OC.TREI@CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU (03/27/86)
From: Peter G. Trei <OC.TREI@CU20B.COLUMBIA.EDU> I recently attended a meeting of AMUSE, the NYC Amiga User's group. This time we had a speaker from Commodore, a Mr. Bazer (sp?). He demonstrated a number of devices, and made some announcments. (I hope I got this all correct). 1. Genlock. He had a working device on the machine at the demo, and fed it from a VCR. It worked nicely, replacing the background color with whatever was in the video feed. It will be out RSN, and he thought it would be about $300. The output is NOT quite 'commercial broadcast quality', but near it. 2. Frame grabber/digitizer. The tape he used as the background color was a demo of the FG, digitizing input from a camera, in color, and letting them fiddle with the color maps of the real time image from dPaint. I got the impression that the digitizing rate was not quite 30 Hz, but it was difficult to tell. 3. He announced two items: (a) As a promotion, Commodore is throwing in an RGB monitor free with Amiga purchases until mid-May. Check with your dealer for details. (b) There is an upcoming contest for graphics and music produced on the Amiga. The grand prize will be a trip to the Louvre in Paris, and there are various hardware and software goodies for runners-up. 4. Rumors. The following are my personal interpretations of his answers to questions. I am not hesitating to read between the lines, so do not assume Bazer (sp?) actually said any of this, or that it is gospel: There are follow-on versions of the Amiga coming. He refused to confirm or deny the significance of the codename 'Ranger' in this regard. This also applies to any of the suggested features of any follow-up machine(s), and to a question about the future role of the 1.5 Mbyte gap in the memory map directly above chip RAM. He stated that if he fed any rumors now, it might lead to future letdowns. Asked about higher resolutions, he 'supposed' that the next step would have to be to 1024 x 1024, but this seemed to be personal speculation. yours, Peter Trei ARPA: OC.Trei@CU20B (reliable) uucp: ...!caip!unirot!ptrei (much less so) (since I am not an officer at work, I dont have to give silly disclaimers). -------