Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 (Tek) 9/28/84 based on 9/17/84; site tekchips.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!tektronix!tekcrl!tekchips!wm From: wm@tekchips.UUCP (Wm Leler) Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga Subject: Re: Welcome! Message-ID: <167@tekchips.UUCP> Date: Fri, 30-Aug-85 17:36:20 EDT Article-I.D.: tekchips.167 Posted: Fri Aug 30 17:36:20 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 2-Sep-85 04:22:19 EDT References: <3436@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> <511@petrus.UUCP> Reply-To: wm@tekchips.UUCP (Wm Leler) Organization: Tektronix, Beaverton OR Lines: 60 Keywords: wow Summary: Brief subjective rundown of Amiga features If you would like to learn more about the Amiga there is a long article about it in Byte magazine this month. I've also seen a videotape of the "launch" in NYC, which features a long demo, and have some of the technical manuals. I have played with one only briefly, not long enough to find any weaknesses. Summary of Amiga - You can read the specs anywhere, so I will give a (very) subjective rundown. I was most impressed by the sound generation facilities. I heard a demo of a variety of sounds, including tom-toms, and a heavy-metal distorted guitar that sounded like the real thing. Sounds can be "recorded" digitally and reproduced, or you can generate new sounds. There are four channels, two of which can be used for envelope control (attack, decay, etc.). You have complete control over waveform and envelope. Sound generators are DMA driven, so they don't tie up the 68000. There is also builtin speech generation that can generate speech from unrestricted text. The graphics resolutions are fairly standard, either 320 by 200 (non interlaced) with 32 colors, or 640 by 400 (interlaced) with 16 colors. There is a 12 bit color lookup table. There is also a mode where the pixel value is taken to be a signed difference from the last pixel, so all 4096 colors can be shown on the same screen. It takes 3 pixels to change color completely this way, but that is not really a drawback since the eye's spatial frequency response to color is rather limited (the NTSC standard does not allow a full color change per pixel, for instance). There are also 8 hardware sprites. The user can have multiple screens, each with a different resolution. Each screen can have multiple windows. The Amiga has true multitasking, so more than one application can run simultaneously. The impressive part about the Amiga graphics is the animation. One of the custom chips is a co-processor that can perform actions based upon the state of the display, so animation can be synchronized with display refresh. There is also support for collision detection, fast polygon filling, line drawing, and bit-bliting. This system is fast. I saw a demo of the flight simulator that everyone has seen on the Apple and IBM, except that instead of line graphics, it had full filled polygons running in real time. Other cute features - an IBM PC emulator that lets you run MS-DOS software unmodified (at around 70% processor speed, 100% I/O speed). Genlock option so you can synch graphics with video. Modem that can answer the phone and talk to people. My personal opinion is that this is the machine the Mac should have been. The only concern I've heard about this machine is that it might be too late to grab any market, but who cares? I'm going to buy one. It uses a 68000, and can run MS-DOS, so there is going to be plenty of software for it. Besides, what software hacker could resist it? Wm Leler