Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!elroy!gryphon!richard From: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) Newsgroups: comp.graphics Subject: Re: Amiga or PC-AT ? Summary: sigh Message-ID: <5273@gryphon.CTS.COM> Date: 5 Aug 88 16:19:16 GMT Reply-To: richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) Organization: Trailing Edge Technology, Redondo Beach, CA Lines: 99 Clearing up yet more misinformation) In article <17611@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) writes: > > The Amiga is the world's greatest toy computer. No it's not. A Sun 4 is. > Fundamental problems: > > 1. The screen is TV resolution. This is not good enough for text. > You can see the dots all too well. It's like using a 1975-vintage > glass TTY, but with color. Uhh, you might try using an RGB monitor instead of a TV set. Granted a TV set will work (a real plus for displaying pictures or animations etc.) but yes, 80 col text is hard to read on a color TV (B&W is fine). I hav a Sony KV1311CR which is both a TV and an analog RGB monitor. By setting the thing into interlace mode, I get 48 80 col lines, and by choosing appropriate colors, i get no flicker. Yet to see a PC that would do that. > 2. Commodore doesn't really believe in hard disks. It's like the > early days of the Mac; everything is diskette-oriented and most > disks seem to be bootable. With a certain amount of pain and anguish, > disk vendors have been able to bolt on hard disks. This works > about as well as it did on the Mac before Apple offered a hard disk. This man is obviously a plant form apple or atari. You go to the store, you plonk down a couple hundred bucks, you plug in the hard disk, connect the cable, boot it up and it works. Pain and anguish ? Try not buying stuff from the Marquis de Sade peripheral supply co. > I hear that Commodore is now supporting hard disks in the new > (real soon now) release of AmigaDos. Hard disks have been supported in the OS for about a year and a half. > 3. The mechanical and electrical interfaces for the Amiga 1000 and > 500 are terrible. In theory, one can add on peripherals. The > general comment is "one add-on will work, two may work, three > won't work". In other words, add-on memory and a hard disk > will probably be flakey. Some add-ons only work right with > the covers removed. This does not apply to the Amiga 2000, > which has slots. There is *some* truth to this. The A500 and A1000 have no internal slots (like early mac's). They do have a connector on the side where the 68000 bus is brought out to. You can connect an expansion chassis to it, or connect peripherals to it directly. Yes, if you're going to hand 4 of them on there, sometimes you find one that doesnt pass the buss through correctly. this is the fault of the peripheral manufacturor, not Commodore. > 4. The product is positioned as a high-end toy. Most of the > available Amiga software is games. On the other hand, there > are no serious spreadsheet programs for the Amiga. The major > networking vendors do not support the Amiga (although schemes > involving the MS-DOS compatibility box have been made to work.) There is more ray tracing, 3d rendering and animation software for the amiga than any other computer short of a Convex. Yes there are lots of game. I dont think I've ever played a game on my amiga however so I really cant comment on them. There are even a couple on 1-2-3 clones for those who insist on torturing themselves. > The one vendor in Palo Alto that still handles the Amiga > now relegates them to the back of the shop, and has removed all > Amiga material from the store window. There you go folks. You should all make your decision based on what one vendor in Palo Alto does. > 5. The file system is on the fragile side. It is all too easy to > destroy a disk. This applies to both fixed and removable > media. (Known bug: invoke the system call DELAY with a 0 > argument and track 40 of a disk will be trashed!) I've had 3 disks trashed in 3 years. There is a utility, which reconstructs disks from the redundent information in every sector. When I was using a PC I trached one a week and there was no way to get them back. I've been able to recover every byte of every Amiga disk I've ever trashed. I have to admit I was amazed. >It's a fascinating machine. I have an Amiga 1000 myself. But if you have >only one machine, it probably shouldn't be an Amiga. Sound like you *really* like it, eh ? > > John Nagle If you only listen to one person it shouldnt be John Nagle. -- Bad sunburn. Real bad. richard@gryphon.CTS.COM {backbone}!gryphon!richard