Path: rcfnews.cs.umass.edu!barrett From: granr@sasknet.sk.ca (Ron Grant) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: The Digital Universe Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.applications Date: 9 Nov 1995 17:21:27 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 275 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <47tdan$2dt@kernighan.cs.umass.edu> Reply-To: granr@sasknet.sk.ca (Ron Grant) NNTP-Posting-Host: astro.cs.umass.edu Keywords: science, astronomy, commercial Originator: barrett@astro.cs.umass.edu PRODUCT NAME The Digital Universe BRIEF DESCRIPTION A great new astronomy program for the Amiga. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Author: Dan Charrois Publisher: Syzygy Research & Technology Ltd. Address: Box 75 Legal, AB Canada, T0G 1L0 Phone: (403) 961-2383 E-mail: sales@syz.com support@syz.com WWW: http://www.syz.com LIST PRICE I would like to delay this report and try to find more negatives to balance it out, but the price will rise at the end of October. Prices are: Canada (CAN $) US (US $)* Inter.(US $)* Software and User Manual 114.95 89.95 99.95 700 page printed Encyclopedia 49.95 44.95 54.95 After October 31, prices will apparently increase approximately 50%. Even at that it's a bargain! SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE An Amiga with at least 3 Megabytes of RAM. 17 megabytes of Hard Disk space. (11 MB for partial installation.) Math co-processor is strongly recommended, but not required. SOFTWARE Workbench 2.04 or higher. MUI 2.3 or higher. COPY PROTECTION The User Manual and Program are personalized with your name and address. Otherwise, none. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 2000 with G-Force 030-40MHz CPU 1MB Chip, 12 MB Fast RAM Kickstart 40.63 (3.1) Workbench 40.42 (3.1) INSTALLATION The Digital Universe is supplied on 14 diskettes. Installation is with the usual Commodore Installer program. You just need to feed the diskettes into the floppy drive(s) as needed for quite a while! If you need MUI, it is included on the diskettes with its own Installer. REVIEW Recently, Mike Smithwick, author of Distant Suns, posted an article in one of the newsgroups (comp.sys.amiga.applications I believe) with the sad news that support has been dropped by Virtual Realities for Distant Suns on the Amiga. This came as a blow for astronomy lovers like myself who were expecting an upgrade notice instead. Once again, I felt the pang of disappointment that Amiga Users everywhere have become quite familiar with over the past few years. Just weeks later I came across a huge file, "Digital_Universe_Demo," that was 3.3 MB long. Normally, I would have ignored it (my modem is 14.4K bps) but the astronomy category sucked me in. I installed it and to use an old cliche, "it blew my socks off!" I ordered it two days later. This program requires MUI. I am neither friend nor foe of MUI. It is already on my system for the usual reasons, and I have never felt that I suffered from the problems which have been reported by some users. This program has never crashed or locked up, and is not slow compared with Distant Suns on my system. You will need lots of disk space and memory and will want reasonable processor speed and an FPU. This is one of the NICEST programs I have ever seen on an Amiga computer, PERIOD. The features are so numerous it is difficult to list them comprehensively. Even with an extra 20,000 star-set and an image set addition to Distant Suns 5.0, my DS directory is 4.6 MB and my Digital Universe directory as supplied is 17.85 MB! Some of the features are: o Yale Bright Star (YBS) Catalogue of 9110 stars. o Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) Catalogue of over 250,000 stars. o Messier's Catalogue of 110 deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and clusters). o Sky & Telescope's NGC 2000.0 Catalogue of 13,226 deep sky objects. o Jost Jahn's comet database containing 2298 cometary orbits. o Jost Jahn's minor planet database containing orbital information for thousands of asteroids. o Orbital information for approximately 900 Earth-orbiting satellites. o Can generate accurate views of the night sky for any date from 100,000 BC to 100,000 AD. o Over 700 pages of hypertext with over 250 pictures (AmigaGuide) o Typical accuracies of better than 1 arcsecond (1/3600th of a degree). o A context-sensitive help system The program can use several levels of accuracy depending on your needs. Star computations are fast on my system, and faster than Distant Suns, considering the greater number of objects being calculated. If you zoom in on Saturn, you will soon see a bulge (the rings) and if you continue zooming in you will see this perfectly rendered image of Saturn and its rings, all oriented correctly right down to the edge on view of the rings which is the case for Saturn at this time. The moons come into view, all in their accurate positions. Zooming on a moon will show its shape, a grid showing the poles, equator and orientation. Clicking the mouse on a star results in an information window with an amazing amount of scientific and useful information. Once you have scrolled through all the information, click on "More Info.." at the bottom and the hypertext encyclopedia opens with more information, historical data, all the names this star has been called through history, pictures and so on. Exploring the skies, looking at pictures, hearing audio in some cases and checking out the encyclopedia will consume an evening in short order. I was peeking at Pluto one evening and was surprised to see Clarion (Pluto's moon) swim into view. Setting your environment (latitude, longitude) is as easy as scrolling through the HUGE list of cities and clicking on where you live. I don't know how complete the list is, but I found Regina, Saskatchewan (Canada) in there which was just great for me! You even set your altitude and outside temperature. Printing at any point is through the preferences printer and prints at the maximum resolution your printer allows. In addition, screen shots can be saved as IFF ILBM's. The screen can be of any size depending on the amount your chip/video memory. The program was developed entirely on the Amiga. I found everything "as it should be on the Amiga" with no nasty surprises. I had no crashes at any time, nor any hint of problems. This is often not the rule for brand new software as we all well know. This is the largest program I have had on my Amiga and I was expecting some "trials and tribulations" Once installed though, it gave new meaning to the idea of "Plug-n-Play" I wonder if the developers would consider a complete Internet package? The program runs on a number of graphics boards, but I don't own one yet, so couldn't test this. Who is Syzygy Research & Technology Ltd. from Legal AB.? It's worth a phone call just to hear how they pronounce their name! I sent e-mail to Dan a couple of times, and got immediate replies back. I ordered my copy by e-mail, then phoned my VISA number to them. A favourite item in The Digital Universe deserves special mention. There is a report generator. It will either print or send to a file a report consisting of fields all selected by you. There are many choices. Just for example, you can select Moon of Earth, and select phase angle, azimuth, rise/set times, etc. for say, two weeks and each 24 hours and out comes a report for these moon conditions for the month. That is just one thing out of many choices of the kind of reports it will generate. The Digital Universe may not perfect, but it sure comes close, especially for the price. I hope they develop more software. My PC friends won't hardly talk to me since they have seen this program cook! I should say that I do not know the developers, have never met them, or heard anything about them until the demo showed up in Aminet. My enthusiasm for this program is entirely my own. It is a great boost to the Amiga and those interested in science and astronomy. BUGS There is a reported bug where the system could crash on the intro screen with some graphics boards. There is a second icon with no intro for anyone who might experience this problem. There may be other bugs, but I have not wandered across them yet. LIKES o When you click on a star, there might be actually more than one star in your target crosshair, even if you didn't see it. In this case, a small window pops up with a list of candidates which were within the "target." o Nice search facility with extensive wildcard support for the massive encyclopedia. o If you make a mistake resulting in an unwanted screen update and recalculation, you can abort with a mouse click without having to wait for the recalculation to finish. Nice for slower machines, or for very high-accuracy views. o Build your own horizon in a text file with any editor. 360 lines of text define each degree's elevation of your horizon. o Produce stand-alone IFF Animations viewable with ShowAnim. DISLIKES AND SUGGESTIONS o No Arexx interface. o I miss a summary window for quickly seeing the moon and its current phase and rise/set times for objects in our solar system. o Date and time take up too much width in reports. I'd like to have more choice on how dates are formatted and whether the year needs to always be included or not. If you generate a report on moon rise & set times for a month, you don't need the month and year printed out 30 times in all those columns. I'd like to be able to get 30-Oct-95 instead of 30-10-95 or is it 10-30-95?? o Can't save the current state. It would be nice to set view direction and field of view and have it saved for the next start-up. CONCLUSIONS This is an incredible piece of software for those who have great interest in astronomy. One PC user spent a whole evening looking at this program. He has his own observatory out on the farm and knows more about astronomy than I. Now he is looking for a used Amiga so he can use the program. We could use more of this type of interest in the Amiga! No kidding! COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1995 Ron G. Grant. All rights reserved. This review is freely distributable. You can contact me at: ============================================================== Ron G. Grant VE5RG granr@sasknet.sk.ca> FAX: +1.306.781.4098 ============================================================== --- Accepted and posted by Daniel Barrett, comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews