ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar) (11/06/88)
What the heck. I'll tell the world about some of the interesting goodies seen at the World of Commodore show in Phila. today. * The Viking Monitor, 1008x800x4 shades of gray - you've all heard of it. It looks 'real good.' When the rumors appeared months ago, it was going to cost around $600 - in real life it lists for $1995. Oh well. * ASDG showed the TWIN-X General Purpose I/O Board - "Every Computer I/O Function Ever Invented, And Even A Few That Haven't Been." It's a Zorro-II board that can hold two IEEE-959 modules. They give examples of modules: D-A/A-D converters, serial ports, ethernet controllers, disk controllers, bubble memory, barcode reader, precision timers, shaft encoder, CRT controller, RS422 ports, motor controller, Centronics ports, SCSI controller... sounds like fun. I'd never even heard of IEEE-959. * Interactive Video Systems showed the Trump Card - a SCSI interface for the 2000 that lists for $189 and was selling for $139 at the show. It's not DMA; they claim about 450K/sec max read speed. The flyer also mentions some kind of DMA adapter - "exclusive IVS hyperdisk port connects to IVS WarpSpeed DMA controller card to speed disk IO up to 8X" - but it's not clear what that means. They also had a Grand Slam Card which included a Centronics port, an RS232 port, SCSI, and up to 8M RAM - about $450 with 0K installed. It was a big fat double-decker Zorro-II board. Both SCSI ports autoboot under 1.3, or will when IVS finishes the autoboot ROMs... Golden Hedge - a retail store - was bundling the Trump Card with a 30M disk for $500. * Gold Disk's Professional Draw - a structured postscript editor like Adobe Illustrator - was working in a beta version. Nice interface and features; very slow, but they said it should be faster in the released version. The show price was $179, but since they haven't released it yet, it probably would be futile to pay. * The Haitex 3-d goggles were there - they work well, though the software was quite unimpressive. Some nice stereo ray-traced pictures and a silly space game. * Caligari by Octree Software was being shown at the Commodore booth. It's a fast 3-d modelling and animation program with a BEAUTIFUL user interface. It renders with polygons, and appears to use HAM mode (I couldn't decide) with no dithering - looked very nice. According to AmigaWorld, the list price is $2000. Oh well. Speaking of modeling software, I would be most obliged if someone could describe/compare Modeller-3D, 3-Demon, Turbo Silver, and/or Forms in Flight's modeling interface. * CompUSave was selling A2000 internal floppy drives for $119 - quite a price. * It's incredible how graphics software has proliferated in the last year. My socks would have been knocked off at least ten times if I hadn't been wearing thongs. For addresses of any companies mentioned above, look in your favorite magazine or write me as a last resort. Your Philadelphia Correspondent, -ranjit "Trespassers w" ranjit@eniac.seas.upenn.edu mailrus!eecae!netnews!eniac!... If you throw a rock into the night and something barks, you know you hit a dog.