Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

'ie. Amiga uoesn't prom,se to
be all things to all men, and
women in these politically
rrect limes, but ills surprising the
erent uses people put their
hines to. From word processing
video, from 3D animation to image
mpulation, from genealogy detains
to route planners. People even
y games on Arnigas, believe it or
This diversity of application for our
rite machine means there are
always new spheres for users to
break into. New users seem to tend
to buy their Amigas solely for games
playing. but the lure of all that other
software soon lakes hold. With the
advent of ever cheaper SCSI hard
trves and hard drive controllers, getting
into the serious side of the Amiga
has never been easier. Now all we
need is a cheap, good quality monitor
compatible with all Amiga screen
nodes.
Ah. but what of the ideal Amiga? I
Fess it you had an unlimited amount
of money to spend and an unlimited
number of PCMCIA, trapdoor or
ZOrro slots, you could get yourself a
amazing bit of kit But seeing
most people are limited to one of
Ole former and four of the latter, we
ciall want to go too crazy.
CRITERIA
So what criteria shall we apply.
ell. I'll limit each category Of
chines to only two choices for
are and two for software - that
we won't be spending excessive
nis of money.
I'll assume both our base machines
the new A4000T-040 and an Amiga
1200 - have got an existing hard
drive of at least reasonable size, and
t the A4000T has 10Mb RAM.
machines can have a standard
or Microvitec because I'm feelgenerous,
but that's it. No more.
Let's determine what the cateries
are going to be for our
erAmiga. With only two pieces
of hardware and software, we
1 possibly have the best Amiga of
worlds, so we try for the best
ga for. say, DTP. Right, we've
one category, what about
others? Hmm, what's
Amiga good at...
how aboutalL
egories for
les, video, 3D modno.
and music. I
Mk that will do for
So let's start looking at
those categories. We may as
well go in the order I listed them
(hey, it's my article, I'll do what I
want). So without further ado, let's
have a look at the ideal A4000T and
Al200 for DTP.
Super DIP Ilmiga
Unfortunately, our choice of software for the Al200
and A4000T is rather limited these days. Basically,
you can have PageStream, or there's PageStream
and if you don't like that you could always choose,
erm. PageStrearn. ProPage is no longer in development,
although you might be able to find a copy of it
from somewhere. As for the others, none of them
were really up to scratch apart from maybe
PageSetter. on a limited basis,
and yes, you guessed
it, it's no longer in
development either
and is just as hard to
find as ProPage
So we'll go with
PageStream 3 (perhaps it
will be version 3.1 by the
time you get to read this) as
our main piece of software for
both the A4000T and Al200.
We still have another bit of software
to get for both machines.
I'm going to start a trend that says
Al200 owners have less money to
spend than A4000T owners, A
stereotype? Maybe, but I think that if
you are willing to spend about E2000
on a machine, you're more likely to be
rolling in it than someone who only
spends E400.
So for my other piece of super software for an
Al200 I'm going to suggest that the best choice
would be Studio II printer software and an HP Deskjet
660C for hardware. This new version of the excellent
Deskjet 500C gives very high resolution mono output
and great colour for a price that would have been
unthinkable four years ago. Combine this with the
superb output that Studio is capable of producing and
you'll have a hell of a low-end set up. To top off my
hardware choice I think a CD-ROM drive would be
the most useful item to take advantage
of the many CD-ROMs
Arte c
ColourStation
FEATURE
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Amiga Computing
OCTOBER 1995
Ben 11115t (11P(k5 put the
ultimate Ilmiga upgrade5 and
MAO hi5 UWfl 511DPI R1711413
available. As for the A4000T side of things, how about
a nice HP Laserjet 5MP? This laser printer Is capable
of 600dpi resolution and has PostScript level 2 support.
What about our other piece of hardware and
software? If I could only have two more pieces of
hardware I would gel a nice graphics card,
probably a Picasso II - especially as it has
recently had a reduction in price - and a
proper monitor like the Idek liyama 17"
mulliscan.
Squirrel que d•spe e d
CD-ROM drive
Al 200
Software
1
1
But I don't, so my other piece
of hardware is going to be the
new Artec Colour scanner.
reviewed a couple of
ww f t
,
94. months ago. This sub-
E400 scanner is an
absolute boon to the
DTPer lurking within you
As for my remaining
piece of software, what
about ImageF/X 2.1 to process
those scanned images.
PageStream 3. El 74_95 from Emerald Creative -
0181-715 8866
Studio II. E49.95 from JAM - 01895 274449
Hardware
HP Deskjet 660C, £385.99 from First Computer
Centre -0113 2319444
Squirrel quad-speed CD-ROM drive, E259 from HiSoft
-01525 718181
A4000T
Software
PageStream 3, £174.95 from Emerald Creative -
0181-715 8866
ImageF/X v2.1. £249.99 (but look for special offers)
from Wizard Developments - 01322 272908
Hardware
HP Laserjet 5MP, 014.99 from First Computer
Centre- 0113 2319444
Artec ColourStation, 099.99 from Gasteiner -
0181-345 5000
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