Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!apple!well!ewhac
From: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Silver (was Re: Amiga 2000 has been swapped)
Message-ID: <6908@well.UUCP>
Date: 24 Aug 88 07:57:16 GMT
References: <2@orbit.UUCP>
Reply-To: ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab)
Organization: (-: ACME Flamethrowers.  Mark Ethan Smith, CEO. :-)
Lines: 31
Quote: "Time.  Travel.  Communication.  Entertainment."  -- Kraftwerk

In article <2@orbit.UUCP> swordfis@pnet51.cts.com (Tim Mitchell) writes:
>Leo, as I understand it you've talked to Don Sidoroff (who wrote Turbo
>Silver.) Impulse and Don have parted ways, and Don seems to have lost his
>taste for the Amiga.

	When did this happen?  I spoke to him not more than a month ago, and
he seemed decidedly pleased with himself at what he had accomplished on the
Amiga, and justifiably so.  Silver is a *great* renderer.

	Impulse hasn't sent me the upgrade yet, though....

>Considering IBM's market saturation, a
>cheap 3D animation system for them could spell trouble for us.  [ ... ]

	I don't think it'll be cheap.  Consider:

	A VGA bitmap is bigger than 64K.  Intel architectures tend to lose
real big on data chunks bigger than 64K, so you'll need a very fast CPU to
bash all the bits at a respectable speed, which won't be cheap.  The '386
doesn't lose too bad on >64K, but they're not cheap either right now.

	Even if you can find a cheap fast CPU that can throw eight bitplanes
around without bogging down, you still don't have NTSC output.

	We're safe.  For a while....

_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
Leo L. Schwab -- The Guy in The Cape	INET: well!ewhac@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU
 \_ -_		Recumbent Bikes:	UUCP: pacbell > !{well,unicom}!ewhac
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