CompuServe Messages

Andrew, I haven't haven't experienced any of the SCALA wannabes. I heard talk of Oxxi's product being a SCALA killer, but must confess I haven't heard a thing about the program since since it's release. I don't know what market these clones are shooting for, but I beleive fair competion is good for everybody! Interesting ideas about CDs and MM consumers, but let's face it – the CD is nothing more than a large, slow storage device. What makes it so valuable to "lessor" machines is that it can provide a fair amount of high quality audio without causing the machine to freeze everything else it's suppose to be doing. Large storage space is a nice side effect <grin>. This talk of MM consumers makes me think of those early pioneers on the Amiga that used to bring us those magazines on a disc. They saw the meaning of consumer MM and provided some amazing things with tools that were much less sophisticated than we have today. All of this from a couple floppy disks — it's frightening to think what they could have done with the storage space of a CD! I have to reluctantly agree that the Amiga is being relegated to the production side of consumer based MM. Fortunately, for business based MM the strenghts of the Amiga are significant enough to keep it plenty viable. Hummm, maybe we ought to due a consumer MM thing for the Amiga… Well, I might as well show my ignorance – when you said the Director does object oriented animation, that suggests to me that the images are vector based graphics verses bit-mapped. If that is true, then I can understand the animation being less fluid than one on an Amiga! A lot of calculation is needed before you can even start flipping bit-map images to create the animation effect. I don't think double-buffering is a hardware thing, I think it is more of a software thing. I thought double-buffering meant nothing more than dedicating a chunk of memory to create a screen image and then pump-it full speed to the display memory to avoid slowly drawing on the screen in psuedo-real-time. Of course I could be all wet! The Media Control Interface sounds interesting. Too bad it doesn't support DataTypes as well as "ARexx" and "shared libraries" <grin>. Next version I'm sure <bigger grin>. How long the IICS been around? Is this a group that is really interested in the technology (and it's advancement) or just folks that are trying to use existing solutions to met current needs? To be more blunt, is this group working to develop/publish/promote good standards or just a means for folks to give/receive insights in how to use existing "popular" solutions? Cleveland is a little haul for me, but you never know — do you have a schedule for meetings? How does an "outsider" get a look at the newsletter? Congrats on using your Amiga for something other than the two approved solutions <grin>!