Subject: REVIEW: The Digital Universe
From: [email-masked] (Ron Grant)
Date: 9 Nov 1995 17:21:27 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

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:		[email-masked]
			[email-masked]
	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  [email-masked]>  FAX: +1.306.781.4098
==============================================================

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