CompuServe Thread

A man in one of the large booths said they's only had about half the crowd of last year; at least they only used half as many bags as last year. Commodore 64/128 software seemed noticeably less common than at previous shows. The "world premiere" of New-Tek's demo reel 3 was a big hit. It seemed to be playing in nearly every booth. Last year it was Dragon's Lair. Although an article in December's Compute's Amiga Resource claims that Very Vivid Inc. has "vanished form the scene", Very Vivid had a *very* vivid booth where they were demonstrating their "Interactor Interactive Presentation System" with "hyperFX." desktop video. For "idiot-proof teleguides, speaker support presentations, question/answer quizzes or program your own videogames." They demonstrated a game for me. Also being demonstrated was "Ultracard" MultiTasking Information Construction Set by Mike Lehman of Intuitive Technologies, another Hypermedia program. I had a short demo, as Mike was too sick to continue for very long. I mentioned a rumour that C Ltd. was out of business within earshot of a C Ltd. rep. He was quite insulted. "Just because we don't advertise in Amiga World every month . . ." I quickly retracted my rumour which I already knew was false before I said it. Anyway, they were demonstrating their new "Han-D-Scan" hand-held scanner. Resolutions of 100, 200, 300, 400 DPI, 3 dithering choices, up to 16 grey levels, max. image size 4.13 x infinity inches (limited by available memory). $399.95 sugg. retail. I only stayed for about 3 minutes during which time he was able to produce several random patterns of pixels on the screen, but the flyer says it "provides crystal clear images" and the scanned picture on the spec sheet lookes very good. Electronic Arts was playing a demo output from DeluxeVideo III, which had some very impressive effects. One was a wipe done in several back-and-forth motions of a picture of a hand holding a chalk-brush. The new program "supports all Amiga resolution modes, including HAM, overscan, and interlace; define paths and edit object motion using only the mouse; control external devices including single-frames VCR through ARexx message port." It also has HyperCard-type interactive capability. Availability is "a few weeks" and upgrade info is available from EA. Call 800-245-4525 (outside North America: 415-571-7171 x555). Suggested retail is $149.95. Spirit Technology had a prototype of their new AX-S system (pronouced "access"). This looks like a full-sized IBM PC case and it has 6 empty slots. It attaches to your 500 or 1000 and allows you to interface PC/XT-AT boards to your Amiga. The price including interface board and power supply is, I think, $1400 Canadian. It has room for extra memory and will allow the use of PC hard drives with appropriate software, but the real advantage is the possibility of boeards not available for Amigas. These includes fax boards and A/D converter cards. Each card needs software to interface with AmigaDos. This unit does not run MS-DOS. One employee at the Gold Disk booth told me there was no truth to the rumour that a new version of Professional Draw was coming, but their catalogue at the show lists several features not in version 1.0: type text on a curve, arbitrary magnification 25% to 1600%. He checked with someone else who said it would be available in late February or March. An advertised demo of NewTek's Video Toaster ended up being a demo of DigiPaint 3.