From: andrey@cco.caltech.edu (Andre T. Yew)
Subject: World of Commodore summary, 9/11 (LONG)
Keywords: world of commodore, a4000
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 02:28:01 GMT

	Sigh.

	The World of Commodore show in Pasadena showed both
promise and disappointment.  Let's start with the most
talked about computer in the past few weeks -- the Amiga
4000.  It's amazing how quickly some people on the net
get their information.  The A4000 has:

- 25 MHz 68040 on a removable processor board
- 2 MB of Chip RAM
- 4 MB Fast RAM with SIMMs (16 MB maximum)
- 512K ROM
- keyboard with mini-DIN in the rear
- 2 joystick/mouse ports on the left (why?)
- Four Zorro III slots, 3 inline with PC/AT
  slots, one with a video slot.
- 2-button mouse, 94-key keyboard
- 120 MB IDE drive
- internal IDE port, no SCSI
- HD disk drive
- 4 3.5-inch drive bays
- 1 front 5.25-inch drive bay
- AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture, aka AA) chip
  set with all the rumored modes
- same sound (more on this later)
- 15.25" deep, 15" deep, 5" inch, 20lbs
- MSRP $3695 (Creative was taking preorders for $3K)

	That's the lowdown on the A4000.  The only available
Commodore SCSI host adaptor is the 2091, although Jim
Dionne said there will be a 32-bit one around Xmas.

	The performance of 4000 is pretty good.  It seems like
the faster of the SVGA cards running Windows -- you could
see regions visibly redraw when you move windows around.
There wasn't much software for it except for ADPro, so I
couldn't see how fast it could move whole screens around.
The machine itself looks like a PC-clone, ie cheap and
ugly (sorry, Commodore engineering).

	Now the bad news, the A3000 seems to be as orphaned as
the A2000 is.  Jim Dionne (president of CBM, Inc.) said that
they will produce 3000's as long as there's demand for it.
That sounds like a death knell to me.  Further, there is
no "easy technical" way to upgrade a 3000 to the AGA.
However, within the next 6 months, expect to see a number
of special promotions from Commodore including a power-up
from the 3000 to the 4000, according to Dionne.

	Actually, there was one other piece of software running
on the 4000, and that was AmigaVision Professional (AV 3.0).
AVPro looks pretty nice.  To everyone named Marc Barrett
out there, this is Commodore's integration of CDTV with
mainstream Amiga computers.  It can read and play back
CD-XL files (full-motion video), it can play CD audio
tracks from the CDTV, supports CDTV preferences, and has
improved MIDI support.  It now has arrays and addressable
objects, more transitions, and a better object editor.
According to Lou Wallace of Amiga World, who was demoing it
for Commodore, it's still in gamma (geez, didn't know they
extended testing periods, but then again testing is HARD! :)
and very stable -- it crashed once in his two-day use of it.
Perhaps most importantly of all, it now has a freely
distributable player.  MSRP is $399.  There is an upgrade
path for current owners.  I don't know how much it'll
cost.

	On to Commodore's lower end stuff.  They had the 600
there and it's a pretty small computer.  It seems to have
pretty aggressive marketing -- the $399 MSRP floppy version
comes with three games (Jim Dionne, comparing himself to a
drug dealer, said Commodore has to get kids hooked on the
Amiga before they can sell more expensive systems).  The
games are Myth, Robocop III, and Shadow of The Beast III
(no I didn't get to see any game other than Myth), and the
whole thing is packed in a really loud, attention getting
box with Robocop as the main feature.  The "high-end" 600HD
comes with a 40MB hard drive, Virtual Reality Studio 2 (don't
know what's new), Pushover, and some other serious software.
It comes in a more sedate box, and has an MSRP of $599.  Street
prices for the 600 was $299, and $499 for the 600HD.  This
is a really good move on C='s part.

	Some more interesting stuff came during Dionne's keynote
address.  Using AVPro on a 4000, he presented all the new
machines and the following stuff.

	Commodore is doing a 4000 reasons to own an Amiga
contest where you can win an A4000, A600HD, or AVPro,
by stating in 25 words or less why you own an Amiga.
The winner will be announced at Winter COMDEX.  Please
don't email me for details, I don't want to type in all
the rules, and no, I'm not entering.

	Dionne also explained the difference between 3.0
and 2.1.  3.0 is for AA machines, and is otherwise
similar to 2.1.  I don't think this is completely
true, but for practical reasons it probably is the
same.  2.1 will ship within 90 days to 2.0 people.
The upgrade is a disk and a manual.

	Commodore's also starting a really aggressive ad
campaign in other magazines like Byte, PC World, and various
trade rags.  Their strategy is to specifically attack
Apple and IBM-clones in areas they feel they have a
clear advantage in.  As one would expect, those areas
are multimedia presentations, training, and desktop video.
One of the snappier lines in the ads was: "The MPC version
of multimedia may cost more than ours.  But it's harder to
use and requires more equipment."  They're also starting
to get in touch with user groups and trying to keep them
up to date and getting input from them.  They realized that
70% of their sales are influenced by Amiga owners and
are trying to "keep the faith", as Dionne put it.

	Also encouraging was Dionne's statement that CD-ROM was
very important to Commodore, and that the upcoming months
would see a lot of developments in that area, including
CD-ROM support for the 2000/3000/4000.  He wouldn't say
any more.  Also, we should see a full-motion MPEG video
board in a year.  This seems pie-in-the-sky, but he's
the boss.

	The question and answer session was pretty long and
mostly devoid of stupid questions.  The first question
was (can you guess?), why IDE over SCSI?  Dionne explained
that it was cheaper to get large drives this way, and that a
full 32-bit host adaptor would be available around Xmas.
He called the 2091 an 8-bit adaptor, so does this mean
he's talking about wide SCSI?  I don't think it would be
because you need an extra cable for wide SCSI, and people
won't buy drives that expensive.

	Other interesting questions concerned the sound
capability of the Amiga.  Dionne said he wished that
16-bit sound was ready for today, but wasn't.  He
did say it would come soon.  Upgrades to it might
be easy with the 4000 since they kept emphasizing
the modularity of the 4000.  He also said that, yes
a low-cost 68020 system is in the works.  Other questions
were about the upgradability of the 2000/3000 and this
is where we heard the line I mentioned above.
Also, the Toaster will not work in a 4000.  I
don't know whether this is a physical thing, but
Dionne definitely said it was an AA chipset problem.
He did say that NewTek was privy to all the technical
details of the AA chipset.

	Phew, that was the Commodore stuff.  I have to express
my feelings here.  Personally, I'm slightly disappointed that
the 3000 has been orphaned in Commodore's future plans, but
it makes sense to go to the 4000 where it seems to be
cheaper and easier to upgrade both processor and chipset
(should there be an AAA chipset).  I'm surprised they
had an IDE interface instead of a SCSI interface.  I hope
Dave Haynie (or whomever else involved in its design)
will comment on the design decisions that went into this.
To me, that's one slot taken up by a SCSI card, one more
by an Ethernet card (yes, I'm one of those people who
believes all computers should have networking capabilities),
and two left.  If you use the Bridgeboard, you'll eat up two
slots with the board and a multifunction IBM board.  If
you use a Toaster, or OpalVision and have some kind of TBC
or some other random video peripheral, that's two slots
as well.  Now, what if I wanted to add more memory?  Or
some other card?  I know normal users won't use their
machines like this, but SCSI would have added one more
slot to the system.  Oh well, I'll wait for the people
in the know to speak.

	So, on to the rest of the field.  I stopped by DMI
and gave them the third degree on Vivid.  Okay, here's
the upshot of it:  the coprocessors are not arranged
in any special pipeline or anything, they just have their
own private, 20ns SRAM cache that they can play with.
Apparently, the Vivid board was working only three
weeks before the show, and the demo I saw wasn't
terribly impressive.  It could handle a Gouraud-shaded
cube pretty well (not too snappy), but when it came
to the X-29 fighter plane, which any lowly Personal
IRIS can whip around, it slowed down to an oozing
2 frames per second.  To be fair, the programmer said
that the program wasn't optimized yet -- he wasn't
using the private RAM of the coprocessors and so forth.
But, it seems that DMI's SGI-stomping numbers are
inflated and hard to get at.  There was also no C
compiler for the Amiga presently that will produce
34020 code.  They had a Mandlebrot set generator
and some unknown company writing a raytracing (why
a raytracer??!!) program for the board.  I didn't
stay around to look, but they seemed okay at a glance.

	For people wondering about Jim Drew and Emplant,
the DMI people said they wouldn't let him display
his product because "he didn't have a working product
with a Resolver".  I didn't see him or the Emplant
board.  Emplant-haters and lovers can interpret
this however they like.  I think Jim Drew is full
of it.

	Next was GVP.  Their morpher looked like your
typical parametric-surface warper, and they were
warping random trucks.  What was neat was the EGS-110.
The Workbench support was really nice and fast (faster
than AA) with a nice Presentation Manager-like look.
I didn't play with the paint program too much, but 
the Elite II-like game (really, it had that Elite
style radar) was really fast and responsive.  It
had big ships which launched little fighters, so
there were lots of objects moving around all over
the place.  If Elite II looks at all like that, I'll
not be disappointed :).  According to the GVP guy,
it's just a giant framebuffer that can move scads
and scads of pixels like nothing else.  I wish I
had one.

	Next up was OpalVision.  Very nice board, very
nice software.  I saw Aliens playing in a loop on
it and the paint software.  Of course you people
all know about it already, so I won't say anymore
about it.

	Octree was there with Caligari 2.  But all they
could do was rag on Allen Hastings and Lightwave.
I didn't stick around for long.  Wil Vinton's
Playmation was there.  It was pretty nice.  The
rendering quality has gone up, except it still
doesn't antialias.  Apparently Disney TV studios
uses it and someone from Disney was complaining
to them about not receiving manuals.  I guess
SGI animation software companies aren't the only
flakes around :).  Ben Williams was there being
defensive about his fax thing.  ASDG was there
in the form of a looping videotape.  Morph plus
and ADPro were being presented.  Morph plus is
really nice with all of its special effects.  The
morphs looked very natural and effective, and the
swirly stuff was really smooth.

	I also saw ProWrite.  It looked like ProWrite --
Red Porsche with text flowing around it.  Oh boy.
If only we had something like Ami Pro 2.0.

	Jerry Pournelle was also there looking at
the 4000, but I don't know what he thought of it.

	So that's the World of Commodore on Friday.
I'm going back tomorrow to see and hopefully talk 
to Commodore's President of Engineering.  He's
suppose to be a very receptive guy and Jim Dionne
suggested that we throw our technical questions
and suggestions at him.

--Andre

P.S.  Someone suggested to Dionne that Commodore
should go after Atari music people since Atari
looks like it's in trouble.  I guess AMIGA 600
and AMIGA 4000 will CRUSH extinct Atari (deep) DODO
bird computer.  Commodore start advertising in
BYTE and PCWORLD.  Many SMART people read BYTE,
so MANY MILLIONS and MILLIONS of SMART people buy
AMIGA!! Commodore SMART and change it DIAPER already.
:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

-- 
Andre Yew                             andrey@tybalt.caltech.edu (131.215.48.100)