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From: dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Future Amigas (Ranger rumor) Suggestions to C-A
Message-ID: <8611062128.AA11889@cory.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Thu, 6-Nov-86 16:28:05 EST
Article-I.D.: cory.8611062128.AA11889
Posted: Thu Nov  6 16:28:05 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Nov-86 22:10:58 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 32


	The current Amiga is hot.  If you intend to create 'new' Amiga's
with 'better this' and 'better that', DON'T MAKE ANY MISTAKES!  It had
better be a *lot* better.  Don't go half-way.

	I would strongly advise that any 'new' Amiga have AT LEAST 1024x1024
resolution (obviously you need a custom screen here).  Also, I suggest you
increase the # bit planes allowed without contention to 8.

	Remove the DMA address range limits COMPLETELY... increasing it to
2 MEG is not good enough.  I don't care if you introduce a priority scheme
which allows faster access to certain parts of ram, but the most you should
impose on the OS is an 'advisory load memory range'.

	USE A 68020!!!   Do NOT use an MMU (it's going to be expensive as it
is and an MMU would make it incompatible with the Amiga's already well-designed
OS).  Forget about waiting for Motorola's 68030 (just in case you get the
thought).

	And you had better make this cheap.... the machine will flop if it's
price is anywhere near SUN's workstations due to the fact that SUN has much
more prestige than C-A in the high-end workstation area.  The idea is to have
two machines on the market, the Amiga, and the (Ranger?).  Which are medium
and high-level versions of the same basic design.  The current state
of the OS is such that you could easily make the software upward compatible,
and us program-writers could easily make it compatible the other way as well.

	Alternately, if you only make small improvments to the new machine,
it would compete directly with the current Amiga.  I needn't tell you that	
this would probably cause the downfall of the new machine.

					-Matt