Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!rochester!kodak!sisd!jeh From: jeh@sisd.kodak.com (Ed Hanway) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga Video Mess (was RE: More Marc...) Message-ID: <1990Sep17.145251.27799@sisd.kodak.com> Date: 17 Sep 90 14:52:51 GMT References: <30633@nigel.ee.udel.edu> Sender: news@sisd.kodak.com Organization: Printer Products Division Eastman Kodak Lines: 47 I think a few people in this group need to turn their Marc Barrett flamethrowers from "full auto" to "semi auto." He makes some valid points, perhaps a bit abrasively, but the responses basically ignore what he said and flame him personally. In a limited sense, devices like the DCTV and HAM-E are compatible with existing video modes, since they both basically decode a normal hi-res screen in different ways in order to trade spatial resolution for more colors. However, primitive Amiga graphics operations like line drawing, area filling, text, color selection, etc. won't produce the expected result, so in this sense they're incompatible with the standard Amiga modes. Further, these two devices are incompatible with each other, so even if a program did jump through hoops to use the features of one, it would be useless on the other. What the Amiga needs is a way to have multiple instances of graphics.library open, one for each possible display device. You could buy a high-res gee-whiz graphics board, plug it into a Zorro slot, and as it autoconfigures it would add its own version of graphics.library to the system. The problem is that this requires leadership from Commodore, namely reworking intuition/layers/etc. to work with more than one graphics.library as well as defining the standards for third-party graphics libraries. I hope that something like this can be done with little impact on existing programs, but one big architectural change is that there would be more than one possible kind of chip memory (each board would have its own), so requests for CHIP memory would have to be more specific. With the proper standards and leadership from Commodore, we could run Intuition screens on all of the current "hacks" and there would be no excuse to call them hacks any more. In a completely unrelated message, someone noted yet another hard disk controller was announced at an Amiga show, complete with the requisite claims that it's faster than all others. In my opinion, there are far too many hard disk controllers for the Amiga already, but they're relatively easy to design and get working because there's support for them in the OS and a benchmark (the A2091) to shoot for. In the early A1000 days, it was the same with 256K RAM expansions. Everybody and his brother made them, but almost nobody made larger SOTS expansions until Commodore added real support for them in 1.2. If support existed for plug-in graphics boards, and especially if Commodore produced their own board, then everybody would be selling their own boards, each with the requisite claims that theirs is faster, higher resolution and more colorful than the others. Ed Hanway uunet!sisd!jeh standard disclaimer applies