From: srp@travis.csd.harris.com ( Stephen Pietrowicz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: FINALLY!  THE MARC BARRETT POSTING TRANSLATOR!!!
Date: 12 Sep 92 21:56:33 GMT
Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy


Here's something I whipped up.  Try it out.  Makes those postings
a lot more fun to read.  :-)  If you improve it, please post the
new program to the net so we can enjoy it too.

A sample data file (with actual posting clippings) follows the program.
Try it out.

Steve

--------------------------8X--CUT HERE--X8-----------------------
%{

        /*  Marc Barrett posting translator;
		amaze your friends
            To compile: lex mb.l
                        cc -o mb lex.yy.c -ll
	    To use:
			mb < Your_MB_posting
        */

        char buf[128];
%}
%n 1000
%%
"I know" 			   printf("I think");
"looks a thousand times better"  printf("looks worse");
"years ago"                        printf("years ago (before I bought an Amiga) ");
"no improvements"                  printf("many improvements");
"As far as I know"                 printf("I don't really know");
"as far as I know"                 printf("but what do I know");
"totally official"                 printf("a wild rumor");
"kludged"                           printf("designed");
"be any"			   printf("be some");
"also likely never"	   printf("also probably");
"likely never"		   printf("probably");
"everyone"			   printf("some people");
"being unreasonable"		   printf("being an idiot");
"I don't understand"		   printf("I dont' understand.  ");
"it is unreasonable"		   printf("it is stupid.  ");
"everybody"			   printf("some people");
"have never"		        printf("will");
"must have"	                printf("could have");
"will never"		        printf("will");
"never will"		        printf("will again soon");
"would not"			printf("may"); 
"the need"			printf("some silly things");
"The problem"		        printf("My problem");
"the problem"			printf("my problem");
"the simple fact"		printf("my opinion is");
"simply"			printf("(with great difficulty)");
"it's kind of embarassing"      printf("I'm kind of embarassing");
"I often see"      		printf("I never see");
"I questioned"      		printf("I flamed");
"development costs"		printf("development costs (which, I'd like to remind you, I know nothing about)");
"IMO"		   		printf("(belch)");
"to explain"		        printf("to give my wacky ideas about");
"practically zero"		printf("astronomical");
"I think"			printf("I think.  ");
"don't think"			printf("don't think.  ");
"do not think."			printf("do not think.  ");
"I am trying"			printf("I am flaming");
"I've"		          printf("Commodore has");
"Beware the ides of September" printf("I'm gonna flame any new stuff shown in September");
"Sad."				printf("Weird");
"sad"				printf("weird");
"I WAS RIGHT"	 		printf("I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT");
"Commodore is"			printf("I am");
"Commodore"			printf("Marc Barrett");
"CDTV"				printf("Marc Barrett");
"CD-ROM"			printf("Marc Barrett");
"IDE"				printf("Marc Barrett");
"A500"				printf("MB500");
"A600"				printf("MB600");
"A1000"				printf("MB1000");
"A2000"				printf("MB2000");
"A3000"				printf("MB3000");
"A4000"	 			printf("MB4000");
"AmigaVision"			printf("BarrettVision");
"AA"	 			printf("MB");
"AmigaDos"	 		printf("BarrettDos");
"AmigaOS"	 		printf("BarrettDos");
"AmigaDOS"	 		printf("BarrettDos");
"Amiga"	 		        printf("Barrett");
"ARexx"		 		printf("MBrexx");
%%
--------------------------8X--CUT HERE--X8-----------------------

   Are you surprised?  Amigas aren't much fun anymore.  Games and demos have
lost their touch because of the comparitively low screen and color resolutions.
Heck, SimAnt on the Macintosh looks a thousand times better than the Amiga
version, and SimEarth isn't even available for the Amiga as far as I know.

   This happens when a system like the Amiga stagnates.  Things that were a lot
of fun years ago are boring now, and there have been no improvements in usable
resolutions and color capabilities to keep the Amiga interesting.  I have 
basically been limited to using my Amiga as a dumb terminal, and I have 
numerous friends who have been using their Amigas for the same thing.  Sad.


   It is now totally official: CDTV is dead.  On Monday, August 3, 1992, 
Commodore laid off all of their CDTV development people, including Gail
wellington and Ben Phister.  Most (if not all) CDTV development has now been
effectively canceled.

   Basically, this reaks of more Commodore short-sightedness.  Commodore has
again canceled all development of an innovative idea, because one and only
one implementation of this idea did not sell massively well immediately.  I am
certain that Commodore could have made money from the efforts of their CDTV
development people if they had simply shifted all CD-ROM multimedia development
to the Amiga, and made CD-XA-compatible CD-ROM drives, MPEG hardware, and
innovative CD-ROM software available for all Amigas.  But no, Commodore just
went ahead and canceled everything.  Since the people who were fired were also
the people at Commodore who were leading the charge at Commodore for more 
Amiga CD-ROM support, there will likely never be any Amiga CD-ROM drives 
forthcoming from Commodore.  The rumored MPEG hardware will also likely never
be available for the CDTV or the Amiga.

   Another very sad day.

   People often accuse me of being unreasonable, but I have never flamed 
Commodore for surface-mounting, and never will.  As long as some protection
is provided for chips that connect to ports on the outside (especially the
CIAs), surface mounting is a good thing.  I do not like a closed, nearly
unupgradable box like the A600, though, but this has nothing to do with
surface-mounting.  (It just happens that the A600 is both unupgradable and
surface mounted)  I also will never flame Commodore for developing a new chip
that is not pin-compatible with an older version.  Even Motorola abandoned
pin-compatibility after the 68010.

   True, but the A570 has already been developed, and rumored to be shipping
in Sweden.  I keep referring to the need for a method to allow A2000 and
A3000 systems (or any system that can use Zorro II cards) to run CDTV titles.
There have been three articles in AmigaWorld on a CDTV-compatible CD-ROM drive
for the A500, but no articles on one for the A2000/A3000, so it is in question
whether or not such a device or product is in development.

    Or I have another idea.  A third-party developer could license a 2.0-
compatible version of the CDTV OS from Commodore, including the extra 256K
of OS software.  This third-party could then modify the CDTV OS slightly to
allow it to run properly on Amigas with appropriate third-party CD-ROM 
drives.  It might not run on all third-party drives (the 'subcode data' 
problem being one example), and it might have to be restricted to only 
running on systems with at least 2M of total RAM and 1M of chip RAM and an
MMU, but it would be better than nothing.  At the very least, it would 
allow all A3000 systems with an appropriate CD-ROM drive to use CDTV titles.

     "Beware the ides of September..."

   Unfortunately, Commodore has taken that attitude in the past, in particular
when the Los Gatos facility was closed.  I think everybody here wishes that
Commodore had not closed that facility, and had simply let Amiga development
continue primarily at Los Gotos and leave the West Chester facility for
developments not directly related to the AmigaOS or custom chips.

   I wish that showed in the amounts of mney that Commodore is investing in
the future of the Amiga.  

     "Beware the ides of September..."

   I know some people here who will strongly disagree with you.  HAM is nice
in that it can compress 12 bitplanes to 6, or 18 bitplanes to 8, or 24
bitplanes to 10.  And I wish Commodore had exploited HAM's real potential
sooner, by developing a 10-bit HAM mode a long time ago.  But HAM is 
hardly the only way to achieve this kind of color compression.  DYUV (which
is used in the DCTV and CD-I systems) achieves this with far better results.

   A mucho flicker.

    "Beware the ides of September..."

   Yes, IDE is fast and cheap, but it is not flexible.  But do you really want
cheap unflexibility on a high-end system?  I agree that IDE would be ideal on
a hypothetical low-mid-range system with an '020, no FPU, a minimum of RAM, and
a smaller HD; but we are talking about 25Mhz '040 systems with lots of RAM and
big hard drives, and it just does not make sense to me to use IDE in such a
system.  The faster CPU and extra RAM make up the bulk of the increased cost, 
so that the extra cost of SCSI (around $50 per system) is low by comparison.

   With IDE, you can't use more than one or two devices no matter what you do,
and good luck finding compatible devices besides hard drives.  Whereas SCSI
can handle seven devices which can be anything from ethernet cards to laser
printers to frame buffers to tape drives.  And you get this extra flexibility
at a cost that is less than the cost of an extra HD floppy drive.

    "Beware the ides of September..."

   Hardly.  Just look at the Mac groups for a model of how this would work.  
For instance, a few weeks ago I questioned Commodore's commitment to 
AmigaVision, saying that I felt that it had been abandoned.  Nobody came back
with any solid information, just some general bullshit that Commodore was
comitted to AmigaVision but with no details.  Compare this to just a week ago,
when somebody on comp.sys.mac.hypercard questioned Apple/Claris' commitment to
HyperCard.  A real Apple rep posted a message in return showing Claris' plans
for HyperCard for the next three years, in detail.  That kind of support is
all people want here, and there is nothing Orwellian about it.

   Yes, it's kind of embarassing.  I often see poor English on Usenet, but it
is usually from international readers who do not know English very well, but 
this does not really mean that they are in any way lacking in intelligence
because I am positive that I would sound a million times worse if I were
forced to get around in a language that was not my native tongue! :-)  However,
this Jeff Young guy is most likely an American, probably born and raised here,
which makes me embarassed to think of what the international readers must be
thinking about an American who cannot even speak his own language.

   They may also have successfully gotten into UNIX workstations six years
before the development of the A3000UX.  I do not remember all of the details,
but Commodore had a Z8000-based UNIX system around 1985 with a nice 800x600
monochrome display, with a price tag of around $3500 (cheap for workstations
with such resolutions at that time).  I also remember that the first litigation
between Commodore and Atari right after Jack Tramiel took over Atari involved
this workstation and not the Amiga (as is commonly believed).  Were it not
for the Amiga, Commodore might have put more marketing and development into
this system.

   Unfortunately, this would require that Commodore spent about $120,000 to
layout and fabricate a PC board custom designed to fit into an A500 case, and
I do not think Commodore would be willing to spent such an amount just to
please 2 million or so people.  They never developed a similar custom A500 
board to fit into an A1000 case, so I doubt they will do the same with any
new technology boards for A500 and A2000 systems.


   Actually, that's 2.2% of total sales.  Commodore spends a higher percentage
of their profits on R&D, but measuring investments as a percentage of profits 
is very misleading, as it can make a bad company (which has low profits
precisely because they haven't been investing enough in critical areas) look
good.  

   It is not a matter of preannouncing anything.  It is simply a matter of
showing that a company has long-term plans for a product, and what those plans
are.  For all I know, Commodore has already decided to kill AmigaVision, and
has been attempting to do so as quietly as possible, so that nobody catches
on to what they are doing.  If Commodore were to say "Yes, AmigaVision is still
very much alive, and were are in the middle of a rewrite.  Here are some
features we will try to put in:  ...", then this would show me that I am not
correct in my assumption that AmigaVision is already dead.  This is the policy
that Commodore had toward AmigaOS 2.0, way back when it was still being called
1.4, and it did not violate Commodore's no-preannouncing policies in any way.
Indeed, I think Commodore has not been showing any of their long-term plans for
many of their product because they do not have any long-term plans for the
products.

   OK, so what are the planned features for this major rewrite?  And how long
do the people working on it think it will take to develop this rewrite?

   The Paula chip in the A3000 is exactly the same chip as the Paula chips in
the very earliest A1000s.  The Paula chip cannot access 1.44MB drives in 
general; IE: you cannot plug in any old IBM 1.44M drive and use it, as you
can plug in any IBM 720K drive and use it.  You have to use special HD drives
that spin the motor at half-speed, so that the old Paula chip can keep up
with the data stream.
  
   You are still implying that any 1.44M floppy drive can be plugged into an
A3000 and used.  This is totally untrue.  Reread what I said above. 

   Hardly.  It would show that Commodore is committed to getting the new update
to the market.  With the vast numbers of quality systems and products that have
been cancelled internally at Commodore over the past year, and the lack of
desire by Commodore reps such as you to make factual statements about anything
until the last minute, it sounds to me that you are yourselves unsure whether
or not the products you are working on will ever be released, even if they
are major products.  

   Counter-productive only if you view Commodore's public-relations support as
being totally satisfactory, and not needing any changes.  I seek positive 
change from Commodore in this area; but since it is not easy to get change 
from a company that will not change without causing a certain amount of 
trouble, of course my efforts will be viewed by insiders as being counter-
productive.  

   I am just using an off-the-cuff figure.  An acquaintance EE student here
put the cost of developing a whole new motherboard at $100,000 or so, which
includes the costs of developing the schematics and costs of having the
design sent outside the company for routing.  It also includes the occasional
goof in designing anything as complicated as a PC motherboard, which can push 
costs up.

   I was being very sarcastic and cynical when I posted this message.  I still
do not understand why Commodore never developed an A500 motherboard designed
for an A1000 case, as it would have satisfied the A1000 owners far more than
all of the trade-up programs, and they would have been able to keep their
keyboard garages!  :-)  From a public relations standpoint, the costs would
have been very much worth it.

   Yes, we know for certain that the '040 A3000T uses the ECS.  Why?  Because
this machine is an officially released product, and the Commodore people and
Amiga developers are still not talking about any future technologies and
chipsets.  If this machine did not use the ECS, the wraps on the chipset that
it did use would be off.

   Of course not.  To release it to the general public would be a sign of
intelligence, and Commodore does want that.

   There was a segment on CNN last night about a new program that IBM has 
created, to help schools teach with CD-ROM multimedia systems.  The systems
are PS/2 systems (of course) with generic CD-ROM drives, and the multimedia
software running on the systems is quite good, with stereo sound and 
partial-screen motion video (about as good as from a CDTV, but with higher
resolutions and color capabilities, and no NTSC/PAL flicker).  The program
teaches selected intructors on how to use the multimedia systems in their
classrooms, and asks that each intructor help at least one other intructor
on how to use the systems in their classrooms.  IBM has also been helping
by practically giving these systems away to various schools.

   This kind of support from IBM is the straw that broke the cammel's back.
I am sick and tired of seeing so much CD-ROM support from IBM, Apple, and
other companies, and absolutely none whatsoever from Commodore.  Apple is
getting ready to introduce several Macintosh systems in a month or so that
have built-in CD-ROM drives, and all we get from Commodore is the standalone,
unupgradable appliance called the CDTV.  To this date, Commodore has promised
CD-ROM support for the A500 and A600 but still has not delivered on it, and
has yet to even hint at such support for the A3000 and A2000 systems -- the
very systems that would form the backbone of competition with Apple and IBM,
if Commodore would get their act together.
 
   Commodore has been making modified versions of the CDTV OS compatible with
AmigaOS 2.0 available to CDTV developers for several months now.  I'm pretty
certain that only the extra 256K of CDTV-specific ROM has been modified; the
rest of the OS is the standard 512K 2.04 ROM.  What I propose is getting a
dump of the 2.04-compatible 256K CDTV ROM into the hands of one of the bigger
European cracking groups, with the challenge that they develop a software-only
package that would allow A2000 and A3000 systems with a capable SCSI CD-ROM
drive to run CDTV software.  After all, if Commodore will not support us,
why should we continue to support them by remaining loyal to them?  This
bypassing of Commodore could also send a signal to the Commodore management
that they need to get their act together, or the Amiga community will 
continue to disregard Commodore's directional and legal wants and desires in
the future.
 
   If any Commodore reps have the gall to say that this is somehow immoral,
I would like to ask them what is so immoral about trying in any way possible
to push the AMIGA (not the CDTV) into the booming CD-ROM multimedia market?
Commodore has shown absolutely no desire to provide support that would allow
the Amiga to survive and compete in this market, despite how easy it would be
to provide such support.  This is the greater immorality, IMO.

   Scale is for making presentations with static pictures, the computer 
equivelent of a slideshow.  Not very many people would equate this with
multimedia.  What were are looking for and not finding are interactive 
presentations with high-resolution partial-screen motion video and high-
quality sound.  Something like CDTV, but on a high-resolution non-
interlaced screen with tiny fonts -- more like computer than a VCR, 
with text small enough for "hypermedia" purposes and not an overdependency
on graphics, like traditional low-resolution Amiga multimedia ususally
forces.

   A user's nightmare.  Meaning that a person has to have a degree in
computer science to do CD-ROM multimedia from an Amiga.  Nothing is 
available that is ready-to-run on an Amiga.

   There we go again with video.  A flickering, low-resolution screen
with fonts as big as cities.  Terrible for text-oriented hypermedia.

   There we go again with programming.  To get anything done, a user has
to be an expert programmer.  User-friendliness goes out the window.  

   Foundation is a bad clone of HyperCard with no support.  

   You still have to have a good knowledge of ARexx to make use of it.  I am
talking about usability for complete novices, which is something that Amiga
multimedia does not provide.  

   High-resolution motion video isn't really possible on Amigas currently.  
It's old hat on IBM and Mac systems.

   Computer elitism.  ARexx is a much more difficult programming environment
than you make it out to be.  In an industry where the trends are toward more
and more user-friendliness, the user should not have to do any programming
to get some simple task done, like use a CD-ROM disc.  If Commodore and third-
parties do not improve the situation, which is currently causing the Amiga
to buck completely against the rest of the computer industry, it will never
survive.

   Well, no.  I am talking about interactive sessions, with a computer and a
user one-on-one.  This is what the bulk of multimedia is all about, really.
And this requires a mix of colorful graphics, good-quality sound, and a high-
resolution non-interlaced display with the ability to display text in small
type.  To see some really good examples of truly useful multimedia, people
should take a look at some of the existing PD and shareware HyperCard stacks.
I have several, which I have used to get my mom better aquainted with how
to use a Macintosh.  

    You cannot be coputer novice, either.  The fact is, the requirement of
having to know anything about ARexx locks the Amiga out of 99% of potential
buyers.  

   No I am not.  In situations like these, I always think of how easy-to-
use of friendly something would have to be for my mom to be able to use it.
She knows very little about computers, so a program has to be very user-
friendly for her to be able to use it.  I installed a Mac emulator on her
A3000 for this very reason.  There is a wide enough base of pre-written
ready-to-run HyperCard stacks of all kinds that she does not have to know
anything other than 'point-and-click' to make use of multimedia.  For her
to do any of this on an Amiga, either I would have to write everything for
her (which is unrealistic, because I am only home about seven weeks out of
every year) or she would have to learn some complicated programming
environment, because there is nothing pre-written and ready-to-run on 
her system.

   People often accuse me of being unreasonable, but I have never flamed 
Commodore for surface-mounting, and never will.  As long as some protection
is provided for chips that connect to ports on the outside (especially the
CIAs), surface mounting is a good thing.  I do not like a closed, nearly
unupgradable box like the A600, though, but this has nothing to do with
surface-mounting.  (It just happens that the A600 is both unupgradable and
surface mounted)  I also will never flame Commodore for developing a new chip
that is not pin-compatible with an older version.  Even Motorola abandoned
pin-compatibility after the 68010.

   True, but the A570 has already been developed, and rumored to be shipping
in Sweden.  I keep referring to the need for a method to allow A2000 and
A3000 systems (or any system that can use Zorro II cards) to run CDTV titles.
There have been three articles in AmigaWorld on a CDTV-compatible CD-ROM drive
for the A500, but no articles on one for the A2000/A3000, so it is in question
whether or not such a device or product is in development.

    Or I have another idea.  A third-party developer could license a 2.0-
compatible version of the CDTV OS from Commodore, including the extra 256K
of OS software.  This third-party could then modify the CDTV OS slightly to
allow it to run properly on Amigas with appropriate third-party CD-ROM 
drives.  It might not run on all third-party drives (the 'subcode data' 
problem being one example), and it might have to be restricted to only 
running on systems with at least 2M of total RAM and 1M of chip RAM and an
MMU, but it would be better than nothing.  At the very least, it would 
allow all A3000 systems with an appropriate CD-ROM drive to use CDTV titles.

   Sounds like Commodore's management is just sick and tired of being
repeatedly upstaged by small Amiga hardware developers, such as the
makers of the ATonce and PowerPC.  I think that one of these companies 
will probably have their PC emulator ported to the A600 for the A601
slot long before tortoise Commodore finally gets theirs to the market,
so the issue is irrelevant.

   I will apologize for stating that the CDTV is dead if and when Commodore
gives me convincing proof that the CDTV is still alive.  With the two people
most responsible for the CDTV gone from the company, and with the way the
CDTV is being marketed (hardly at all), one can hardly call the CDTV 'alive'.


   You state that I am probably wrong in my statement that there are less
than 1000 Amiga dealers in the U.S., and then artificially inflate the
number in order to prove me wrong.  A number of people from various parts
of the country have come to my defense on this one.  I now have solid enough
information that there are no places in the U.S. where the Amiga is thriving.
For there to be 1000 dealers in the U.S., there has to be someplace that 
has a whopping hell of a lot of them, and no such places have been named.

   BTW, I am talking about dealers, where Amigas are sold at higher than
normal prices in order to provide service, and where both Amiga hardware
and software is sold.  I am not talking about mail-order houses and I am
not talking about K-Marts and Toys-R-Us's.  
 
   What I want is a better Amiga.  I can more honestly call myself an Amiga
pioneer than 90% of the people who flame me for my messages.  I got my first
Amiga in March of 1986, only a few months after it started hitting the streets.
There are probably plenty of people at Commodore who ahve not been using 
Amigas as long as I have.

   If it doesn't, it will probably only require a minor update to get it to
work.  Actually, the modes settable from ADPro are so close to the modes 
available from AA that I am surprised that ASDG did not violate an NDA's 
with its release! :-)

   I would like to explain a few things about what was going on back then.
When I started posting to Usenet, it was so now to ISU that I did not even
have access to a newsreader of any kind.  The only way I could read news 
back then was to receive comp.sys.amiga through the mail, from
amiga-relay@udel.edu (which is now defunct).  This, in conjunction with the
fact that all of the Amiga messages were junked into one main newsgroup back
then, meant that I was absolutely FLOODED with mail/messages.  Also due to
the fact that I did not have access to a newsreader, I could not post 
followups very easily.  These also had to be sent through the Udel relay,
and I had to put the quoted lines from the original message in by hand -- a
real pain.

   What happened when I posted all of those messages in rapid succession 
(which, on hindsight, was not a good idea, I admit), was that the Udel relay
then chose to go down, for almost a full week.  Without access to the 
followups to my messages, I obviously could not follow-up to the follow-ups.
I replied to allof the messages that I recieved through mail, even the
nasty ones.  But I was then totally blind to the public followups to my 
messages.  

   The Atari Lynx was loosely based on the Amiga chipset, in the same way
that the Amiga chipset is loosely based on the old Atari 400/800 chipset.  
All of these were designed by several of the same people, and to say that
the Amiga chipset and Lynx chip(s) are in no way related is preposterous.

   What happened is that, after installing 2.0, I opened Notepad, noticed that
it looked different (the screen colors were reversed), and had a version 
number of 2.something.  I stupidly assumed that it was a new version included
with AmigaOS 2.0.

   True, but critical corporate investments should always keep up with
sales increases.  Otherwise growth in new products and customer services 
will become out-of-sync with corporate growth.

   All the information I need is in the R&D investment statistics.  With 
a low R&D budget, there are obvious limits to what Commodore engineers could
be doing right now.  For instance, with a $30 million/year overall R&D budget,
it is totally reasonable for me to conclude that Commodore is not developing
any supercomputers.  Other conclusions are only slightly less reasonable.

   BTW, I have been generally correct in most assumptions about Commodore
product development.  Over two years ago, when I first brought up Commodore's
sorry track record with respect to their R&D investments, I predicted that
the "32-bit chipset" probably would not see the market before 1993.  Well, I
was wrong, but I was not off by much.  If it does see the market before 1993,
it will probably be only one or two months before the end of the year.  I also
predicted that the project to give AmigaOS device-independent video would take
an even longer time to develop.  I was correct here too.  All of this was
based on the fact that Commodore's R&D budget was too low to get such projects
done in a reasonable time frame.

   I've also received more private agreements than disagreements on this one,
which is unusual.  People don't want to say so publicly for fear of being
labeled a pirate with me, but many people agree that Commodore is a liability
for the Amiga, and that freeing the Amiga of dependency on Commodore through
means such as this would be a good thing.

   You got me on this one.  For a long time I did not know what my aim was 
with my messages.  I now have been attempting to point out to the Commodore
product development people areas where Amiga development is needed.  For 
instance, by talking about possibly yanking Amiga CD-ROM development from 
Commodore's hands, I am trying to let the Commodore people know just how badly
Amiga CD-ROM development support is needed.  With the possibility that they
may lose control of a key Amiga market, this may spurr them to make needed
modifications to the CDTV OS to allow it to run on an A3000 with a third-party
CD-ROM drive, and market the product themselves before the same product was
created and distributed by Amiga cracking groups.
 
   Consider this: the Commodore engineers have been working with tights budgets
ever since the Amiga was created.  With budgets so tight, I do not think it is
altogether unreasonable to conclude that the Commodore engineers probably do
not have access to the best hardware and software development tools available
in the computer industry.  I do not think it is unreasonable to conclude that
the Commodore engineering department is overstaffed, either.  All that I am
saying is that, had Commodore engineering been given somewhat higher budgets
and better development direction since 1985, two or three years might have
been saved in the development of the AA chipset, and other Amiga hardware
and software projects.  

   If you think these conclusions are not reasonable, just tell me why.  
With access to much better tools and with a bigger staff, I don't understand
why it is unreasonable to say that a significant amount of time could have
been saved on my projects, especially on longer-term projects like the AA
chipset.

   So what?  I was not even able to afford a C compiler until last year.  I
come from a lower-middle-class family, so it has been a bit of a struggle for
me to be able to afford the programming manuals that other Amiga programmers
take for granted.  The few books I have on Amiga programming were purchased
used and are very outdated.  As well, I had to sell my 2.0 RKM manuals not
long after purchasing them to help pay for tuition.  

   BTW, I have a reasonable amount of expertise on programming on other
systems, where I can get programming manuals free from the computation
center library.  Not long ago, I wrote a Motif shell for a file transfer
script, to allow users of some NMRi systems to copy some bizarre files from
Sun systems to DECstations, with automatic translation.  


   Commodore is not growing, that's for sure.  In fact, if you take global
inflation into account, Commodore's sales have been steadily decreasing since
1987.

   The midwest does not exist in a vacuum, either.  And I do get enough of
an indication from messages from people at other universities that the
situation for the Amiga at ISU is the rule rather than the exception for
other universities across the nation.
   
   I did not say that.  I only said that I would not cry if he died.  And I
was not the only person to say this -- I was merely the first.  Lots of other
people have made similar comments in the past few years.

   If Commodore improved 1000%, I would not complain, period.  The only reason
I continue to post complaints is that I continue to see very little progress
from Commodore.  In many respects -- especially marketing -- all I see is
constant deterioration of their efforts.  For instance, only two years ago
Commodore was making some reasonable efforts to get Amigas into universities,
by advertizing in university newspapers, instituting the Amiga On-Campus
Consultants program, and pushing Amiga UNIX systems into the research market.
In the past year, *ALL* of these efforts have been complete curtailed.

   Yes, I can take personal credit for that! :-)

   It wasn't Dave Needle alone.  Several of the others who were responsible
for the development of the Amiga were in on the development of the Lynx.
 
   Actually, what my diatribe was all about was a flame that a small company
like Epix could develop a new Amiga-like chipset, but Commodore couldn't.

   I do not support software piracy.  This is a special case.  What I am
advocating is for the Amiga community to remove a product critical to the
Amiga's survival from Commodore's hands.  Since Commodore has refused to
develop this product, it is up to the Amiga community have it developed and
distributed for them.

   This is not quite what I've been looking for from Commodore, but it will
do for the VERY short term.  For a real solution to allow Amiga 3000 systems
to operate as CD-ROM multimedia systems, it does not cut the mustard.

   The ideal solution is still an external CD-ROM drive which connects to the
A3000 SCSI port, and includes a modified CDTV OS ROM-kicked into the A3000
memory, and a similar software-only package for existing owners of third-party
CD-ROM drives so that these pioneering people do not end up with white
elephants.

   The advantage of the ideal solution is that it would be vastly more 
flexible in the long run.  For instance, with a Commodore or third-party CD-ROM
drive connected via the SCSI port, it would be possible to allow the system
to run Macintosh CD-ROM multimedia software under Emplant or A-Max.  It would
also be potentially possible for Commodore to modify the Janus software to
allow an Amiga equipped with a SCSI CD-ROM drive and a BridgeBoard to run
IBM MPC software.  None of this is possible with this cheap hack, connecting 
a CDTV to an Amiga via the parallel port.

   IMO, this temporary solution -- which will very likely end up becoming a
permanent one -- is damage control due to Commodore's inept decision to include
an IDE port and not a SCSI port in the new Amiga systems.  The ideal solution
for Amiga CD-ROM multimedia is now less workable on the new Amigas because of
their lack of a SCSI port.  The real tragedy is that replacing the SCSI port
with an IDE port will not have the cost advantages that people are saying it
will have, due to other bad decisions on Commodore's part.

   I have tried to be as constructive as possible.  Take for instance my idea
for getting the Amiga into the CD-ROM multimedia market, by marketing a 
modified version of the CDTV OS that would allow A3000's with SCSI CD-ROM
drives to run CDTV software, among other things.  IMO, this would be a far
more workable solution in the long-run and easier to develop than Commodore's
recent "solution" of connecting a CDTV to an Amiga via a parallel cable.
First of all, it would not turn people's existing third-party CD-ROM drives 
into instant white elephants.  Second, it would have added flexibility 
in terms of allowing multimedia for other platforms (Mac and IBM/MPC) to
run on the Amiga.

   You and the others at Commodore engineering are good hard-working people,
but you just have bad management direction.  The replacing of SCSI with IDE
in the new systems is probably the most infamous example of this.  Luckily
the guy who made this decision is no longer working for Commodore, but the
damage has been done.  You yourself used to say in your .sig: "Programming
is like sex: one mistake and you have to support it for life."  This applies
to hardware developing, too.

   I'm talking about development costs, and not manufacturing costs.  I will
get into details in a few days, but what we have here is a case of something
that would have cost nothing to develop but more to manufacture (SCSI) versus
something that cost plenty to develop but much less to manufacture (IDE).  
Both development and manufacturing costs have to be considered, and in the
short term development costs have a greater influence on the list prices.

   Actually, I agree.  I have no opposition whatsoever to IDE in low-end
systems.  But putting IDE into high-end systems is a travesty beyond words.

   See all of you jerks who flamed me for saying that there couldn't possibly 
be 1000 Amiga dealers in the U.S.A. -- *** I WAS RIGHT***  !!!!

   'Nuff said!!

   In a way, the AA chipset is going to become the great equalizer, in favor of
systems like the Mac and IBM systems which have had 256-color hi-res modes for
a long time.  Ever since the Mac II and IBM SVGA systems first started coming
out, people have been complaining about their slowness while stating (falsely)
that the Amiga was faster.  The real problem all along has been that 640x480x8
is a hell of a lot of data to move around, and the Amiga did not have any modes
to use as a comparison against these systems.  Sure, the Amiga seemed faster,
but only because it's inferior display meant that it was not burdoned with 
moving lots of data around.

   But along comes the AA chipset, and we finally get to see how an Amiga 
performs with 8 bitplanes at 640x480, and we see that it **CRAWLS**.  In fact,
we find that the Workbench is **UNUSABLE** in 256-color mode because it is
so slow, even though the Mac and IBM systems -- which have been available for
much longer -- are pokish but still very usable with 256 colors.

   The odd thing about the AA chipset, then, is that it could easily move
die-hard Amigaoids to viewing Mac and IBM systems with a little more respect.

   For about a week or so, I've been promising to post my detailed explanation
of exactly why Commodore's use of a super-cheap IDE HD interface in the A4000
has very likely pushed the initial list prices higher than what they would have
been had SCSI been used.

   The problem comes down to the architecture of the A4000 itself.  As has been
rumored before, several good systems were canceled not long after DevCon '91,
a year ago.  What has not been said is that these included all of the systems
that Dave Haynie designed that incorporated the AA chipset.  Indeed, none of
the new Amiga systems -- including the A4000 -- were designed by him.  They
were designed in a rush by junior engineers at Commodore.  

   The whole design of the A4000 can be summed up in a fairly short sentence:
the A4000 is an A3000 with the CPU moved to a card, the AA chipset kludged in,
and with the SCSI subsystem replaced with IDE.  I will get back to the issue
of SCSI & IDE in a minute, but I would first like to explain what other 
problems this has.  Basically, the A3000 was not designed for the AA chipset.
The Ramsey and Buster chips in the A3000 were designed for use with the ECS,
in particular the 2M Agnus chip.  The new Alice chip in the AA chipset -- the
replacement for Agnus -- can potentially address 4M of chip RAM.  But since
the Alice chip has been kludged to work with other chips intended for the
2M Agnus chip, none of the new Amigas can use more than 2M of chip RAM.  The
use of the A3000 architecture also has other problems, namely the 
restriction of 16M of fast RAM on the motherboard.  This was not a problem
several years ago with the A3000 was designed, but 16M is not all that 
much anymore, with RAM prices at $34/megabyte for 60nS static-column memories.

   OK, I've established that the A4000 is an A3000 with the AA chipset kludged
in.  Now it makes sense to me that it would have cost less in development costs
to simply leave the A3000's SCSI design there instead of removing it and
replacing it with something else.  The costs of including SCSI in the A4000,
then, would have been practically zero in development costs.  

   In addition to the costs involved in removing the SCSI subsystem from the
A4000's design, though, we also have to consider the costs involved in 
designing the IDE design.  These costs would have been practically zero if
the A4000 had simply used the same IDE design as the A600.  The problem is
that it does not -- the IDE design used in the A4000 is a whole new design.
The new design was created by Randall Jessup, and includes extra hardware to
make the IDE interface and HD look somewhat like a SCSI interface and HD to
Amiga software.  This is a reasonable effort to make the most of a bad
situation, IMO, but the simple fact is that a design like this must have cost
quite a lot to develop, and would not have been necessary had the A3000's
existing SCSI design simply been left in the design for the A4000.

   As Dave Haynie and Randall Jessup have already pointed out, IDE -- even the
new one in the A4000 -- costs next to nothing in terms of manufacturing costs.
But the development costs involved in creating this IDE design must have been
very substantial compared to the costs that would have been involved in
simply carrying over the A3000's existing SCSI design to the A4000.  These
development costs are still costs, and Commodore is going to want to recoup
these costs as quickly as possible.  This means boosting the list prices
to pay the development costs, and then lowering the list prices later as
soon as these development costs have been payed for.  In the short-term, then,
the prices on the A4000 and other new systems will be higher than if they
had used a SCSI design. 

---
| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
--------------------------------------------------
     "Beware the ides of September..."

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Steve
--
"For a long time I did not know what my aim was with my messages."
		-- Marc Barrett