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From: daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: net.micro.apple
Subject: Re: Re: Apple //gs
Message-ID: <884@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 13-Oct-86 14:55:21 EDT
Article-I.D.: cbmvax.884
Posted: Mon Oct 13 14:55:21 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Oct-86 07:02:25 EDT
References: <2115@ecsvax.UUCP>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 51

> 
> Bill Mensch at the Western Design Center said in an interview over a
> year ago that the minimum speed available was 4mhz and that 6mhz parts
> would be available soon.  How long GTE has been building them, I don't
> know, so their yields may not be up there yet.

Bill Mensch says alot of things.  He also claimed he would deliver a 100MHz
Gallium-Arsinide 6502.  GTE IS the only house making production 65SC816
chips.  You should believe what Mensch says when its real, not when he's
hyping it.

> 16 colors PER LINE in 320X200 for a total of 256 possible, 4 per line
> in 640X200 for a total of 64 using the 16 color tables available.  The
> 640X400 mode in the Amiga looks nice in pictures but not on a screen
> the flickering is just too noticeable, and high persistence phosphors
> smear animation.  The early pre-release versions of the graphics chip
> had a bug, so that may be why it was socketed, but I didn't see the bug
> in the demo machine.

The socketing may be for replacing bad chips on the line; you wouldn't
necessarily ever see one in a production unit.  The PER LINE argument you
give above is what the Apple's capable of, but according to the folks I've
talked with at EA, DPaint isn't supporting per-line reassignments.  The
Amiga could just as easily change color assigmnets on a per-line basis, 
via the copper, though Amiga DPaint doesn't support that either.

>> > File formats for the //gs are standardized so that any software can
>> > use another's images.  
>> 
>> Is this an Apple standard, or DPaint.  They could be using the IFF standard
>> developed by EA and Commodore-Amiga; this would let the IIGS DPaint display
>> most Amiga images, and vias-versa.
> 
> This is an Apple standard, but I don't know the details of it.  In the
> past Apple has used straight bit maps,  I hope they get a little more sophisti             
> fancy than that but we'll have to wait and see.

Too bad.  While it'd certainly be easy read each-other's graphics via 
conversion programs, I thought with EA involved we might see an industry 
first in terms of compatibility.  You can expect software from EA 
relatively fast for the IIGS.  Everything they did for the Amiga was at 
least for the most part coded in C language, so ports to the GS can happen 
very fast.

-- 
============================================================================
Dave Haynie	{caip,ihnp4,allegra,seismo}!cbmvax!daveh
		"Techno-Hippie, heathen, designing evil computers"

	These opinions are my own, though if you try them out, and decide
	that you really like them, a small donation would be appreciated.