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Conference hydra::amiga_v1

Title:	AMIGA NOTES
Notice:	Join us in the NEW conference - HYDRA::AMIGA_V2
Moderator:	HYDRA::MOORE

Created:	Sat Apr 26 1986
Last Modified:	Wed Feb 05 1992
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	5378
Total number of notes:	38326

4186.0. "" by GOBAMA::WILSONTL (Tony, the HOSS TRUMPET) Tue Oct 09 1990 18:01

    Went to the local Amiga store the other day.  I hadn't gone in for a
    while since the  new sales guy was a PC bigot.  (Sidebar is that he
    eventually bought an Amiga anyway).  They had a demo of a DON Bluth?
    game similar to the one on the laser disk system (can't remember the
    name, but the game comes on 6! diskettes).
    
    The interesting thing is that they had both the Amiga version and the
    PC version running side-by-side.  The PC version sat there silently
    displaying pictures (crude ones, at that) and showing action in a sort
    of jerky motion reminiscent of slow-motion TV.  All the while the Amiga
    500 with its two diskettes and no hard drive was describing the game in
    digitized sound and a video display that would make the Saturday
    morning cartoons envious.  I would like to have been a mouse in a
    corner when other customers came in.

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
4186.1	Clone ramblings	LEDS::ACCIARDI	Probing the limits of adhesion	`Tue Oct 09 1990 21:49`	28
	I went to the Marlboro MA Pee Cee show on Saturday, October 6. This show comes around a few times a year and vendors from all over the east coast hawk their wares at very reasonable prices. Most of the booths had 386 clones running some very simple animations that were reminiscent of what was being done on the Amiga in 1985 with Aegis Animator. (I believe the animations were done with AutoCAD Animator, which was partially written by Jim Kent of Amiga reknown). The showgoers all seemed very impressed with these simple cartoon-like demos. There was a fairly good one of a ray traced chess board with pieces being stamped out with a robot arm. Not quite up to Amiga standards, but close. There was a very interesting slide show running in 1024 x 768 Super VGA (256 color) mode at one booth. The images (of bathing suit beauties) looked like photographs. The downside is that these enormous images (.77 MB each) just cannot be loaded in quickly from hard disk to perform any animation at any meaningful frame rate. The PC/AT 8 MHz bus must also be a bottleneck. I think the PC world is finally getting excited about graphics, animation and sound. Too bad they still don't know what an Amiga is! Ed
4186.2		BAGELS::BRANNON	Dave Brannon	`Wed Oct 10 1990 18:17`	12
	re:.1 Did you see the raytraced sliver balls going around in a circle? There were lots of nice demos, and really great prices. That catch was that price of systems doing the demos was not cheap. I hope CBM or somebody will come out with a 1024x768 amiga graphics card sometime soon, those monitors looked great and the price is dropping fast. Dave
4186.3		LEDS::ACCIARDI	Probing the limits of adhesion	`Wed Oct 10 1990 23:18`	18
	Re: cheap monitors... I was actually entertaining the thought of picking up a 14" monitor (I currently use a 12" Princeton that is very sharp, but smallish), but most of the off brands being bundled with the 386 systems did not impress me, despite the .28 mm dot pitch and 1024 dot resolution. The cheap SVGA monitors ($450) seemed to have displays that made scanned images look good, but text looked weak. Also, the display actually jittered on many of them. By comparison, the Sony and NEC displays looked much better; rock solid with more vivid color. Also about $200 more. I kept my money. Ed.