CompuServe Messages

The following was posted in comp.sys.amiga.advocacy by Kevin Roll … —————- Ahh, hard to believe that eight hours ago I was standing in the midst of the World of Commodore Toronto… I took some notes during Lew Eggebrecht's keynote address, here's what I thought was important. A lot of what he said was old news as far as technical information, but there were some interesting points. The first part centered around CD32. As Darryl already reported, they have just started making the NTSC units, and only had a few for the show. Apparently half of the shipment got delayed at Customs. Lew reported that CD32 is the number 1 selling CD platform in Europe. He also said that there are 120 licencees developing titles, and that Commodore has spent absolutely no money subsidizing any of them (as they did with CDTV). I think this is very good news. Next, he began to talk about the MPEG module, and how there are two standards – Video CD and Philip's standard. He then stated that C='s solution was to play them both, which brought a round of applause! The FMV card is in production, with 2000 units expected by next week (kiss my ass Barrett). The first round are all going to France, where they have a guarenteed order for some large project (this last bit overheard from a rep on the floor). The discussion then turned to the AAA chipset. As previously reported by C= employees, the first silicon has been made. Lew stated that it has > 95% functionality already, and is "darn close" to completion. The wonderful 24-bit images are being blitted with incredible speed. He said that all 4 chips have tiny bugs that are being worked out. In the next 2 weeks, two of the chips will go for second-pass silicon, with the other two being sent by the end of January. Systems based on these AAA chips will be released on a time schedule dependant on the performance of the second-pass silicon. He hoped that this would mean around next fall. As far as the systems go, Lew *confirmed* that the Intel PCI bus standard has been chosen. This will allow a processor-independent architecture, with the 68060 first and then an undetermined RISC processor later. In other news, a cost-reduced version of the A4000 has been engineered and released to manufacturing. Also, C= is pushing hard on the A4000T to get it going. C= is working on the CD-ROM drives for the 1200 and 4000, with the 1200 having priority. Lew said that the 1200 would be internal, and the 4000 would be a Zorro card + external drive. The clincher was that the 4000 version would include the FMV card! He anticipated these models being available next spring. Someone asked about the DSP technology – Lew indicated that it had been licensed out, but that it would be on the motherboard of the AAA systems. Also, as previously stated, AAA sound will be 8-voice, 16-bit, 100kHz sample rate. Lew then really freaked me out by telling us all that C= is already looking *beyond* AAA. Their goal is to do real-time 3D rendering, with a target of 30 million pixels/sec. To do this, they are designing their own 3D pipeline scheme. This is serious Silicon Graphics territory, and I was amazed to discover they are planning this. Someone also asked about Photo CD. Lew said that a license had been arranged with Philips, but not executed yet. Development is underway, and something will be out after the 1st of next year. The last question was the eternal, "will there be a laptop Amiga?" Lew said there are no plans for now, but as the AAA chipset is entirely CMOS, it lends itself much better to that sort of thing. Now if they can get a 24-bit LCD… As far as my initial impression of CD32, I thought it was great. The demos and games they had available were certainly exciting. They had the dinosaur morph demo that has been previously described, the flight demo, and four games to be played – Pinball Fantasies, D/Generation, RoboCod, and something else I forget. One other machine was playing a football game, and an MPEG machine had a really cool game going whose title I never heard. It was like a Fantastic Voyage theme, with the player cruising through an artery blasting stuff. The MPEG stuff they showed during Lew's talk was excellent. They had about a 15-foot screen set up, and the clarity was brilliant. They were using the Paramount Star Trek 6 CD for a demo, and it looked great. They also showed the European commercial with the exploding robot, which brought another tremendous round of applause. Overall, the show was lots of fun. Commodore is certainly not dead, and the CD32 looks poised to take off like a rocket. Throw in Zool, the Ninja from the Nth Dimension dancing to the techno coming from Newtek's booth (Toaster is God, repeat after me) and you have a recipe for fun. Also, I won a free CD from SunRize and one of the PD houses had my game for sale. Well, I'm babbling now so I'll conclude. — — /// A4000/040 |…../\ NEW RIVER | AMIGA// Author: |…/ \O| GORGE | \\\/// New World |../ | Bridge Day | \XX/ |/ / \ '93 | ————— -sja