====================================================================== _ __ _ <>_ __ _ || /\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\ || A M I G A U P D A T E /__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\ || -News and Rumors- / \\_ | \/ ||_ _||_ \__// / \\_|| (An Occasional e-mail KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING || Newsmagazine) ====================================================================== AMIGA and the Amiga logo are trademarks of Amiga, Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 990328 A M I G A R C 5 T E A M N E E D S H E L P C O R R E L R U M O R S P O T T E D O N N E T P U R E P P C F R O M P H A S E 5 . . . . . .A N D F R O M M E T @ B O X U G N T A P S H E N R Y C H U N G P A L M B A C K U P R E L E A S E D N E W S F R O M D V S D I R E C T B E T T E R W E B F R O M P A N T H E O N T W O N E W F R O M A T E O C L I C K B O O M A U C T I O N F O R A L L A M I G A R A D I O N E W S N E W I C O N S 4 . 5 A V A I L A B L E A N O T H E R M O Z I L L A P R O J E C T T H O R 2 . 6 R E L E A S E D W I L D F I R E 7 F R O M N O V A D E S I G N Editor's Thoughts and Introduction: This must be the PPC issue. Just as we were sending the last issue off, we learned of a very interesting PPC board from Phase 5 but weren't able to get a good story for that issue. We do have a story in this one. Then, as we were preparing this issue, we learned that another similar board had also been announced. This one is from met@box, formerly known as Pios. We've information on both boards below. We sure hope there's room in the market for both. News is always a bit slow after a major show such as the Amiga 99 show which just ended, but despite that we have many interesting items for you to read. Just about all of it positive; the sort of news we most enjoy sending your way. Brad Webb, Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- E-mail to the E-ditor: 20 Mar '99 Hello Brad, In regards to the guy that asked about a printer driver for a HP 690C. If that is a DeskJet 690C TurboPrint which is the finest print package I've seen has a driver for it. regards, Lee ~~~~~~ Lee, Several people wrote in to point that out. Thanks for being one of them, and further thanks to all the AU readers who did so. Amigans have always responded well to requests for help and information, and clearly the readers of AU are on the top of the list. Brad ====== 19 Mar 1999 Hello Brad, I just recieved your newsletter, I am suprised you didn't recieve more feed back about the show. Maybe it's because the community is still taking it all in. I attended the show with my parents and my brother (who is a programmer and made an announcement of his own :-) ) and we felt a sense of excitement and hope for the future. I would have to admit some of Jim Collas' speech could be called political by the doubters (and was) but I felt a sincere atmosphere. It always impresses me how a regular Joe can talk so freely with any of these powerful people at the head of Amiga Inc./Amiga International. Every one seemed to be receptive to any input and sincerely listened. I don't think I'd be too far out on a limb to say you wouldn't walk up to the likes of Bill Gates and get a glance and a nod let alone listening and asking pertinent questions. My brother and I spent some time with a group of revellers in one of the suites after the pub closed on Saturday night. Among this group were Jim Collas, Jeff Schindler, and Joe Torre. My feeling was that Jim Collas is much like a 'regular' guy and he really has a grasp of what we feel as an Amiga community. He asked us in his speech to give him a chance and I don't think we will have to wait long, but we will have to wait. What's a little longer. Some changes can already be noted. We were told Amiga.com and Amiga.de would be integrated and that has already happened. An agressive time-line has been announced for the release of OS3.5 and AmigaSoft4.0OE. BTW: the distinction between OE and OS is an operating environment encompasses an operating system and operator experience. Sounds like the Amiga feeling to me. My brother was talking from a developers point of view w¡th some users at the show. These users seemed to have a common point of view I heard expressed: "why should I pay for an OS3.5 upgrade when I already have Miami/Ibrowse/NewIcons/etc." My brother's point was that the enhanced functionality from a programmers point of view made the likelyhood of greater development for Amiga Classic very real and the users would naturally migrate to 3.5, 3.6, 3.7... Overall I came away from St. Louis w¡th some great Amiga hardware, a feeling of greater excitement than I have felt in a long time, and a chance to meet and greet with the new President/CEO of Amiga Inc. We're BACK! Can you feel it??? Jody ~~~~~~ Jody, Thanks for your take on the show, and especially a programmer's perspective on the upgrades to the Classic OS. Web users will probably have noted that the two Amiga web sites are now unified in content as you point out. We just got the official count of attendees from the show: 1,142. Not bad for an Amiga show, especially on a weekend when Mother Nature aimed a snowstorm at St. Louis. Brad ====== 21 Mar 1999 Hi. I've been reading your March 19th edition. I was disturbed by part of Dr. Havemose's open letter. He said -- "I know that the MMC speculation has been fun, but there unfortunately isn't much to speculate about. We just have not had to make a decision yet, so we haven't !" How in the name of sweet reason does Amiga Inc expect QNX to write a version of Neutron for the MMC if they don't know which chip it is? Look, I appreciate that ol' "Visa Bill" Gates doesn't need to know what Amiga Inc is up to, but their partners had better! Be afraid. Be very afraid. Allan ~~~~~~ Allan, Your letter makes a nice counterpoint to the mostly upbeat mail we've had since Amiga 99 ended. Unfortunately, you raise a very good question. Even more unfortunately, I don't have any kind of an answer for it. I hope someone somewhere does, preferably at Amiga. Brad ====== 20 Mar 1999 Dear Brad, Do you know of any reason as to why AMIGA SHOWS are not held in N.Y.C.? Also since Gateway is the BIG DADDY why don't they advertise the NEW AMIGA'S on T.V. Fact is, there are still many people that have never even heard of the AMIGA.Leastwise not here on the East coast. If a prson walks into an appliance or computer store(RADIO SHACK) and asks for AMIGA software, they look at you like your"re an alien. GOOD LUCK AND GOOD HEALTH-JIM ~~~~~~ Jim, I've been amazed myself there are no shows in New York or Chicago. There used to be some good ones in both cities. Anyone out there want to organize one, especially since the good folks in Ohio won't be having theirs this year? As for advertising the new Amigas, that's probably premature at this point. It's usually a bad idea to sell "futures" so until the next models are ready to ship, ads will have to wait. However, when we get to that point I hope Amiga Inc. will do a better job than the former Amiga owners did. Wouldn't take much. Brad ====== 20 Mar 1999 Hi Brad, Thanks for the great newsletter and supporting the amiga. One reason for this E-mail is the article I read in the March 10 issue of TV Technology on page 4. the article talks about Echostar's set-top Dish Network and names Gateway as a partner and custom-builder of these machines. Is this part of Amiga future? Ron ~~~~~~ Ron, Hadn't heard of that but it's most interesting. I don't know if the Amiga plays into this or not, but we'll be keeping our eyes open for further information. Thanks for sending this along. Brad ====== 25 Mar 1999 Just found your Web Site and I'm very impressed. Had put my Amiga2000 in the closet a few years ago and just recently dusted it off. Now I'm even on the WWW with A L L Amiga hardware/software. But... that's another story. I'm writing regarding Tony's e-mail to you on 12/18/98 regarding replacement of old battery in Amiga. I bought a new battery at the Amiga99 show in St. Louis recently. Maybe you could publish the steps (exactly for be- ginners) on how to remove old battery and install the new one. Looks like some soldering involved. Called local computer store. They want $65 per hr with 1/2 hr minimum. Thanks. gary ~~~~~~ Gary, You raise a good topic. However, don't have a set of instructions for replacing batteries. Does anyone know of a goos site on the web or a text docment that covers this? Brad ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A M I G A R C 5 T E A M N E E D S H E L P 7 Mar 99 Hello Amigans, The Amiga RC5 team could sure use your help. The rc5 contest is a worldwide experiment in distributed computing. The goal is to crack a heavily encrypted code using the spare crunching power from computers being used in all walks of life. Its a pretty noble cause--after all who knows when this technology might really come in handy to quickly solve a real world crises--but more importantly, its a cut throat down and dirty fight to prove which platform has the user loyalty and computing power it takes to find the winning key. Out of 5,854 registered teams, the Amiga RC5 team is currently in a dogfight for third place daily. However, ever since the rc5 stats page exploded early this year, the team hasn't grown as quickly. The daily stats are back up now, so we can check progress once again... http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/tlist.php3?low=1& limit=100&source=y Please consider downloading the rc5 client from the link below, and adding Myzar to your WBStartup drawer. Its just that simple to join the team. The Amiga's excellent priority driven preemptive multitasking OS will allow you to crunch keys in the background without denting your daily performance, no matter what processor your Amiga uses. Everything you need to be up and crunching in a few minutes is on the Amiga RC5 homepage, in the download and misc sections. http://distributed.amiga.org/ Thank you for considering joining the team, -Steve. -http://www.amigapro.com -The website for the Amiga performance enthusiast. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- C O R R E L R U M O R S P O T T E D O N N E T 23-Mar-99 {Found the following fascinating item in the Amiga Newsgroups. For now, best regarded as a rumor ... I think. Brad} Apparently Corel (the makers of CorelDRAW and WordPerfect among others) have announced in Com-Digit Journal, that they will port their Corel-Office package for the next generation Amiga. The magazine comments: "If the Amiga was supplied with this software at a competitive price, it could be a real threat to PCs." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- P U R E P P C F R O M P H A S E 5 . . . Oberursel, March 19, 1999: Once again phase 5 digital products is happy to announce a groundbreaking new development, which will represent an extract of phase 5's leading-edge technologies and the many years of expertise in designing upgrade products for Amiga computers. After a long time of evaluating the market, we have decided to support the existing Amiga user base and the new developments at Amiga Inc. with a next generation product, which will offer highest performance, future compatibility and a bridge to industry standards. This product will be a powerful PPC accelerator for A3000/A4000 systems (and other Amiga systems expanded with an A4000 compatible CPU slot) and the upcoming Amiga OS 3.5, as well as future versions of the Amiga OS. The new accelerator, the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 board, is a pure PowerPC-based processor card. It will ship with a fast PowerPC750 or PowerPC7400 (G4 with Altivec), which is installed in a ZIF socket. This ZIF socket is fully compliant with the Interposer standard from IBM and Motorola, which is also used in PowerMacs and other systems, what will allow easy upgrading, if required by the user in the future. In the base version with a 400MHz PowerPC750 processor and 1MB backside Cache @ 200MHz, the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 will provide an impressing peak performance of up to 19.2 SPECint95 and 13.1 SPECfp95 (source: IBM website 03/18/99). In real-world applications, this allows incredible application performance, which is estimated to reach 15 -20 times the performance of a 50MHz 68060 processor (with native PowerPC coded or PowerPC optimized applications). The CYBERSTORM G3/G4 will use standard SDRAM running at 100MHz, providing a peak memory transfer rate of 582 MB/s, and has two DIMM sockets which will support up to 1 GB main memory. An on-board PCI 2.1 interface will allow the connection of all kind of industry standard devices and cards. The on-board Flash ROM with 512kB size can be used to install software necessary for system-startup and other functionalities. By default, this Flash ROM will only contain a basic boot-strap functionality (hardware write protected) which will allow to install any kind of system software from disks; this functionality will be fully documented and freely available to everybody. By it's design concept, the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 is the perfect solution for running native PowerPC coded Operating Systems as well as emulated 68k OS segments. As a processor card which fits into the A4000 compatible fast slot, it allows to run 100% native PowerPC code, and has full access to all system hardware functionalities and interrupts which is not the case with add-ons that are not installed in the fast slot, but e.g. in a Zorro slot. With it's ability to be the master system CPU, the PowerPC on the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 does not need an additional 68k processor which is the case in other designs. Beside the technical advantages of this approach, it offers the user the opportunity to e.g sell an existing 68060 processor card in the second-hand market, thus lowering the cost of the upgrade to the PowerPC G3/G4 generation. phase 5 digital products will NOT built or deliver any software or hardware add-ons for the CYBERSTORM G3/G4. The CYBERSTORM G3/G4 will be open to third party developers in a wide way: o Software support will be realized with the new developments from Amiga Inc. and Haage&Partner, especially with the upcoming Amiga OS3.5 with PowerPC support, and upcoming 68k emulator products. Additionally, the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 is perfectly suited for the implementation of other Operating Systems such as Linux, which have already been realized on earlier PowerUp boards. o For hardware add-ons, the implemented PCI 2.1 interface will allow third-party vendors to design PCI bus backplanes, and write drivers for any common PCI card on the market. The interface is implemented as a single connector, to which other vendors can connects e.g. PCI cards or PCI backplanes, or design a physical link to PCI slots on bus expansion boards. However, due to the current market status, we can only justify the realization of this project with a significant number of preorders. We will therefore have to collect a total of 1,000 orders from customers (end users, dealers, or distributors). For each of these orders, we will also ask for a down-payment of DM 250, which will be collected on a notary account and will only be made available to us at the time we deliver the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 product to the customers. This gives security to all customers who want to support this exiting new project and get stunning G3/G4 performance for their Amiga, and will give security to us when we make the necessary investments. What will be the cost of this product, and are there benefits for preordering? The regular list price for the CYBERSTORM G3/G4, including o the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 mainboard with an Interposer ZIF socket for G3/G4 processor modules, 2 SDRAM DIMM sockets for up to 1 GB memory, 512 kB Flash ROM for system software (system software not provided with the board), a fully implemented PCI 2.1 interface with one connector (for PCI backplanes provided by third party vendors) o one G3 CPU module, with a PowerPC750 processor with 400MHz and one Megabyte Backside Cache with 200MHz clock rate will be DM 1,995 plus local taxes (in Germany: DM 2.299,- incl. MwSt). This price is based on the current price projections for components and parts for the 3rd quarter 1999, and will be updated whenever major components such as the CPUs fall in price. A price for a CYBERSTORM G3/G4 model with the new XPC7400 (G4 with Altivec) processor is not yet determined, and will depend on the pricing of these new processors. As soon as we have these pricings, we will determine a list price for this product. For those Amigans who are ready to support this major technological step forward by placing one of the necessary preorders, we offer a special benefit: Customers who are ready to order this board in advance, at the conditions mentioned herein, will get this stunning product for a special discounted preorder price of DM 1,750 plus local taxes, including world-wide free delivery by economy postal service. And even more: If the regular list price drops before the preordered CYBERSTORM G3/G4 boards start to ship, the discounted preorder price will be reduced by the same amount. How will the whole project proceed, and be finalized? First of all, we will now be looking forward to the response of the Amiga community to this project. The basic concepts of the CYBERSTORM G3/G4, as well as major parts of the design (such as the SDRAM controller and the PCI bridge) have been developed at phase 5 digital products during the past year, as building blocks of other projects that we are working on; in other words, most of the product is already "in the drawer". From the day we can make the decision to start the project finalization, we estimate roughly four months until the product can be shipped to the customers. Therefore, the shipping date will largely depend on the time which we need to collect the preorders. The project has four stages: 1. Announcement and preorder phase. We now collect preorders from customers all over the world. Please only place a preorder - which is not yet legally binding - if you are really ready to buy the CYBERSTORM G3/G4, and if you are ready to later pay the prepayment. If many users place preorders now, but then cancel or refuse to prepay, this will hurt the project flow significantly. If you are not definitely interested in this stunning new technology, please don't place an order. 2. Notification phase. Once we have received the necessary 1,000 preorders - the sooner, the better, of course - we will open the notary account, and send notifications to all customers which will include a proforma invoice and the terms of the contract, as well as information about the usage of the prepayments. At the same time, we will also release updated product information and updated pricing, if available. All customers will be asked to pay the prepayment with 3 weeks to the notary account. Important: The prepaid amounts will not become available to phase 5 digital products before we actually ship the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 boards to the customers who have ordered. If we fail to deliver the product within a certain time from date of notification, the prepaid money will be reimbursed. The prepaid money will not be reimbursed if the customer cancels his order for any reason. 3. Development phase Design finalization and verification, including rapid prototyping and full in-system test will require appx. 3 months. During this time, we will also work in close contact with other developers, and support software development on the new boards. 4. Release & Shipment Once the CYBERSTORM G3/G4 is released for production, we will go into the assembly, and start to fullfill the preorders. The first boards will ship appx. 4 weeks after the start of the production. We will fullfill the preorders in the order we have received them. After the preorders are fullfilled, we will decide if we continue to built CYBERSTORM G3/G4 boards for the regular market, what will depend on the market situation and the demand forecasts at this time. If you want to take part in this stunning new development for the AMIGA, which finally will bring the latest G3/G4 technology to the AMIGA and support the new developments by AMIGA Inc. and their partners, then go ahead and PLACE YOUR CYBERSTORM G3/G4 PREORDER NOW! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- . . . A N D F R O M M E T @ B O X PRESS ANNOUNCEMENT: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Hildesheim/ Germany, March 26, 1999 JoeCard G 3 goes AMIGA ! met@box AG (formerly known as PIOS Computer AG) is proud to announce the newest member of it´s award-winning JoeCard family: the AmiJOE. The AmiJOE will be the first pure PowerPC solution for the existing Amiga platform. AmiJOE will implement the powerful G3 PowerPC architecture which will enable the Amiga to outperform today´s personal computers. The met@box engineering team decided to make the AmiJOE available not only to users of the high end Amiga Systems, but also to the many people being committed to their A 1200. The basic specifications of the AmiJOE products are: o PowerPC 750 (Lonestar) G3 Processor o 333 or 400 MHz o 1.024 Kbyte Backside Cache o 66 MHz Local Bus Speed (A 1200) o 100 MHz Local Bus Speed (A 2000/ A 3000/ A 4000) o Universal Serial Bus (USB) o Realtime Clock (RTC) (A 1200 only) o PCI compatible Connector for future expansion (A 2000/ A 3000/ A 4000 only) - Socket für SDRAM Modules - Flash ROM for easy Software upgrade The AmiJOE for the A 1200 is clocked at 333 Mhz at a recommended street price of 599 EUR, while the AmiJOE for the A 2000/ A 3000/ A 4000 is clocked at 400 Mhz with a recommended street price of 899 EUR. Prices do not include VAT/MWSt. met@box AG is ready to take orders without any prepayments. First product shipments are planned for the beginning of Q3 1999. Purchase orders please send to sales@joecard.com http://www.joecard.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- U G N T A P S H E N R Y C H U N G FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 25th March 1999 The User Group Network (UGN) is pleased to announce the selection of Henry Chung as the Asia Coordinator for the UGN. Henry will help represent user groups located from Pakistan to the Far East. Henry, like the other Worldwide Coordintators, will collect information from user groups in his area when needed, as well as forward on to them information from the UGN, Amiga Inc., and developers. Henry is one of the many Coordinators who represent the UGN's Worldwide committment to supporting Amiga User Groups everywhere. The UGN Area Coordinators function as the Board of Directors. Their decisions make sure that the UGN goals and plans are beneficial to all. They will do their best to ensure that all Amiga User Groups are supported. The UGN is not about one person, or one country. It's about all of us! The User Group Network is an organization dedicated to the advancement of the Amiga oriented User Groups worldwide. The UGN will work cooperatively with all to establish a valuable resource to share and dissemminate information to Amiga User Groups. See what the UGN can offer your User Group at http://ugn.amiga.org. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- P A L M B A C K U P R E L E A S E D 2 Mar '99 W.F.M.H. is happy to announce that PalmBackup has been released. If you own an Amiga and 3Com's Palm Pilot Personal, Palm Pilot Professional, Palm III organizer, IBM's WorkPad or derivatives, this software is for you!. INTRODUCTION During the development of our PalmSuite for Amiga software, the PalmLink library was released. As we needed to find out if that library gives us any gain compared to our connection stack, we quickly adapted some tools we got here, to use PalmLink library. The PalmBackup is the result of that. FUNCTIONALITY PalmBackup features: o backup of user preselected organiser databases o restore o configurability of almost any option it offers. o multi user support o internal cache system (once you list your unit, PalmBackup will o keep the list of the remote files). o advanced manager for installing, removing, purging etc o fully system compatible o quick, fast and efficient code o fully localized o and more... AVAILABILITY W.F.M.H. home site: http://amiga.com.pl/ Aminet mirrors: comm/misc/PalmBackup.lha ---------------------------------------------------------------------- N E W S F R O M D V S D I R E C T 5 Mar '99 DVS Direct to Handle Assembly and Distribution of RBM Digitaltechnik Products in the US RBM Digitaltechnik of Eschwege Germany is the maker of several innovative products for the Amiga Computer including the TowerHawk expansion chassis. The TowerHawk expansion chassis is design to convert the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 desktop computers into a full tower configuration. The TowerHawk 1200ex is the world's first Amiga 1200 expansion system that fully supports Newtek's Video Toaster Flyer system. Other RBM products include IOBlix Multi - I/O - interfacecard: 4 serial ports and optional 10base/100base ethernet modules. DVS Direct will also be integrating Complete Amiga Based systems using the TowerHawk and A1200 . This will ensure an abundant supply of Amiga Host systems for the Video toaster Flyer as well as other Amiga specific applications using The Amiga 1200 Motherboard and TowerHawk. DVS Direct will be stocking TowerHawk components here in the US thus eliminating lead time for shipping. DVS Direct is also manufacturing an ISA adapter card to allow use of ISA power devices in the TowerHawk. For more information the TowerHawk go to our website at http://www.dvsdirect.com/ DVS Direct 69 Beaver Dr. Suite 110 DuBois PA 15801 PH 814 371 5640 FAX 814 371 2033 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- B E T T E R W E B F R O M P A N T H E O N FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - March 8, 1999 Pantheon Systems LLC today announced its BetterWeb web publishing hub service, which includes free home page publishing, great web publishing hints and tips, and a unique set of commentaries and news items for the web-savvy and web-beginner alike. Users with free web sites on BetterWeb are granted access to BetterWeb's ultra-easy web-based site management tool, which makes publishing and managing your web site a breeze. No clumsy FTP programs, just view and manage your site completely within your web browser! In addition, all BetterWeb users are automatically enrolled in the BetterWeb search engine, and have access to a set of excellent tools, including a hit counter and online discussion forums. Moreover, BetterWeb's servers are connected to the fastest Internet backbones, so you'll never have a delay calling up your free home page. Since the BetterWeb site management tool is completely CGI-driven, it is compatible with all Amiga browsers, including A-Web II 3.2, IBrowse 1.2, and Voyager 2.9x. To get started publishing your own, free home page, point your browser to: http://www.betterweb.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------- T W O N E W F R O M A T E O 12 Mar '99 Two product announcements from Atéo Concepts. Pixel64 ZorroIII Atéo Concepts is designing a new version of the Pixel64 named Pixel64 ZIII. This new version of the Pixel64 will plug on a ZIII slot of the A3000 or A4000 (Sorry, no ZII support...) 3D features for the Pixel64!!! Atéo Concepts is working on a 3D expansion for the Pixel64. This expansion will be based on the Voodoo chip (version 2 or 3). The 3D expansion will be available for all the Pixel64 version. The release date is not yet available. Full information about these news on http://www.ateo-concepts.com/amiga/eproj.html ---- AteoNet The cheaper Ethernet card for the Amiga are now available. Two models exists, a simple Ethernet with RJ45 output and a full version with RJ45, BNC and AUI output. More information and order on http://www.ateo-concepts.com/amiga/eateocards.html ATEO CONCEPTS Le Plessis 44220 COUERON FRANCE Tel : +33 (0)2 40 85 30 85 Fax : +33 (0)2 40 38 33 21 E-mail : info@ateo-concepts.com Web : http://www.ateo-concepts.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- C L I C K B O O M A U C T I O N F O R A L L Toronto, March 20, 1999: clickBOOM announces a fully automatic real-time online Auction place now open to all Amiga users. After a month of successful operation at The Portal and due to a high demand, clickBOOM has taken the next step, making Amiga Auctions available to everyone. This is where all the action is -- you can bid on or sell Amiga-related items at the one and only place of its kind on Amiga. Finally there is a place for Amiga users to be able to trade their hardware in a simple and absolutely private manner. 1. Amiga Auctions is the place where you will find the best Amiga deals, guaranteed. 2. Bidding is absolutely free. 3. If you have an Amiga-related item to sell, Amiga Auctions is the place - hold an auction and have other Amiga users bid on it. It's fully automatic - create a new auction in less than 5 minutes, and don't worry about it until you make a sale at the highest offered price. Best of all, it's free if your item doesn't sell! 4. Advanced options such as Automatic Bidder, three types of Auctions, notification, etc. 5. English and German, with more languages coming soon. To see all of the Auctions just visit http://clickboom.com/auctions If you wish to bid on, or sell items, fill out a simple form to register yourself, and you will automatically receive access within seconds. Portal users should continue accessing Auctions through The Portal. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A M I G A R A D I O N E W S March 20, 1999 The User Group Network (UGN) is pleased to announce the arrival of Amiga Radio News. Amiga Radio News the first Amiga news source to broadcast live to the Internet using streaming audio! Amiga User Groups can download and playback this weekly Amiga news update. Every Friday, a new update will uploaded to Amiga Radio News. Amiga Radio News is located at http://ugn.amiga.org/arn/. In order to listen to the Amiga Radio News you will need to download an Amiga compatible streaming audio player that supports either ADPCM or GSM 6.10. Fortunately two such players exist and are available off Aminet. ADPCM_Package.lha is needed for the ADPCM file, and GIR06.lha is needed for listening to the GSM encoded file. In the future Real Audio, MP3, and 8SVX file formats may be added. The User Group Network is an organization dedicated to the advancement of the Amiga computing platform and the fostering of Amiga oriented User Groups worldwide. The UGN will work co-operatively with the owners, licensees, user groups, and the users to establish and expand a customer support base for licensed Amiga computer products. The UGN will endeavor to provide a single, centralized resource for the promotion and assistance of User Groups and users world-wide. The UGN Web Page is located at "http://ugn.amiga.org". ---------------------------------------------------------------------- N E W I C O N S 4 . 5 A V A I L A B L E NewIcons 4.5 is now available for download. See below for the list of feature changes and fixes. Now the bad news. If you haven't heard already, Eric Sauvageau, our programmer, has ceased further development of NewIcons. While he still has his A1200, he is now spending most of his time on his new PC. Unfortunately, this is the second time I've had to annnounce the loss of our main coder to another platform (Nicola left the project after version 2). Eric has been kind enough to do one last version to optimize things further and fix some minor bugs. Fortunately, after nearly seven years of updating, the NewIcons System is highly optimized, and as stable as ever, and there are thousands of you out there using it every day. As was the case with Nicola, the NewIcons System has been a labor of love, rather than a commercial enterprise. Neither Eric, nor Nicola asked for one dime for all their hard efforts. I'm glad I've been a part of this project from the start, as it really exemplifies the spirit of the Amiga community. Eric still hangs out as an IRC operator on the Amiganet IRC network, and you can still catch him there often. You may be worried that this is the end of NewIcons...NOT SO! I will continue to pump out more icon sets and other NewIcons related graphics, and I'm sure many others will also. AmigaOS 3.5 is still in development (it's true), and I have a good feeling that the NewIcons concept of dynamically remapped, palette independent icons will, in some form, be integrated into the 3.5 operating system. When that happens, you can be assured that the images you're using today will still be usable, NewIcons patches or not. Overview of version 4.5: o 4.5 is mostly meant to be an housekeeping version. It mostly consists of fixes and minor improvements. It also denotes the departure from 2.04 support. We'll keep the low-end version of the library so that applications can still use it to display/remap icons, but the patch itself will now require V39 (Kickstart 3.0). o Most of the patch code was rewritten, speeding them up and making them smaller (some patches are now fully in ASM rather than a mixture of E and ASM). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- A N O T H E R M O Z I L L A P R O J E C T 9 Mar '99 MOZZAM is a project to port the Mozilla OpenSource browser to the Amiga platform. It used to be called AMozilla, but has recently been renamed to avoid confusion with another ongoing project with a similiar goal (but different approach). MOZZAM utilizes the MXlib, my own X server library which utilizes MUI to provide a native X client API to applications. The ultimate goal behind MOZZAM is to be in sync with the Unix source tree of Mozilla and, on the long run, to simply do ./configure make make install with any new Mozilla source release on a gcc equipped Amiga. MXLib will be made public later on as an OpenSource resource to ease porting of other well known applications from the Linux world to AmigaOS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- T H O R 2 . 6 R E L E A S E D 28 Feb 99 Ultima Thule Software is happy to announce that THOR 2.6 (finally) has been released. - THOR - Release 2.6 Copyright (C) 1993-1999 Ultima Thule Software, All Rights Reserved. THOR 2.6 is an advanced multi-format offline reader, supporting the QWK, Fido, UUCP, SOUP, Bluewave, Omen, ABBS, MBBS and Hippo (BBBS) message formats. It will also handle TCP-connections with NNTP, SMTP and POP3, with extensive MIME support. Changes from 2.5a to 2.6: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ THOR: - New Save window added. - The main listview has complete support for proportional fonts now. There's a slight speed penalty involved with using proportional fonts due to some extra calculations required for the wrap code, but it shouldn't be too bad. - Fixed so that GETCURRENTSYSTEM from an ARexx enter/leave script will report the correct conference at all times. - SAVEMESSAGE from ARexx has several new arguments. - The conferences window now has a tree-view layout, with configurable folder setup etc. - Trippled the minimum stack size due to reports of a possible problem with the stack on advanced multipart messages. - You will now be allowed to Edit Data on a Forward Msg event and add a text comment, or remove the previous text comment. - Previous search results will now be cleared in all conferences and not just those that matches the current result. - The TAB key or the small gadget marked 'S' can now be used to toggle selection of all enties in all requesters where multiple entries can be selected from a list (eg. To Name/Address when sending mail, joining groups, etc). - Added FilterThor to the external menu. FilterThor is a new MUI based tool to configure sortmail triggers. - Added conferences field in the attachment listview in the pack/purge window. + many bug fixes and improvements QUESTIONS? ~~~~~~~~~~ There is a newsgroup for Thor with the name of alt.sys.amiga.thor. If the group is not available at your newsserver, ask for it by sending a mail to your system admin. Mailing Lists: The old THOR mailing list has be resurrected. To subscribe to this list, send a mail to majordomo@thule.no with "subscribe thor-ml " in the body. There is a mailing list for developers of programs and ARexx scripts related to THOR. To subscribe to this list, send a mail to majordomo@thule.no with "subscribe thor-dev " in the body. If you have no interest in making scripts or programs related to THOR, you do not need to join this mailing list. -- Petter Nilsen EMail THOR Team: thor@thule.no WWW site: http://www.thule.no/ EMail: pettern@thule.no IRC: Mitchman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- W I L D F I R E 7 F R O M N O V A D E S I G N 17 Mar 1999 Wildfire 7 - Animation Sequencing and 3D Effects Nova Design, Inc., producers of the award winning ImageFX package and the highly received Aladdin 4D package, are proud to announce that they have arranged to be the exclusive distributors of the Wildfire 3D effects package for North America -- now in version 7! Wildfire is an exciting new animation sequencing, 3D effects, transitions, and animation package by Andreas Maschke published in Germany by Oberland Computer. It can be compared to SGI Flint or Flame systems and it is capable of creating amazing 3D effects by mapping video sequences into Wildfire's intuitive storyboard animation sequencing system. Wildfire is perfect for the animation hobbyist, Toaster/Flyer professional, Movieshop/Draco editor and all others who use their Amigas for animation and video. Highlights of Wildfire Wildfire is a professional animation sequencer that allows you to create and process animations in several formats, to generate time-dependant 3D special-effects and design large projects containing several animations and frame-synchronized sound-effects. Wildfire's animation sequencing allows you to combine animations on a timeline and output the results as a YAFA animation with synchronized sound. Wildfire is able to perform basic non-linear editing of animation sequences and can import or export frame sequences, Amiga ANIMs, YAFAs, MPEGs, Windows AVI, and Macintosh Quicktime formats! The 3D effects included in Wildfire include height-field deforms, cubes that automatically unfold and fold again, Lightwave object support, 3D magnet effects, 3D transitional morphing, unlimited mathematical deformations, twists, sphere mapping, twirling, water transitions, perspective transforms and more! o Full CyberGraphX Support o Font Sensitive GUI o Full PowerPC Support o Storyboard editor Interface o Convert using MPEG, AVI and Quicktime movie formats o Timecodes Editor o Envelope Controls for Effects o Filmstrip Interfaces o Real-time Feedback o Transition Maker o Preview for almost any Operation o Animation with Sound o Post Processing Tools o Color correction Tools o 24-bit Animation Player with Sound Wildfire is an open development platform, like Nova Design, Inc.'s own products, with a complete plug-in development system and a full Arexx interface (with over 400 commands) is included. Ordering Wildfire Wildfire works on your standard Amiga 68k models as well as the PowerPC and it is only $199.95. You'll find it's available at your favorite Amiga dealer or mail order firm. Wildfire comes on CDROM and requires an Amiga 68k series or PowerPC system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Amiga Update on the net: All back issues available at: http://www.globaldialog.com/AdventureCentral/AU/index.html Stop by and check out our archive! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 1999 by Brad Webb. Freely distributable, if not modified. ====================================================================== _ __ _ <>_ __ _ A M I G A /\\ |\ /|| || / ` /\\ A M I G A U P D A T E /__\\ | \ / || || || ___ /__\\ U P D A T E / \\_ | \/ ||_ _||_ \__// / \\_ amigaupdate@globaldialog.com ======================================================================