neil@atari.UUcp (Neil Harris) (09/25/86)
The Northern California Atari Expo this past weekend in San Jose had a few
interesting developments besides the first sales of the Magic Sac (aka Mac
Cartridge). Here's a brief report:
About 5000 people attended during the two days of the show. Among the
speakers were Atari officials Sam Tramiel, Leonard Tramiel, Shiraz Shivji,
Sig Hartmann, Richard Frick, and evenmyself. Other speakers included
Jerry Pournelle, Tom Hudson, David Beckemeyer, Frank Cohen (of Regent),
and Paul Heckel (Zoomracks).
Xanth displayed an amazing new ST animated demo, topping their previous
effort of Fujiboink. This one had 4 large "bubbles" moving in and out in an
"eggbeater" pattern. The lower part of the screen was the name Atari and
the Fuji logo, and above the top of the screen was a red-white checkerboard
pattern. Both the lower and upper areas were faithfully reflected on the
bubbles. Xanth also showed an ST version of _Mazewars_ which permitted up
to 15 ST's to be MIDIed together. For the uninitiated, this game is a 3-D
1st-person-perspective game where you wander around in a maze trying to kill
the other players. The scrolling was very smooth. No word on a commercial
release, and they seemto be leaning toward making it freeware.
Speaking of multi-ST games, the FTL folks had a very pretty dogfight game
for 1 computer or for 2 players with 2 ST's and MIDI cables. The graphics
were similar to the games from Microprose, and the play action was so good
that it was almost impossible to get near the machines all weekend. FTL
also showed a later version of the dungeon game demo available here on BIX.
The graphics are truly outstanding here. Availability of both games
is October.
Antic was showing their 3-D liquid-crystal-shutter glasses again, with
some better demos than last time. Still no sign of Jez Sans' Starglider game
adapted to the glasses, though. Also from Antic was the 2nd issue of STart
magazine, a very good-looking issue and a great improvement over the first
one.
Metacomco unveiled 3 new programming tools: Cambridge Lisp, an interpreter
and compiler with good GEM support added; BCPL, a C-like language (near as I
can tell); and a Make utility. All are available right away.
Regent Software had their Regent Word 2, an upgrade using the normal ST
character set (which made jerryp very happy) and full GEM support. They also
showed Regent Base.
Michtron had their videodisk controller ready for sale, along with an
adventure game driver and the Dragons Lair disk. Since Dragon's Lair is old
hat for arcades, it seems like the disks can be had for very little, so the
folks at Michtron added a parser so the ST can control the action. Michtron
also have their ST Pool game ready to ship, another very nice implementation.
QMI displayed a lot of vapor products that look quite nice. Steve Grimm's
BBST is coming along nicely, including support for QMI's forthcoming ST-Net
so multiple ST's can be linked to make a larger BBS. The big news from QMI
was their Desk Cart, a cartridge-based desk accessory package similar to
Cornerman but without all the memory being taken up. They also showed the
ST-Talk Professional 2.0, ready to ship Real Soon Now.
Quickview Systems is almost ready to ship their Zoomracks 2, a GEM-based
program which seems to have incorporated many user suggestions to make it
easier to use and faster.
Haba was showing a few products that seemed a lot better than some of
their earlier efforts. In particular, their Haba View data base manager which
makes good use of the GEM user interface to create customized databases.
Hippopotamus was selling their ST Sound Digitizer and their Video
Digitizer. The sound product was interesting -- more when I've had a chance
to play with the one I took home.
Oh yes -- I'd better not forget to tell you what Atari showed. We had 2
ST's with the final working blitter chip. We were able to test this with a
few programs, including a nearly final version of Degas Elite, and everything
seems to work very well (not to mention much faster). The blitter really
helps when large pieces of memory are being moved, since there's more
overhead to set it up than the RAM blit but less time actually used in the
movement. Looks like a 1st-of-the-year release for the blit upgrade, at
about $120. Atari also had ST Star Raiders on display. This one's on sale
now. A later version of Microsoft Write was shown, supporting features not
seen at the LA Fair, specifically support of GDOS-based proportionally-spaced
fonts. Going to be a _nice_ word processor, available late in the year.
(And I accused QMI of vapor???)_
Supra had their 60-meg hard drive on sale for $1795 (show special, the
regular price is $1995). They cooked up a special slide show demo that was
really moving -- several feames a second, straight from the hard drive.
There were several booths showing MIDI software and products. In facrt,
one of the highlights of the show was having the ST on stage controlling
_all_ the synthesizers at the show, even the ones in the booths on the floor!
Talk about surround sound...
Next stop, Portland OR, October 11-12.
--
--->Neil @ Atari
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"I'm a 20th century man but I don't want to die here." -- Ray Daviesrmk@rayssd.UUCP (Richard M. Kulakowski) (10/08/86)
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