Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!kent From: kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu (Kent D. Polk) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Re: Faith in the Amiga Message-ID: <25107@swrinde.nde.swri.edu> Date: 7 Feb 90 19:13:02 GMT References: <02030.AA02030@sosaria> <5487@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM> <+!1^3&@rpi.edu> <5494@tekig5.PEN.TEK.COM> <1521@gould.doc.ic.ac.uk> <1397@corpane.UUCP> Reply-To: kent@swrinde.UUCP (Kent D. Polk) Organization: Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas Lines: 47 In article <1397@corpane.UUCP> sparks@corpane.UUCP (John Sparks) writes: [...] >moan, moan. :-) actually the Amiga is fine for what I do with it, but it >could be better. I think it's time we asked for better graphics. If we >don't let CBM know that we want something better than we have, then CBM >probably won't bother improving it till they are way behind in the market. >I would rather complain and convince CBM to improve, than to just abandon >them and buy something else, because I like CBM and they deserve my support. I agree. Hope you guys will forgive me. I've held my tongue for a long time, but I'm about to bite it off. The Amiga is set to be a fabulous technical computer. There are only a few things missing to allow it to be such. One is adequate graphics. I realize that many of you seem to want it to be just for home uses, but there is really no other system poised to fill so many voids like the Amiga is. Give it a chance. Ok, now... Proposition: How about the Lowell card with Intuition support? The card has the right stuff - maybe at too high a price for some, but it needs Intuition support to be useful. I could start using Amigas for many projects here at work if I had Intuition or X11 support for the Lowell card. Without it, I can't use the Amiga. The standard graphics are simply not adequate: resolution (need 512 height for fft stuff), need 256 color levels for image processing display, need 8 bit pixel organization for changing colors by changing the color scale before tomorrow comes (not having to re-write all the pixels at the incredibly slow WritePixel() rate). While the current bitplane configuration may be neat for animation, etc. It is totally inadequate for technical image and data processing applications. I need instead to be able to set a color map & give a pointer to an array & have it be displayed in one simple operation - like on the big boys :^). I need to do color map changes on increments other than bitplane boundaries. Also, check the speed on a 16 color high-res screen. Incredibly slow. (etc., etc., etc.) Instead of discouraging high-end graphics cards, please let those of us who need them pay for them & have true OS support for them. ==================================================================== Kent Polk - Southwest Research Institute - kent@swrinde.nde.swri.edu Motto : "Anything worth doing is worth overdoing" ====================================================================