Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!ucbvax!pasteur!helios.ee.lbl.gov!lll-tis!lll-winken!scooter!neoucom!wtm From: wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Amiga public impressions Summary: Difficult to copare Amiga to Atari ST (or whatever)... Keywords: new machine old user Message-ID: <1377@neoucom.UUCP> Date: 24 Oct 88 15:14:33 GMT References: <12626@eecae.UUCP> Distribution: na Organization: Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine Lines: 96 Terry made several interesting points in his article. From a joe consumer point of view, he is correct in many instances. Unfortunaely, the Amiga is often compared with the Atari ST. Both machines are in the same general price bracket and do employ the same central processing element. Really, the two machines excel in different applications areas. I feel that comparing the Amiga (models) is sort of like comparing the IBM model 80 and Sun 386i. The latter machines both happen to use an 80386 CPU, but each has its own niche. One thing that hurts the Amiga's game image is that some games are poor ports from other machines to the Amiga. Of course, the fault is not the Amiga's, but rather the software author's. There are many Amiga specific programs that do use the Amiga's abilities to the fullest. Unfortunately, the Amiga's advanced hardware makes it difficult to port the other direction. It is relatively less work to port (but not enhance) some IBM PC CGA program over to the Amiga. What you get on the Amiga then is CGA quality graphics. Since software houses understand economics, stuff tends to get written to the least common denominator. Even a year and a half after VGA graphics have become commonly available in the IBM PC marketplace, there are relatively few mainstream applications that use VGA to its full extent. I've programmed custom graphics applications for both the Amiga and IBM EGA. I've frequently cussed at EGA becuase you just can't do things in the EGA hardware that are easy on the Amiga. VGA is better, but it still has realatively minimal harware smarts. As far as flicker goes, the high end IBM yardstick is the 8514 graphics system (hope I got the number right!). The 8514 *IS INTERLACED*. IBM smelled the same economics that C-A did. High resolution non-interlaced graphics requires a *very good* monitor. To do a 600*400 display non-interlaced at 60 Hz would require doing 600 lines in 1/60th sec. That translates to 27 uS per line. Let's allow 7 uS for the horizontal retrace. That means that you have to put out 600 pixels in 20 uS, or a pixel every 33 nS. To get a semblance of a decent picture, you'd have to have a video fequency response that is no more than -3 dB at 30 MHz! (Even that would be marginal). That means that you'd have to get a monitor at least as good as a NEC multisync Plus. The Multisync Plus has a frequency response to about 38 MHz on the VGA connecor, or about 45 MHz through the BNC connects. (Why it is better through the BNC who knows; maybe they factor in some calbing losses for the VGA connector). The street price of the Multisync Plus in the latest Priority One catalog is $900. (Don't confuse this with the cheaper Multisync II, which is $600.) Of course, if your wallet is up to it, you can get the Microway Flicker Fixer (~$500) and a Multisync Plus and kick some serious video tail with an Amiga 2000. Unfortunamely, this makes the entry level price around $3000, which is not in the same market as the ST. But with a 40 meg drive, the Amiga would still be well under $4000, which makes it a very attractive player in the medium level graphics market. We use the interlacing to our advantage on the Amiga. We use the Amiga to study growth patterns in neurons (brain cells). We can collect data on video tape, looking at the cells under a microscope. At that time, we don't even have to worry about the computer. Later on, we can play the tape back into our digitizer. One thing you do have to watch is that your VCR has an interlaced pause feature. Some of the newer VCRs with digital freeze do. Standard VHS decks give you a non-interlaced half-frame in pause. We take the shots in 640*400 mode, save them to disk, and then do a post hoc video subtraction to see what changed over time. The neat thing is that the digitizer + software cost only $129 for the Amiga. True, it takes 30 sec to digitize a 640*400 grayscale image, but for us that is OK. Our A-1000 based system with hard disk was well under $3K (exclusive of the cost of student slave labor to program it). It would have been impossible or much more expensive on any other system. It would have been around $6K on an IBM system. On Mac II, I don't even want to think about the cost (and the Mac has that yucky Mac O/S to deal with; yes I've really used Macs enough to be fair). Atari TOS versus Amigados is not a terribly fair comparison either. No more fair than comparing Unix/Xenix to msdos. It didn't really seem to me that using CLI is required to do things equivalent to GEM operations. There are things that I can (and do use CLI) for that are not possible in GEM/TOS. You can use a Sun strictly in Sunview or Suntools without ever touching a C or Bourne shell, but you won't get the most from the machine. The same is true for Amigados; CLI can be spurned if desired, but it is there. The Amiga has "only" been on the market since the fall of 1985. Considering that the Amiga hardware and software are unique products, it seems to me that the machine has shown considerable growth in that time. The first 3 years of the IBM PC were pretty dull years, with most software just being knock-offs of CP/M products. Really, once one learns how to write for Amigados, the Amiga is easier to deal with because all hardware configurations are more-or-less congruent. In the IBM world, there are umpteen hardware configurations operating at umpteen CPU speeds. Wost of all is the plethora of video types. It is daunting to thoroughly test out a PC application. --Bill