New board means affordable masters in any CD format

Microboards, Inc., the Japanese company that sold Philips its first authoring system for cd-i, is now offering U.S. authors what it says is the first multimedia interface board compatible with recordable cd units and/or storage devices and can deliver output in virtually all cd formats.

The $4,500 Witchcraft-S interface board, already available in Japan, uses an AT&T digital signal processor for data compression and decompression. A large unnamed Japanese company is preparing an MPEG chip for the Witchcraft board, which Microboards of America’s general manager Craig Hanson says will be made available “shortly.” JPEG compression is already supported, he said.

The making of the master. The software allows authors to create a master disc on site in virtually any compact disc format — audio cd, CD-ROM, CD-ROM XA and PhotoCD, cd-i, CDTV and various computer game cd formats.

Hanson says the company can provide a complete system — which includes Microboards’ Witchcraft-S interface board, a fast ‘486 PC clone, hard disk drive, digital audio tape (DAT) player, a write-once compact disc unit, and authoring software for one cd format for $30,000. Each additional format is $5,000.

“When we did the initial systems for Philips, we recognized the cost of entry was really preclusive to a lot of people,” says Hanson. “It was a specialized system that could do one thing and one thing only, and it cost a lot of money to do it. So we decided to go with an architecture that would allow all the cd formats to be dealt with using the same hardware, but with different software.”

Hanson says MBI is getting authoring software from various sources: for CD-ROM, it has a deal with Dataware Technologies of Cambridge, MA, to distribute and co-develop authoring-retrieval software products; for audio cd, it’s working with New York-based Gotham Audio. And it’s working with two very big names — though he won’t announce who they are — on authoring software for PhotoCD and CD-ROM XA formats.

BETTER ON THE MACINTOSH

Veteran interactive producers say the Witchcraft-S system sounds good for the price, but they wonder how successful the company can be with a pc-based product in an authoring market dominated by Macintoshes.

“The problem is that most developers have already adopted the Mac not the pc, for authoring because of their graphical capability,” said one.

Hanson says that Microboards isn’t planning to make a NuBus version of the Witchcraft board for the Macintosh, despite the market’s proclivity. MBI’s early authoring systems, he says, were in VME (the operating system for Digital Equipment’s minicomputers) or dos.

Microboards, Inc., is headquartered in Funabashi City, Japan. Microboards of America is located in Carver, MN.

Denise Caruso