Might be cool, part III

September 22, 1996

Well, here we go - I've gone and committed the ultimate web sin, that of making a cool looking page before the actual content is done. A few sections in the new Amiga Page and Rumor Mill 2.0 aren't done yet, but there's enough there that I can finish them at my leisure.

So here's Part III of the "Might be cool" trilogy - in which I play with the Aminet Set 3 CD. Now, keep in mind I don't have a CD-ROM drive. Cheap internal ATAPIs can be had, but I have to come up with a case to put one in, which means ribbon cables and other crap. I'd thought about "modifying" an A1200 case, moving the power/drive lights and removing the floppy drive, cutting out that corner of the case and Bondo-ing around it to house an internal CD-ROM. But that's a lot of work... besides, I figured I had a cheaper solution to the CD-ROM problem.

I popped Set 3 Disc 2 in the drive of the Mac on my desk at work. I brought up NCSA Telnet 2.7 and set up its FTP server (it was quicker than going to InfoMac to download a real FTP server), gave myself an account and made my "home" directory the root of the CD-ROM. Simple, effective - right?

I went home, dialed in, FTP'ed to that Mac, logged in, found the Imagine directory, and did a multiple get.

Ouch.

It thought all the files were directories - but all the directories returned "File not found." None of the Amiga FTP clients I tried could understand the NCSA FTP server.

I called work - the boss was still there - and I asked him to go to that machine and bring up Fetch and just upload those files to somewhere accessible - my account on one of the UNIX boxes, perhaps. He said "I have a better idea," grabbed the CD out of the drive, and popped it into the Windows NT server drive. He quickly added me as a user and made the CD my home directory, then activated the FTP service.

I tried it. Nada. No directory. Nothing.

He went back in and fixed a couple things, I tried it again. This time I got a directory - but again, I couldn't "get" any files - probably due to Windows NT's bizarre treatment of case. I finally did an "mget *" and it downloaded the files. Unfortunately, it (either NT or the FTP client I used) "flattened" out the directories - and NT refused to send any file with an "odd" filename - like anything ending in .info. So I was stuck with several hundred iconless files in one directory.

Needless to say, Imagine ran with somewhat reduced functionality. XIPaint wouldn't run at all - kept complaining I had to run Xinit first, but Xinit complained about a library I didn't have. I started having nightmarish Emplant 1200 flashbacks - although a kind reader did send me the proper jam.library, so that works now... sorta.

The next day at work, I downloaded MacLHA and tried to use it to build an LHA archive of the directories of the CD-ROM I wanted - and then upload them to one of my UNIX accounts. MacLHA balked on the XIPaint directories - too many files. But I did manage to get Imagine archived and uploaded. I went home and downloaded the LHAs and uncompressed them - success, the directories were where they needed to be - but found to my horror that MacLHA had "MacBinaried" all the files, adding a piece of "resource" to the start of each one, so all my text files said "TEXT" at the beginning, pictures wouldn't display, and executables wouldn't run. All that was for nothing - the files were utterly useless, because I was in no mood to go through and 'demac' them all.

Last try. I opened up Fetch and uploaded the entire Imagine directory from the CD-ROM to one of my UNIX accounts. Then I went home and downloaded the whole directory - manually, directory by directory, I don't trust my FTP clients to preserve directory structure anymore.

Aha! Success... sorta. Imagine and other files now have icons like they're supposed to, Imagine itself runs. XIPaint still won't run - the installer pukes, complaining about a "missing library" without specifying what library is missing. But Imagine can't find its textures.

On a hunch, I go look at the textures directory. All the files are in uppercase. This is an Amiga, it shouldn't care - but then, this is Imagine, a program whose buttons are shaded from the wrong direction. Impulse has never opened a Commodore style guide in its life. I bring up DOpus, select all, rename, *.ITX to *.itx, and suddenly Imagine is happy again.

But already you get an idea for my opinion of Imagine. It's a powerful program, yes. Lots of industrial-strength features. Decent modeler. Awesome render engine. But... it's still Turbo Silver. Its interface sucks - someone knock on Impulse's door at 2AM and tell them gold and gray look ugly together. Things could be more intuitive - you can't tell by looking at a menu item if it's toggle or otherwise - and many elements of the interface have remained unchanged since 1988. I wouldn't doubt it at all if this program ran under 1.3 - there isn't a single Gadtools object anywhere in it. The Action editor looks positively ancient. And although I'm paying for the modeler and such, seeing a cheap interface kinda makes me wonder about the quality of what's underneath. And fer cryin out loud, it's the Nineties, knock it off with the nonstandard file requestor. Anyone still running 1.3 has no business running Imagine - asl.library exists for a reason.

The Aminet Set 3 version of Imagine comes without a manual. It does have several tutorials and guide files, not to mention some tidbits from the Imagine Mailing List, but nowhere in any of those docs could I find a decent explanation of how animation works in Imagine. Even the tutorial I tried didn't work. Other than the IML itself, does anyone know a really good resource for learning Imagine's animation features?

In other news, the POV-Ray team has apparently given up on their Amiga version. The guy who was doing it seems to have disappeared - and no one has taken up the slack. The team, meanwhile, has been getting a LOT of email since the release of POV 3.0, letters in which people seem to forget POV is freeware - the POV team has taken their email addresses off the www.povray.org homepage to try to slow down the flood of downright abusive email. Anyway, the sources for POV are available, does any enterprising Amiga programmer wanna tackle it?

Emplant A1200 is still not working to my satisfaction - Drew's hardfile system is horribly slow, but yet I can't make "filemount" work properly. So now I'm stuck with a dreadfully slow "boot drive" on this Mac. But I did a fresh System 7.5 install. It complained about "This system lacks necessary files to run on this Macintosh" - which is weird, I just ran the Installer, shouldn't Installer know what files a heavily modified Mac IIcx needs to run? I did have a working boot floppy - one of our emergency disks from work - and I copied System and Finder over from it, so now I can boot from the hardfile, plus the Monitors control panel works.

Emplant A1200 is still a disastrous product as far as I'm concerned. It does not perform as advertised. It does not come as a complete package. It is quite obviously still in beta. Literally the only thing it has going for it is the fact that it works with 256K Mac ROMs... and it doesn't work particularly well with those. When Jim Drew gets his ass kicked by Shapeshifter, I'll be smiling. I think it's funny that when Shapeshifter first appeared, Drew ranted about how it's an inferior product, you can't emulate certain Mac custom chips in software - and now he's done it, and proved himself right, that Jim Drew can't write a software-only Mac emulator.

Oh but what about Emplant A1200's use of A1200-specific features to speed it up? I haven't seen any evidence of it yet. 256-color mode is still a slug. The promised high- and true-color modes aren't there - nowhere did it say they required a video card, but on the other hand, how do you add a video card to a 1200? They simply aren't there. I have yet to actually get any use out of the emulator - I can't make a hard file big enough to be useful, it's either slow (UU's method) or won't format (filemount). I couldn't make the modem or network support work - some documentation would help here, Jim. It just flat-out doesn't work as advertised. So far I am very, very disappointed - I cannot recommend it in its current form even to those who only have 256K ROMs available - even if it's the only solution you have, it's just not worth the headaches.

So what else is new? Oh, yeah - September 19 has come and gone. Viscorp owns the Amiga? Viscorp does not own the Amiga? Viscorp will own the Amiga? I have no idea. Jason Compton popped onto the net on the 18th to let us all know Viscorp is still working on this... but that didn't tell us much, about what has to be done still, will it be done in a reasonable length of time, so on. Remember when they got the 30 day extension, they were told there would be no more extensions after that - and that extension is over. I'm starting to worry - is this going to be another Commodore liquidation, where every 30 days they say "30 more days and that's it - no more" for an entire year? Or worse, if VISCorp fails to get their ducks in a row in time, and they don't get the Amiga, who will? Remember ESCOM is currently in the process of dying a painful death... if the Amiga stuff isn't bought out before ESCOM collapses, we could see Commodore all over again, while the assets go through another lengthy international liquidation process.

But anyway. People keep asking me why I don't like Viscorp. People on USENET keep pointing out that it's pointless of us to say "Viscorp owes this or that to the Amiga community" - they're in business to make money and they don't owe anybody anything. I figured it's time to disagree with this - a company that doesn't feel like it owes its customers anything is, well, Netscape Communications. Viscorp will sell X number of units through sheer bullshit - whether they try or not. Look at how many Commodore Plus-4s there are at yard sales - a product can move without any help at all, no matter how bad it sucks. But Viscorp could, by taking a tiny bit of time and effort and possibly money, do more to appease the frustrated Amiga community - and sell X plus Y number of units. You spend money to sell units. You spend slightly more money to sell more units. You piss off customers -and for that matter, make enemies of potential allies - and you sell fewer units.

People on USENET ask "Why would Viscorp lie to us? Why would they tell us things that aren't true, that they have no plans of doing? Why would they spend all this money to let the Amiga die?" I don't know - ask ESCOM. ESCOM proved all my initial fears right - they did a truly pathetic job with the Amiga, two or three weird-looking prototypes, lots of lip service, some A1200s at 1992 prices and some 25MHz A4000s at the same price as a 240MHz Power Computing box - ten times the clock speed at the same price. ESCOM's financial difficulties? Possibly - but Amiga Technologies had the chance to do greater things even before ESCOM's financial troubles came to light. AT walked away from the RISC table, leaving Phase 5 holding the sagging reins. AT had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making NTSC A1200s. AT never got a single new hardware design on the market - no 68060's, no Q-Drives, no Walkers, absolutely NOTHING except four-year-old Commodore motherboards and MAYBE a new A4000 case. This, after those awesome pep-talks we heard this time last year - oh wow, they hired Peter Kittel, we're in good hands now! They're making Amigas, they'll cost-reduce them so we're competitive again, they're making new operating systems, they're gonna work with the AOS project team, they're gonna make a Power Amiga, yadda yadda yadda... a year later, nothing.

So here comes Viscorp. They've been much like AT was in the beginning - deathly silent, except for the occasional eerie spoken words not saying what we'd like to hear. So far the excuse has been that they can't say much while the buyout is in progress - but there is nothing legally preventing them from saying "Once we buy the Amiga here's what we're doing with it." Rather, they haven't said anything of the kind - because they don't yet know what they're doing with it.

Viscorp doesn't care about the Amiga. Some of Viscorp's employees like Amigas and use Amigas - but so do I, that's not to say the place where I work is going to support the Amiga. Viscorp's primary concern is ED. ED just happens to use the Amiga chipset. They bought the Amiga to protect ED. Anything that was Amiga but not ED was an afterthought - many of their earlier statements were to this effect. Look at the discussions of Amiga desktops, and how long it took to get an answer to the simple question "Will you continue to support existing Amigas?"

Meanwhile, while we wait on Viscorp to get things together enough to be the Amiga's "leader," companies like Phase 5 and Pios stepped forward, saying "We're sick of waiting - here, while you buy Commodore's old outdated technology, we'll go ahead and write a new API for the future," apparently hoping Viscorp would see the light, and pick one of the two Power Amiga APIs and make that the standard, much as Commodore made Electronic Arts' IFF ILBM the standard. But no. Viscorp hasn't decided what they're going to do yet, but they've made it quite clear that they don't want anyone else doing anything before they do. Yes, Viscorp has every right to say "We are the Amiga, we say what is and is not standard" - but seeing as how Viscorp hasn't even decided on a RISC chip yet, it won't kill them to look to another company that's ahead of them, and say "We like your API, can we call it the standard?"

So instead of cooperation, they've hung up the phone on Phase 5 and Pios. Pios is now selling UMAX Mac clones, and is working out a deal to distribute the BeBox in Germany, because Viscorp won't cooperate with them on the Amiga front. Phase 5, as you know, is coming up with a PowerPC "accelerator" that's little more than a custom DSP, because they also cannot get Viscorp to cooperate with them on defining a Power Amiga API that's more closely coupled with the operating system.

Let's face it, people - Viscorp will not have anything new Amiga-related until mid-1997. All of Amiga Technologies' old R&D people work elsewhere now - Peter Kittel is with Pios along with Andy Finkel and Dave Haynie. Viscorp has some guys who're trained to do set-top boxes - a couple guys from Commodore's old team - and not much else. Pios and Phase 5 are already farther down the road than Viscorp, but can't do anything because Viscorp has already promised to sue them if they do anything without a license and then refused to give/sell them a license. (Some of this may just be due to Viscorp not having a coherent public relations policy the last several months... I pity Jason Compton, having to backpedal over some of the dumb things said prior to his coming on board.)

So how do we get around all this? The obvious solution would be to pool moolah and buy the damn thing ourselves - put somebody besides the suits in charge for the first time since Los Gatos. But as I've mentioned here before, there's no coherent agreement in the Amiga community about where the Amiga needs to go. And without Commodore's bulk, we can't just sorta ride on inertia.

Perhaps, then, we should find a leader. Someone who understands the Amiga. Someone who likes the Amiga. Someone who wants the Amiga to succeed again. Someone who isn't a suit. Someone who can come up with a direction for the Amiga that will piss off the fewest people. We need an Amiga election. This is our machine, dammit - we kept Commodore afloat all that time, we made this machine, we and the engineers, not Commodore itself. Why should we sit and watch the suits toss our favorite piece of technology around like a soccer ball? We could, and by all rights should, control our destiny.

Now, this is just an idea. But if it works, here's how it would work: we pick a small number of "candidates" - people who fit the above qualifications - and hold an election. Then, for the winner, we hold a telethon or something to raise money from concerned Amiganites, for $50 million or more total. The winner then uses the money to set up a new company, hire a few staffers, buy the Amiga out from under Viscorp (for $40 mil), and use the remaining $10 mil as initial operating capital for important stuff like - in this order - advertising (just one commercial spot on Babylon 5 - all we could afford - would do wonders), manufacturing (parts shortages killed Commodore), and of course, r&d.

Most of the industry has forgotten us. People at big software companies often have no clue what an Amiga is. All the time people keep saying "Didn't Commodore go out of business?" having never heard word one about ESCOM or Viscorp. "Amiga - is that something like an Atari?" Uhh... yeah. Commercial developers will not write for the Amiga because there's no reason to, largely because of Microsoft's sickening 89% market share... but even Mac and yes, even BeBox developers won't do Amiga software because they don't perceive a market. And they're right - this computer has no head, no leadership, how can it have a market? We aren't sure from month to month who'll be making the damn thing - it'll probably get sold off again in April 1997 for all we know. Who wants to write for that kind of market? Even Metrowerks, whose CodeWarrior compiles executables for Mac, Windows 95 and NT, BeBox, and a couple of palm-top computers, seems to ignore the Amiga's existence. SAS Institute has given up on the Amiga version of their C compiler. Several other "multiplatform" companies have shrugged off the Amiga - even Netscape.

Having REAL leadership is key. An Amiga President would be proof that there is something here, that it is under control, it is secure, and it will be here six months from now. All the rest will follow once someone steps forward and says "Follow me to the promised land."

I'll post nominations here on the Rumor Mill.

Meanwhile, stay tuned... and above all, enjoy the look of the new Rumor Mill!