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- Hi Rev.,
-
- In a message of 18 Jan 96 you wrote to All:
-
- RJJ> review. Has the standard 16-bit V-Lab board in it, not the 32-bit
- RJJ> Draco bus V-Lab, which is still being developed. He is very happy
- RJJ> with it, says the 060 cuts rendering time, etc. Improved picture
- RJJ> quality even with 16-bit board - can go to 100% JPEG. Big news for
- RJJ> current V-Lab board owners, however, is that Macrosystems has dropped
- RJJ> the idea of developing a Zorro-III version of V-Lab; they now propose
- RJJ> selling an 060 accelerator for existing Amigas with an on-board Draco
- RJJ> bus. Current owners would be able to put this in their existing
- RJJ> machines, and upgrade to the 32-bit Draco bus V-Lab board.
- RJJ> Combination should give top-end BetaCam quality, with transfers of
- RJJ> around 7-8 megs/ sec sustained and up. Even better news is that they
- RJJ> are working on the DEC Alpha coprocessor option which should do
- RJJ> renders at about 20x the rate of a stock 040-25. Wow. Matt is
- RJJ> somewhat doubtful that Amiga Tech will actually bring out the
- RJJ> announced PowerPC chip Amiga (hope he's wrong), but he is fairly
- RJJ> confident that Macrosystems will actually finish and distribute the
- RJJ> DEC Alpha coprocessor. This sounds very good for current V-Lab
- RJJ> Motion system owners.
-
- Not to me it doesn't. I don't want to buy 060 accelerators when I have an
- 040/40/SCSI-2 FAST, and would prefer to upgrade to a PPC if anything. I just
- want a VLAB with a better bus interface than Z2 (namely Z2/Z3 auto-sensing, as
- it should have been from the very start), so I can achieve better quality in
- the machine I already own.
-
- I'm very disappointed that the Z3 version has been dropped. All it indicates to
- me is that MacroSystem is dropping support for the generic and existing Amiga
- base, and concentrating on the DraCo and spin-off products.
-
- I for one will be looking at other solutions than the DraCo or MacroSystem
- accelerator/VLAB combos.
-
- Regards,
-
- Mark
-
- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- mpa@wvision.iig.com.au Cairns
- Wishful Vision Australia
-
-