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From: hadeishi@husc4.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Buying an Atari computer
Message-ID: <1320@husc6.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 28-Feb-87 16:06:02 EST
Article-I.D.: husc6.1320
Posted: Sat Feb 28 16:06:02 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 1-Mar-87 17:12:39 EST
References: <855@ubc-cs.UUCP> <285@sage.cs.reading.ac.uk>
Sender: news@husc6.UUCP
Reply-To: hadeishi@husc4.UUCP (mitsuharu hadeishi)
Organization: Harvard Univ. Science Center
Lines: 30
Summary: No upgrade from Commodore to new blitter since new machines have old

In re: Whether Commodore-Amiga is providing upgrades to the old users:

	The OLD Amiga blitter chips are being used in the new machines,
the A500 and the A2000, so there is no need for an upgrade.  There is
no upgrade path anyway since the new (unreleased) blitter chip is
rumored to have a 2 Mb address space and the old blitter is restricted
to the lower 512K of RAM (known as "CHIP RAM" to Amigoids.  This is
somewhat of a restriction only for frame-buffer animation, and it is
plenty of memory for most graphics applications and text applications at
640x400 resolution.  Note that 640x400 with 16 colors, the larget
Amiga resolution and color depth, takes up only 128K, and you can swap
in graphics from non-CHIP ram as long as you don't need blitter speed
to do it.)

	The new chip is rumored to be intended for high-end graphics
workstations in the 1024x780 or 1Kx1K market running a version of
UNIX (probably Sys V.2 or V.3, not BSD WAAAH) as well as Amiga Intuition
on at least a 14Mhz 68020.  It has the 2 Mb address space simply because
of the larger resolution.

	It is possible to add graphics boards to the Amiga series
to provide upgrades to resolution and/or blitter speed/address space,
but of course you would need a new, expensive high-resolution monitor
to go with it.  Such a trick was demoed at a show a few weeks ago,
apprently; Amiga Intuition supports different screen sizes and resolutions.
Most users won't need more than the 640x400 resolution made possible
by the introduction of the new $500 long-persistence color monitor available
from Commodore.

				-Mitsu