________________________________________________________________
si@mailserver.aixssc.uk.ibm.com "I`m unique in the respect I`m not You"