A-Squared Live! Frame Grabbers

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SACC Guy
Reviving this old thread. Do you still have the Mandala software for Amiga Live! boards? I have a couple of them and want to get a system up. Please let me know thanks.

I have the Mandala software, legal disks even, which I bought years ago from someone at college in Pennsylvania one spring. I didn't install it right away, but when I did, I found out it needed a hardware dongle like Scala! Which, of course, was not sent with the disks. By this time, he had gone home/graduated, and I was never able to track him back down.

I heard that there were dongle-less versions, but I've never been able to track one down - or a dongle. Anybody know what happened to Vivid Group?

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Hardlink

That is interesting. Would you be willing to make copies of the disks for me. I think you should .dms them for all of us. Vivid Group is now defunct AFAIK...Maybe one of the original programmers is still around...

I seem to have boxes of Amiga floppies almost to the ceiling, so it may take awhile to find. Since the program is unusable without the dongle, it's mainly of historical interest ...

Calum Tsang, who used to be maintainer of the Amiga 3000 Hardware Technical Notes, worked at Vivid Group, although not a programmer. He is very active on the web now and apparently works for RIM; perhaps someone with a little time could contact him and see if he knows what happened to the tech people (who knows, maybe he still works with them:).



Woha! It's coming back to me now - there was something better than Mandala. From the web page:

http://philosborn.joeuser.com/article/15624

"Meanwhile, one-man-show Tensor Productions, created a Mandala clone for the Amiga and then for the PC, but preserving all the programmability and other functionality of the Amiga version, unlike Mandala, and sold it at a tiny fraction of what Vivid was asking for a vastly inferior system. However, Joe Shen (Tensor) also feared patent suits, and so he never tried to seriously market his product. Dean Friedman  ended up as Joe's only customer,* and finally he put the Amiga version of his CyberScape out there for anyone to use freely, and took the PC version off the market altogether."

And it's STILL available, and he open-sourced the source code! I believe just before he quit developing it, he added support for VLab frame grabbers, which are much easier to get than Live! boards. Taa Daa:

http://www.inter-actor.com/software.htm

Okay everybody, get hacking!

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I just looked at the source code for CyberScape, and this version does not include the VLab support. Should not be that hard to add if the programming Vlab info is available. However, there is support for a Mattell Powerglove!

BTW, there is a rumor that Dale Luck has been playing around with a Live! board very recently. Now he could write some good software if he wanted to! Since he and RJ invented/wrote the original Boing Ball, how about making it respond to video