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From: huxham@ucbvax.ARPA (Frederick Huxham)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga reactions
Message-ID: <10369@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 12-Sep-85 17:50:29 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10369
Posted: Thu Sep 12 17:50:29 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Sep-85 04:59:47 EDT
References: <3568@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> <368@ssc-bee.UUCP>
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 31
Summary: >1 appliacation = severe slowdown

> > gymnasium type reverb sound effects.  The really impressive thing about this
> > demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something
> > only 8% of the time.  That means it's 92% idle!
> > 
> I've heard these numbers before and am a little skeptical of what they really
> mean.  The numbers seem to imply that the Amiga 68000 could do 12.5 times
> as much work without slowing the demo down.  In reality, I suspect the
> bus may be so busy with the graphics that any increase in 68000 processing
> will slow down the graphics.
> 
> Can anyone shed some light on this?

I went to one of the Amiga "World Premieres" a few weeks ago.  After the  
presentation, I was able to play with one of the machines for a couple of
hours.  One of the disks I had contained a number of simple graphics demos.
Each demo drew multiple lines, shapes or dots in it's own window.  They were
drawn in color with no sound.  

I would have one demo running in a 2 inch square window and start up another.
This would cause the first demo to slow down quite a bit, starting up a
third and you could almost hear the machine asking for help.  If a fourth
application was started things almost came to a standstill, the response time
from moving the mouse until the cursor moved on the screen was a couple of
seconds.  The fourth or fifth application was generally sufficient to crash 
the machine.  

I liked the machine anyway, I want one to play games on.

Fred A. Huxham
huxham@ucbcory.arpa
huxham@BERKELEY.arpa