Amiga is bought by Gateway 2000 (28/3/97)

A press release has just been released announcing that the Amiga has just been bought by the PC company Gateway 2000. Please see this link Press Release for the full annonucement. Hopefully thus will turn out to be good news for the amiga even thought the expected buyout by Quickpak has not taken place. Amiga Technologies will be renamed Amiga International and will still have the same president, Petro Tyschtschenko which should provide a bit of stability and has good knowledge of the Amiga market. If they can get new Amigas out in the shops along with plenty of advertising and new software, the Amiga might be able to catch up on the PC and get back it's market share of the home and video market it had a few years ago.

Amathera goes bust

Sadly the amiga company Almathera has folded. The company brought us the brilliant Photogenics which was universially recieved but they state that due to Viscorp not paying them for development for their settop boxes, they had to fold. A sad departure for a dedicated Amiga company. Hopefully someone will pickup and continue development of Photgenics.


Amiga Hardware

SMD-100 VideoCD MPEG Decoder

This is the new Suirrel MPEG Decoder from HiSoft which allows the use of an existing CD-Rom drive to play Video CDs. It provides 24-bit quality video with CD quality sound. Any Video CD or CD-i Movie can be played on either a monitor or television. A remote control unit is used like an ordinary video player allowing skipping tracks, slow motion and a rock solid still feature. Frames can be grabbed directly from the CD.It retails at £199.95 and can also be bought in a variety of complication packs with various speed SCSI CD-Rom drives.

Amiga Applications

Imagine 6 Upgrade

Impulse see that to implement all the new features would take at least 12 months to do. For $100 Amiga users can take part in their Constant Upgrade Program where Impulse would be giving out a series of updates with at least 4 upgrades over the 12 months. This is a special offer as the final upgrade price to Version 6 will be over $200.

Here is a partial list of new things that are being done to Imagine for the Amiga!

Final Writer 97

Softwood are showing their support for the Amiga with a new version of their popular wordprocessor. As well as keeping the easy interface, there are a whole load of new features added to the program. New features include Text Frames, Linked Text Frames, Articles, Snap-To Guides and Arrow key positioning. Check out Softwood's Home page for more details and screenshots at www.softwood.com

Finale Webcruiser

A new Amiga Developer called Finale Development has several new exciting products coming to the Amiga. One of them is Finale WebCruiser. This is a new rival to the IBrowse/Voyager/AWeb web browsers which has quite an impressive feature list. They include: With the Moca extension, This should be the first Amiga Browser to support Java. Check out their homepage at http://www.Finale-Dev.com for the latest info about it.

Draw Studio 2

Draw Studio2 is a new structured drawing package for the Amiga. There has been a lack of this type of program in recent times with Provector being the only one that has been updated and the likes of Art Expression and ProDraw not being developed anymore.This looks to the best all of them with some impressive features. It uses MUI for its interface and a version is included with it. There are tools to warp, distort, fill and transform objects. There are quite a number of types of fills with transparent, tileable and bitmap fills with fill patterns fully editable. It supports Adobe Type 1 fonts and most graphic cards and an arexx port. A demo of the program can be obtained from LH Publishing and costs £59.95 plus P&P for the floppy disk version and £74.95 plus P&P for the CD version which also includes Image Studio and Texture Studio.

Disk Magic 2

Also from Hi-Soft is a new version of the Directory Opus rival file manager. It has many improvements on first version with new functions such as a very fast delete command, extra filetype options, support for the LZX archive format, more arexx commands and file encryption support. There are also some other small improvements and several other internal functions. The new version retails at £39.95.from HiSoft.

Cinema 4D 3

From Hi-Soft is the new version of their new 3D rendering package. Having obtained version 2 from a magazine covedisk and been very impressed with it, the new version promises even more features such as Glows, Lens Flares, Visible Light with 26 different lighting styles including spot, sun, parallel,ambient and coloured. With this comes with MagicLink to convert objects from most formats to Cinema 4D and back. It retails at #199.95 from HiSoft.

Media Magic

Here is another new piece of software from Hi-Soft who are becoming the Amiga's most prolific software and hardware developers. Media magic is a multimedia creation package in a similar vein as Scala. Presentations are made through the use of scripts which are shown graphically on screen with an easy to use interface. It is compatible with graphic cards and supports all amiga graphic and sound formats. I personally tried a demo of the program and it is quite easy to use and provide some impressive results. It retails at £49.95 from HiSoft.

Wordworth Office

As well as the new version 6 of Wordworth having just been released, Digita have decided to bundle some of their software into an office suite. In this pack is the new version 6 of Wordworth reviewed on my review page as well as Datastore 2, Money Matters 4 and Organiser 2 on both floppy disk and Cd versions. The Office pack pack is available from Digita for #49.99 or #34.99 as an upgrade from a previous version of any of the above mentioned packages. Contact Digita on there WEB address www.digita.com or by e-mail at sales@digita.demon.co.uk.

PCX Pentium Emulator

The PCX is a new software only PC emulator from Blittersoft the makers of Emplant. It is supposedly to have the full emulation of the Pentium processor with even undocumented instructions included. According to the developers, the emulator is 3 times faster than the Emplant E586 module for Emplant in protected mode(Windows) and 50% faster in DOS. It can be highly customisable with options for graphics cards, 16 bit sound emulation, CD-ROM support, SCSI Support, hard disk partitions or file disk partitions. Currently Blittersoft is giving a free demo of the emulator which can be found on their home page at the following address.Blittersoft Home page The demo is limited to 4MB, with no CD-Rom, SCSI,and Hard Disk partitions. There are several other limitions but it is usable enough for a good view of it's operation and performance.

Amiga Games

Myst

Since ClickBOOM have got the rights to develop the the Amiga version, they have now updated their web page with more info about the game along with about 8 pictures from the game. Looking at them, they are very impressive and I can't wait to get my hands on the game when it is released in the summer. So check out their web page at Clickboom for the latest news on the game.

AmigaQuake

Contrary to what has been reported, the author of the port has not abandoned it and is still continuing with development of it with the current version being 0.49a. It is rumoured that a company may be picking it up to become a proper commercial release. Will keep you posted on how it is going. Check out the web page www.angeldos.demon.co.uk/index.html for thelatest public release of the port.

Epic to release 30 game this year

Epic Marketing has through a special deal managed to get hold of a lot of games that have been released in Germany but never converted to English. Epic are planning to release 2 to 3 games a month with the car racing game Flying High as their flagship game. They are also planning on releasing 60 classic amiga games aimed at PC owners with a Amiga emulator for the PC bundled with the games.

Explorer 2260

There is a new game being developed by Chris Page and is inspired by the sci-fi series Babylon 5. It is a Frontier type game involving travelling between worlds trading goods and getting involved in battles. It will require a hi-spec machine with it being fully tecture mapped and hopefully be the First Encounters which we didn't get. The author Chris Page can be reached at the WEB address www.cs.man.ac.uk/~pagec5/index. html. and be contacted by e-mail at pagec5@cs.man.ac.uk. He is looking for ideas and any contributions towards this game.

ACID re-release classic Microprose games

Guildhall Leisure have purchased the rights to reissue ten Microprose games under the ACID label. Some of the games have been recent releases and several others are from a few years back. 5 of these are released at the price of £14.99 including the likes of UFO Enemy Unknown and Colonization and the other 5 are at the price of £9.99. Some of these games at the lowe rprice include F117-A, Starlord and Mission Impossible. I purchased F117-A over Christmas and would recommend it to Flight Sim fans as it is a very good game although an accelerated amiga would be advised to speed up the frame rate.

Capital Punishment

As reported in Amiga Format, Click Boom has run into problems with distribution in the UK after Effigy pulled out of distributing the game stating there were too many problems with trying to get the game to run. As far as I know they have not found a new distributer for it yet. Anyone interested could try e-mailing click boom at Clickboom.

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Any comments, etc please send e-mail to Collins-EP@ulst.ac.uk