papa@uscacsc.UUCP (06/01/87)
Last friday I got my copy of the "official" Diga! communication program from
Aegis Development. As a competitor of us I was very interested in finding out
its good and bad points. I was very surprised to find a variety of basic
flaws and BIG bugs together with some neat features. I have been testing
Diga for the whole weekend with a variety of systems and software and these are
my experiences.
Bad Points
---------
First and major problems are the emulations. Both VT100 and Tektronix
4010/4014 are brain-damaged. The VT100 emulation is broken with both emacs and
vi under UNIX 4.2 and System V. I did not even try EDT under VMS! It has got
no chance. This was VERY surprising, considering that there are "perfect"
emulations of the VT100 in the public domain (Dave Wecker's) with source code
available.
The much touted Tektronix 4010/404 is totally broken. Only "simple" plots that
use ONLY the commands MOVE and DRAW will properly draw a graphics image. I
tried standard plots from DISSPLA, ANVIL-4000, GnuPLot, and the UNIX graphics
utilities, and on most of them the plots were never generated, just a flash of
the screen indicating that the emulator had not recognized the sequence. The
interactive graphics cursor is "supposed" to be working. I tried "ged" from
the UNIX System V graphics utilities. No way! I could not even draw a box
with the interactive cursor. The cursor position report is NEVER sent out and
the program just hangs there.
As is, the Tektronix emulation is totally useless. Good news for our company
that markets the only (STILL) full Tek 4010/4014 emulator for the Amiga.
In general Diga! crashed a lot. I was not able to use it continuously for
more than 30 minutes without crashing the machine. Most of the crashes
happened when changing screen size (using overscan for example). No gurus,
but total machine lockup instead.
Both screen update and scrolling (in VT100 mode) and graphics drawing (in
Tek mode) were slower than comparative programs (Dave Wecker's VT100 and
A-Talk Plus in the instance).
The program has a very annoying bug in that it puts up a requester that wants
to write to the workbench disk EVERY time the program exits. This shows
really bad beta testing of the program. At the SCAN LA Show in LA about two
weeks ago Aegis was supposedly showing a "beta" of Diga! that was crashing
all the time. The guy was replying "it's just a beta". It turns out that
the beta was the real thing!
The much publicized "custom" emulation feature is NOT documented anywhere.
The same is true for the "doubletalk" protocol (see later).
Good Points
-----------
Doubletalk supposedly allows two Amigas to send and receive files at the same
time as "talking" with the guy on the other line. I had no way of testing
this since you need to Amigas connected via modem to accomplish this. Since
the protocol is not documented anywhere do not expect to see it appear on your
favourite network any time soon.
The Tektronix emulation (when it works) has a neat "zoom" feature. There is
no panning on a large 1000x780 superbitmap (like in A-Talk Plus), though.
A standalone program is included to transform Tek plots to Aegis Draw plots.
Unfortunately, plots cannot be saved in IFF format (A-Talk Plus does both).
The script language looks very nice and complete.
All in all I was surprised at the large number of bugs in a program that Aegis
is said to have been in development for well more than a year. As is, the
program needs at least 4-6 months of more testing and fixes before it becomes
usable. Aegis started taking orders (and checks) a few months ago, and might
have felt the pressure to come out before the program was in fact fully
debugged. Considering the fine programs they have been developing so far,
this is the first slip they made. I hope it does not happens again with
Videoscape-3D.
Note again that this is not an independent review. Our company has two
competing products with Diga! (A-Talk and A-Talk Plus) and I WAS looking
for bugs in it. I just did not expect how easy this job would have been.
Now I feel relieved :-)
-- Marco
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Marco Papa 3175 S. Hoover St., Ste. 275 (213)669-1497
Los Angeles, CA 90007 USC: (213)743-3752
F E L S I N A
Now working for ::::::: BIX: papa
But in no way :: ::
Officially representing ::::::: ...!oberon!uscacsc!papa
S O F T W A R E papa@cse.usc.edu
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-cheung@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Wilson Cheung) (01/10/88)
Its been ages since the update to Diga! 1.0 was promised. Does any one know if that update has ever come out? Wilson Cheung
hrlaser@pnet02.cts.com (Harv Laser) (01/12/88)
cheung@vu-vlsi.UUCP (Wilson Cheung) writes: > > Its been ages since the update to Diga! 1.0 was promised. Does any >one know if that update has ever come out? > > > Wilson Cheung Nope, it hasn't. UUCP: {ihnp4!scgvaxd!cadovax, rutgers!marque}!gryphon!pnet02!hrlaser INET: hrlaser@pnet02.cts.com