& LIGHT-YEARS! - TRS-80 Color Computer Archive

Amiga
The recent explosive growth in the
Amiga hardware market has made tak
ing a basic Amiga 500 system—512K
computer, single 3'/2-inch disk drive,
and Amiga RGB monitor—to the
hardware max a lot easier. For a mere
$ 1,000, you can build a graphics com
puter Max Headroom would be proud
of. Or put together a home-productivity
machine that will give you far-reaching
number-crunching and databasesorting
capabilities. Of course, there
are other possible $1,000 Amiga addi
tions to cover such uses as music cre
ation, computer-aided design, and
even gaming.
Animated Workstation
There are almost loo many exciting
hardware tools for Amiga graphics: De
ciding on the add-ons best suited for
you can be daunting. Just keep in mind
the capabilities you need for your art,
though, and assembling a system
should be simplified.
Before you add any exotic graphics
hardware, you'll want to turbocharge
your Amiga 500 with additional memo
ry by buying the A501 512K RAM ex
pansion, from Commodore ($ 199).
Amiga Add-Ons
Commodore Business Machines
1200 Wilson Dr.
West Chester, PA 19380
(215)431-9100
Creative Microsystems
10110 SW Nimbus
Suite B1
Portland, OR 97223
(503) 620-3821
Great Valley Products
Plank Ave.
Paoli, m 19301
(215)889-9411
40 COMPUTE
You'll also want to add more disk stor
age with an external floppy disk drive; a
good example is the Master 3A disk
drive, from Oceanic America, widely
available for $ 160. The extra memory
and storage space will make it possible
to create super-sized graphics and com
pile animations without a lot of irritat
ing disk swapping.
Two simple devices can really ex
pand your Amiga's usefulness as a
graphics workstation. The Digj-View
Gold video digitizer, from NewTek
($200), complete with the Panasonic
WV-1410 monochrome CCTV camera
($280; also available from NewTek),
lets you capture any external image for
later manipulation with a paint or an
animation program. Digi-View pro
duces accurate, full-color reproductions
of anything you can focus a video cam
era on. The system is simple and easy
to use, and gives far better results than
you'd get from any other digitizer on
the market. For desktop video applica
tions, nothing beats a genlock, a device
for mixing live video and Amiga graph
ics for taping on a VCR. The basic
Amiga genlock of choice is the Amigen,
from Mimetics ($179). This small unit
is the only low-cost genlock on the mar
ket that works with any Amiga. With it.
Mimetics
P.O. Box 1560
Cupertino, CA 95015
(408)741-0117
NewTek
115 W. Crane St.
Topeka, KS 66603
(800) 843-8934
Oceanic America
P.O. Box 70587
Eugene, OR
(503) 741-1222
you can easily put titles and animations
on your videos for professional-looking
effects.
The total cost of your newfound
graphics power is $1,018. Watch out,
Walt Disney!
Amortized Amiga
You may not think of the Amiga 500
as a business dynamo, but it can pack
the same productivity wallop you'd get
from an AT clone or a Macintosh SE.
What the basic Amiga 500 lacks,
though, are the hard drives and faster
processor speeds that give those ma
chines the clout to eat through big
spreadsheets and massive databases.
At the moment, the most efficient
way to add mass storage to your
Amiga 500 is with the Impact 20HD/
RAM hard drive, from Great Valley
Products ($795). This external SCSI
drive allows up to six more SCSI
peripherals to be connected to the
computer. With the optional Autoboot
EPROM (an additional $100; also
from Great Valley), you can start your
Amiga 500 directly from the hard disk
under version 1.3 of the Amiga operat
ing system. The Impact drive also has
room to accept two megabytes of
RAM, which you can purchase when
and if the price of memory chips de
scends from its current stratospheric
level. (Commodore has promised, and
even shown, a combination 20-
megabyte hard disk/RAM-expansion
unit. Called the A590, it may appear
sometime in 1989; its price is
undetermined.)
If the 7.16-MHz 68000 micro
processor in your Amiga 500 seems a
little pokey when you compare it to
the 10- and 12-MHz 80286 chips in
current ATs, or even to the notexactly-maxed-out
8-MHz 68000 in a
Macintosh SE, how about giving your
Amiga a caffeine jolt with a faster
processor? Creative Microsystems of
fers a 68000 microprocessor (S200)
that runs at 14.32 MHz, double the
standard speed. Simply pop out your
current 68000 and pop in the faster
version for speed increases of up to a
theoretical 200 percent. (Opening the
Amiga 500 case voids your warranty.
but the speed increase is worth it.)
Pumping up your 500 to give it
productivity prowess doesn't come
cheap, but it shouldn't exceed
$1.100—well worth the numbers when
you're crunching numbers.
— Steven Anzovin 3
Heidi E. H. Aycock and Peter Scisco are the
assistant editors, and Gregg Keizer is the
editor, of COMPUTE!. Steven Anzovin writes
the Amiga column for the "COMPUTE! Spe
cific" department. All of them want more
than $1,000 to spend on their computers.