CompuServe Messages

Greetings Andrew, Glad to hear your project came off OK. I think you've just stole my "speed demon" title away — anyone that can cram 28 hours into one day has my upmost respect <grin>! Shoot, by my calculations (on a Pentium – hehe, it's a joke) you were only 10 minutes farther away between the MAC and the Amiga for a null modem cable to actually work! If I had a similar situation, I would have seriously considered physically taking my machine to the other and then performing a null modem transfer on the spot, but it would depend on how many floppies the transfer really amounted to — something you probably already factored. Somehow, I don't think there is enough of a market to support an IM course, which is unfortunate, because it is one of those products that almost requires that level of instruction to get the most out of it. I understand there is a video tape available that is suppose to do IM some justice, but that is only on hearsay since I don't have the tape myself. I'm not following you on your statements about flexibility and using "built-in support or develop your own." Develop my own is a gross overstatement for using AmigaDOS and ARexx commands, especially when compared to whipping out the C compiler. The Amiga offered me an incredibly easy solution to controlling the serial port connected laser players outside of any authoring program. Certainly built-in support is easier as long as all the capabilites of the player can be accessed, but what do you do if the built-in support isn't there? Will tech support whip up a special driver/program just for you, especially if the player you are using is an old obsolete model (which was my case)? I own the Director version 2, but must shamefully admit I haven't really used it 🙁 I have heard nothing but praise for the Director, but when Keith Doyle stopped development on it, it became yet another symbol for my bookshelf of what could have been. If I remember correctly, the Director was the program credited by lots of folks that used it to make those impressive entries for demo contests. Don't know if controlling laser disc players was high on the list of things to do back then <grin>. I can certainly relate to wanting tech support solutions when under a dealine, however, I rather enjoy problem solving. I also like to believe people like to pay for ingenuity, especially when it makes them look good. Forcing an Amiga solution is pretty easy with this philosophy — show them a well done animation while complex sounds are emitting and have them make a selection for more information (all running from an A1200) at the same time is usually enough to get tham asking if you can do this or that or even this-that <grin>. To be honest, I must admit that I had one person watch the "show" and tell me that his 486SX laptop could easily do that! Being the pig I am, I matter-of-factly asked him what software he was using that could do this and things went down hill pretty rapidly… What was really scary about this incident was that this person was on a "multimedia" council of a local college. The kiosk system I worked on was used at a trade show for 5 days straight. Was told it worked extremely well — no problems. This client came back for the kiosk about a month later for another show which lasted about 3 days. Of course I had to go in and "fix" those minor nits that bothered me but nobody else complained about. In the process I tried to optimise response times even further but didn't have enough time to check things out thoroughly. This time I heard the kiosk had to be "rebooted" after the second day — oopppssss. I don't buy your "industry standard" line <grin>! About the only thing I've seen that's even close to an industry standard in this multimedia madness is MPEG, but that's just my opinion. You do have a point about the Amiga solution now-a-days – it's getting darn hard to locate machines if you do sell it (certainly can't call that a standard!). There looks like there are a few nibbles for some future projects for me, but I'm not betting anything on them. One looks like a lot of fun – a computer based training system. Other than these nibbles, I'm basically unemployed.