bbs00244@uafcseg.uucp (Viet Ho) (10/07/90)
This gonna be a quick review since I burn't out and gonna be back tomorrow at the show for Allen Hasting's LiteWave lecture... Downside: NewTek wasn't present, and C= had a dinky booth with no Amiga UnixSYSVR4 or Lowell combo... Upside: 24 bit color finally! DCTV! I must have one of these puppies! Creative was selling them for about $400 a piece. DC had a huge booth demoing their 24 bit HAM-E like composite/digitizing box. They were showing a slick looking paint program that comes with it and allows you to paint in full NTSC 16mil colors. Also were some realtime DCTV anims going on off the IVS HD. Looks like this could be the next DigiView hit for the AMiga! HAM=E : not too impressive.. sorry BB 8-( At least they were first to ship.... M.A.S.T. also jumped in the HAM-E bandwagon with their own ColorBurst box (I may have the name wrong). It works sorta like a HAM-E in that in plugs into the RGB ports, but that's where the simliarity ends... It supposedly has it's own small memory buffer which the custom chips can access and alloows for TRUE 24 bit per pixel in the amiga 320xXXX modes and 16 colors from a palette of 16 million in the hires modes. The images looked crisped and sharp not soft and NTSC fuzzyines like DCTV. Since the image is in the little buffer, you can't do real-time anims. Price: $495 Progressive Peripherals showed their Video Blendor (supposedly a Toaster contendor) which sports a 34020 base (VideoMaster32) 32 bit graphics buffer/card (8bit overlay,24bit image) w/ resolution up to 1024X1024 in 16 million color glory. It could also do stuff like the Toaster's DVE, whipes, chroma FX, etc... Expect 4th quarter 90 or 1st Quarter 91.... Price.. not as cheap as a Toaster! Also at the PP booth was a real live 68040 card for the A3000 w/ an optional DC(data compression) unit on board. The rep said they are waiting on Motorola to deliver more stable 040's. The one shown wasn't able to do anything much since it had a bad FPU (awe shucks, no raytracing gymnastics!) but the rep assured me that the 040 by itself outperforms the 68882 by a factor of 2-3. Expect em by XMas (great present for that raytracing guru in your family8-) and only $999 w/68040 and w/out DC. $1299 comes w/ the data compressor. This does realtime hardware lempel compression on data writing to media (HD, floppies, etc...) for tight space storage...pretty neat! Phew... ok so I lied.....8-) fingers are getting weak... Oh, one more thing, Hash's Animation JourneyMan was demoed. I was quite impressed. It's really better than what I expected . Forget Imagine! (BTW Impulse had a lame demo, I was quite dissappointed). I'll rehash on JMan when I come back tomorrow to play with it and listen to the legend... AH FILMS demo LightWaves... -Viet Viet.HO@samba.acs.unc.edu
a217@mindlink.UUCP (Vincent Lim) (10/07/90)
In <5360@uafhp.uark.edu>, bbs00244@uafcseg.uucp (Viet Ho) writes: > [Quick Ami-Expo review deleted] > Progressive Peripherals showed their Video Blendor (supposedly a Toaster > contendor) > [...] First the Video Toaster, now the Video Blendor (sic). What's next, the Video Cuisinart, the Video Waffle Iron, the Video Microwave, the Video Pressure Cooker, the Video <insert your favourite kitchen appliance here>? > -Viet > Viet.HO@samba.acs.unc.edu -- //\migaTrek: The First Generation, Captain of CBM-A1000 "Advantage" \X/incent Lim, Librarian for Pacific Northwest Amiga Association Smart: a217@mindlink.uucp | Dumb: uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a217 "It isn't pre-marital sex if you don't get married"
xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) (10/09/90)
a217@mindlink.UUCP (Vincent Lim) writes: > bbs00244@uafcseg.uucp (Viet Ho) writes: >> [Quick Ami-Expo review deleted] >> Progressive Peripherals showed their Video Blendor (supposedly a Toaster >> contendor) >> [...] > >First the Video Toaster, now the Video Blendor (sic). What's next, the Video >Cuisinart, the Video Waffle Iron, the Video Microwave, the Video Pressure >Cooker, the Video <insert your favourite kitchen appliance here>? What a great idea! I think you've come up with the cure for commercial television: the Video Garbage Disposal! OK, who wants to invest a little venture capital here? Kent, the man from xanth. <xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us> -- Heh!
boi@cpg.trs.reuter.com (Ken Boi) (10/09/90)
In article <3444@mindlink.UUCP> a217@mindlink.UUCP (Vincent Lim) writes: >First the Video Toaster, now the Video Blendor (sic). What's next, the Video >Cuisinart, the Video Waffle Iron, the Video Microwave, the Video Pressure >Cooker, the Video <insert your favourite kitchen appliance here>? > Just a litle tidbit from Computer Graphics World (October,1990) as to why it was named the Video Toaster: "... The 3D software that comes with the Video Toaster - which, by the way, got its name because it's a "video appliance that is easy to operate," says Newtek director of marketing Mark Randall- is called Lightwave 3D ...."
billsey@agora.uucp (Bill Seymour) (10/15/90)
In article <27136C77.859@ics.uci.edu> rang@ics.uci.edu (Roger Penaranda Jr. Ang) writes:
:But what I'm curious about is what people were using to run there
:anims. At the expo, there was a Roger Rabbit cartoon ( the beginning
:of the movie ) and Predator ( I think this was a sampled anim ) being
:shown on Amiga screens with no VCR in sight. The Roger Rabbit cartoon
:looked a little grainy close up but was okay. In the lower right hand
:corner there was "12 fps", meaning it was going at 12 frames a second.
:Both had good sound. Predator looked like it was the full movie ( it
:was going for a long time ) and I could see the Amiga accessing the
:hard drive all through it. SO WHAT WERE THEY USING THAT LET THEM PLAY
:ANIMS FROM DISK WITH SOUND!!!!!
Both ICD and GVP had demos going with real time playback of anims
and sound from hard disk. They were both completely bypassing the Amiga's
filesystem, however. Note that it's really not that tough to display
graphics in real time from a fast SCSI HD (I believe they were both using
Wren VI drives) as long as you don't have to worry about a file system
and can just dump raw data from the drive into the Amiga. (BTW, the
Preditor animation was about 15 minutes! That was a big, fast drive!) :-)
: Roger P. Ang (rang@ICS.UCI.EDU)
:Irvine? Where's Irvine? Grad student at the
:In the heart of the Orange Curtain. Dept. of Information & Computer Sci.
:Oh no! The poor fool. Univ. of California, Irvine.
--
-Bill Seymour billsey@agora
***** American People/Link Amiga Zone Hardware Specialist NES*BILL *****
Bejed, Inc. NES, Inc. Northwest Amiga Group At Home Sometimes
(503) 281-8153 (503) 246-9311 (503) 656-7393 BBS (503) 640-0842timm@public.BTR.COM (Timothy M. Maffett timm@btr.com) (10/17/90)
In article <1990Oct15.043855.2900@agora.uucp> billsey@agora.uucp (Bill Seymour) writes: > > Both ICD and GVP had demos going with real time playback of anims >and sound from hard disk. They were both completely bypassing the Amiga's >filesystem, however. Note that it's really not that tough to display >graphics in real time from a fast SCSI HD (I believe they were both using >Wren VI drives) as long as you don't have to worry about a file system I don't know about ICD but GVP was using a Quantum 170S for the replay of the Roger R anim. I was surprised because of 1) I would have thought that the anim was bigger than 170M and 2) I would not have thought that the Quantum 170 would be fast enough. BUT, I saw it in the drive with my own eyes ;). >and can just dump raw data from the drive into the Amiga. (BTW, the >Preditor animation was about 15 minutes! That was a big, fast drive!) :-) > > -Bill Seymour billsey@agora -tim