NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/hardware-part1/6513

Text File | 1996-08-05 | 5.7 KB | 120 lines

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Path: admaix.sunydutchess.edu!ub!dsinc!scala!news
From: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
Subject: Re: Amiga vs. PC
Sender: [e-mail] (Usenet administrator)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 23:52:05 GMT
Reply-To: [e-mail] (Dave Haynie)
References: <4glavu$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4h1vmj$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4h7gic$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4hkl2h$[e-mail]>
Nntp-Posting-Host: gator
Organization: Scala Computer Television, US Research Center

In <4hkl2h$[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Mike Farren) writes:
>[e-mail] (Dave Haynie) writes:

>>>I surely do wish that somebody, somewhere, would do a chipset that
>>>combined the Amiga's flexibility with the PC's raw power.

>>Just where do you find the Amiga so much more "flexible" over
>>something I can buy off the shelf today?

>Integration.  The ability to get the system to do what you needed
>*and* have a reasonable expectation that your app would work on
>all of the available systems without requiring 40-gazillion different
>drivers, with a fair chance that in three months, there will be
>new cards out there that will not run your stuff.

That's not what I'm talking about. My premise is that there exist
graphics & sound devices, in standard PCI bus interface form (eg,
they're on the PC) that totally blow away the Amiga's
equivalents. That's not to say that PCs can, or ever will, be able to
take full advantage of this kind of hardware.

>A reasonable base OS to work from, so you don't need to go to the
>metal to accomplish what should be simple tasks.  A flexible OS
>structure, so that changes are possible without major heartache.

That is exactly what I have been saying: the AmigaOS is vastly
superior in a number of ways to anything on the PC. It'll remain this
way when driving hot new graphics chips, and it can even change to be
able to support these better. That's not likely to happen on the PC,
since no one's controlling HW and SW. Things, in practical terms, tend
to stall at the level of Windows API, or the amount of custom
programming any company feels like doing, no matter what's currently
possible.

>Very easy methods to do things like sprite manipulation, page
>flipping,

Sprites are not a big thing these days, 3D and more general object
manipulation support in hardware is rendering them a thing of the
past, beyond the obvious mouse pointer use (just because it's fairly
easy to implement).

>screen mode changes without resetting the video system,

That works on the Amiga simply because every screen mode is based on
the same pixel clock. You can have the same on any graphics chip
hardware if you don't change the pixel clock between graphics
modes. And that's possible -- most modern SVGA chips have programmable
scan rates like ECS and AA, many have pixel clock dividers independent
of the PLL (how you get 35ns, 70ns, and 140ns pixels on the Amiga
today). If you're going to have a flexible system, though, you really
want a pixel clock synthesizer. That's going to cause a jump when you
change pixel clocks; this was going to be true on AAA as it is on most
PC graphics devices today (though on AAA, we could support four
independent PLLs at once, so smooth changes at a given resolution were
possible, although fairly expensive to actually implement).

>display synchronization,

Every SVGA chip on the market can give you a vertical blanking
interrupt, but most PC OSs don't use it. Of course, they never really
think in multimedia terms there.

>You underestimate the usefulness of sprites.  It's nice to not
>have to worry about the things you must worry about if you're
>doing sprites on a non-sprite system.

These are "worries" best left to the OS. If the OS is designed
properly, you're not going to know the difference. 3D support
certainly helps here too, since you can have some real depth concept,
rather than the fairly primitive prioritization levels of sprite
systems.

>No argument.  But then, that wasn't ever what I was saying.  I bow
>to none in my liking for the Amiga - but I've been working with PCs
>for the last couple of years, and for new work, wouldn't go back.
>But still, I can dream - and my dream has PC technology mated
>with Amiga levels of integration, and it's a nice dream, I'll
>tell you.

When you're talking integration between the graphics and the OS,
you'll have that on the Amiga, no matter what kind of graphics it's
driving. Anyone using PC-industry parts to build computers doesn't
necessarily have to use any arbitrary PC-industry part to build that
computer, just a selected one, or perhaps some minimal level of
functionality. That's a significant advantage over PCs, which have to
deal with anything you throw at them.

>And I don't think I'm the only one - what else is the BeBox all
>about?

That's 100% software, really. Other than not having to deal with the
whole history of CGA, VGA, and SVGA (the GXE64 card they're supporting
today is a fairly reasonable 64-bit DRAM-based SVGA card, with
blitter, 8 to 24-bit bits/pixels, high resolution, programmable
display rates, etc), they're not really doing fancy stuff with
hardware selection. Which is probably appropriate for a system at the
desktop PC level. When you're talking about lower-end, game and
multimedia oriented systems like the Amiga, you can be more selective
about the hardware you want to support.

Dave Haynie          | ex-Commodore Engineering |   for DiskSalv 3 &
Sr. Systems Engineer |  Hardwired Media Company | "The Deathbed Vigil"
Scala Inc., US R&D   |    Ki No Kawa Aikido     |     [e-mail]

         "Feeling ... Pretty ... Psyched" -R.E.M.