npd@doc.ic.ac.uk (Niall P Davis) (11/20/90)
Hi out there I have a question for all of you, maybe even someone at CBM?
Anyway I was at the AMIGA'90 in Koln Germany about 10 days back and all I
can say is WOW. There were a couple of really neat graphical application
packages there. One thing that caught my eye was the 24 Bit-Graphics card
from Xpert a german Firm from Moosfeld in Munchen. As far as I know its the
only real 24-Bit graphics card as opposed to Framebuffer on the market for
the Amiga at the moment. I heard somewhere that CBM were developing a
special Library to support 3 party graphic boards, and was wondering if
they were going to be supporting the VISIONA 24-Bit card.
For all you in Germany: Does anyone know why Xpert does not sell
its products over here?
The price for the VISIONA was from around
5000.- DM which makes it pretty competitive
compared to the boards on the MAC.
Any Idea where on can purchace such a board
in England?
Oh, yeah, and someone tell Xpert to advertise
the rest of their impressive produkt list
which includes such things as Transputer boards
and a CACHE card for the Amiga 3000.
All the best,
Niall.
***************************************************************************
AMIGA// There * Niall Davis * Amiga
// Can be * npd@doc.ic.ac.uk *
\\ // only 1! * Department of Computing * ... A way of Life
\X/ * IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON *
***************************************************************************drtiller@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Donald Richard Tillery Jr) (11/22/90)
I am in an area rather devoid of Amiga shows and haven't been able to actually lay my eyes on any 24 bit boards until our local dealer got a Toaster. I was so impressed that getting a 24 bit board has become somewhat of an obsession in rather short order. But, alas, as you can see above, I'm a relatively poor college student and $1500 for the Toaster or the Firecracker 24 (which to my knowledge is still not shipping) is beyond me. However, while perusing the newest Amiga World, I notice that M.A.S.T. had a 24 bit board listed in their ad for the more resonable price (extra features of the Toaster notwith- standing) of $495. I immediately called them to verify its existence in light of a couple of other vaporware products they've advertised in the past and never produced. They quoted me 5 weeks to production. When I pressed them, however, they said that the hardware was done, along with utilities for transferring most 24 bit formats to the board (Digi View/C= IFF RGB standard, Impulse, Sculpt etc.). They said they were waiting on the 24 bit paint program, which they said would real-time update to the board and would be a month or so away. Now I don't really care too much about a paint program right now (although I DO want it when it comes out) so I think I may have been able to swing getting hold of one within two weeks. If/when I do I'll let the net know whether it's worth the money (or even exists :-). FYI: 24 bit frame buffer - ColorBurst - by Memory And Storage Technolgies o plugs into the RGB connector of ANY Amiga o comes with 1.5 megs expandable to 8 megs for minimal 24 bit animation o produces NTSC or PAL compatible _RGB_ video o pseudo-gen-locks behind standard Amiga video as third playfield o digital fade in/out o 768 x 580 resolution at full 24 bits per pixel (16.7 million colors) o comes with conversion utilities for most standard 24 formats (IFF RGB, Impulse, Sculpt, etc.) o comes with 24 bit paint program which updates to the board in real time All this at a reasonable price of $495. I hope this exists and I can get hold of one soon.....my ray-traces will never be the same (and neither will our storage devices once we have to start storing 24 bit files! We need better image compression). Rick Tillery (drtiller@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu)