kevin@voder.UUCP (The Last Bugfighter) (09/24/86)
The Northern California Atari Expo was held in San Jose over the weekend
of September 20-21, this is a short report on what all went on.
First, it is important to note that because Atari is going public in October
there were no new product announcements, people would only talk about items
that had previously been announced. However you should look forward to the
upcomming Comdex show, by the number of times it was refered to it seems there
will be more than enough new products to keep everyone happy.
I have tried to get all my facts straight and am not mentioning a few things
I couldn't get enough information on. If I do make any errors it's not for
lack of trying. Any mail concerning spelling mistakes will be returned to the
sender 256 times.
MISCELLANEOUS
The Atari Explorer magazine will be coming off the presses this week (Sept.
22) and should be available soon. Hereafter it will be published every 2
months as Atari now has the staff necessary to produce it.
There were over 40 booths and of course Atari itself was there, there were
several notable speakers such as Leonard Tramiel, Shiraz Shivji, Neil Harris
and others. The hall was so packed on saturday that it was difficult to move
around. ANTIC and ANALOG magazines had their own booths so a more complete
write up in these magazines is likely.
8-BIT HARDWARE/SOFTWARE
At the 8-bit hardware and software conference Atari representatives John
Scrutch and Lane Winner gave repeated assurances that Atari has no plans what-
soever of dropping the 8-bit line, in fact they have several new products and
several more under consideration.
The XEP80 80 column board will begin production very soon. This product
plugs into a joystick port, has a built-in parallel printer interface, and will
work on all 8-bit machines. Although it will work on an NTSC color monitor a
monochrome monitor is recommended. It should sell for about $80.
The SX212 1200 Baud modem will be available in late fall. It has both an
RS-232 port for 850 or ST applications and also has the 8-bit SIO interface.
XE-TERM is being upgraded to accomodate 1200 Baud operation and the entire pack-
age will sell for about $100.
Concerning memory upgrades for the 130XE, Atari may or may not sell some-
thing like a 340XE or a 520XE, the technology is simple and is something that
they are considering but not saying (remember, no new product announcements).
However they are considering making their Freddy chip available to 3rd party
manufacturers. Freddy is the memory management chip that is used in the XE,
by making it available to others they could make their own memory upgrades
which would be 100% 130XE compatible (unlike some that are available).
Also something in the future would be a monitor like the Commodore 1702.
Atari did show such a monitor at a past CES but never persued it as there was
no real need.
Finally, the 3.5 inch 8-bit disk drive! The drive is still being developed
and probally will not be seen until early '87. It will be a single sided,
double density with 320k of storage, formatted. The DOS is being written by
OSS (Optimised System Software, who wrote the original Atari DOS) and will
be DOS 2.5 compatible. In fact it will allow the drive to act as an 810 or
a 1050 in single or enhanced density as well as the full 320k. It will be twice
as fast as a 1050 and will have sub-directories as well as the capacity to
address up to 16M bytes, and will be capable of random access.
A 640k double sided drive is a distinct possibility as Atari is currently
the largest buyer of 3.5 inch drives in the world.
ST HARDWARE/SOFTWARE
The first thing you saw when walking into the hall was Xanth's "Shiny
Bubbles" demonstration. Xanth is the company that gave the 8-bit computer its
bouncing ball and bouncing fuji demos and this was its new ST demo.
Imagine four silvered spheres suspended in midair while you're looking down
and slightly to the left at them. The floor has the word ATARI printed in four
columns and the ceiling (which isn't directly visable) is a yellow and red
checker-board pattern. Imagine that the floor and ceiling are smoothly scrol-
ling into the background. Imagine that all this is accurately reflected in
the spheres. Now imagine that while all this is going on the spheres are
revolving around one another in a level plane! Phenomenal! Comparing the
Amiga bouncing ball to this is like comparing a Ford Model T to a Ferrari
Testarosa!
Xanth was also showing their game "Kill A Happy Face" (they're looking
for a new name). You're a happy face floating through a maze searching for
other happy faces to destroy which are the other players. Up to 15 people can
play by connecting 15 STs together.
FTL had two STs hooked together playing Sundog and were showing an interes-
ting new game called Dungeon Master which is a Dungeon/Adventure game with
excellent graphics.
Although there were a several companies showing various software packages
the main thing you noticed were the synthesizers. It seemed like every other
booth had half a dozen synthesizers hooked up through the MIDI ports. Acti-
vision was showing its new music program, even Guitar Showcase (which sells
musical instruments and NOT computers) had a booth with several synthesizers
going.
Data Pacific was there showing the new Magic Sac cartridge (formally Mac
Cartridge) which they were selling for $100 and sold out of the first day.
This is the cartridge which turns your ST into an Apple Macintosh. The normal
price for the cartridge is $129 for the kit and $149 for the fully assembled
version. They also offer a modification to the Atari ST drives which allow
them to read a Macintosh disc directly. The cartridge comes without the Apple
ROMs which you must supply, the booth next door was selling them for $30.
Of course the Atari booth was at the center of the hall and they were
showing STs with the new Blitter chip. The blit chip is now ready and will
begin shipping soon. Contrary to popular rumors it does not increase screen
resolution or the number of colors available. It is simply a memory management
device capable of moving large blocks of memory very quickly, not necessarily
just screen memory. There were some demos running both with and without the
blit chip and the blitter equiped ST was considerable faster.
Upgrade kits should be available by the end of the year and may be installed
in both 1040 and 520 STs, even in 520STs that have had their memory expanded as
long as the memory expansion does not physically interfere with the blit chip
location (it goes on top of the CPU).
The OS9 multi-tasking software will be shown at Comdex as well as an IBM
style box for the ST. The new 2080ST and 4160ST (2 and 4 megabytes) were shown
earlier in London, they should be priced at $1500 and $2000 respectively with a
monochrome monitor.
A laser printer is another posibility to be announced at Comdex as well as
a hard disc installed inside the IBM style box. The AMY sound chip is still
being worked on.
The IBM emulator may be available by the end of the year. This is the hard-
ware version with its own 8088 and memory, a software version is also under
developement.
Atari is still looking at the CD ROM but prices are going to have to come
down for the hardware before they will sell such a product.
Well that's it. I probally left out a quite a bit and have tried to be as
accurate as possible. 8-bit sales have been keeping pace with ST sales and
the ST has been selling extreamly well in Europe so Atari seems to be doing
well.
---
Kevin Thompson {ucbvax,pyramid,nsc}!voder!kevin
"It's a sort of threat, you see. I've never been very good at them
myself but I'm told they can be very effective."