Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
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From: sl242003@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Jon Paul Baker)
Subject: Re: Amiga Custom Chips - why hasn't C= made them faster?
Message-ID: <1991Apr4.200011.23370@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington
References: <1991Apr2.235710.13984@news.iastate.edu> <1991Apr3.130218.25163@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <6456@amiga.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 91 20:00:11 GMT
Lines: 24


I agree with the need for more high-resolution colors, but there is a
point where this becomes ludicrous.

So an IBM with Super-VGA (a non-standard, by the way), can do
640x480x256 (or 1024x768x256 if he has 1meg of video ram).  What good
does this do?  It makes for pretty fractals, and nice GIF's and
suchlike, but for animation...  The best animations I have seen (done
with hand-coded, hand optimized assembly code) just cannot animate
like an Amiga.  You get weird flicker, and parts of things dissapear
in rotation (as in its not smooth and things flicker in and out) and
the rotation is SLOW.  And this was on a 33mhz '386.

If you are trying to do real-time games, or real-time modeling, you
still need an Amiga or a high-end workstation.  If you are not doing
these, than what need is there for the resolution?  Some particular
things need it (surface mapping, etc), but how many people would
really NEED it?

I can wait for now.  When you pull out an animation like Spigot (old,
I know) and IBM programmers just look and sigh, because to do that
they need hardware that costs as much as a hard-drive Amiga system.

Jon