david@twg.com (David S. Herron) (03/17/91)
Place: HT Electronics, Sunnyvale CA Time: Since yesterday (that is: 14-Mar-1991) Impressions: Hmmm.... maybe. First .. it is pretty much as billed. An Amiga wrapped around a CD-ROM player. Except that no part of the user interface implied that there was a computer hidden down in there. It looks like a sleek-black CD player. The IR keyboard looks, for all the world, like the Game Boy hand held video game thing. Y'know.. you hold it in both hands, slightly curved, has controls at each end and some more in the middle. The disk was a Time Table of History by some company whose name I can't type in because they put an umlaut over the I and this silly character set we use doesn't allow for umlauts. Anyway.. it's a pretty darn imprecise overview of World History. Though what's surprising is that it doesn't concentrate on on European history like most imprecise overviews of world history do... The presentation was pretty decent. Made heavy use of buttons you could press to go to other places & of a scrolling timeline along the bottom. For the time line it had either one or two buttons-with-arrows which showed which direction was valid at that moment. (At either end of the timeline it became one button pointing only at the other end of the timeline ... in the middle of the time line there were two at each end of the current time frame & the buttons pointed outwards). The buttons were all the 3-D sort of look that is the New Thing in computer GUIs. (Motif, AmigaDOS v2, and CanDo (at least) all use these 3D looking buttons.. these in particular looked like CanDo buttons, coincidence?) Features-Seen: very interesting MIDI in & out Serial Parallel Keyboard "Control panel" (name?) RGB Left and Right audio There were two spots with screw-down plates covering them. These were kinda rectangular and didn't fit the size of, for instance, any A2000 boards. One was labeled something along the lines of "Expansion", and didn't have anything in it at the moment. The other was "Video Slot" and was filled with a board whose outputs included: Composite, S-VHS, Channel Select, and one or two others.. It is very interesting that this is a replacable module. Obvious use right off is for a PAL version (?). What other uses? Is it a Video Slot like in an A2000? The IR control keyboard had one button marked "Genlock" ... Down-Sides: (*sigh*) Response was poor using the IR keyboard. I frequently had to hit a button 3 or 4 times to get it "to happen". The buttons were, I feel, much too large. Screen real estate is a very precious thing. (But then I wanna have a wall sized screen for my workstation and feel very constrained by this 1100x900 screen this Sun 386i has..) I know that NTSC is pretty low resolution and you NEED to make the controls bigger ... but ... Disclaimer: HT Electronics hadn't had it around long enough to learn anything about it nor did Commodore give them much information. They just had the box & a couple of disks. David