Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

i arcii
Do you have a problem? Do you
sometimes find yourself poised
over your Amiga with axe in
hand. spouting profanity at the
stubborn refusal of your software
or hardware to behave properly?
Well, calm down and swap the
axe for pen and paper, jot down
your problems, along with a
description of your Amiga setup,
and send it off to Amiga
Computing Advice Service. MG
Media, Media House, Adlington
Park, Macclesfield 5KI0 4NP.
Alternatively, e-mail us at
AGASIglacomp.clemon„co-uk
IMPLE
SAMPLE
I have a stock Al200 and am look-
) ing to buy a I6-bit sound sampler
that has high quality recording with
a minimum of hiss. I would be willing
to upgrade the Al 200's processor
and RAM if the sampler requited it, any
suggestions?
Ben Finowski, Ohio USA
L
lem as both the Technosound
i
r Turbo and Mega-Lo-Sound
t
t samplers provide good 8-bit
y
sampling. h Unfortunately, 16-bit samplers
are only
o
e
available for big box Amigas.
The
u
n
best solution currently available for
the Al200 w is the Aura sampler made by
t
HiSoft. aThis
gives your Al200 the ability to
sample
hnand
replay stereo 12-bit samples,
the software
et
that comes with it lets you
manipulate re
8,12 and 16-bit quality samples,
and e d OctaMED v6 supports it so you
get an w8
extra sound channel to play about
with. o-
You ubsay
you have a plain Al200, but if
you are l i going to be playing around with
I2/16-bit d t samples a hard drive is going to
be essential, bs
and extra memory would be a
great e help a as both these are going to allow
you to nm
sample at higher rates and longer
lengths o of time. If you do not know, the
p
higher p the sample rate in kHz the better
l
the quality, r but the more memory space
they consume.
i
o
Having n a hard drive will also allow you
b
to sample g direct to disk, so essentially let-
-
ting you sample very long periods of
sound.
When doing this the speed of your
processor and hard drive will dictate the
top quality you can sample.
n The Pe we nPC
chip promisca to
revolutionise a n d
rejuvenate t h e
Amiga
Applcon in t ro d u ce d with Workbench 1 , a n
Applcon is a n interface t o a program, o r a n
Application's 1001t When you run a program it can
place a new icon on the Workbench in to which put
can drop files :hot wr/1 then be loaded straight into
the program
Andopos - a system standard that allows any program
that supports them t o lo a d any instatled
Oulatype fire So a program that supports picture
Datotypes can load li.130K Gff lp e g and any other
picture Datalype you base installed
Rom - Read Only Memory, refers to part of the
computer's memory that can only be read from and
not wizen la compared to RAM that can be both
written and read from
Root - direaones are said to he ordered in a tree
fashion, with &Wanes existing in other directors
and so on, The lop ol d iS tree celled the root
OWER UP
I have an Al 200 with a 120Mb hard drive and two simple questions. When do you think t
PowerPC boards will be available for the Al200 in the United States and what will they c
in cold, hard US dollars? I will appreciate as much information as you can give me on HI
subject
Secondly, talking of money, can you list the price of things in American dollars as well
UK pounds, or heti
yet why not print
UK vs USA curren
equivalency table as
matter of course
every issue?
Something like th
sure would help u
on this side of th
pond.
Christopher Mohr,
Coliform
The original release
from Phase 5 states
that PowerPC boards
will be available mid
1996.
These will be
available in a num-
ber of configurations,
initially from
Slow-end' 100MHz
MCP603e up to
150MHz MCP604
boards. There are
also plans to develop
high-end systems
that will be packing
300MHz MCP620
and will include 64bit
wide memory
and bus systems,
with an optional PG
bridge. The initial
price range is from DM1000 up to DM2000, which translates roughly to E450-E900
367541350. Obviously, things are still at an early stage and the final specifications and
pricing could, and probably will, change.
Along with the board I would expect you will get PowerPC software support. As a
PowerPC processor will be able to run Emulated 680x0 code faster than your Al200,
some sort of emulator will come with it. Along with this you will also get CyberGmphy 3
which is going to give the Amiga proper RTC support along with a set of new 3D libraries.
Personally, I cannot see why we could not print the prices in US dollars, but I will have
to see what our production staff have to say.
directory. So 164A4 es the root of the RAM direaury
Archive - an archWe triers to a number of Nes that
how to be coWected into one Re which is then nor-
mally compressed rtir3 makes trcinstrinting many
ligesalat cower
Device DM 'S a spcool piece of code that lets the
operating system access new devices and Newsterns,
such as PC/Mac/Zip desks
FattRAM - so called FastRAM an the Amiga is
memory that cannot be accessed b y the ((KRIM
allo Because of this the processor has unrestricted
access and program can be run faster from ta ct'
RAM than From 'chip RAM. a s there is no access
conflicts with the custom chips
PC 1.401 - aho Imam as the PCMCIA Slat this is a
interface standard mainly used on portable
machines
AMIGA COMPUTING
MAY / 9 6
Jargon
D O X
FPU - Floating Point Unit a speaaksed chip a t pat
of a chip that is dedicated to calculating Floating
Point equabons floating point numbers allow computers
to store very large and very small numbers
isdexte they could not do easily otherwise
PO - Public Domain softwure is minced to as PO
Any software that is entirely in the public dornoui
can he coped and used b y anyone, but there are
normally restriction imposed by the waiter o f the
saltimire
HD - when connected seith floppy disks it WO%
high density these disks an store Noce the ornount
of data than a normal DO o r double a'ensity desk,
but you need a HD disk drece to read thtni
KHz - refers to how many oases a second a sompk
should be token So a 16-bit 40Atit sample 144 lake
40,000 16-bit samples a second