=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amy Today A text-file magazine for all Amiga lovers Volume #6, Issue #2, December 25th =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= SPECIAL CHRISTMAS ISSUE =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Editor : John Rydell Writers: Howard Owen, John Shortle, Bob Riemersma, and Michael Cox (Wow! Two whole lines worth!) Address all correspondence to: "Amy Today" C/O John Rydell GEnie address: J.Rydell1 640 Willowglen Rd. (#54790) Santa Barbara, CA 93105 Plink address: J*Rydell GEnie discussion in category #2, topic #29 Plink discussion in Section #2 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: 1. A Message From the Editor John Rydell 2. Distributing "Amy Today" John Rydell 3. Amiga Happenings John Rydell 4. Dragon's Lair Review Howard Owen 5. Arkanoid Update John Shortle 6. Sheldon Leemon Speaks, Part II Bob Riemersma 7. GVP Controller Review Michael Cox 8. Killer Demo Winners John Rydell 9. Trading Galore!! John Rydell 10. Newsletter Trading John Rydell 11. Advertising John Rydell 12. In the Future John Rydell =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= A Message From The Editor: Welcome to the special Christmas issue of Amy Today. I have chosen to write one big magazine to take the place of issues 6-2 and 6-3. Because of this, the issue is coming out on the 25th of the month rather than the 20th. This is by far the biggest issue I have ever published. (17 pages plus an index!) I have now published 18 issues of Amy Today and have successfully lost about $50 for my efforts. If you can find someone who would like to place an inexpensive advertisement, please let me know. Heck, you can buy yourself an ad and start your own picture trade or something fun like that. (I've gotten about 50 responses from the trade...that would be GREAT response for a business!) Have fun reading the articles in this issue. There is something for everyone--hard drives, games, interviews, and more. Have fun and have a joyous Christmas and a great New Year! John Rydell (Editor) =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Distributing "Amy Today": Amy Today is file-based magazine which has been copyrighted by John Rydell. I am allowing everyone to freely distribute it as long as they give credit to Amy Today for anything taken from the magazine. I also request that the magazine, itself, remains "AS IS" when being distributed. Please do not modify it in any way if you are going to distribute it. About Distributing: Please upload Amy Today EVERYWHERE! This magazine simply will not flourish if it is not uploaded whenever possible. Every issue is kept near 15,000 bytes ARCed so that upload/download time should never be a problem. So, please, if you have the chance spread the magazine around the country! Give a copy to your friend! Keep Amy Today alive and going strong! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Amiga Happenings: (John Rydell) <> Interfont- Syndesis recently released their new program Interfont. Interfont is a program which creates 3-D text objects for modeling programs. It is designed to support Sculpt 3D, Video Scape 3D, TurboSilver, and Forms in Flight. Interfont retails for $119.95 and users can upgrade from Interchange for $79.95. For more information or questions contact Harriet Tolly at (508) 657-5585. *CLtd- CLtd of Wichita, Kansas has released their new SCSI dos 3.0. The new software is for use with Workbench 1.3. Upgrades are available from any of the SCSI dos 2.xx and up for $20.00 which should include a replacement chip. <> Contact CLtd., 723 East Skinner, Wichita, KS 67211 phone (316)267-0202. CLtd also maintains their own 24 hour BBS. Call (316)267-1222. *Software Etc- Software ETC. in B. Dalton bookstores have recently started carrying Amiga software again. This time, however, they are carrying newer up-to-date titles usually at a 10% discount off of list price. If you were a regular customer of Software Etc., you recently got a holiday 1988 catalog. In it are discount coupons for use in December and January. If you did not get one, just ask for one because you can get an ADDITIONAL 20% off the regular price of any one item in the store between now and December 24, 1988. <> *Amiga Package- There is another Amiga 500 package deal available. For $1,229 from CMO you can get The Amiga 500, 1084S Stereo Monitor, and $500.00 (retail) software package including Money Mentor, Ferrari Formula 1, TV Text, Graphic Studio, and Textcraft AND a FREE Video Cassette Recorder. There is also an Amiga 2000 deal available. It includes the 2000, 1084 monitor, Aegis "Video Titler", Aegis "Video Scape 3D", EA's Deluxe Video V1.2 for $1,999 from CMO. (Ed's note. I assume CMO stands for Computer Mail Order.) *Dos2Dos Update- Central Coast Software has recently released an upgrade to its Dos 2 Dos disk utility software, which allows the reading, writing, and formatting of MS-DOS and Atari ST (Gem) disks. The current version now supports MS-DOS partitions on hard-disks networked with Amiga's either through LANs (local area networks) or through SCSI devices. There is also new support for lower case filenames and wildcard copying to and from the MS-DOS disk. To upgrade, sent $15.00 plus your original disk to Central Coast Software. The following is a list of some of the newest titles that have been released this year. Some of were actually released a while back, but, none-the-less, they are fairly new: <> -GOMF Button is an extension of the popular GOMF "Get Outta My Face" software program. GOMF helps recover from GURUs rather than crash. With the button you can now save the data even after a crash. List Price $69.95 from Hyptertek/Silicon Springs. -Pc-Elevator 386 is an MS_DOS accelerator card that is compatible with the A2000 Bridgeboard. It turns your 8088 based 4.77 MHz bridgeboard into a 16 MHz 80386 based computer. From Applied Reasoning Corp., it retails for $1795.00. -LazerXpress is the new laser printer from CLtd. This unit comes with plenty of software. It can print up to 8 pages per minute and does a magnificent job on graphics. Suggested retail is $2,500.00. -Perfect Vision has a real time digitizer. It supports all Amigas and does color or black and white (b&w at 1/60th of a second). Suggested retail is only $249.95. -Flicker Fixer is a de-interlace card for the Amiga 2000 only. This board will provide a quality display for word processing or CAD use that rivals VGA or Mac II quality when used with a multisync monitor. Available for $595.00. -Another board that is available for all Amigas is the Processor Accelerator. This board is designed to speed up the Amiga from 7.14 MHz to 14 MHz. It is advertised as an inexpensive MC68010. It has a socket for an optional math co-processor to get even more speed. Creative Microsystems offers the board for $199.95 retail. <> Finally here is a list of what "Oaces" calls "some of the Best Games of 1988". In alphabetical order: AAARGH! - Arcadia/EA - $34.95 Arkanoid - Discovery - $29.95 Battle Chess - Interplay - $49.95 Bubble Ghost - Accolade - $34.95 Capone - Actionware - $39.95 Captain Blood - Mindscape - $49.95 Earl Weaver Baseball - Electronic Arts - $49.95 Ebonstar - MicroIllusions - $49.95 Empire - Intersel - $49.95 Faery Tale - MicroIllusions - $49.95 Fire and Forget - Titus Software - $39.95 Fire Power - MicroIllusions - $24.95 Flight Simulator II - SubLogic - $49.95 Hardball! - Accolade - $44.95 Hunt for Red October - DataSoft - $39.95 Obliterator - Psygnosis - $39.95 Ports of Call - Aegis - $49.95 Roadwars - Arcadia - $34.95 Rocket Ranger - Cinemaware - $49.95 Stellar Conflict - Par Software - $39.95 Under Fire! - Avalon Hill - $34.95 Univ Military Sim - Rainbird - $49.95 Who Fmd Roger Rabbit - Bueno Vista - $44.95 Vampire's Empire - DigiTex, Inc. - $44.95 Zoom! - Discovery - $29.95 Amiga Happenings is a column dedicated to giving you information on what is happening in the Amiga community. Some of the information could possibly be wrong due to the fact that I am trying to get early information. I do not in any way guarantee that the information will be accurate although I will try my hardest to protect the innocent. >>If you have some new information you would like to share please submit it to Amy Today. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Dragon's Lair Review: (Howard Owen) Don Bluth's Dragon's Lair is distributed by ReadySoft and retails for $59.95. I always thought that the arcade version of Dragon's Lair was a waste of money. It had something to do with the arbitrary nature of the puzzles. Why pour quarters into a machine simply to figure out which way to pull the joystick or when to push the fire button? Besides, the real appeal of the game was the graphics, and finding out what came next, both of which you could get watching some puerile youth feed the game with his parent's hard earned copper-nickel alloy. It therefore came as quite a surprise to hear an irresistible siren's song emanating from a copy of "Don Bluth Dragon's Lair" on the shelf of my local Software Etc. store. "I have insanely great graaaphics" sang the software. "Quiet!" I retorted, "You take over the machine and won't work with my hard disk. " "I have a hi-res mode that will knock your sooocks off" sang the software. "Get thee behind me!" I commanded, "You are too expensive. " I'm discounted a whole entire 5 perceeent" sang the software. "I'll take it!" I said in abject surrender. So what if I hadn't got any Christmas shopping in? Getting the game home, I proceeded to open the package. Dragon's Lair comes on six floppy disks, accompanied by a little two page instruction sheet. The cover of the package states "For the Amiga A500/A2000 with 1 Mb, A1000 with 512K. " This rather peculiar requirement arises from the fact that the game uses the 256K of "writable control store" or kickstart RAM in the Amiga 1000. Using this memory allows the game to run on a stock Amiga 1000. This is only possible because the game ignores the Amiga's own operating system; otherwise it would need the routines stored in the WCS. In addition, the game does not use Amiga DOS, but instead relies on a custom loader written by the developers. Why they bypassed the Amiga's multitasking operating system is a matter of speculation. On the one hand, they probably gained a great deal of speed loading animation data from the floppy drives. On the other hand, copy protection is a lot easier when you trash the host computer's operating system. Going directly to the hardware has other consequences, as we shall see. Starting up Dragon's Lair is simple: put disk one in DF0: and boot away. The instructions state that "The game will recognize as many disks as are connected. " I was a little worried that this would not apply to the external floppy on my A2000. AmigaDOS configures this drive as DF2:. Since I don't have an internal DF1:, I thought this might give Dragon's Lair some problems. Fortunately though, the game had no problem with my configuration. Perhaps that is one slight benefit of dropping the supplied DOS in favor of a custom loader. However, one big drawback to doing that is the impossibility of loading the game on a hard disk. Readysoft says they "support" the Comspec SCSI controller and drive, but you need to give the game a dedicated partition of ten megs! This requires reformatting the disk to load the game. Not my idea of support! The custom loader is quite fast, although I can't help wondering how much faster the game might load from my hard drive with the fast file system. Yes, I know most people have only floppies, but if they hadn't ignored Amiga DOS, then everyone could have been happy, including hard disk owners. In any event, it wasn't long before I was watching Dirk the Daring glance suspiciously to his right and left. As he turned to stride purposefully toward the castle gate, I was feeling a trifle overwhelmed. There were too many astonishing elements in the scene that was unfolding in front of my eyes. The animation was smooth and realistic. The scene appeared crisp, with a minimum of "jaggies." The image filled the entire screen from top to bottom. This game was done in overscan! Pressing the "H" key yielded another surprise. The digital soundtrack fell silent, and the screen shrank to about a quarter of its original size. in this smaller area, an image sharper and clearer than any I had ever seen on my Amiga before appeared! A bare trace of flicker betrayed the use of interlace in the ultra high resolution display. I sat back and cheered! As a result, I was eaten by the slimy monster at the bottom of the castle's moat. A trivial price to pay for the privilege of seeing the opening sequence! After getting over my initial astonishment at the sheer technical artistry of Dragon's Lair, I settled in to enjoy the game. As in the original version, the controls are simple. The four "cardinal" directions on the joystick, and the fire button are the only options for control. The key to the game is knowing WHEN to push the appropriate widget. Since I hadn't given in to the urge to fill the arcade version with quarters, I never memorized the sequences needed to get through the various screens. This left me in a neophyte adventurer's position with regard to the Amiga version. I found that at first, the wait for disk loading was tolerable. As I progressed beyond the first few screens, however, I found myself becoming more and more impatient for the next scene (which I had seen before) to load. Another feature which I sorely missed was a pause button. I KNOW it wasn't present in the arcade version, but this is HOME computer software. Come on, guys! Other than that, I found myself experiencing a profound sense of deja vu. Although the game is supposed to contain a few differences from the arcade version, it IS Dragon's Lair, digitized frame-by-frame from the original. It has all the strengths, and all the weaknesses of the arcade version. If (like me) you were annoyed by the shallow and arbitrary nature of the puzzles in the original, so will you be with the Amiga version. If you were blown away by the graphics and smooth animation in the arcade, you will be equally astonished when you see the same graphics on your Amiga's screen. The game behaves anti-socially by seizing control of the machine. The Amiga's operating system is designed to allow very low-level access to the custom chips while at the same time providing for multitasking and sharing of the machine. This approach is unfamiliar to many game designers who are used to working on 8-bit machines. They tend to ignore the operating system, justifying their behavior by saying it is necessary in order to squeeze the last drop of performance out of the hardware. This argument had more force when the machine in question was a C-64. By contrast, the Amiga is a far more powerful system, and such measures are less justifiable. Having said all that, I must admit it is barely possible that Dragon's Lair may represent an exception to the rule. The game does some astonishing things. It's impossible for me to say with absolute certainty that Dragon's Lair would have been possible without ignoring the operating system. All I can say for sure is I WISH it were possible! In conclusion, I give Dragon's Lair a ten out of ten for artistry and technical excellence, and a five out of ten for game play. If you can live with the lack of multi-tasking and hard disk support, I'd say it belongs in your software library, if only to show your less fortunate computer brethren what they are missing! The preceding article is Copyright, 1988 by Howard Owen. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Arkanoid Update (John Shortle) Discovery Software recently updated their arcade hit Arkanoid. The new version is identical in game play to the original. The only difference is the addition of thirty-three new levels (sixty-six total). Players must select which set of levels they wish to play (the new set or the old set). Like the original, a player may start on any level from one to twenty. The new level thirty-three (the final level) is the same as the old. The new levels have an entirely new set of background graphics, some of which look very nice. I feel that the new levels are slightly more thought out than the original. Some of the original levels require too much luck to complete. Finally, Discovery has lowered the retail price of Arkanoid from $39.95 to $29.95. For a complete review of Arkanoid, see Amy Today 1.1 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Sheldon Leemon Speaks, Part II: (Bob Riemersma) <> Now we resume after he has covered his own background with the Amiga product line, then gone over what he knew of the computers to date. Here he went on about future, starting with AmigaDOS 1.4... Sheldon talked about the recent philosophy at Commodore that is hushing up development efforts, since people get impatient waiting for things. The presence of ex-IBM people at Commodore should be taken as a good sign, since they are more marketing- oriented than Commodore people have been in the past. Sheldon feels that rumors should simply be taken as encouragement that the Amiga is still being supported by Commodore. While Commodore had been telling developers that 1.4 would be done by the end of 1988, this should be discounted based upon past performance. 1.4 is geared to support some of the new things they are doing. The custom chip set has been both a blessing and a curse. Hardware and software has been advancing to the point that the Amiga is being passed by, so new chips or alternatives may be expected in the future. An example of the tricks they can do with the Amiga custom chips is the A2024 high-resolution monitor and supporting software. The A2024 cuts down the refresh-rate, and sends four "screenfuls" of information at the current frame-rate for each actual screen displayed. The four images are buffered, or stored, in the A2024's screen buffer in a "2 by 2 screen" pattern for display as a single high-res image that is 1280 by 800 pixels updated one fourth as often. In actuality the image is only 1008 pixels wide which is better suited to the Amiga hardware and software. Lousy for animations purposes, but fantastic for CAD, desktop publishing, and similar applications. Future developments include the "really fat" or "obese" Agnus chip that will replace the current chip in the A500 or A2000 to allow other hi-res modes, including 640 x 400 non-interlaced images. This will require a new monitor such as the bi-sync monitor under development by Commodore or any of the multi-sync monitors now on the market from other sources. Sheldon recommends that these promises for the future should not be the basis for purchasing decisions. Experience with the computer industry shows that such promises take years when they're lived up to at all. A lot of 1.4 software improvements are there to support the newer hardware better. For example, the existing system fonts produce very tiny (though sharp) menus, etc. on hi-resolution screens. This can be seen on the interlaced Workbench today and will get worse as resolutions increase. Multiple serial port support is another issue we may see addressed by future releases, since there is no standard presently. Overscanned screen standards, color font support, fast file system for floppy drives, and many other future developments are in the works - though which will actually appear someday is uncertain. Sheldon then reiterated the advantages of Commodore's recent "go slow" approach on system software development - primarily the avoidance of massive upheavals every two years or so, where old software becomes obsolete and new versions of everything must be developed and purchased by the consumer. At this point a break was declared before a question and answer period between the meeting attendees and Sheldon Leemon. Question: Where is Comic Setter? Sheldon: Comic Setter is really, truly going to be out there real soon. They (Gold Disk) should be shipping within weeks (early October?) Q: What else is available inexpensively besides the mouse for drawing input? SL: The favorite alternative to the mouse is a drawing table, and those being produced for the Amiga are priced like those for the IBM computers. They are all in the $300 - $500 price range. Light pens are available for the Amiga, but drawing with a light pen is like drawing with a bar of soap. Q: Have you experienced booting from recoverable RAM disk with the 1.3 version of Kickstart? SL: I have a 1.3 Kickstart ROM in my 2000. That was the "party favor" at the end of the last Developer's Conference. I have seen it actually boot from the RAM disk and from a hard drive. A1000 owners may still have a shot at auto-booting hard disk drives, by using one of the third-party Kickstart ROM add-ons for the A1000. Q: How much has the effort that has been put into "PC" compatibility detracted from other Amiga development efforts? SL: I don't think that it really has. The bridge board has been a by-product of Commodore's activity in the PC compatible market. In terms of the bridge board interface project, Commodore has gained some valuable experience they can use in other multiple processor development in the future. Things like drop-in Transputer boards, a hot issue in Europe. This concept uses numerous processors working in parallel to accomplish tasks that would be very expensive to do with a single processor. I don't see a lot of effort being expended in the bridge board are these days. There is a lot more work to be done. Q: I use the FACC II disk cache system and recently saw an ad for another product, a disk drive accelerator. Is this like the old "fast load" tricks used with the C64 and 128? SL: That sounds familiar, but I don't know of another system except one that lets you reorganize the layout of data on your floppies, but it is still standard AmigaDOS format. The fast load techniques employed with the old Commodore serial disk drive interface don't sound like they'd apply to the Amiga since the Amiga disk system software is the limitation rather than the hardware. Something like the 1.4 Fast File System for floppy disk will use a whole new incompatible format to gain speed. Q: I've been trying to do some color mapping work in high- resolution mode and I need a better hardcopy. Will 1.3 help me with this? SL: Yes, this is precisely the kind of thing they are trying to do with the new printer device in 1.3, since one of the problems has been getting a one-to-one pixel ratio between the screen bitmap and the printed image. The 1.3 Preferences program has a new printer graphics screen in addition to the one you're used to: width type (width in pixels, height in pixels), smoothing, dithering, algorithm selection, density (dots per inch) selection for printers which support it, and many more controls and features for printed graphics. The best thing you could do prior to 1.3 was to play around with margin settings until you got something close to what you wanted. Q: You've been evaluating hard drives. Do you have any favorites at this point? SL: I like Supra right now, because it has an easy to use installation program for the A2000, and it has a fast DMA controller. The A500 drive doesn't use the same installation procedure, but is still a good drive. Q: What about hard-card controllers? SL: There really is only one Amiga hard-card drive right now. That is the Pacific Peripherals Overdrive - well, Great Valley Products also has one but it is not a DMA device. I like Great Valley pretty well, and the board itself looks very well produced, and uses a very fast drive. A non-DMA design potentially gives you less problems because it will not contend with the other Amiga hardware for DMA time slots, though under most circumstances DMA drives will be faster. Q: What about IFF formats? They are supposed to be interchangeable, but recent IFF-supporting word processors seem to have compatibility problems. SL: Bit-mapped graphics are fairly straight-forward, while word processors take any number of different approaches, with little or no standardization. I don't have much hope for word processor IFF standards. Animation is in much the same state, lacking standardization. Q: Music files have the same problem, don't they? SL: Music files differ, but are not too hard to fudge unless they are far apart in structure. Q: What about ARP? Will Commodore ever embrace the ARP concept and efforts to date? SL: ARP was started about a year and a half ago by Charlie Heath of MicroSmith's along with Scott Valentine(?) and others who were somewhat disgusted with slow floppy speed. TriPOS was kind of "grafted" onto the rest of the system, and there is a loss of efficiency in converting data structures between TriPOS and C software. They decided to try to get rid of all the BCPL stuff they could. Their starting point was to replace all the CLI commands which are coded in BCPL. They now have a lot of this done, and in general the new routines are smaller and often have additional features. Commodore's point of view is that it is difficult to maintain code, especially assembly language code, that was written outside the plant. Much of what was done with ARP defeats the goal of maintainability, so Commodore has not been too keen on ARP. They have, however, taken a look at what has been done in ARP and other third-party software and are adopting the ideas the outside developers have advanced. Q: What about viruses, in particular the ones we're hearing about that are not boot-block resident and therefore undetectable by the various "vaccination" or virus-check utilities. SL: I have not run into any of these viruses that do all these other horrible things myself. "Trojan horse" viruses are the type that hide inside an otherwise useful looking program and do their damage when you run them, rather than when you warm-boot the computer. I haven't seen one myself yet, but that hardly means they aren't floating around. Q: What about support for FORTH, Modula-2, or FORTRAN on the Amiga? SL: Excellent support is available for all of the programming languages you've mentioned. Multi-FORTH is a good product, several Modulas are around, and Absoft's FORTRAN 77 product is very good. It was actually done by a company here in Rochester, Michigan. Absoft did the FORTRAN sold by Microsoft for the Macintosh. There is an APL now too, but I don't know much about it. Q: There are so many Amiga magazines out now, which do you recommend? SL: You're right, the Amiga has spawned a number of newcomers in the magazine market. Right now I'd still recommend Amazing Computing, though they have some editorial unevenness, and AmigaWorld. Those are the main ones. I've done a lot of work with COMPUTE! Publications over the years, and while they haven't announced anything yet I think you'll be seeing a disk and magazine combination from them in the future. After this Sheldon demonstrated a "Wheel of Fortune" game from a Public Domain disk he is donating to our library. The game was done by a member of his club (Slipped Disk?). The game includes a cute disclaimer intended to throw off the dogs in case of any threat of lawsuit over Copyrights or Trade or Service Marks. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= GVP Controller Review: (Michael Cox) <> After I finally decided it was time to buy a hard drive for my A2000, I spent much time researching the various products of many third party manufacturers. Of the two basic types of drives available, both the ST-506 (originally designed for use in the IBM PC) and SCSI (Small Computer System Interface - used on the Apple Macintosh) drives can be used on the Amiga. An SCSI drive is something of an "intelligent" device, in that it will automatically remap for bad sectors independent of the host, and is considered faster in data transfer than the ST-506 design. Another interesting aspect of SCSI drives is that they are usually treated as "devices," rather than just disk drives. The advantage of this is that an SCSI controller will be able to "talk" to other peripherals without having to define a new protocol. This enables one to use optical storage devices (among other things), in the future. Having decided on an SCSI-type drive, I looked at what the companies had to offer. While many of the third party manufacturers have similar products, only one offered something that none of the others had. Great Valley Products, of Paoli, Pennsylvania, has incorporated a space for RAM memory expansion on some of their controllers, effectively allowing you to save the use of an expansion slot in the 2000. As I already had one memory board in my Amiga, adding a hard drive controller and a separate memory board would normally use up three of the five slots. With the GVP controller, I could expand my system to 5 MBytes and still have three open slots. In my research, I talked to owners of many brands of controllers; Commodore A2090 owners, along with users of Supra, Cltd., and other configurations. While the majority of these people had seen little or no difficulty with their controllers, only one brand stood out as being the most trouble-free. This was the GVP Impact controller. I found that the Impact controller was available in three different designs. One design is their "hardcard." This is a controller card with room on the card to physically mount a 3.5 inch hard drive. This has the advantage of leaving your 5.25 inch drive bay open for such things as the floppy disk drive that comes with the Bridgeboard, for instance. No expansion memory is available on-board. The other two cards use remotely mounted drives, either in the drive bay or external to the Amiga (or both). Both can support up to seven SCSI peripherals, with the main difference between the two being the amount and type of memory they can hold. The controller I purchased (A2000 2/0) has sockets for 32 1 Mbit RAM chips (256Kx4 configuration), for a total of 2 MBytes of additional memory. This memory can be added in 1 MByte chunks, or 16 chips at a time. The other controller (A2000 1/0) uses 256Kx1 RAM chips. These are the chips that have been making the news for the last two years (as their price to the consumer went from $3.00 each to a high of over $15.00). Small lots of these chips currently sell for $12.00 each. To fully populate this 1 meg card, 32 of these chips are required. However, similar to the 2 MByte board, you have the options of either installing half (or all) the memory at once, or just using the controller sans memory (and wait for the RAM prices to drop). I felt the documentation for the GVP controller was above average. My only real complaint is that the 27 page booklet was actually for the A2000 1/0 model, with a 1 page addendum for the 2 MByte board. After an introduction describing the features of the product, the booklet goes on to cover the installation of the controller, drive and software. Additional chapters cover installing fast RAM, multiple SCSI devices, drive partition sizes, and SCSI error handling and correction. The controller's technical specifications were also included. The included installation software was very straightforward and easy to use. It automatically recognized my Seagate ST-277N 64 MByte drive, and offered to format two 32 MByte partitions. When I chose one 40 MByte and one 24 MByte partition instead, it not only formatted the drive to my specs, but also updated my mountlist to reflect these parameters. The software will automatically install Workbench v1.3 on the drive, and assign it as the SYS: disk. The software I received had WB version 34.18 and worked perfectly, though I later purchased and installed version 34.20 (the version that was officially released in October). The only problem I experienced was quite minor in scope. The Seagate has its Drive Activity LED mounted directly to the bottom of its PC board. Since I wanted to see this LED without having to look at the black front plate (comes with the drive) sticking out of my tan Amiga, I simply removed the black plate from the drive, desoldered the LED, attached a 90-degree header to the drive's PC board, and plugged in the cable from the Amiga's remote hard drive activity LED. The GVP has a couple of advantages over Commodore's new controller, the A2090A. Obviously, the capability of having both memory and controller on the same card is one of them. Furthermore, while both controllers will autoboot with the new v1.3 ROMs, only the GVP can truly autoboot an SCSI Seagate drive (The A2090A has trouble with the Seagates because they take a few seconds longer to initialize. The GVP ROMs take this into account and wait for a signal from the drive before completing the boot-up.). Both Commodore and Great Valley Products controllers require a small partition to boot from when using the FFS (Fast File System) format, since the Amiga cannot recognize FFS directly from the v1.3 operating system Direct Memory Access Both the A2090A and the GVP controller use DMA (Direct Memory Access) for the transfer of data. The A2090A does this by using the internal DMA channel in the machine. This causes problems when displaying "severe-overscan", since both functions are handled by the same custom chip. The GVP controllers instead use their own DMA channel to a static 4k on-board cache. This method not only keeps data transfers fast, but by not using the Amiga's DMA channel, it prevents any problems when using a combination of DMA and overscan. In the two months since I installed the GVP Impact controller, it has run 24 hours per day, with absolutely no errors. Any questions I had for the technical staff were answered while I was on the phone to them, often by an engineer. The boot ROMs were shipped to me via UPS Blue Label as soon as Commodore released their Kickstart 1.3 ROMs. I even found that I could have obtained the same card and drive combo directly from GVP for less than I paid to the dealer I purchased them from, and that dealer had the least expensive set-up of those I had checked (GVP said they even re-work the drive LED before shipping). In Summary... I have found the people at Great Valley Products to offer something that all computer owners need; great products, and great service, all at a great cost-to-performance ratio. -------- 1 Mbit chips vs. 256 Kbit chips At $12.00 apiece for the 256K chips, it will cost $48.00 to equal one 1 Mbit chip. When they can be found. Right now, it can be difficult to secure these particular integrated circuits. On the other hand, 1 Mbitchips are going for around $30.00 each, and the cost is expected to dropsometime in the first quarter of 1989, as manufacturers meet demands for the chips created by new computer systems such as the PS/2 line. 1 Mbit chipswere not affected by the artificially high cost induced by our government to prevent the Japanese manufacturers from "dumping" low-cost memory in theUnited States. Also, companies like Toshiba are now shipping "commercialsamples" of their 4 Mbit RAM chips. This new technology will also help drive down the cost of lower-capacity memory chips. -------- Technical Specifications GVP A2000 2/1 SCSI Controller/RAM card - Combination 2MB, zero-waitstate, Fast RAM controller and ANSI X3T9.2 compatible SCSI controller. Supports up to 7 SCSI peripherals. - High performance DMA data transfer to/from hard disk. - SCSI data transfer rate up to 2MBytes/sec for asynchronous SCSI peripherals. - SCSI data transfer rate up to 4MBytes/sec for synchronous SCSI peripherals. - Amiga A2000 expansion bus host interface. - Auto-configs both Fast RAM and SCSI controller. - Sockets for AUTOBOOT hard disk driver in ROM/EPROM (can only be used with Amiga V1.3, or later, Kickstart ROM). 16-bit wide data path allowing hard disk driver to be directly executed out of these ROM/EPROMs. - Internal 50-pin SCSI connector. - External 25-pin (DB25) SCSI connector. Macintosh compatible pinout. - Power requirements: +5 Volts 5%, 2.2 Amps maximum. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Killer Demo Winners: (John Rydell) The judging for the 1988 Badge Killer Demo Contest took place just a little while ago. Here is a list of the winners as well as the other people who entered the contest. All of these animations are going to be given to Fred Fish to include on his public domain disks. If you wish to have a set of two disks containing the top three demos, send $5.00 to: Badge Killer Demo Contest c/o Randy Spencer P.O. Box 4542 Berkeley, CA 94704 The winners of the contest were: (First prize this year was a new Amiga 2000 computer!) Best Overall Demo -- "Charon" by Brad Schenck Best Custom Demo -- Tank by Vince Lee; Funniest -- "Not Boing Again" by Dr. Gandalf; Best Sound -- "Charon" again, by Brad Schenck; and Best Graphics -- Tychoid by John M. Olsen. The following is the list of all enteries and how they faired: Tool Based Demos: Charon Brad Schenck Not Boing Again Dr. Gandalf Tychoid John M. Olsen AmigaWave! Allen Hastings CUCUG Ed Serbe Education of a Young Coyote" Gene Brawn Asteroid Field Michael Powell Sail Marvin Landis Stereo Flowers P. McIntyre Splash Robert de Bie Alice MedioTech Bowl Vern Staats NuHand Bryan Carey Gallivan Tiger B. Rifaux Dogs World Charles Voner Heartbeat MedioTech History Of Computers Robert Berryhill Cardiac Surgery MedioTech Custom-Programmed Demos: Tank Vince Lee Triple Tom Rokicki Multitasking Rob Peck Hawk P. McIntyre Brownian John M. Olsen Stereo David M. McKinstry MemFlick Jim Webster Picture Garden Steve Tiffany =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Trading Galore: First we had a picture trade. Users were urged to send in a disk full of pictures and, in return, were given a disk full of the best pictures that had been collected so far. The picture trade was, and will hopefully continue to be, a GREAT success! Because of this, I have decided to open up a new trade which allows everyone to participate--not just those of us with pictures. Send me a disk full of anything you want. (Music, Art, Animations, Sound files, and Public Domain/Shareware software...anything!) Include a SASE (please remember the stamps!), and I will send your disk back to you filled with whatever you want. Just tell me whether you want music, art, software (you can even specify a specific pd/shareware program but I can't guarantee that I have it), and I'll send it back. On request, I'll even send disk copies of all issues of Amy Today. The disks currently copied and ready to be traded are: 1 - Amy Today Picture Disk #1 2 - Amy Today Picture Disk #2 3 - Amy Today Animation Disk #1 4 - Amy Today Back Issues #1 5 - Amy Today Music Disk #1** 6 - Amy Today Picture Disk #3** **Both of these coming soon. Send your disk and a SASE to: Amy Today's Trading Galore 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 <> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Newsletter Trading: (From Issue 1-1) I am looking for Amiga user groups who would like to trade newsletters with me. Every month I will send you three issues of Amy Today and, in return, I would like a copy of your newsletter. I know a lot of this trading takes place and would love to get involved. The more articles and information that I have about the Amiga, the better I can make Amy Today. If you are interested please drop me a line on GEnie, Plink, or by mail. I would really appreciate a sample newsletter and will mail you Amy Today in return. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Advertising: Amy Today is open to advertising at VERY affordable prices. Large and small companies both have a great opportunity for quality advertising while supporting a public domain Amiga magazine. If you are interested please write to: Amy Today ATTN Advertising 640 Willowglen Rd. Santa Barbara, CA 93105 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= In the Future: A review of Modula-2 A review of a CLtd 33 meg hard drive An interview with a shareware programmer Maybe even more interviews, also And hopefully numerous articles from you--the readers. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Amy Today" is copyright 1988 by John Rydell. Portions of the magazine may be reprinted but the content of this magazine may NOT be changed without the expressed consent of John Rydell. Yet everyone is encouraged to distribute it AS IS. Please give credit to "Amy Today" as well as to the individual author when reprinting material. "Amy Today" as well as any of its authors are not responsible for any damages that occur because of errors or omissions. Articles reprinted from other newsletters, as noted, are not property of Amy Today but are under the control of their original authors. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=