#CAD
Peter,
Did Aegis tell you directly that Pro-Draw would not be done? I've heard
rumors to that effect, but no confirmation.
I haven't looked at Dynamic CAD for a long time. It wasn't too good when I
first looked at it, and I don't know of anyone who uses it.
I did call up Haitex in Texas about X-Cad, and spoke to a fellow named Alan
Brandenburgh. The program is being written in England, and theoretically will
be finished this year, or maybe early next (never assume the best case in these
matters). He said that it would be shown at Comdex, which is happening around
now.
Some of the features we discussed involve electronic work, so I won't go into
those. Other things he said are:
a) It is a full Amiga development, not a port from another system
(like DCAD is).
b) It will have Draw+ file read capability, though probably not
write capability.
c) You need 2MB to use it, and they strongly recommend a hard disk.
d) It is supposed to be very fast, partly because it is
integer-based. (As I see it, this can be a good thing IF they use
a very large integer range, and present the user interface as
a flexible floating-point format like Aegis Draw does.) He cited
some benchmarks that were run vs. AutoCAD and RoboCAD running on
an AT. He talked about a circle-draw benchmark in which X-CAD
did 12 seconds on a stock A1000, while the IBM AT programs did
around 2 minutes. I'm not sure what that proves by itself, other
than the fact that the Amiga can draw circles fast – but he did
say that other benchmarks were also favorable, and that they were
run by an independent firm.
e) The expected retail price is $599.95, which means that X-CAD had
better be a very good program.
One other thing, Peter – you might try leaving your messages in normal text
style (not all upper-case). If you were typing in lower case, then maybe your
CompuServe user options are set incorrectly – the SYSOPs here can tell you more
about that.
Talk to you later.
Joel