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From: jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Software Development
Message-ID: <2055@lsuc.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 27-Sep-87 22:16:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: lsuc.2055
Posted: Sun Sep 27 22:16:56 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Sep-87 04:07:30 EDT
References: <872@percival.UUCP> <3878@well.UUCP> <1263@dasys1.UUCP> <1751@cadovax.UUCP> <800@sugar.UUCP> <1769@cadovax.UUCP>
Reply-To: jimomura@lsuc.UUCP (Jim Omura)
Distribution: na
Organization: Consultant, Toronto
Lines: 64
Summary: CAD-3D on the Amiga
Xref: mnetor comp.sys.amiga:8821 comp.sys.atari.st:5330

In article <1769@cadovax.UUCP> keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle) writes:
>In article <800@sugar.UUCP> peter@sugar.UUCP (Peter da Silva) writes:

...

>
>Sure, sure, but when faced with the prospect of porting a GEM application
>to Intuition, (I've looked at it, and we're talking some major rewrite here) 
>many developers will decide it's too much work and just stick to the Atari.  

     Difficulty of porting hasn't been that much of an issue from
what I've seen.  It's more a matter of some programmers simply
wanting to support one computer or the other.  Where the programmer
has *wanted* to support both, the programs have become available
on both.

>GEM on the Amiga, silly as it sounds at first, provides an almost 
>immediate new market for Atari developers with little effort expended on
>their part.  And GEM is a completely portable windowing system, DESIGNED 
>to be ported around.  TOS weirdnesses and ill-behaved talk-directly-to-hardware
>applications present some interesting challenges, but allowing Atari
>developers to spend a little time hacking 5% of the code is a lot more
>palatable than spending a lot of time hacking 70% of the code.  It could
>make the difference between a lot of applications migrating, and almost
>none migrating at all.

     The reason TOS was created, as I understand it, was due to
the difficulty getting reasonable speed out of GEM under CP/M.\
But CP/M is a very straight forward, *fast* OS.  In fact, most
of the better ST programs have substituted their own low level
routines to get around the slowness of GEM.  Flash! has custom
RS-232 drivers.  Jim Kent's Cyberpaint is almost all custom code.
There are others as well.  GEM's portability seems to have
resulted in slowness.  What's more, that problem has create
a reality where simply running GEM on the Amiga in itself
won't help that much to port the software running under it.

>
>And hell, it just opens up it's own screen so you can still multitask at
>the same time.   Not 'sticking' the GEM interface on the users is

     I've heard knowledgable programs say that you can't multi-task
with GEM.  I have heard others say you can.  I'm tired of hearing
speculation.  I'll believe it when I see it.

>only going to 1) hurt the Amiga sales of Atari developers, and 2) hurt
>Amiga users who would like to have Atari packages.  Cad-3D anyone?

     I have CAD-3D.  It's nice, but not wonderful.  I've seen Sculpt 3D
and it also is nice, but not wonderful.  Coin toss really.  Still,
I can't say that Amiga users are desparate to get ahold of CAD-3D.
Each has its own strong points, but just for example, Sculpt 3D
addresses on of my "holy grail" features -- you can move an individual
point!  Anybody who has tried to do serious work on CAD-3D knows
how important this can be.  I would have expected it to be one of
the most important things that TH would try to add to CAD-3D version
2, but he didn't do it.  I have no idea why.



-- 
Jim Omura, 2A King George's Drive, Toronto, (416) 652-3880
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