Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!bu-cs!purdue!decwrl!labrea!polya!ali
From: ali@polya.Stanford.EDU (Ali T. Ozer)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: Amiga or PC-AT ?
Message-ID: <3491@polya.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 3 Aug 88 14:35:15 GMT
References: <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP>
Reply-To: aozer@next.com (Ali Ozer)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 30

In article <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP> marco@hpuamsa.UUCP (Marco Lesmeister) writes:
>I am thinking of buying an AT-clone with some graphics card in it,
>or maybe a commodore amiga would suit me just fine, but then I could
>not make use of the mountain of DOS applications currently available.
>So, what should I do, should I buy a cheap AT with an expensive 
>monitor and an expensive graphics card (which one should I buy?), or
>should I buy an amiga with the disadvantage that I can't expand the
>graphics capabillities.

Go with the Amiga. The machine comes with lots of great graphics
support that you'll pay oodles for on other machines. For instance, the
HAM mode allows you to have 352x512, 4096 color pictures that can be 
animated at upto 30 frames/second. Try that on an AT graphics card!

Hardware is considerably cheaper for the Amiga than for IBMs (or even Macs).
Toys such as genlocks, digitizers start at under $150, and with the
addition of a cheap VCR and a cheap camera you can have a full desktop
video station in addition. Thus you can create home videos while ray
tracing in the background (using Amiga's multitasking).

And, don't worry about software; Amiga software is reasonably priced,
and a lot of good stuff is available in freeware form (on "Fish" disks
and other public domain collections, available in Europe as well).
You might want to spend $200 on Sculpt 3d + Animate 3d combo for a good
ray-tracing/animations package, and that might be all you need to spend.
Or you can go crazy and delve into the dozens of other 
paint/animation/graphics programs... The software is all there, and you
won't go broke.

Ali Ozer, aozer@next.com