Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!convex!killer!tness7!tness1!nuchat!uhnix1!sugar!peter From: peter@sugar.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Amiga or PC-AT ? Message-ID: <2393@sugar.uu.net> Date: 4 Aug 88 01:56:59 GMT References: <1820006@hpuamsa.UUCP> <554@gort.cme-durer.ARPA> Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX Lines: 62 In article ... brickman@cme-durer.ARPA (Jonathan E. Brickman) writes: > (1) Awkward and rigid color mapping arrangement. For heavy graphics use, yes. But it gives you more gradations of color in one screen than an 8-bit card. AND you can record your images directly to videotape. > (2) Very limited software availability. Hundreds of packages, particularly in the graphics feild. > (3) Unreliable operating system. Where have you been for the past couple of years? > a _very_ well-supported machine with a very polished and multiply-compatible > graphics card running two popular operating systems (PC-DOS and OS/2, with An obsolete operating system and a vaporware one. > to buy and Amiga, you are buying outdated hardware (68000 at low speed -- > almost nothing uses those things anymore), 68020 and 68030 expansion is cheaper than the graphics card for the AT. > a cheaply built and unexpandable > graphics capability (uses interlaced graphics -- hard on the eyes at Graphics expansion cards exist and more are on the way. Interlaced graphics is *necessary* for some applications, such as video. > max resolution), an operating system which crashes roughly three times as > frequently as PC-DOS 2.0 (3.3 is much better yet) with corresponding loss I have never crashed AmigaDOS 1.2 except while developing software. I used to crash PC-DOS all the time, mainly due to trying to run multitasker enhancers to try to get around its limitations. > of data, work, temper, and possibly disk data, and very limited > expandability (limited simply because very few companies build the stuff). You can stick all the PC and AT cards you want in a 2000. And run them concurrently with the 68000 (or even 68030). > If I were you I would go for one of the newest 80386CX chips (CX I think -- If you can afford an 80386 you can afford a CSA 68030 (yes, 030) card. The 68000 is slightly faster than an 80286. The 68020 is 80386 class. The 68030 is beyond anything intel has to offer. The 80286 is *not* in a class with the 68000, though, because of the overhead involved in dealing with objects greater than 64K. As an extreme example, Byte demonstrated that the seive benchmark slowed down by a factor of 11 when the array passed the 64K mark. Ray traced images are typically much larger than 64K. If you're going to use an 80386 in 80386 mode, you're going to have to run UNIX... it's the only real 80386 operating system out. You won't want to use any of your PC-DOS software in that environment. -- Peter da Silva `-_-' peter@sugar.uu.net Have you hugged U your wolf today?