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From: ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Amiga impressions et al
Message-ID: <708@othervax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 9-Oct-85 10:49:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: othervax.708
Posted: Wed Oct  9 10:49:44 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Oct-85 12:21:12 EDT
References: <2715@vax4.fluke.UUCP> <244@ssc-vax.UUCP> <2283@sjuvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn)
Distribution: na
Organization: Philips Information Systems - St. Laurent  P.Q., Canada
Lines: 67
Summary: 

>> ........... Why do computer marketing people treat us like
>> the idiots like THEY are.  What do they think?  That we won't understand
>> computer graphics?

Its not really surprising how marketing people treat us(?), when you
consider that in the early days of this newsgroup, and to a lesser extent
now, the non-objective hype was flying so freely from us(?), that you would
have thought that the Amiga design had somehow overcome the laws of physics!
Its quite natural though, issue a vague or not fully understood spec of a
new product development, and everyone reads their current personal wish-list
into it!

For my own part I was mildly disappointed when I saw the Amiga yesterday,
after all the buildup it has had.  My MAIN impressions:

a) It is externally a well designed low-profile machine, with space
underneath for a so-so keyboard - layout is ok, but (subjective) feel is
mushy.

b) The sound demos were very impressive, except voice which was so-so and
consonantless (presumably due to too low a sampling rate).

c) The 640*200 line display is just that, a 640*200 line display, no better,
and no worse than others.  When using their workbench, the display is just
as fuzzy as on an IBM colour card monitor, and not (in my opinion, and most
PC users opinions) suitable for continuous text operation.  Yes, important,
it does have more colours, so that instead of games etc running in 320*200
mode a la PC, they can run, with more colours, in 640*200 on the Amiga.

d) The 640*400 line interlaced display is just that, a 640*400 line
interlaced display, no better and no worse than others.  I've had a lot of
experience with interlacing, and, hype aside, it flickers!  Depending on the
picture being displayed, the flicker is either acceptable or unusable!  The
mandril demo has lots of flicker in the visually noisy areas, and none in
the 'wash' areas.  Another other picture I saw (cant remember its name) was
virtually all 'wash', and only flickered round the edges.  Yes, the salesman
tried to tell me that the flicker was due to both the lighting AND the fact
that the building's power supply was noisy!  Consider, - if the 640*400
display is acceptable, why doesn't the Amiga use it for its standard text
display, since 640*200 is barely adequate for that purpose?

e) The multi-tasking worked nicely, and "pulling-down" various running
windows was fun.  The "8% of the CPU being used" for the bouncing ball demo
is misleading hype!  Fact: When running two continuously moving demos
simultaniously, each slowed down *significantly*, and I would expect, when
running a graphics process and a CPU-bound process simultaneously, a similar
slowdown would occur. The *data-bus* is the bottleneck here, not the CPU!
Incidently, when you see the bouncing ball demo being initialised on the
screen, the generation of the graphics does not appear significantly fast,
and 200 line resolution is of course, not very impressive on round objects.
The movement of the ball is obviously NOT being done by the usual trick of
showing a sequence of preformed displays.

f) When loading a window with icons, the machine was unexplainably slow,
with each icon taking about 1 second to appear. Why?

g) When running Basic, the screen was in a 40*25 line mode, why?  Probably
that was just its initial mode, but it seemed anachronistic.

h) The system crashed, and had to be re-booted, four or five times during
about 45 minutes of use, in particular, memory full recovery was suspect.

Well, that's it.  I hope I haven't blasphemed too much, but I have yet to
become born-again!

Ray Dunn.  PC Architecture. Philips Information Systems.
..philabs!micomvax!othervax!ray