perry@well.UUCP (Perry S. Kivolowitz) (01/28/86)
We (the Jersey Amiga User Group) held our second meeting last Friday. One hundred and sixty (count'em, 160) people were in attendence HALF of whom had Amigas! Speakers were Harry Suckow of Manx Software Systems and Jim Charne of Activision. Harry talked about activities surrounding the future of the Manx C product. Of interest, he said that: o There will be a commercial (list 499) package as well as a developer (list 299) package. The commercial package comes with more support tools. o Discounts will be available for official Amiga developers as well as students. I wont mention the discount amounts but consider them SUBSTANTIAL. Privately, he said that Manx may be willing to discuss a tradein deal for owners of Lattice licenses. o The next release of the compiler (due to Beta testers any day now) will have a compile time flag switching 16 bit int operations into 32 bit ints. Manx suggests that any new code be developed to take advantage of the smaller integer size because there is a performance penalty for for using the larger ints. o There was talk about a substantial optimizer effort going on within Manx. The effort (for one of their other compilers) will benefit the Amiga product. Global optimization over the parse tree was mentioned. This will mean that the good quality code produced now will become excellent quality. Jim Charne demonstrated hacker, borrowed time and mindshadow. All available now from dealers. The games are interactive fiction using color stills to liven things up a bit. The next JAUG meeting will be the third friday of February. I want to take this opportinuty to ask any vendors out there to get in touch with me (160 hungry customers is nothing to sneeze at) to arrange for you to come down and talk. We are a non-profit group not associated with Commodore-Amiga, Inc. The Fish Disks (as I have christened them) were a big hit. While talking about them (Fish Disks) a got tongue tied and it came our Fish Dicks. Maybe thats' a strong argument for calling them something else. Anyway, everyone in net land owes Fred a debt of gratitued for an excellent job. Tune in next month when I summarize Cherry Lane's talk about music hardware and software. Perry S. Kivolowitz ihnp4!ptsfa!well!perry (201) 271 - 4522 (amiga made message machine!)