NEWS, NOTES AND QUOTES
BY STEPHEN MORTIMER
INSIDE ATARI
Atari racked up a solid profit of $1.5 million in the second quarter of 1990 on sales of $84.9 million. Last year Atari earned $300,000 on sales of $82.7 million. Atari President Sam Tramiel attributes the increased earnings to continued strong sales of the Portfolio and greater market penetration of the portable Lynx game machine.
LEXICOR AND IMAGE SYSTEMS
Image Systems is now shipping their own 24" monochrome monitor. Utilizing integrated circuits and modular design, the monitor can be fixed easily if anything breaks. It has multi-synching capability up to a resolution of 2000 x 1500, and is compatible with the Moniterm controller board. Jay Craswell of Image Systems says the company is planning to make their own high-resolution monochrome monitor controller that will support user-definable resolutions.
Lexicor, another high-end graphics publisher, is producing three software packages offering photo-realistic editing capabilities. Prism Paint is a resolution-independent color paint program that includes page-flipping animation. Rosetta allows users to view objects from many different CAD formats, including CAD-3D, DFX and Sculpt. The draft animation program in Rosetta allows realtime animation to be produced in a moving storyboard format and then saved as a Delta file. Chronos is Lexicor's motion-control program. This complete animation package can also save animations as Delta files as well as in a custom Lexicor format.
To complement the software, Lexicor offers an image-capture and Genlock package developed by JRI. A 24-bit color board for animation is also available. Lee Seiler of Lexicor stated that his company is completing the development of the ParSec graphics-board software that will be offered in the United States by Rio/Datel.
Lexicor offers their software in a package containing TOS 1.4 and the ISAC board for $775, $25 cheaper than the retail price of ISAC. Rio/ Datel markets the Lexicor hardware and software. To contact Lexicor, call (415) 453-0271.
CALAMUS SL - THE NEXT GENERATION
Calamus SL is near completion and is expected to be ready for Fall COMDEX, according to Nathan Potechin of ISD. This modular version of the desktop publishing package includes new, major features, with color support and four-color separation first on the list.
Other advances include a module that converts a page to CVG format so that, in turn, it can be converted to Postscript and printed. (A direct Postscript driver is under development.) A new Line Art module, the modular version of Outline Art, features over 30 new functions. The Calamus SL Raster Vector module will import raster images for autotracing using Bezier curves. The upgrade policy has not been announced.
|