hatcher@ingres.Berkeley.EDU (Andy Hatcher) (12/03/86)
I saw the Sidecar in operation in the U.S. today; this seems to be news, since the only other reports I've seen on the net were from out of the country. If the following report is old news, then thanks for your patience, flames freely accepted. It is still to be available "Real Soon Now" as usual; I saw it at a local Amiga dealer (H.T. Electronics in Sunnyvale, California). They say that they're the first ones in the country to get one, but they only get it for two days (Tue and Wed, Dec 2 & 3) before they have to give it back to be passed on to other dealers! They had it put together in 5 or 10 minutes, including rearranging furniture. (Their Amiga had been in a cramped space, and the Sidecar is somewhat bulky. "Gee, I was hoping they'd make it bigger!" -- overheard during setup.) The Sidecar nestled up flush against the right side of the Amiga, and had two connectors there that plugged into the mouse and joystick ports. This connection was effortless and worked on the first try. The Sidecar has some kind of passthrough so that you connect your mouse and joystick into connectors on the front of *it* now that the original ones are tied up. The Amiga still worked fine by itself, and you get to the Sidecar via clicking on a Disk icon. This fires up a boot of the Sidecar via its own 5 1/4 floppy, and the IBM world is suddenly peeking at you through a Workbench window, complete with pull down menus for adjusting colors etc. The fact that this is a window is invisible to the Sidecar, and the borders on the window can be made to disappear (via pull down menu) so that the Sidecar's screen is wholly visible . They immediately tried out a few IBM diskettes, all of which worked fine. One of these was the SubLogic Jet flight simulator. All in all, the interface seemed to be ideal: the Amiga side acts as if you're just running an Amiga application (Intuition supported window/menus etc), while the IBM side thought that nothing else existed. I don't know about what they do for file transfers, etc. I got the impression you could cut and paste to/from the Sidecar window, but didn't get the chance to check this...I just watched for about 20 minutes. The installation manual said some interesting things. For one, they said directly that it would run "all IBM software"...they're guaranteeing absolute compatibility. For another, it said that the Sidecar had been ok'd by the German "Bundespost" but there was still nothing about the FCC (this was in a multi-lingual legal notice in the back). Lastly, to use it in color mode on boot (as opposed to black and white) a strange command (to me; I'm not an IBM-er) had to be carefully typed to the Sidecar while no echo occurred. This last was the only problem of any sort I observed in the short time I was there. Hope this is of interest to ya'all. Doug Merritt ucbvax!ingres!hatcher