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From: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Amiga OS *IS* state of the art
Keywords: Amiga OS
Message-ID: <1044@cbmger.UUCP>
Date: 3 Apr 91 06:53:21 GMT
References: <1003@cbmger.UUCP> <7827@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <8806@gollum.twg.com> <3058@tpki.toppoint.de> <3075@tpki.toppoint.de>
Reply-To: peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY)
Organization: Commodore Bueromaschinen GmbH, West Germany
Lines: 47

In article <3075@tpki.toppoint.de> kris@tpki.toppoint.de (Kristian Koehntopp) writes:
>
>I had a talk with a friend (He is an A3000 owner) on Amiga and its future.
>Being more the suit type than me, he said "What is going to hurt future Amiga
>sales more than a lack of 1280 * 1024 in true color is the lack of 320 * 200
>in 256 colors." The availability of this video graphics mode makes it easy
>to port VGA games to the amiga without having the entire graphics repainted
>by an artist.

That shouldn't be a big problem. There exists decent software to transform
256-color pictures to HAM on the Amiga with no viewable loss of quality at
first sight. Ok, though HAMs are not best suited as background for action
games with BOBs, hmm. But also converting a 256-color picture to 32-color
lores doesn't give a sooo bad picture, you can easily edit it a little in
dpaint and get a nice background. Remember, we talk of 320 pixel resolution
here, that's not such a painful thing.

>To make 320 * 200 * 8 usable one had to do at least the following:
>
>- add 2 additional dma channels (same functionality as the current 6 video
>  dma channels)
*** would need more space on chips
>- add 2 more address lines to the internal register bus
*** would need more space on chips
>- add 256 32 bit wide color registers covering the address range from
>  register $200 to register $400 (the back 512 register adresses)
*** this is it: would need *much* more space on the chips, no chance
    with current NMOS technology
>- replace the current 12 bit video d/a converters with 24 bit converters
*** this easier, because this also today is *not* part of the Amiga custom
    chips but external. There are available today rather cheap 3*8 D/A   
    chips for VGAs that could be of use. Aren't there also some that
    contain also CLUTs (color lookup tables)?
    
All in all, this all is not possible in the moment with current NMOS
technology. As Dave already stated, the chips can't be packed with more
gates. It would be quite different, if they were converted to CMOS
technology. Perhaps you know that the new custom chips for the A3000
are already in CMOS, so this is no foreign word for Commodore chippies.
But to really do this conversion, surely needs several man-years.
Alas, I have the strong feeling that they have heard all these ideas
(better word for "complaints" :-) so often in past many months, that
they think hard about it.
 
-- 
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel  // E-Mail to  \\  Only my personal opinions... 
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany  \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk