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Conference hydra::amiga_v1

Title:AMIGA NOTES
Notice:Join us in the *NEW* conference - HYDRA::AMIGA_V2
Moderator:HYDRA::MOORE
Created:Sat Apr 26 1986
Last Modified:Wed Feb 05 1992
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:5378
Total number of notes:38326

1237.0. "V1.3 Notes and Then Some ..." by DICKNS::MACDONALD (WA1OMM Listening 52.525) Thu Mar 10 1988 01:35

                   Questions and Answer Session
                          with John Beem
       District Sales Representative for Commodore Northwest Region
                         and Allen Burke
           Western Regional Education and Technical Coordinator
                   at the January meeting of the
                       NORTHWEST AMIGA GROUP

Question:
     Are we going to have access to the Fat Agnes chips for               
the Amiga 1000?

Answer:
     I don't think so. I don't believe there are plans to support that,
just because of the size plus the configuration for it to go in there. 
There is talk about other types of modification to other board to
implement such, but at present no.

Question:
     Can you tell us anything about the availability of the
2080 monitor?

Answer:
     Its safe to say it is very close.  Within the next few weeks.  As far as
pricing is concerned, I have no idea until it shows up, until they
announce they have it in inventory.

Question:
     When will the 1.3 updates be out?

Answer:
     They will be out at the end of this quarter, probably in March.  1.3
is going to be two part upgrade.  One will be pretty much the same way we
handled the 1/2 upgrade with an Enhancement kit.  For the Amiga 1000
owners we will release 1.3 Kickstart on a disk and 1.3 Workbench on a
disk.  You will not need the Kickstart to use the Workbench.  The only
people that will need the 1.3 Kickstart are the people having auto-booting
devices such as hard disk drives which will auto-boot right from
Kickstart.  There will also be a (1.3) Workbench for the Amiga 500 and
Amiga  2000.  Currently we do not have plans for releasing 1.3 in ROM as an
upgrade.  We do have plans for releasing that along with our controller
card and/or with, for example, the way Creative Microsystems did things with
Kickstart Eliminator.  Perhaps they'll also license the kickstart 1.3 and
do the same kind of upgrade.
     To cover more specifics of 1.3 Workbench, some things I can tell you,
some things I can't.  One of the biggest changes you will notice will be
printer drivers.  I would say the changes that are going to be done are
more than just changes, they are really revamps.  Basically the results we
are seeing are from 10 to 12 times the speed.  We will also have in those,
specialized, customized algorithms for things like color corrections.  So,
when you print your beautiful blue sky, it won't be purple.  Or if you
print your beautiful purple sky, it won't come out  blue.      There will
also be algorithms to handle things like dithering and smoothing.  So when
you print things, for example,  when you are printing an arc your printer
may have far greater resolution than your screen, I certainly hope so.  I
don't know any printer that doesn't, and it will help handle those and you
will have much smoother lines, arcs, and curves.  Additional support will
have the paint set in it, a new printer driver for the Xerox 4020
color ink jet printer and a few others as well.

Question:
     Will there be a cost?

Answer:
     Yes, there will be a minimal cost  Something like we did with the 1.2
Enhancement kit.  Those went for $14.95.  this is not a profit making
venture for us.  The price has not been set but may be between 15 and 20
dollars.

Question:
     Let me see if I understand then, does this mean my printer drivers
will be no good with Workbench 1.3?

Answer:
     There will be a new Preferences.  Your printer drivers will work the
same.  Your wordprocessors will print faster.  The computer will
constantly be waiting for the printer no matter how fast a printer you
have.  You will also have full 24 pin support as well.

Question:
     Will the 1.3 Kickstart and Workbench have anything to do with
speeding up disk drive access or actual file formatting as rumored?

Answer:
     No.

Question:
     Can you talk about the Amiga 1000?  Whether they are still making
them. And how about sales figures of various models?

Answer:
     The Amiga 1000 has been discontinued for some time.  We are not
manufacturing any more of them.  As for the sales figures, I can't give
you exact numbers for the various models, but we have passed the
half-million mark on the Amiga.

Question:
     Shipped or sold?

Answer:
     I believe sold.

Question:
     Since the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 have been introduced into the
marketplace, have the been able to track any difference or comparison with
how the Amiga is selling as compared to several of its rivals?

Answer:
     There really isn't any competition.  The Amiga is being picked up by
major professional accounts like Hughes Aircraft, Boeing, Rockwell, NASA,
and Teledyne, as well as others for graphics use.  It is definitely being
taken seriously and definitely selling well.

Question:
     On the 1.3 updates is there any further hard disk drive support?
Backups, maybe?

Answer:
     Currently on the 1.3 Workbench we do not have any plans for any hard
disk drive backups.  There are several commercial packages available right
now .

Question:
     What about being able to partition a hard drive?

Answer:

     There is no trouble  doing that now. On thing that differs on the
Amiga from the MS-DOS environment, MS-DOS generally (with a couple of
exceptions) will not allow you to format above 32 meg.  Amiga can, and we
have, successfully formatted an 800 megabyte WORM drive, a 108 meg hard disk
drive, 40 meg hard cards, etc.  We do not have size limitations.  We can
address the full capacity of a hard drive.

Question:
     How soon can we expect to see the  68020 board with 32 bit ram
available for the Amiga 2000?

Answer:
     Currently there is a company called CSA of of San Diego that has this
available and is shipping immediately.  I have had one of those boards for
over a year now.  We have installed it in Comdex, we have no trouble with
it.  I have no release date or prices for you.

Question:
     Is there a release date for the Fat Agnes chip?

Answer:
     I don't have an official date to give you.

Question:
     How about an unofficial date?

Answer:
     How about January some year coming up?  If you are taking notes, my
name is Joe Smith.

Question:
     what is Commodore's opinion of more than 1 meg of internal memory on
the Amiga 500?

Answer:
     We don't recommend it.  Our power supply, as many of you may know is
not designed to run a city.

Question:
     Has Commodore been marketing their machines?

Answer:
     Yes, in the press. We have had extensive ad campaigns during the last
quarter of 1987 throughout the Christmas period and the beginning of
January 1988. Currently we do not have any magazine ads going.  The big
push now is with the retailers.

Question:
     Are you going to have a more powerful CLI (Command Line Interface)?

Answer:
     The CLI is magnificent. It supports multi-tasking and a lot of other
things.  I don't know what else you would like to get into it. If you
would like to see it more  like a Unix or XENIX type shell.  There are
more commands that will be added but basically no, it is not going to be a
revamp where you see a CLI 2.

Question:
     Are there any Accelerator boards that work with the bridgecard in the
Amiga 2000?

Answer:
     Yes.

Question:
     What are they?

Answer:
     Let me backup and explain. Some do and some don't.  Most of the
acccelerator boards are meant to run on a 16 bit bus. the bus or the bridge
side of our PC slots are 8 bits. There are two products that I know of
that work . A 286 board called HOT SHOT from AST Technology. Also there is
a 386 which is only about three grand.  I don't recommend the turbo
processors.

Question:
     When is the 286 bridgecard from Commodore coming out? What is the
price?

Answer:
     Extremely soon.  I don't have a price but it will be very competitive
in the market based on the 286 products.  We will be running at 10
megahertz and I've worked with it and its great.

Question:
     Will the bridgecard ever be sold separately without a 5.25 inch disk
drive?

Answer:
     The current bridgecard will not be sold without the 5.25 inch disk
drive as it stands today.  As for marketing strategy on the AT bridgecard,
it has not been decided yet.

Question:
     Being that Commodore has developed bridgecards condensed on an
IBM form factor card, when are they going to introduce the worlds cheapest
clone using those cards as the clone?

Answer:
     Commodore already IBM-PC compatible systems currently on the market.
We have the PC 10-1 which became the PC 10-2.  They thought the would sell
about 30,000 of them, sold 60,000 of them, ran out far faster than they ever
 expected and are about to release, in the next few weeks a new PC 10-3.

Question:
     What can you tell us about the 286 bridgecard price wise?

Answer:
     GOOD PRICE!

Question:
     Will the 286 bridgecard support EGA?

Answer:
     The problem with EGA is it requires 70 hertz plus 60 hertz monitor
cycle and the 1084, 2002, 1080 don't support that, so right now , no.

Question:
     Will Commodore come out with their own hard drives in 1988?

Answer:
     No. I don't know of any company that does. We use other peoples
drives. We have our own hard disk controllers and it's probably one of the
finest. It will work with any disk drive out there, so why re-invent the
wheel?

Question:
     What is the price of the hard drive controller?

Answer:
   The  A2090 sells for $395 or $495. It goes in one slot and supports 7
SCII devices and  2 ST506 devices simultaneously.

Question:
     Will the 1.3 release document the changes made to AmigaBasic  in 1.2
and who supports it?

Answer:
     Beats me!  I have no idea who supports it. I appreciate you concerns
but I don't have the answer to that one.

Question:
     Is it at all likely that the 286 bridgecard will have a trade-up
program for it?

Answer:
     It is being discussed but currently I don't know.

Question:
     Is there anything to the rumor that an Amiga 3000 will be released?

Answer:
     Basically, someone had a really nice 6-pack one night, got up and
wrote an article that is totally false.  They were fascinated, they were
hallucinating, they were really dreaming. There is no other system!

Question:
     Are we doing anything to change our resolution which is currently 640
X 400 interlace?

Answer:
     What we have going, which you will see real soon, is 640 X 400
non-interlace.  We are aware of at least the general publics' desire to go
beyond that. There were many things shown at Comdex.  
There were other types of monitors and technologies shown by third
parties.We are definitely working on it, but I have nothing to tell you
specification wise.

Question:
     Does Commodore have any plans on support in a peripheral way of
reproduction things, such as printers or image processing?

Answer:
     I can't discuss that. I can't confirm or deny it.

Question:
     Is Commodore doing anything with Unix?

Answer:
      I can't confirm or deny it, I can only tell you that we like it.

Question:
     Is Commodore going to similar tactics that Apple did with the
MacIntosh market wise?

Answer:
     We have serious market campaigns we are currently working on with our
dealers.  My job as Education Specialist is to get into schools,
Universities, and places like Boeing.

Question:
     Is Commodore working with third parties on networking standards?

Answer:
     There are currently networking products available manufactured back
east.  Their products are magnificent. I can't say we are.

Question:
     On the various points that you can neither confirm or deny, what is
the earliest date that you could confirm them?

Answer:
     That depends on which one it is. Really you want me to tell you 
earliest date we could confirm them?  No.



	You can reach the Northwest Amiga Group at:

	PO Box 1140
	Oregon City, OR 97045
	(503) 656-7393 BBS


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