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By Steve Duff, Contributing Writer, sduff@wolfenet.com
Editor's Note: Steve Duff is a computing enthusiast whose writing has been published several times in the Feedback column of The Amiga Monitor in recent months. What makes him unique is that he never even saw an Amiga until very recently; he has just purchased his first Amiga, and went right for the top-of-the-line. He brings a fresh perspective to the Amiga community, and we would therefore like to help him share his story.
Hi, I'm an Amiga newbie. Sadly, you don't hear a lot about new Amiga owners these days, so let's all hope this trend gets reversed.
Not only am I new to the Amiga, I'm relatively new to computers in general. Throughout the entire computer revolution I was busy doing other things, like investing in fast musclecars, street racing, stuff like that. My only contact with computers had been in the Navy, where I was a Fire Controlman. This job involves aiming and shooting missiles and guns at other people. In order to do that a Fire Controlman must operate and repair a wide variety of equipment, such as radars, missile and gun directors, and fire control computers.
In my Navy days I developed a dislike of computers and a love of radar. Following bits through AND gates and OR gates was, to me, nowhere near as much fun as playing with 10,000 volts. The digital computer I worked with on the carrier Enterprise came from a Swedish tank and was nothing to write home about. Aboard the battleship Wisconsin I worked with a 1938 analog computer, so I really straddled a lot of history.
My first home computer was a Macintosh Performa 6200 with a 75Mhz PowerPC 603 CPU. Given my affinity for excessive displays of brute force, it's perhaps unsurprising that this system failed to cut the mustard. It was soon replaced by a Mac clone, a PowerWave 604/132 that drove the MacOS about three times as fast. This machine thrilled me and seemed to herald an all-Mac future of ever-faster machines. The ultimate employment planned for this beast was video editing, which I figured was a Mac forte.
Around about December of '95, while searching for Mac magazines at a local bookstore, I spied a British Amiga journal. At that time the name Amiga was just a hazy memory to me, so out of curiosity I picked it up. As luck would have it there was an article about ShapeShifter wherein the author voiced complete scorn for MacOS and sang the praises of Amiga. This pissed me off, but got me interested. After all, PC users seldom bragged that their OS was superior; they just gloated over the money they saved by comparison to buying a Mac. I searched the magazine for Amiga ads and was dumbfounded by the specs and price of an A4000T -- an '040/25, hardly any RAM, a puny hard drive and no monitor or video card, all for a price of roughly $4,000 US. I laughed my ass off over such highway robbery.
I mentioned the ads to some internet Mac friends. One of them knew about Amigas and told me that the advertised system was actually a very capable machine, thanks to the Amiga's lean, multitasking OS and efficient use of system resources. Other, real-life friends spoke in reverent tones about the great Amiga games and graphics of years gone by.
Well, now I was really interested. Within a month I arranged to visit a local video studio to see their Toaster/Flyer system. The whole installation was about an $18,000 piece of work run on an A3000 with an '030/25. To the owner of a PowerWave 604/132, this was absolutely Pre-Cambrian. Then the guy showed me what it could do -- like instantaneous edits and special effects outputted to a big-screen TV.
After I picked my jaw up off the floor, I realized I needed an Amiga.
Through diligent research, I discovered that I could buy a brand-new big-box Amiga, slap a Toaster/Flyer into it, plus a TBC, three external hard drives totalling 18 Gigs, and a pro video deck for thousands less than just upgrading my Mac to a similar standard. Buying used boards and shaving the storage overkill could shrink the investment even further.
The Amiga interested me for more than just its video potential. I became very enamored with the Magic Workbench look, the depth of MUI, the potential of a true multitasking OS, plus the availability of more software at Aminet than I could ever even test in three lifetimes. I took the time to visit Zipperware in Seattle and saw Amigas in action. They seemed very easy to use and rather Mac-like in many ways, with real drag-and-drop. The Amiga's ability to emulate the Mac, plus the forthcoming availability of Power-Up boards, also offered the real possibility that I could sell my PowerWave and run Mac apps at 200Mhz on the Amiga instead. I was really, really eager to get my hands on my own Amiga.
Enough preamble. I received my QuikPak A4060T in mid-December of '96. The big box physically dwarfed the PowerMac as well as the P-166 minitower I'd sold to defray the Amiga's cost. The specs included 2MB Chip and 16MB EDO Fast RAM, 1 Gig SCSI hard drive and 4X SCSI CD-ROM. I had the thing set up in about 5 minutes and hooked to a Viewsonic SVGA monitor. Thus began a long series of problems, problems which should be taken into consideration by any and all Amiga system manufacturers who plan to see the market grow. In order to allay any fears, I'll state now that I love my Amiga, but let's deal with the bad stuff first.
There's obviously a worry in the Amiga community concerning CPU speed, but this is as nothing compared to the Amiga's display problems. The Viewsonic synched to 30Khz, which allowed very few AGA modes to be displayed. As a result, nearly every program I tried to launch made the screen go blank. It didn't help that most of the screen modes were left in the Devs Storage drawer, causing further newbie frustration. I had planned ahead of time to order the CyberVision64/3D and AT M1764 monitor, but they were unavailable at that time. Now that such items are becoming available, system vendors should offer them as part of a package. At the very least, flicker-fixers should be an option on every system purchased. Lack of such hardware basically made the A4060T an expensive desktop decoration for over a month.
The CV64/3D, which arrived with a corrupt installation floppy in late January, made the system much more attractive but no more useful. However, the speed under the graphics card on an 800x600x16-bit Workbench is stunning compared to a 256-color AGA Workbench. This card or the Picasso is a must for any user accustomed to Mac and PC displays. However, the refresh rate still leaves something to be desired, at least until some software problems are taken care of. It also appears that the Scan Doubler is essential to promote Amiga screen modes through the CV64/3D, which makes this a $540 dollar graphics card. For anyone who foresees little or no need for 3D acceleration, the Picasso IV offers most of the same features plus a built-in Scan Doubler for $100 less.
The arrival of the AT M1764 monitor finally cured the bottleneck. Initial fit and finish was sub-par, since part of the casing had sprung loose in the front, but I was able to snug it back up with no further problems. Also, the display area is a bit off-center. With this monitor I currently run a 32-color Multiscan 'Productivity' 640x480 display, which offers good speed. Most importantly, the monitor handles all screen modes, and screen mode promotion works very nicely. By comparison to the Sony 17sfII on the Mac, the AT (Microvitec) monitor has inferior brightness and more awkward (though thankfully comprehensive) controls. The image quality is excellent and although the screen has some curvature it is very evenly distributed, more so than I've seen in other non-Trinitron displays, so there's really no distortion at the edges. Therefore, I have to rate this monitor as one of the most desirable features of any Amiga system. It's even more desirable than a graphics card!
Since the big-box Amigas are aimed at video professionals, most of whom already have Amigas and plenty of Amiga gear, my complaints may be in the minority. However, to broaden the Amiga audience you can't just preach to the choir. What you have to do is make Amiga systems that are ready to go full-throttle out of the box if the proper options are checked off. To do otherwise really accomplishes very little except to feed an upgrade audience among existing users.
A second problem that soon cropped up was the Workbench partition -- a mere 8MB on a 1GB drive. As one might imagine, this leaves little room for nifty Workbench utilities and as a result I'm faced with reformatting the hard drive and re-installing the OS from floppies (or perhaps making Assigns?). This is an ugly prospect for a newbie. This problem may not have occurred if I'd ordered direct from QuikPak, but given my ignorance of many Amiga specifics, there's no reason to assume it would have been different, either. I therefore suggest that all manufacturers assume that any user would love to take advantage of the available Amiga shareware utilities. For that reason, the default Workbench partition should be 50-100MB or at the very least scaled to the drive size. Further, for any purchaser who orders an installed CD-ROM, the OS and the entire software package should be available on a boot CD.
Here's a note that many Amigans may find disheartening: compared to the mainstream platforms, Amiga OS is not easy to use for a newbie. First, any OS that includes a command-line is automatically more difficult than MacOS. What Amiga OS offers instead is tremendous low-level control and configurability. In order to take advantage of this a user needs a certain degree of experience. I plan to spend a lot of time learning how to do it, but I should also note that installing software is rather more complex than with MacOS and Win95. For instance, NewIcons requires a patch to the Startup-Sequence script for OS3.x users. I chose not to apply this patch since, at my current level of experience, screwing up may have caused an error I couldn't correct. As a result, I have a pretty funky-looking WorkBench right now. :>
The whole North American Amiga scene is clearly deficient in mid-level computers. There is absolutely nothing in between the inexpensive A1200 (which basically doesn't exist) and the workstation-grade big-box Amiga. What's needed is a minitower system with Zorro slots which, when fitted with an '060, can compete favorably in price to a P-133 or 166 system. Systems close to this spec are already made by Eagle in Europe -- the A1200TE comes with a Blizzard 1260 for something between $1,200 - $1,500. Alas, no Zorro slots. You get an IDE bus instead. I'm sure this spec can be bettered and offered with a full option range of RAM, HD, graphics card, monitor, CD-ROM's -- the works.
Finally, if you wanted to promote the Amiga to a wider audience with, say, ads in various general computer magazines, it would be a really bad idea to have a screenshot of the standard WorkBench. But if you showed a fancy NewIcon or Magic Workbench screenshot, any ensuing new customers might be a bit peeved by what they saw upon booting the system. Therefore it might be a good idea to offer an 'Amiga Shareware Bundle' with such items as MUI, Magic Workbench, Magic Menu, NewIcons and so on, which could be discussed with customers on purchase. This way hardcore Amiga ShellHeads and classic Workbench fans could choose an option - delete, while other customers could have attractive pre-sets already loaded when they receive their machine, and be happy in the knowledge that the shareware fee is pre-paid, thus giving them the registered version. Keep in mind that PC clonemakers are masters of bundling and expert at offering customers a wide range of options. The Amiga has to climb out of the hole here, so it would behoove manufacturers to bend over backwards to please their customers and expand their market.
Now for the good stuff. How does the A4060T compare to the PowerMac and P-166 PC? To put it mildly, very well. This comes as no surprise to experienced Amigans, but even though I was somewhat prepared for it, I find myself amazed on a daily basis by how powerful this machine is. The one deficit encountered so far is that the Amiga seems to load large graphics much more slowly than the Mac and a little more slowly than the PC. Further, the detail seems a bit less. Worth noting here is that my primary viewers have been MultiView and Personal Paint. Aside from this stumbling block the Amiga seems to equal or exceed the other machines in nearly every category. It opens windows and searches volumes more swiftly than the Mac and is roughly equivalent to the PC in this regard. Vertical scrolling is a bit slow, especially by comparison to the Mac, and I've yet to test the gaming capabilities. However, the multitasking more than makes up for the few weak areas. I've run AMountains and a music Mod off the CD-ROM while rendering three fractals at the same time with ChaosPro, and the machine didn't even burp. Needless to say, this cannot be done on the Mac and might even be problematic on a Win95 PC. The Amiga is also more stable than the other machines and rarely crashes. There is no doubt in my mind that QuikPak's A4060T is a quality piece of gear and a scorching performer, and I haven't even optimized this thing because I'm not experienced enough to know how!
I have found other things very worthwhile in the Amiga scene. Oddly, the relatively small size of the scene is an asset. I've received considerable help from experienced, fanatically loyal Amigans. Software is centralized and available by the megaload. With a few CD-ROM's costing less than $100 total, I now have =thousands= of files to peruse. Of course, in Seattle I have the advantage of Zipperware, a real Amiga store less than two miles from my door. Hopefully I'll be as lucky in Chicago.
The Amiga has also dazzled me with its creative software. I have Scala. I have Cinema 4D, with which I did my first raytrace just the other night. I have several other 3D packages, plus Photogenics and Personal Paint and the Art Effect demo. These programs have made the Amiga tremendously fun to use. With the Mac and PC, I mainly have fun playing games. With the Amiga, computing itself is a total blast. Clearly, all the hype was true. The Amiga really is the superior machine. I find myself enjoying it more every day and am already planning to add a second Amiga to my collection in about a year.
So far as I'm concerned the Amiga has a future. I plan to be here when it happens. :>
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