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COMDEX Report<br />
by Peggy Herrington<br />
There was slim pickin's on the exhibit floor<br />
at the '86 Fall COMDEX Show in Las Vegas,<br />
although we uncovered several fine Amiga<br />
products and even something for the C64. In a<br />
bid to move into what has been Macintosh<br />
territory, the big deal was desktop publishing<br />
on the IBM PC and its legion of clones, with a<br />
fleet of laser printers and page layout<br />
programs launched for MS-DOS machines.<br />
Ventura Publishing, an elaborate package from<br />
Xerox, looked good, which it should at $895.<br />
But because it, and everything else we saw<br />
requires an AT, it made us wonder how many<br />
regular old PCs are going to be upgraded so<br />
people can do what INFO has been<br />
accomplishing with Commodore equipment and<br />
elbow grease for years. PC developers seemed<br />
excited about it but even Show Daily headlines<br />
on desktop publishing seminars weren't enough<br />
to stifle the yawns in the press room.<br />
Exhibitors were scattered about without<br />
regard to type between the Convention Center,<br />
the West Hall and four major hotels, which<br />
made it tough to find C64 and Amiga<br />
companies. Neither Apple nor Commodore<br />
themselves were there (despite the presence of<br />
IBM and Atari), but Amiga World hosted a<br />
reception for which Commodore/Amiga<br />
provided at least a dozen Amigas. It was a<br />
madhouse — a couple hundred people showed<br />
up — and we soon went from elbowing dealers<br />
and wholesalers to munching hors d'oeuvrcs<br />
and exchanging gossip. Lots of products were<br />
demonstrated there rather than at the show, not<br />
only because it was cheaper but because an<br />
official Amiga Developers Conference had<br />
been held on the west coast a few days earlier.<br />
From those attendees, we learned that Version<br />
1.2 of Kickstart and Workbench is being made<br />
available on disks with a 40-page manual for<br />
$15 through dealers, a private developers area<br />
has been established on Byte's BIX, making it<br />
the official Amiga support network, and Fred<br />
Fish was presented with an award for his great<br />
public domain disk collection. But On With<br />
The Show...<br />
f<br />
"■'"1<br />
1<br />
- -<br />
1 I III<br />
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Amiga WordPerfect is supposed to be<br />
available this spring and will offer all the<br />
features that have made it the number-one best<br />
seller in the PC world, according to<br />
WordPerfect's press statement. Mark Hamilton,<br />
the programmer doing the conversion, says the<br />
Amiga version will be even more powerful<br />
than that for the PC (and the ST and Mac,<br />
both of which are being done now) due to its<br />
operating system and 880K disk drive. Some<br />
of the features include What-You-See-Is-What-<br />
You-Gct word processing with math and<br />
sorting, merging, macros, pull-down menus, on<br />
screen columns, graphic imports, headers,<br />
footers, footnotes and endnotes, and an<br />
integrated spell checker and thesaurus. I saw a<br />
hands-off ('cause was still crash-prone) Amiga<br />
demo and it was impressive. Expansion<br />
memory is supported and 32 windows can be<br />
open concurrently; with macros, according to<br />
Hamilton, you can work in all of them at once.<br />
IBM-PC WordPerfect is priced at $495 (mailordered<br />
it's about $200), and establishing the<br />
price for the Amiga version was the subject of<br />
much discussion. They're planning to market it<br />
through their existing PC dealers, whom they<br />
don't wish to offend with a price cut since it is<br />
more powerful, but they also feel that Amiga<br />
users won't support that kind of price-tag. For<br />
more info, contact WordPerfect Corporation,<br />
288 West Center Street, Oren, Utah 84057,<br />
801/227-4420.<br />
The Creator is an Amiga special-effects<br />
generator. Actually, it's a high-tech black box<br />
with lots of flashing lights that does the most<br />
amazing things to video images. How'd you<br />
like to add the black-and-white lead-in that<br />
slowly fades to color in Saint Elsewhere to<br />
your own videos? With The Creator,<br />
ShowTime says you can do fades, polarization<br />
and posterization as well as monochrome; it<br />
will produce synchronous effects with soft or<br />
hard edges, do wipes, cuts, dissolves and<br />
superimpose any image, any size, anywhere on<br />
the screen. It allows look-ahead previews of 4matrix<br />
video, with high-fidelity stereo inputs<br />
selectable from two busses. And, with a new<br />
version of SoundScape ProMIDI Studio<br />
(Mimetics' was actually demonstrating The
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