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Author Topic: The DraCo/Dracovision, the first "true" Amiga clone  (Read 16796 times)

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Offline number6

Re: The DraCo/Dracovision, the first "true" Amiga clone
« on: September 06, 2009, 04:56:09 PM »
@Gulliver

No list of contributors would be complete without mentioning at minimum, the following:
Douglas Nakakihara - Probably the best amiga manual writer I ever knew
Sherwood Stockwell - Beta testing co-ordinator Macrosystems U.S.
And *cough* the testers themselves, who never got to meet one another until years later. That IS, how it was done back then.

Oh...and Eric, Bohus, and others might have a different spin on the public history you summarized, but I doubt you'll see them post. Eric was Macrosystems U.S., better known as Noahji's. Bohus still works in the video editing business and was on the Draco team in the U.S.

And, although Casablanca was ahead of its time, we can see that time marches on with this page, which might have been written by Steve..dunno. We had a lot of "Steves".

http://www.kernersville.com/casablanca/index.html

More info:
http://www.kernersville.com/draconet

Macrosystems U.S.:
http://www.macrosystem.us

Some Macrosystems history:
http://www.macrosystem.de/e/history.html

Sadly, the group is gone now at:
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/MovieShop
Prior to that there was a listserver, which contained a wealth of Amiga audio/video knowledge. Sadly, that was all lost.

I'll stop now before I start sounding like Bernie, telling old war stories. Heh.

#6
 

Offline number6

Re: The DraCo/Dracovision, the first "true" Amiga clone
« Reply #1 on: September 06, 2009, 05:35:03 PM »
@Gulliver

Another thing people today might appreciate knowing is the general co-operation amongst the top firms back then. Most old timers will remember MainActor, so this tie-in with Macrosystems might be of interest.
Macrosytems-MainConcept
Interesting to also note that the last version of AdPro (unreleased) contained a new file viewer, MainView, which was also a part of the MainActor package.

Added: btw-I don't recall anyone working on these projects ever discussing whether we were a "clone".

#6
 

Offline number6

Re: The DraCo/Dracovision, the first "true" Amiga clone
« Reply #2 on: September 06, 2009, 06:32:20 PM »
@terminator4

I don't see that as a fair comparison since the Draco was a non-linear editor and the Toaster was not.
I think you mean a Video Toaster/Flyer system, and it was quite easy to spend a small fortune on those. 5-10 grand not uncommon. After all, certified 9gig SCSI drives were almost a grand alone back then and you needed several..

#6
 

Offline number6

Re: The DraCo/Dracovision, the first "true" Amiga clone
« Reply #3 on: September 06, 2009, 07:51:13 PM »
@amigadave

Regarding differences between classic and Draco...I would sometimes get software on a Draco DRDD or DRHD formatted disk. All I had to do was run the Draco driver on the A4000 to access the disks.
Most of the dedicated graphics packages of software for Draco were backward compatible with the A4000. In fact, that was part of what I tested. At the time they were looking at making some of the Draco software available for the 68k machines running Movieshop, but I think the thrust had already changed to focus on Casablanca by then.
Dunno if the general public saw most of these addons like Monument Designer and such for classic Amiga, but they were quite advanced for their time, imo.

Added: Yes, the Time Base correction with VlabMotion worked quite well actually.

#6
« Last Edit: September 06, 2009, 07:58:40 PM by number6 »