are universally available. Larry Niven and I use Zip cartridges for file transfers now, and I can testify that they are pretty rugged.
Of course, Zip drives are relatively slow, and while 100 MB used to be quite a lot, now it may not be enough to hold all of a big project.
The answer to the speed problem is to use a SCSI-cartridge drive, either internal or external. There are a number of these, including Iomega's Jaz drive.
Another good system is the Olympus SYS.230, a 230-MB cartridge system from the same people who make my wonderful digital camera. This is an external drive that comes with a parallel-to-SCSI conversion cable as well as a regular SCSI cable. It has SCSI termination and diagnostic lights, it's easy to use, and the cartridges are magneto-optical (MO).
MO is slower than conventional magnetic-cartridge drives, but it's vastly more stable. Records on MO cartridges may not be eternal, but they'll last for decades. I wouldn't trust a magnetic cartridge for more than five years. MO cartridges are also infinitely rewritable. I've never had any problems with the Zip cartridges Niven and I use to exchange files, and I don't expect to, but problems are even less likely with MO.
Finally, MO cartridges are cheap and somewhat smaller than magnetic cartridges ho
lding the same amount of data. At 230 MB, one cartridge is large enough to hold nicely, say, the entire Visual Basic environment plus all my program files, lesson scripts, wave-table sounds, etc., and the cartridges are cheap enough to allow spare copies. Except for speed, MO has it all over magnetic cartridges. The cartridges are a bit harder to get than Zip cartridges, but most big supply houses will have them.
If 230 MB isn't enough, there's the new SyQuest SyJet. This monster holds 1.5 GB per cartridge. There are internal and external versions of the drive. Both install easily and have worked just fine. They're not quite as fast as a regular hard drive, but they're sure fast enough, as fast as any drive was only a few years ago. The medium probably isn't as rugged as the Zip cartridge, but that's mostly a guess from inspection. SyQuest has been making removable-cartridge drives long enough to get the bugs out, and I make no doubt that the SyJet cartridges are rugged enough.
You just connect the Sy
Jet into the SCSI-drive string -- in my case, that included an external Zip drive and a Fujitsu DynaMO drive. Turn the system on, install the SyQuest utility software, and Bob's your uncle. Of course, you'll get the usual drive displacements. The SyJet muscled ahead of the Zip and Fujitsu drives as well as the CD-ROM drive. Fortunately, it left the D drive alone, installing itself as drive E.
After you have the SyJet installed, you can go into System Manager and try to set drive-letter priorities. They may even work, but they won't be reliable, because the SyJet behaves differently on boot-up depending on whether or not there's a cartridge in the drive. Without a cartridge, it can be told to be drive F or G, any letter before the CD-ROM drive (it insists on having a lower letter than a mere CD-ROM drive). If there's a cartridge locked in on boot-up, the SyJet will grab the E slot -- no matter what you have told it to be. That was my experience, anyway.
The SyQuest software behaves well when you discon
nect the SyJet: it becomes invisible except for a desktop icon that will inform you there's no drive if you click on it.
All told, the SyJet is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem of software bloat, and when, as seems inevitable, I find I've filled up Princess's 4-GB hard drive, I'll hook up the SyJet again. By then, they ought to have Windows NT 4 drivers, so I can use it no matter which way Princess boots up.
David Em, our artist associate who works on high-end graphics,
has our new test-bed Compaq with dual monitors and twin Elsa Gloria-L OpenGL-accelerated video boards, as well as our new Power Mac 9500 MP dual-processor system. David has been working both systems hard; here's his report:
"First the Compaq. I loaded PageMaker 6.5 and used it to design two publications. The first was a brochure for Griffin's (David's son) day-care facility. This consisted of some text, some black-and-white photos, and some line art. The combination of the Compaq's processing speed, 2
56 MB of RAM, and the fast Elsa graphics boards makes for a powerful punch -- there were no noticeable performance lags, and I knocked the thing together in no time flat (imagine how long it would take to paste up something like this).
"Next was a more complicated project, a 30-page illustrated children's book called James the Dinosaur. Each page is 4 inches by 4 inches by 300 dots per inch, plus a text layer, which comes to a little over 8 MB per double-page spread. I found that what works best for me is to use three programs simultaneously: PageMaker, Photoshop, and Fractal Design's Painter. I use Painter to create the images, Photoshop to adjust them, and PageMaker to lay out the pictures with the text. By keeping all three programs open at once, I'm able to work on the images and keep the final publication in front of me and updated at every stage.
"This is where the dual-headed two-monitor display really pays off. I keep PageMaker open at all times on one monitor and use the other to work on the
images, which as soon as they're done, I move into PageMaker. This greatly enhances productivity, not only because I'm not constantly opening and closing programs, but because I can quickly update what I'm working on if it doesn't look right on the page.
"This is also where all that RAM earns its keep, since these three programs are all memory hogs. With all three open, it is quite easy to run up to the limit (256 MB), so often I just have two open at any one time, and even then it doesn't take long to hit the wall. To work on an 8- by 10-inch book with full-color illustrations, it wouldn't hurt to have a full gigabyte of RAM (the usual strategy is to break a publication up into smaller sections, but obviously that's not ideal).
"I tried printing both projects on the Alps MD-2010 color printer, which turned out to be a real pain. It is somewhat finicky about paper stock in higher resolutions (600 by 600 dpi), has problems with placement, and often repeats line columns. I'm still fooling around trying
to get this sorted out, at the cost of a lot of time and ink. It's interesting to note that this printer comes with only Windows 95 drivers; a color printer without Mac drivers would have been unthinkable two years ago, wouldn't it?
"I've just started on the 3-D side of things with the Compaq, and the results so far are impressive. I'm using 3D Studio Max from Kinetix/Autodesk as my 3-D program of choice. It was designed for NT from the ground up and takes full advantage of multiprocessing and multithreading. Its interface is the most unified and, in my opinion, the best designed of the 3-D programs available for NT.
"With the two-monitor configuration, I can keep the visualization viewports from getting cluttered up with all the menus and display panels the program uses. Having the major interface components always available, but not on top of my workspace, means I can spend most of my time creating instead of constantly covering and uncovering the workspace with panels I need to access frequently, b
ut for only a few seconds at a time.
"The two Elsa graphics boards (as compared to the Matrox Millennium in Princess; Compaq makes the Elsas available for those needing great OpenGL speed) have dramatically speeded up the viewport displays, and the on-board texture memory means I can get a pretty close approximation of what my scenes will look like before rendering. A big win here -- I used to do a lot of time-intensive renders to get an idea of what was going on in a scene, but this is no longer necessary unless I want to examine fine detail or lighting.
"Speaking of rendering, the speeds are very fast (seconds rather than minutes for a lot) in 640- by 480-pixel video resolution. Higher-resolution renders are fast, too. The hit for greater resolution does not seem to be linear. Rendering, by the way, is all processor-based; the graphics cards have no effect here. Since 3D Studio Max can manage a thousand rendering processors, setting up a render farm made up of a ton of Pentiums without graphics boar
ds or monitors could be a pretty cost-effective way of creating motion-picture-resolution animations.
"By the way, despite my obsession with color and resolution fidelity, I find that working in 16 bits rather than 24 or 32 is fine for 3-D work. The 16-bit image dithering is excellent. I can tell the difference only in finely graduated areas, a luxury I'm willing to forgo for 1600- by 1200-pixel resolution on each screen. Also, 16 bits is faster, so performance is improved. Anyone not needing the finest color fidelity 100 percent of the time should consider this option.
"Kinetix's 3D Studio Max has an open architecture that lends itself to easy plug-in development, and there are already over 150 of them out there, for generating everything from explosions to schools of fish swimming through water. One of the most impressive is Character Studio, from Kinetix. It lets you create a "skeleton" for two-legged creatures, attach a mesh figure to it (human, dinosaur, alien, or whatever), and animate it by lay
ing down footsteps on the ground, which the character follows. Using this footstep-driven animation, you can easily make digital characters walk, run, jump, climb, do flips, etc. Actions like this that used to take days to animate can now be done in minutes. This is revolutionary stuff.
"We have not yet reached nirvana, however. Certain calculations such as complex Boolean transformations can still take forever and a day; and as with the 2-D stuff, once 3-D objects begin to look really good with smooth curves and high-resolution textures, the need for RAM just won't quit. Also, when it comes to animation, the hard drive requirements go up astronomically. Even with 8 GB on the Compaq, I'm constantly editing and scraping to make sure everything fits."
"Now, on to the Mac.
As far as having dual-headed (or more) displays figured out, the Mac gets the prize, hands down. We can run different monitors at different refresh rates and resolutions, it's smart enough to know not to display system
messages in between monitors, it's a snap to set up and modify color depth, and there's even a screen to arrange the vertical relationship of multiple displays to each other. Very elegant by comparison with NT.
"The new System 7.6 is now installed, too. I hope it's more crashproof than System 7.5.x was. I see why the new 200-MHz dual-processor system (we have the earlier 180-MHz Power Mac 9500 MP) comes in a newly designed case -- this one is a bear to get off and on, as we learned in installing the Integrated Micro Solutions (
http://www.integratedmicro.com
) TwinTurbo 128M8 graphics card that IMS sent us. Apple is bundling the IMS TwinTurbo 128M4A board in their new multiple-processor systems, and from what I can tell, the board does a great job with graphics and video playback, and their drivers seem to
do the job. These PCI boards are a little pricier than their PC counterparts, but IMS is clearly dedicated to the Mac market, and considering that boards like this would have cost thousands of dollars not very long ago, they are pretty cost-effective solutions.
WEB EXCLUSIVE: The Graphics Test
