neves@uwai.UUCP (08/14/85)
Look on page 90 of the August issue of Byte for a picture showing the
Workbench display of the Amiga (in 640 by 200 mode). I don't know
about you but I couldn't look at those characters very long. On page 91
you see a sample MAC display. Much more readable.
Question for anyone who has seen a live Amiga. Is the character display
really that bad? Or was the picture on page 90 just a bad photograph?--
David Neves
Computer Sciences Department
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Usenet: {allegra,heurikon,ihnp4,seismo,uwm-evax}!uwvax!neves
Arpanet: neves@uwvaxcsc@watmath.UUCP (Jan Gray) (08/15/85)
In article <228@uwai.UUCP> neves@uwai.UUCP writes: >Look on page 90 of the August issue of Byte for a picture showing the >Workbench display of the Amiga (in 640 by 200 mode). I don't know >about you but I couldn't look at those characters very long. On page 91 >you see a sample MAC display. Much more readable. To get a good idea of what the characters on the 640 x 200 Amiga desktop feel like, find an IBM PC w/colour graphics adapter. Both are 640 x 200 pixels. On the "desktop", more colour doesn't do much for you. And forget about using 640 x 400. For that you will need interlacing -- and a long persistance monitor. Does anyone know if the standard Amiga colour monitor being sold by Commodore is long persistance? The Macintosh (and forseeable future Macs) use monochrome technology to provide high quality, readable displays, because the great expense of providing the equivalent resolution in colour doesn't get you much -- unless you like painting or playing games. Given a bitmapped monochrome display and the same resolution (not interlaced!) in 4-bit-deep colour, I'd rather have the monochrome display. Although there is an argument to be made for setting the Amiga colour tables to get 16 level gray scale. Jan Gray watmath!looking!jan Looking Glass Software, Waterloo 519-884-7473
keith@ssc-vax.UUCP (Keith Nemitz) (08/16/85)
> Question for anyone who has seen a live Amiga. Is the character display > really that bad? Or was the picture on page 90 just a bad photograph?-- > I've seen it, and it is a standard IBM-PC resolution display, with the option of about a billion colors for things to be. Mac's screen is much finer and clearer to read in my opinion. Face it, very, very few applications really NEED color. Games, some drafting maybe. Still if you want color, amiga is the best PC for the money. It's multitasking is the other main point that makes it desirable, but it's memory manager does NO HEAP COMPACTION. That means that if you quit one application it does not mean another will fit in the space released. Once last point, due to the offloading of graphics work from the processor, I figure that you'll see things run faster than a PC-AT, mac comes close right now. keith (* This is to notify you that your left hemisphere is at war with your right hemisphere. Please do not be unduly alarmed. You were not using either of them anyway. *)
david@ecrhub.UUCP (David M. Haynes) (08/21/85)
> > Question for anyone who has seen a live Amiga. Is the character display > > really that bad? Or was the picture on page 90 just a bad photograph?-- > > > [Keith Nemitz writes..] > I've seen it, and it is a standard IBM-PC resolution display, with the option > of about a billion colors for things to be. Actually you have the choice of 60 or 80 characters/line, so sometimes it is a standard (colour) IBM-PC dosplay. > Mac's screen is much finer and > clearer to read in my opinion. Uhmmm. Let's be careful here. The mac comes with a nice small B/W screen of about 8 inches diagonally. The Amiga has a much larger screen (IBM PC monitor size) so, remember that the display is spread over a larger area and is, therefore, grainier. > Face it, very, very few applications really > NEED color. Games, some drafting maybe. Still if you want color, amiga is > the best PC for the money. The sound quality is nothing to sneeze at either. BTW. maybe its not clear but the Amiga will write video and sound as well as read it. So computer animation and movies anyone? Opinion time: I freely admit that I prefer the Macintosh to the Amiga as both products stand now simply because there is a much larger amount of software available for the mac. If the people at Amiga (Commodore) get their act together and produce software for the types of tasks I tend to do, well then I'll look at the Amiga more seriously. Til then, its nice, it could be a lot of fun to play with, its a hell of a machine to develop for, but its not very useful to the end user. -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- David M. Haynes Exegetics Inc. ..!utzoo!ecrhub!david Exegetics Inc. is a legal convience and does not care what I have to say. Emerald City Research Inc. is very kind to let me use their machine, but in no way is even remotely responsible for the stuff I post.
kdmoen@watcgl.UUCP (Doug Moen) (08/28/85)
>Look on page 90 of the August issue of Byte for a picture showing the >Workbench display of the Amiga (in 640 by 200 mode). I don't know >about you but I couldn't look at those characters very long. On page 91 >you see a sample MAC display. Much more readable. >Question for anyone who has seen a live Amiga. Is the character display >really that bad? Or was the picture on page 90 just a bad photograph?-- Yes, the Amiga display does look pretty much like that, and I agree, the Mac is certainly more readable. There are a number of reasons for this: more pixels: The Mac has 512x342 pixels (175104) vs 640x200 (128000) for the Amiga Workbench. (When I saw the Amiga at Siggraph, I was told by a technical person that the Workbench as supplied can not be run in 640x400 mode, and that because of the flicker caused by interlace, you wouldn't want to if you could.) smaller pixels: Pixels on the Mac are square, 1/72 of an inch on the side, while the Amiga's pixels are larger (because of the larger screen) and elongated (because of the small # of scanlines). monochrome vs colour: A monochrome pixel is a dot which is either all black or all white. A pixel on a colour monitor consists of a red dot, a green dot, and a blue dot. Black and white looks much better on a monochrome display than on a colour display. better fonts: The Mac system font has variable width characters 9 dots high, between 2 and 10 dots wide, with 3 dots for descenders. The Amiga Workbench font is constant width 5x7, with 1 dot for descenders. better graphic design: The appearance of windows, controls, etc on the Mac seem to have been designed with a lot more care. Compare the Macs title bar, grow box, etc, with the Amiga. Note the use of rounded-corner rectangles in some places, and the drop-shadows underneath windows and pull-down menus. By the way, this shouldn't be read as an anti-Amiga diatribe. I'm really impressed by the operating system and the graphics support chips. I'm waiting until the Apple shareholders meeting in January (when they announce the new improved mac) before I decide whether to buy a Mac or an Amiga. -- Doug Moen (watmath!watcgl!kdmoen) University of Waterloo Computer Graphics Lab