From: barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N. Barrett)
Subject: Re: CBM at CES/Vegas quickie report
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, IA
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 08:06:27 GMT

In article <73144@cup.portal.com> Harv@cup.portal.com (Harv R Laser) writes:
>One new thing being shown, altho very quietly, as in no
>signs and no press release is MPEG on a card inside a 4000
>running full motion full screen video streams in a sizeable
>window. Jeff Porter of CBM Engineering (a real nice guy btw) 
>told me this is a new Amiga product in development. Release date/price 
>to be announced later. It looked damn good to me. 

   Good.  I just hope Commodore does not take their usual eternity in getting
this product to the market.  Of course, I hope this also means that Commodore
is getting serious about developing Amiga (not CDTV) CD-ROM systems, since
MPEG and CD-ROM go hand-in-hand.

>I also attended the absolutely standing room only
>press conference for the new company 3DO, founded by
>E/A's Trip Hawkins. I'll post more about this later when
>I get home and get a chance to type in some of what was
>in their press kit but for now I'll say that what I saw in
>th way of demos was damn impressive, although rather limited.
>The first 3DO machine is already being shown in prototype form
>in their booth with the Panasonic name brand on it, and
>they plan to ship in Fall '93 with an anticipated price of
>$700.00 or thereabouts. They claim 80 software houses
>are already working on titles and their financial partners
>include AT&T, Time Warner, and a number of other financial heavyweights.
>RJ Mical and Dave Needle, both of the original Amiga Inc.
>were on the stage driving the demos during the presentation.
>They are part of the software and hardware team that has been
>developing this product in near secrecy for quite a while
>now. The proto machine is RISC based, full 24 bit output,
>has a CD drive, plays many kinds of media including music and photo CDs,
>and is equipped with coprocessors which let it do nice
>things like real time image mapping and rotation and warping
>and transparency and real-life lighting effects. 2MEG RAM is standard and
>the prototypes had a plethora of ports on its butt end
>and is manipulated with a hand-held controller not unlike a
>games console. No keyboard was shown. All the software I saw
>looked to be very carefully crafted demos of very early stages
>of what has the potential to be a mind-boggling new product,
>as revolutinary in 1993 as the Amiga was in 1985.
>We'll see   :)

   Too bad they've already made agreements with Panasonic to let them sell
it.  I guess there will be no miracles opportunities for Commodore to get
outstanding technologies cheap this time.  

   BTW, is it me, or does this seem a bit like the NeXT-Apple situation of
a few years ago?  With the NeXT, a former Apple founder made a new company
and a highly-advanced very-Mac-like product.  With this thing, it seems 
that some former Amiga founders have made a new highly-advanced 
very-Amiga-like product.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

---
| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"No, I just think that a computer grafted on top of another computer
is a kludge.  It has nothing to do with the AGA chipset." -- me
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.programmer