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From: young@yale.ARPA (Jonathan Young)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Amiga impressions et al
Message-ID: <394@yale.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 22:37:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: yale.394
Posted: Tue Oct 15 22:37:58 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 16-Oct-85 15:21:21 EDT
References: <2715@vax4.fluke.UUCP> <244@ssc-vax.UUCP> <2283@sjuvax.UUCP> <708@othervax.UUCP>
Reply-To: young@yale.UUCP (Jonathan young)
Distribution: na
Organization: Yale University CS Dept., New Haven CT
Lines: 51

Summary:

In article <708@othervax.UUCP> ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn) writes:
>For my own part I was mildly disappointed when I saw the Amiga yesterday,
>after all the buildup it has had.  My MAIN impressions:
>
I just saw one today (so did Action news), and my impressions
were substantially the same.  My local dealer (Hamden, CT) said that
his store, Computer Factory, is distributing in both the NYC and Boston
areas.

>b) The sound demos were very impressive, except voice which was so-so and
>consonantless (presumably due to too low a sampling rate).
I've heard that there exists a better one.  The one we heard had very
scratchy consonants - pops and stuff that shouldn't be there.
Can anyone tell us what's up?

>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.
Interesting.  My impression was that the ball and shadow were being moved
in hardware, while the software was only writing the new x,y for the ball
and changing the color scheme (so the ball seems to rotate).  That sure
sounds like 8% of the cpu to me.

>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.
I managed to crash the OS by putting another disk in the drive that the
"desktop" disk had been in.  The salesman's description of the logical
disk system - you can apparently put a disk in any drive and the system
deals correctly with it; you can daisy-chain any number of drives together -
sounded rosy, but occasionally not checking before reading (or writing!)
would be quite a thorn in the OS's side.  Can anyone verify this account
of the DOS?  How does it work (for us non-Mac-owners)?  Is this what slows
down the disk I/O?

All-in-all, I wasn't immediately converted, either.  I'd like to see
a lot more technical information before buying one (like, details on
wait states...).  Maybe I'll wait until Commodore starts discounting
them...

				--- Jonathan

	     ...decvax!yale!young@UUCP or young@yale.ARPA
Disclaimer:  I'm not affiliated with anybody.