Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ubvax!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.UUCP (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Studebakers
Message-ID: <4429@killer.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jun 88 05:29:06 GMT
References: <4400@gryphon.CTS.COM> <56089@sun.uucp>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
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In message <56089@sun.uucp>, cmcmanis%pepper@Sun.COM (Chuck McManis) says:
>In article <4400@gryphon.CTS.COM> (Richard Sexton) writes:
>> As a related question, given you had ONE improvement you would make
>> to the amiga, what would it be ? 

More colors. Definitely. Some of the extended VGA cards put the Amiga
to shame graphics-wise, for very little more than ordinary EGA cards
(although the speed of display isn't up to Amiga standards, of
course).

In particular, there's no reason to not have an 8-bit-plane lo-res
mode, considering that 8-bit-plane lo-res would use the same bus
bandwidth as 4-bit-plane hi-res uses today. The main overhead would be
that CBM would have to add 256 registers somewhere to hold the color
tables (perhaps as SRAM seperate from the video chips). VGA
specifically has 256 colors in its lo-res mode, without the
limitations of HAM mode.

If we're getting into the wild-and-wooly pie-in-the-sky area,
8-bit-planes in HIRES. Some VGA cards  are already supporting this
resolution. Unfortunately, this is also double the bandwidth of the
Amiga bus, which means goodbye low-cost DRAMs and cycle-multiplexed
bus interface, hello lots of trickery and kludges and expensive fast
RAMs. However, this resolution would allow the Amiga to move into
areas such as low-cost image processing that the current display
simply is too limited to adequately support (at least in a manner
acceptable to the current state-of-the-art in image processing, which
is either RGB 24-bit or 8-bit grey-scale).

--
Eric Lee Green    ..!{ames,att,decwrl,ihnp4,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg
          Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509              
"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse?"