Classic Computer Magazine Archive START VOL. 5 NO. 3 / NOVEMBER 1990

NEWS, NOTES AND QUOTES


BY STEPHEN MORTIMER


INSIDE ATARI

Atari racked up a solid profit of $1.5 million in the second quarter of 1990 on sales of $84.9 million. Last year Atari earned $300,000 on sales of $82.7 million. Atari President Sam Tramiel attributes the increased earnings to continued strong sales of the Portfolio and greater market penetration of the portable Lynx game machine.


LEXICOR AND IMAGE SYSTEMS

Image Systems is now shipping their own 24" monochrome monitor. Utilizing integrated circuits and modular design, the monitor can be fixed easily if anything breaks. It has multi-synching capability up to a resolution of 2000 x 1500, and is compatible with the Moniterm controller board. Jay Craswell of Image Systems says the company is planning to make their own high-resolution monochrome monitor controller that will support user-definable resolutions.

Lexicor, another high-end graphics publisher, is producing three software packages offering photo-realistic editing capabilities. Prism Paint is a resolution-independent color paint program that includes page-flipping animation. Rosetta allows users to view objects from many different CAD formats, including CAD-3D, DFX and Sculpt. The draft animation program in Rosetta allows realtime animation to be produced in a moving storyboard format and then saved as a Delta file. Chronos is Lexicor's motion-control program. This complete animation package can also save animations as Delta files as well as in a custom Lexicor format.

To complement the software, Lexicor offers an image-capture and Genlock package developed by JRI. A 24-bit color board for animation is also available. Lee Seiler of Lexicor stated that his company is completing the development of the ParSec graphics-board software that will be offered in the United States by Rio/Datel.

Lexicor offers their software in a package containing TOS 1.4 and the ISAC board for $775, $25 cheaper than the retail price of ISAC. Rio/ Datel markets the Lexicor hardware and software. To contact Lexicor, call (415) 453-0271.


CALAMUS SL - THE NEXT GENERATION

Calamus SL is near completion and is expected to be ready for Fall COMDEX, according to Nathan Potechin of ISD. This modular version of the desktop publishing package includes new, major features, with color support and four-color separation first on the list.

Other advances include a module that converts a page to CVG format so that, in turn, it can be converted to Postscript and printed. (A direct Postscript driver is under development.) A new Line Art module, the modular version of Outline Art, features over 30 new functions. The Calamus SL Raster Vector module will import raster images for autotracing using Bezier curves. The upgrade policy has not been announced.


FAT BITS

  • Gribnif Software's NeoDesk gets a facelift with version 3 of the bestselling desktop replacement. Low-resolution support, split windows, Desktop Notes (tm) and a file clipboard are four major enhancements. With split windows, two different parts of a directory are displayed in one window. Desktop Notes (tm) allows the user to jot down ideas directly onto the desktop. The file clipboard is an automatic RAM disk that is automatically sized as its files are copied and deleted.

  • Spectre 128/GCR version 3.0 now supports the 68030 microprocessor, the heart of the TT and Gadgets by Small's processor upgrade board. Also, the Megatalk board is nearly ready. Megatalk connects to the expansion bus in Mega STs and provides both Appletalk and Mac SCSI ports. Dave Small says SCSI devices, including hard disks and CDROMs, can be connected directly to the board and used with Spectre.

  • Goldleaf Publishing has produced two new versions of Wordflair, 1.1 and 2.0. Registered users can upgrade to 1.1 from 1.0 for $5; the 2.0 upgrade costs $50. The latest version is faster, 80K smaller, and includes keyboard shortcuts, a desk accessory for image conversion, and a spell checker, a thesaurus and a hyphenation dictionary. It supports footnotes, and comma-delimited ASCII files can be imported into its database.