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From: kdarling@hobbes.ncsu.edu (Kevin Darling)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: Re: Amiga Custom Chips - why hasn't C= made them faster?
Message-ID: <1991Apr6.070156.5779@ncsu.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 91 07:01:56 GMT
References: <1991Apr2.235710.13984@news.iastate.edu> <1991Apr3.130218.25163@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <6456@amiga.UUCP> <1991Apr4.200011.23370@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Sender: news@ncsu.edu (USENET News System)
Organization: North Carolina State University
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In article <1991Apr4.200011.23370@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> sl242003@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Jon Paul Baker) writes:
>
>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.

You get flicker because stock IBM programs don't support double-buffering.
Try non-buffered animation on the Amiga, and you'll see the same flicker;
and worse, the infamous color ghosting because of bitplanes being changed
one at a time.

Nevertheless, I've seen plenty of Amiga ANIM-5's played back on a '386
with a no-wait-state VGA card, and they looked just as nice as could be.

More to the point, my own 12Mhz-equiv 68000 machine has 256-color gfx, and
it animates just fine, thank you very much.  Of course the fact that
the video ram access doesn't bog down at higher color resolutions like
the Amiga's does, no doubt helps ;-).  Plus chunky pixel memory instead of
bitplanes helps at times... to change one pixel only requires one byte write,
instead of bit diddling for each separate Ami bitplane.

And finally, for the zinger: what about all the people around here who claim
incredible animation using the new Amiga add-on gfx boards?  Are THEY crazy?
You can't have it both ways <g>.  Either it's possible to have nice animation
with more colors or grey shades, or it isn't. But in fact, it _is_ possible.
  best - kev <kdarling@catt.ncsu.edu>