@thread
yet another series posts on the
amiwest 2015 blog for you today, including the news that ron nicholson, one of the original amiga hardware designers, will be presenting this year:
Ron Nicholson who, along with Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, designed the hardware for the A1000, has just confirmed that he will present at AmiWest 2015! He is "pulling out all the stops" to present for us just after arriving back in the US after a European trip.
Ron founded HotPaw Productions, developing apps since the app store first opened. His long career includes working as product and system architect for many famous tech companies such as Wyse (now part of Dell), Agate Logic, and Silicon Graphics. His SGI work included developing interactive television systems and consumer multimedia/3D graphics ASICs. He also designed a portion of the Nintendo 64 Reality Co-Processor, and was involved in the design of ASICs for the MIPS Magic Carpet and digital video servers.
He studied engineering and math at UC Berkeley, designing a RISC CPU for Dr. Sequin's CS152A class. He later worked at Apple Computer on Apple II peripherals including the "Super Serial Card," the "Integrated Woz Machine" disc controller ASIC, and the CMOS clock chip for the original Macintosh (case signatures, Mac 128K through SE), as well as the Apple IIc.
In 1983, he was one of the founders of Amiga Corp., where he was a lead hardware architect of the Amiga 1000 along with Jay Miner and Joe DeCuir and graphics chip set architecture designer.
You don't want to miss his presentation. We've told him he can have all the time he wants to have. The presentation is scheduled for Saturday the 17th at 11 AM.
another presentation this year will be from amiga.org member dan schallock on his amiga animation package, take 2:
Dan Schallock, new SACC member and long-time Amiga animator, announced September 27 that Take 2 animation software has been released into his domain. Dan now has the 68K software and assembly source code in his possession.
Take 2 is a great piece of Amiga software. The developer has continued to update it for other current platforms and was not using the 68K version. The developer has released the code as a donation to the Amiga community.
From Animator Mag, here is a description:
"Taking an entirely different approach to animation sequencing is Take 2 from Rombo. This really is an animation package for animators. In fact, it was originally written by Geert Vergauwe as a line tester program when he was a student at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. If the anims, animbrushes, scenes, parts and videos of Deluxe Video sound daunting, then fear not. Take 2 terminology is extremely traditional. Cels are loaded into a Picture Panel either after being created in another art package (such as Deluxe Paint), or automatically if you grab them with a Vidi Amiga digitizer (also made by Rombo).
Take 2 controls the Vidi Amiga digitizer directly from a special digitizer screen. The program automatically numbers drawings as they are digitized, and even speaks their name out loud to confirm that it has done so!
Once cells are loaded into Take 2's Picture Panel, they can be pasted into a four-level exposure sheet. A Cell Panel controls how many times and where they are inserted. The mouse can then be used to drag cells about and to increase or decrease their duration on screen. Sound samples can also be pasted onto the extreme left of the exposure sheet. Once you are ready to play the animation, simply select Flipper and the animation will run at either 24 or 25fps as selected. A VCR style panel is utilised as in other programs to step through animations when in this Flipper mode."
So come and see it at AmiWest 2015! The demo will be on Saturday afternoon. Be sure to come see it run and hear Dan describe how he used it as part of our celebration of 30 years of Amiga.
looking forward to both of these.
-- eliyahu
