Quote:
Originally Posted by emufan
1988 and 8 mb ram expansion - i can imagine newtek gave out some demo disks to some professional costumers on some fairs, but those already vanished or dumped what they had from the amiga times.
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Oh no. It was definitely made available by some PD Libraries at the time and for years afterwards outside the USA. Some hard drives even shipped with it pre-installed (ahem). Long after Newtek binned it and denied any liability. The thing is, advertising material is PD. If they had just used scenes from adverts of the movies, they could have been much more bold about the matter. I think it was Fox that bullied them into backing down.
The big problem was keeping a set of floppies (it was multiple disks, I'm pretty sure) intact. Bit rot and viruses were rampant, and even loudspeakers could damage them beyond playback. And once it was pulled, it stopped turning up at the magazines. In floppy form from PD Libraries, anyway.
I saw it, but I never laid hands on a complete set. When I arrived at format, they were consigned to the "blank disk" box already.
AF was a beast for requiring floppy disks, you see. Most of the copy was typed on Amigas. That meant crossloading via PC floppy onto the Macs. For everything. Inclulding screen grabs of software. AF wasn't special in this way, if a target computer could be used well for wordprocessing, then it was used for word processing. It bonded the writers to the machine. Not for C64, spectrum titles, but everything else was sourced on the magazine subject machine at one point. That's where Future started. Using CPM based Amstrad CPC (Colour Personal Computers) to write copy on. They were OK for that, if you had a WP on ROM. Loaded in one second, spell checkerr too.
I grovelled. I pleaded. I begged. I cried. I tried flattery, bribery, corruption, blackmail even. Nothing worked. Never was I allowed to lay my hands on a network card, plug it into the office A2000, and just do things the easy way. Fear over network disruption outweighed any possible increase in productivity. Basically I wasn't trusted. Other mags just went ahead and did it and stuck two fingers up to the Network people. Instead, I ended up with a Mac plonked on my desk next to an A2000. So I could format my own floppy disks. This was seen as a "productive" use of my time.
Every time you wrote an article or needed to transfer screen grabbed pictures, you had to format a blank PC disk (on the Mac, so a Mac could read it). If it didn't format, it was trashed. No point keeping a dud.
About half of the PD library disks came from ONE source. Ray Burt Frost. RBF software. He loved that demo. At Amiga shows he would have it running. I guess a lot of PD Libraries did similar things. Including 17 bit maybe, before they did games. They certainly kept the post people busy sending bags of new material in.
Later on, after I had stopped coming in to the office, an Amiga was setup on the Network. By then screengrabs were always digital anyway. They were captured on a Mac, but only for lowres game screens, never hires. It wasn't that good at grabbing quality perfect from a raw Amiga video output.
Toaster wasn't an option. That was Sony's doing. Although whether by choice or necessity, I never found out. Toaster relied on a Sony chip, and they never did a PAL version for some reason, only an NTSC version. If Newtek could have built a PAL Toaster, they would have. Maybe. Maybe they thought that wasn't necessary, ultimately. I sure heard that way, and Newtek called a lot of nasty names too. I think they were victims of their own success. They kept succeeding, but CBM did not.
Sony certainly would have earned a tidy sum from all those Toaster sales, if the myth is true. Maybe that's what tipped them off. They rolled it big and are still rolling it big on games. I must admit, I tried following the wave into Sony, but I had another path to follow. I guess I could have really pushed and made it with them, but they certainly didn't need me, and I guess I didn't need to be part of Playstation. They had some really nice people. Michelle Harris did go that route, and she was a GREAT person to work with at Format. She went through EA first though. A brilliant female success story in a male dominated industry. She earned that, but she never wrote a word that appeared in the magazine, I think. Advertising, liasion organization, and show / live event organizer. I met her and talked at the London launch, and admired the work, and told everyone Playstation would dominate the UK game industry for five years minimum. Some were scornful at my words, but there you go.