dwl10@amdahl.UUCP (Dave Lowrey) (06/11/85)
The following information was obtained from a Washington, D.C.
Commodore BBS. It is third generation info, but the source seems to
know wat he is talking about.
Sorry about the 40 columns.
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Readers - 'ARLANL' is the DELPHI user
name of Sheldon Leeman, author of
"Mapping the 64" and a whole lot of
those Compute! articles you've read.
This is a letter he left on the C-64
sig on Delphi.
3147 5-JUN-11:42: C-128 & Amiga
Hard AMIGA Facts! (Re: Msg 2998)
From: ARLANL To: LUNERANGER
Steve, calling the Amiga a Mac clone
is like calling a PC AT a big pocket
calculator. They are similar in some
sense (like they are both computers &
they both use the 68000 chip, they
both have mouse-controlled windowing
environments), but so then are the 64
and the VIC, and nobody has ever
confused them. I have had a chance to
talk to the designers of the machine,
and several of the people who attended
the programmers seminar that Commodore
held in Monterey about two weeks ago.
At that seminar, the Amiga people
supposedly supplied enough detailed
information that you could build an
Amiga with the information given.
Everybody had raves both for the
seminar and for the machine. The
reaction was much more positive than
that for the GEM seminar held earlier
by Digital Research. At that seminar,
many Mac programmers came away
disappointed with the system resources
which they found much weaker than the
Mac. At the Amiga seminar, however, I
had a friend who sat next to a Mac
programmer. He said at the beginning
of the seminar, the guy was raving
about the Mac, how powerful it was,
and how easy to program. By the second
day, however, he was ready to throw
away his Mac.
Please keep in mind that none of
am not privy to official CBM info as
of yet. I am going to take the oath
of secrecy in a couple of days,
however, so I will not be able to
comment after that. But you should be
able to verify most of this in about
6-7 weeks when Commodore makes its
official announcement.?
?
The Amiga is a 68000 based computer
with a windowing environment like the
Macintosh or GEM. Notice that I said
"like", not identical to, or
compatible with. It is not compatible
with anything, least of all any of the
other Commodore computers. If anybody
sees this as a CBM product, he or she
should dismiss that notion entirely.
If anything, it should be thought of
as the next-generation Atari, since
Jay Minor (who designed some of the
original Atari chip set) was also
involved in the chip set design of the
Amiga, and the design philosophies of
the machines are similar. Commodore
had nothing to do with this machine.
They left it up to Amiga entirely
(which was wise, because nobody at
Commodore has the smarts to deal with
anything as elegant and sophisicated
as the Amiga). Forget about using
your Commodore disk drives and
printers with this machine. It would
be like trying to use a cassette drive
with a PC AT. Also, forget about
using Mac software, or GEM software.
"LIKE" definitely does NOT mean
compatible. Also, FORGET ABOUT IBM.
Despite the fact that Amiga at one
point mentioned the possibility of an
8088 co-processor, as far as I can
tell that was dropped long ago, and is
a DEAD ISSUE. You will not see it, at
least in the near future.
So, here are the basic specs of the
Amiga:
68000 processor running at 8 MHz.
It will come with 256K of memory, and
can be expanded to 512K internally
(though you will need a little board
to do so). More memory can be added
externally, and the operating system
can handle up to 8 MEGABYTES of
contiguous memory (no bank switching,
no segment registers, no smoke and
mirrors). There is NO provision for
cartridge ROM. It will also come with
one built-in 3 1/2" disk drive, with
an approximate capacity of 800K.
Additional disk drives can be daisy
chained (up to 4 floppies total) off
the back port. The second disk drive
uses the system power supply, so it
does not need its own. There is no
hard disk as of yet, but third parties
will no doubt jump in, and the
software support is there already in
the OS. The system comes standard
with a nice keyboard (cursor pad and
numeric pad) as well as a mouse (which
plugs into the joystick port I
believe). Those of you who are
starting to foam at the mouth about
the mouse should stop it right now
(you look silly). YOU DON'T?
HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE. The cursor
control keys will move the mouse
pointer, and all mouse functions can
be accomplished from the KEYBOARD
(which also has ten function keys).
As far as ports, there are standard
serial and parallel ports (i.e. for a
Centronics printer and RS-232). Video
out is to any kind of monitor
availble--analog RGB, digital RGB,
compositie, or even a TV set. There
are even video and audio IN ports.
The video IN allows you to take a
composite signal (say from your VCR or
video camera) and display it with
computer graphics overlaid on the
screen !!!! Likewise, audio in will
let you operate on an outside audio
source. Both supposedly can be used
to digitize outside signals (audio and
video), though some additional
hardware may be necessary (albeit less
than to do the same with other
computers). Finally, there is an
expansion port on the side that
contains virtually all of the signals
from the system bus. This is a
TOTALLY OPEN architecture machine. A
planned expansion box will let you use
all kinds of cards from third party
manufacturers (like for hard disks,
and even co-processors (if anybody is
still interested in IBM after looking
at this), and memory expansion up to 8
Megs).
About Amiga graphics.
The screen comes in several
resolutions, from 640x400 in 2 color
mode to 320x200 with 32 colors (like
the highest 64 resolution with a
choice of 32 colors for each
individual pixel). Colors are
selected from a palette of 4096
possible colors. You are by no means
restricted to one graphic mode at a
time -- in fact, you could even have
windows with different graphics modes
sitting next to each other! To get
the best picture, you are going to
need an 'analog' RGB monitor, though
any monitor will work. In fact, I
have seen the Amiga produce a readable
80 column display on a color TV with
my own eyes (though Amiga recommends
that if you use a tv, you cut the
display down to 60 characters).
What about sprites Amiga has 4
with 16 colors per, or 8 with 8
colors. They are 16 bits wide, and as
tall as the screen. Do you know how
on the 64 you can "multiplex" sprites
using interrupts, so that there are
more than 8 On the Amiga, the system
will do the multiplexing for you (no
interrupts required), and even let you
decide priority in the case that two
or more "incarnations" of the same
sprite coincide.
But who needs sprites The
computer has several graphics support
chips, big VLSI mothers as dense as a
68000 CPU. One of these is a blitter
(or bit block graphics transfer chip),
that can move around images on the
bit-map screen at high speeds. The
system lets you define "blobs" (or
blitter objects). These blobs can be
any size, up to as big as the screen.
To move them around, all you have to
do is tell the blitter to erase that
set of pixels and set them down
somewhere else, and PRESTO! its done.
Since a lot of the graphics is done
using dedicated hardware, its FAST.
There are features like hardware line
drawing and filling (you just tell it
where to draw the line, with no
tiresome calcuations of each point on
the line).
One of the nicest features of the
graphics hardware is that it uses the
"off-phase" periods of the system
clock, when the processor is not using
the bus. As a result, graphics,
sound, and i/o for the most part run
in the background, without taking up
any processor time at all. When the
processor tells the graphics chip to
draw a line or fill a shape, it
doesn't have to hang around and wait
for it to get done. Instead, it goes
on to its next instruction, while the
graphics chip takes care of biz.
Likewise, when the processor request
disk access, the DMA controller takes
over, so that the next thing the
processor knows, its got a whole
buffer full of data (the DMA
controller also make for FAST, FAST,
FAST disk access). I was told that
with medium-heavy animation going on,
the 68000 would only lose about 5% of
its throughput speed.
Another important thing to remember
is that the Operating System takes
care of a whole lot of things that
normally get done by applications
software. For example, on the 64, you
need a program to let you do bit-map
graphics (like an extended BASIC or
drawing program). On the Amiga,
practically every graphics feature
that you can think of is part of the
Operating System, so that the commands
can be called by any program (this
should be familiar to Atari owners).
For example, lets say you wanted to
create a scrolling window on a virtual
screen that is 132 characters wide by
80 lines high. You tell the OS that
you want the screen to be 132
characters wide, 80 lines high, and it
automatically makes your screen a
scrolling window on that larger
virtual screen. Want to print out the
who 132x80- virtual screen No
problem. The system has printer
drivers for graphics dumps to 6
different printers (including Epsons,
ink jets, and color printers) BUILT
INTO (!!!) the OS!
There are a whole lot more features
in the graphic department, like 2
different background screens with
switchable priorities, and bit-planes.
But you get the idea (and my fingers
are getting tired!). With the power
of the graphics processor, virtually
any kind of complicated graphics and
animation can be accomplished from
high level languages like C (and
probably BASIC) WITHOUT MACHINE
LANGUAGE programming. My friends say
that they can't think of a graphics
effect that is so complicated that it
is not supported by the OS, and that
you would have to resort to ml for.
About music on the Amiga.
The Amiga has 4-voice stereo sound
(2 voices on the left channel, 2 on
the right channel). Each voice is
polyphonic, so that you can play a
whole chord with a voice.
The operating system lets you control
the waveform of each voice precisely.
It also has defaults set up, so that
you could pick a 'piano' or 'trumpet'
voice. It supposedly can even do
digital sampling. I don't know too
much about it, but supposedly there is
great flexibility and power, and the
Operating System handles most of the
work.
For example, I'm sure that many of
you have heard the software
speechsimulator S.A.M. Well, the
Amiga has a much better synthesizer
built in, that speaks with a male OR a
female voice. AND the operating
system allows you to program the
speech with phonemenes OR a built-in
text to speech conversion programs.
You could literally tell it to READ
you the disk directory out loud!!!
About the Operating System.
The Amiga operating system is
called Intuition. It is a windowing
environment with icons and a mouse
(like the Mac). Unlike the Mac, you
can use the windowing environment
without the mouse, and in fact, you
can use the system without the icons
if you like. There are many layers of
operating system, from the most basic
hardware functions, to OS entry
points, to the user interface. The
programmer is free to use all or none.
Though the MAC is known for having
many programmer's tools built in (like
having the system read the mouse for
you during exception processing and
handing you the result), the Amiga is
said to have even more extensive
support, so that it's OS is more like
a language than and operating system.
The DOS is not like any other,
but is said to have "every conceivable
feature that you could ever think of,
and then some". It supports
heirarchical directories like PC DOS,
so that you can have directories with
subdirectories and sub-subdirectories
ad nauseum.
The most amazing feature of Intuition
is that it is a full MULTI-TASKING
OS!!! You can have as many
applications as memory will permit
RUNNING AT THE SAME TIME. My friend
saw the Amiga folks bring up the DOS
window, open another window and run a
graphics demo program, open another
window, and another, until there were
3 graphics demo programs, a text
editor, and DOS running AT ONCE!!
What's more amazing, he said that
there was NO VISABLE SLOWDOWN of any
of the programs.
What is this amazing computer going
to cost you Well, at the programmers
seminar they said that the 256K,
one-drive system with an analog RGB
color monitor would cost "under
$2000". Since then, talk has been
that it may be up to $500 under.
More to follow in the near future.
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End of copied text.
Sounds good to me. Anyone have any supporting info?
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Lowrey
"To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question....
....or is it?"
...!(<sun,cbosgd,ihnp4}!amdahl!dwl10
[ The opinions expressed <may> be those of the author and not necessarily
those of his most eminent employer. ]vr0z05@unido.UUCP (06/14/85)
When I read your specs, please tell me, where ist the difference between the 520 ST and the Amiga? I see only two: 1. The amiga costs more and 2. it is not availible. Uwe Hoch (..!mcvax!unido!vr0z05)
patrick@ISM780.UUCP (06/15/85)
Sounds wonderful. (In fact, it sounds amazing.) Is it for real? As a Commodore user of many years' standing I am alternately amazed at their capacity to provide powerful hardware at cheap prices, and horrified at their tendency to cripple that hardware by non-existent operating systems, a refusal to adhere to any kind of standards, and (on the 64) snail-slow disk speeds. The 64 is only 20% of the price of an Apple, has the same processor and more powerful graphics/sound capabilities, yet for 'real programming' the Apple is the only choice. How can Commodore get it so right, and yet be so wrong at the same time? My 64 sits languishing in the corner of the room, as it drives me nuts every time I turn it on. (Compared with UNIX on a VAX Commodore 'DOS' doesn't quite match up. I can't even display the contents of an ASCII file [ASCII - what's that?], for *** sake. I like to hack, but I'm not that much of a masochist.) If half of what you say is true, I may abandon my resolve never to buy Commodore again. (But, will they screw it up once more?) Patrick Curran (decvax!cca!ima!patrick)
keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle) (06/21/85)
[........] > >>When I read your specs, please tell me, where ist the difference >>between the 520 ST and the Amiga? > >I see only two: > >1. The amiga costs more and > >2. it is not availible. I see two others: 1. Better graphics ('sprites' or 'player-missiles' etc.) 2. Open hardware architecture (access to complete processor bus) Keith Doyle # {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax}!trwrb!cadovax!keithd
ravi@eneevax.UUCP (Ravi Kulkarni) (06/30/85)
There were a few things in the "description" that I was a little disappointed with. One was the lack of a hard disk interface on the base machine. Unless I am mistaken you would have to buy the expansion box + controller + hard disk. The other concern is the small amount of memory (256k). I hope they have installed that "fantastic" do all operating system in rom or there won't be much room for application programs. From the description the amiga is definitely a more powerful machine than the atari ST. The real question however is how much more money they want for all those goodies. My guess is that they will be sufficiently far apart in price such that there will be only indirect competition. One technical question, how does the amiga get 320x200 and 640x400 on the same monitor? Do they use a dual resolution monitor or (boo) use interlaced video in the hi res mode. Also the numbers don't add up, 640x400x2 colors=32kbytes, and 320x200x 32 colors=40kbytes. ravi -- ARPA: eneevax!ravi@maryland UUCP: [seismo,allegra]!umcp-cs!eneevax!ravi
keithd@cadovax.UUCP (Keith Doyle) (07/03/85)
[...............]
I heard 2 rumors recently about the Amiga and the ST:
1. The Atari ST runs its Video at 70 hz. This rumor came from the fact that
someone who talked to a computer store salesperson (in Canada) claiming
to already have a monitor (wanting to get out of the package deal) was
told "you don't have one of these, it runs at 70 hz".
2. The Amiga has the capability to gen-lock it's video to an external source.
If this is true (seen in a recent EE Times) and it works full color (they
mentioned overlaying on video signals) then I MIGHT be willing to sacrifice
flicker-free (60-70 hz non-interlaced) for NTSC compatibility. Otherwise,
anything less that 60hz non-interlaced is unacceptable (screw NTSC).
Keith Doyle
# {ucbvax,ihnp4,decvax}!trwrb!cadovax!keithd