NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/advocacy-part1/2012

Internet Message Format | 1996-08-05 | 3.4 KB

Path: news.mr.net!usenet
From: [e-mail] (Michael M. Rye)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Dislikes with the MacOS.
Date: 26 Jan 1996 03:26:09 GMT
Organization: Minnesota Regional Network (MRNet)
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>"Michael M. Rye" <[e-mail]> writes:
>>Bernd Bernie Meyer wrote:

>>BB>Abd, to get this back to the Amiga viewpoint: disk read speed is _the_
>>BB>major bottleneck for animations, something the Amiga claims to be good
>>BB>at.

MR>The Amiga is excellent at disk access, whether it be hard drive or floppy.
MR>I've never had a problem running animations on my A1200, from hard drive
MR>or from floppy.  As an example, one of my favorite demos is called "Desert
MR>Dream" (made by the Kefrens group).  It is a floppy based demo that
MR>takes advantage (auto-detects) of both of my floppy drives on my
MR>A500 and detects that I only have a bog standard 7 MHz 68000 processor
MR>and 2.5 Meg memory expansion in the trapdoor slot under the keyboard.
MR>The demo runs full screen & full speed animation and excellent music
MR>and never slows down even while the floppy drives are clicking away
MR>(loading the next part of the demo) at the same time.

BM>And the relevance is? You are _not_ loading image after image from your
BM>floppy, but some code that whirls around some stuff on your screen. Probably
BM>using sprites.

BM>"Animation" in the sense I used it means you have at least half a minute
BM>worth of frames on your disk, and dump them on the screen one after the
BM>other.

BM>Bernie

Yea, right, like somebody's going to store 12 minutes of demo in
frames on floppy!  (Yes, that's how long the demo lasts, I timed it!)
If that's your only idea of animation, then you need to do some
research.  Animations can also be *generated* in real-time, ya
know.  That's what "Desert Dream" does.  It loads programs that do
real-time calculations that determine where everything is put on
the screen.  And if you think sprites are used for the whole thing,
think again.  There's so much stuff moving around on "Desert Dream"
in certain parts of the demo, certainly not all of them could be
sprites, seeing as the Amiga only has 8 at a time on the screen.
Example: the demo contains a part where it real-time calculates and
animates (if I remember the number correctly, I'll have to run the
demo again and check) over 2000 sinusoidal dots (or it's some other
mathematical function, I can't remember).  You may be thinking "Only
dots?!?!?!"  Yea, right, no big deal, I agree.  But the point is it's
still doing it in real-time.  Nuff said.

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* -Michael M. Rye- (Jedi) |  Amiga 1200, '030 50 MHz, '882 50 MHz,  *
*   UNIX/C Admin/Design   |___10 MB RAM, 850 MB HD, SupraFAX 28.8___*
*   [e-mail]   |  Amiga  500, 1 chip/2 fast, 2 floppies  *
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*                        Thought of the Day:                        *
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