BIT ONE: Impulse to Release Imagine 6.0 for Amiga
Due to continued interest in both the Amiga and Imagine, Impulse has decided to support the Amiga in their newest release of their premier 3D ray tracing package Imagine. This new version will support many new features from 040, 060, and Power PC support to jiggle and jitter effects. You can find out more from their web site at http://www.coolfun.com/. The cost for this upgrade will be $200 American or $100 if you enrole in their Constant Upgrade Program for Imagine which gets you no less than four upgrades through the next twelve months.
Stick to this magazine for reviews of this product when it becomes available.
Contributed by: Anthony BeckerBIT TWO: Vulcan, and I don't mean Spock
Seems that there is scarcely a month where Vulcan Software is not mentioned. They are hell-bent on becoming the premier Amiga software developer. With releases like Valhalla, Tiny Troops, and Burnout under their belt their web site now hosts information for software writers bent on being published, information and demos of their products, and the coming attractions from a seemingly endless parade of new titles. Their Mini Series line will be lengthened with titles like Final Odyssey, Pinball Brain Damage, Valhalla and the Charms of King Paul, and their foray into "serious" software, the 3D Environment Construction Kit. This series will be augmented by the Mega Series line of software. These will include Strangers, Uropa2 The Ulterior Colony, Wasted Dreams, Hell Pigs, Genetic Species (previewed in last month's issue), Breed 2001, and Scions of a Forgotten World.
To show that they are not just releasing games to make a quick killing and moving on Vulcan are doing another extraordinary move. They are supporting their existing games. On their web site and on Aminet are 4 free cars and 8 free add-on arenas for Burnout, their futuristic demolition derby game. There is also news of an upcoming expansion disk of 3D landscapes for their flight simulator JETPilot.
The word from Tone is to bookmark Vulcan's Website and visit it often.
BIT THREE: Multithreaded Workbench?
With a machine like the Amiga with its advanced multitasking operating system you would be surprised to find out that its GUI, the Workbench, is not. Try this test: in WB2.x and up lasso a bunch of files and drag them over to another drive to copy them. Now, while the first group is being copied lasso another group to do the same. Can't because of the busy pointer, right?? That is because Workbench is not multithreaded. Multithreaded is when a program (task) can spawn off a process (thread) to perform a task which can then multitask with the original program. This frees up the original program to spawn off more threads and eliminates the busy pointer. For Workbench to be multithreaded, it would have to be rewritten to spawn off processes such as copying or deleting files as separate threads. Commodore never did this, so until now we have been forced to use other programs such as SID or DOpus to augment Workbench. Now there is MBench.
The MBench 0.9c demo can be downloaded from Aminet. Installation is simple and requires Workbench 2.x and up. You need only make two assigns and create the Workspace directory under the provided icon (an oversight in the archive). Then you need only run MBench to replace the aging Commodore Workbench with a multithreaded version. The limitation of the demo is that you can only run one program at a time from MBench. A workaround is to run a program that allows you to execute DOS commands from within it like Term.
MBench not only adds multithreading to Workbench. It also adds a user-customizable menu that you can configure by simply dropping Icons into a drawer much like the Macintoshe's Apple Menu. It also adds Windows 95-like shortcut arrows to Icons that are "Left Out" on the desktop, replaces Exchange with a Commodities menu item, and adds the Copy- and Delete-type requesters in a library so that they can be used by other programs for a consistent look and feel.
MBench 0.9C
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