CompuServe Thread

*** World of Commodore Amiga New York Show Report *** Here are some of the highlights from the New York World of Commodore Amiga Show: 1) General: The show was generallly well attended. New Tek had a very small booth this time. Opalvision and Scala software seemed to be everywhere. GVP basically had the same setup and products as last year, except for a few peripherals for the A1200. I won't comment on these products, since they have been covered in other show reports. There were a lot of software vendors and many good deals could be had at the show. AmigaMan, in particular, had a very large booth and was doing brisk sales. ProWrite 3.3 could be purchased for $40. Amiga World and Amazing Computing were there, as well as a number of User Groups. Blue Ribbon SoundWorks, Centaur, DKB, Gold Disk, ICD, Migraph, Moonlighter, Scala, Soft-Logik, and Utilities Unlimited, as well as many others were present. CBM had its usual large space in the back. 2) Commodore: CBM was showing the A4000, A1200, CDTV, A570 CD ROM, and AmigaVision Professional. An A4000-T was on display, but it wasn't hooked up. There were very few A500s, A600s, A2000s, and A3000s on display. I tried both the A4000 and A1200. The enhanced resolution and color was indeed very nice. The A1200 was smaller than the A500 and bigger then the A6000. The A4000 was a nice machine, but was quite ugly-looking. CBM also announced an A4000 with a 68030 CPU, but without a math co-processor, for $1,650. 3) Soft-Logik: They announced PageStream 3. 4) ASDG: I checked out MorphPlus with "cinematic quality morphing." It worked great, but I still found it to be slow, despite claims that it's the fastest morphing program around. I used it on an A4000. 5) Migraph: I tried their ColorBurst Color Hand Scanner and was truly impressed. It was on sale at the show for $399. Here are some features: – Six resolutions from 50 to 400 dpi. – Five scanning modes: Super color, color, grayscale, dithered halftone (color), and line art (monochrome). – Fast, single-pass scanning. – Half-page scanning window- 4.13 inches wide. – Sensitive color scanning: 262,144 colors, or 4,096 colors on low-memory systems. – True 64-level grayscale scans at 400 dpi. – Scan line art for graphics projects or text for OCR processing. – Quick, accurate scanning and easy saving for direct export. – Save scans in a variety of standard file formats. – Comes complete with parallel interface and cable for easy installation. – Comes with scanning/editing/saving software. – Requirements: For all Amigas (except A1000) with 2 MB of memory. 4 MB and HD are recommended. I also saw their Scan-and-Save, Merge-It, and OCR software, as well as their scanning trays. In addition, they announced the PS-400 Scanning Wand, which allows full-page scanning in one pass, yet it is not a flatbed scanner. It contains a full-page scanning wand, a powerful image editor, and a professional-quality OCR text processor, all for less than the price of a flatbed scanner. 6) Moonlighter Software: They were showing Ami-Back and Ami-Back Tools. I already own Quarterback and Quarterback Tools. However, I was so impressed after I saw a complete demo of Ami-Back, that I purchased it. I've always been a loyal supporter of Randy and CCS (makers of QB and QBTools), but I just have to admit that Ami-Back is simply better than Quarterback. After George Chamberlain left CCS, development on the QB products has just been too slow to suit my needs. I have four partitions on my hard drive and I back up to streaming tape. With QB, it is a very tedious process to restore from any partition other than the first partition. You have to remember exactly which partition on the tape you want to restore, and even then it doesn't always work correctly. CCS has been promising an automated restore procedure for some time now, yet it still hasn't appeared. Ami-Back has had automated restores for some time now. Hey, why should I have to keep waiting for QB to be upgraded when the features I want are here now with Ami-Back. You simply select the partition you want to restore and Ami-back does the rest. Ami-Back also has a beautiful graphical automated scheduling system that allows yuo to make unattended backups at any time. I've also been waiting for a few years for CCS to upgrade QBTools. However, Ami-Back Tools is already here and it's also a fabulous product, so I'm going to buy that, too. I've heard a lot about the Ami-Back products in the past. Now that I've seen them in person, I have to agree that they are the new leader in Amiga backup and HD utilities software. 7) Blue Ribbon SoundWorks: They were located in the Scala booth and were showing the following products: Bars&Pipes Pro 2.0; SuperJAM! 1.1, The Patchmeister 1.0c, The One-Stop Music Shop, Sync Pro, and the Triple Play Plus. B&P Pro is a state-of-the-art MIDI sequencer. With the New Media Madness software accessory, B&P Pro was synched to Scala and provided a fantastic audio-visual experience. B&P Pro was able to control Scala from within B&P Pro. The sequenced sounds triggered the One-Stop Music Shop (OSMS). This is a plug-in Amiga card that contains the award-winning E-Mu Proteus sound engine. It turns the Amiga into a 16-bit CD quality sample playback unit. It's like having a Proteus module inside the Amiga. The OSMS can also be controlled by a MIDI master keyboard, just like any other MIDI sound module. It also comes with excellent graphical editing software, so you can edit the samples. This is a great sound card, that has a pair of stereo RCA audio outputs and MIDI In and Out ports. You still have access to the Amiga's 8-bit stereo out jacks. With the OSMS you can have true 16-bit quality stereo from the Amiga, together with a built-in MIDI interface, all in a self-contained unit. SuperJAM! is an algorithmic composition program similar to Band-In-A-Box, except better. The PatchMeister is a Universal Librarian. Sync Pro is a SMPTE reader/generator and SMPTE/MTC converter that allows you to sync B&P Pro to SMPTE time code by converting SMPTE to MIDI TIME CODE (MTC). Finally, Triple Play Plus is a MIDI interface for the Amiga with three separately-addressable MIDI Outs, providing for a total of 48 separate MIDI channels instead of the usual 16 channels. 8) Electric Theatre: They announced five volumes of their Music Teaching Software called, "Keys to Music." A demo disk is also available. Their number is (215) 379-4538. 9) Microdeal: They announced the AMAS2. This stands for Advanced MIDI Amiga Sampler 2. It's a combination 8-bit audio sampler and MIDI interface in one box, with sample editing software. In addition, they have announced "Clarity" for the Amiga, which is a 16-bit stereo sampler. This is not just a sample playback unit, but it will also allow you to record your own 16-bit samples. Unfortunately, I was not able to try it out at the show. The list price is 149.95 pounds, but I don't know the U.S. list price in dollars. Up to now, the Sunrize AD516 has been the only 16-bit sampler for the Amiga. I don't believe that the Clarity is as good as the AD516, but it is advertised as having the best price/performance ratio for 16-bit samplers on the market. It allows playback of up to 4 tracks on an accelerated Amiga and on 2 tracks on an unaccelerated one. The software doesn't yet work on an A4000, but they said that will be fixed soon. The hardware is not on a card, but is an external unit that connects to the Amiga's parallel and serial ports. It has stereo RCA in and out jacks and MIDI In and Out ports. This was the only information I could get about Clarity, but as of now, it is the only announced 16-bit sampler for the Amiga that will compete with the currently-exisiting Sunrize AD516 16-bit sampler. Well, that's it for my comments on the show. There was a lot to see and do and there were some great bargains at the show. I wore my yellow Amiga Forums ribbon, but unfortunately I didn't see anyone else with the ribbon. I had a good time and I look forward to attending the Fifth Annual WOCA Show in New York next year.