ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn) (10/09/85)
>> ........... Why do computer marketing people treat us like >> the idiots like THEY are. What do they think? That we won't understand >> computer graphics? Its not really surprising how marketing people treat us(?), when you consider that in the early days of this newsgroup, and to a lesser extent now, the non-objective hype was flying so freely from us(?), that you would have thought that the Amiga design had somehow overcome the laws of physics! Its quite natural though, issue a vague or not fully understood spec of a new product development, and everyone reads their current personal wish-list into it! For my own part I was mildly disappointed when I saw the Amiga yesterday, after all the buildup it has had. My MAIN impressions: a) It is externally a well designed low-profile machine, with space underneath for a so-so keyboard - layout is ok, but (subjective) feel is mushy. b) The sound demos were very impressive, except voice which was so-so and consonantless (presumably due to too low a sampling rate). c) The 640*200 line display is just that, a 640*200 line display, no better, and no worse than others. When using their workbench, the display is just as fuzzy as on an IBM colour card monitor, and not (in my opinion, and most PC users opinions) suitable for continuous text operation. Yes, important, it does have more colours, so that instead of games etc running in 320*200 mode a la PC, they can run, with more colours, in 640*200 on the Amiga. d) The 640*400 line interlaced display is just that, a 640*400 line interlaced display, no better and no worse than others. I've had a lot of experience with interlacing, and, hype aside, it flickers! Depending on the picture being displayed, the flicker is either acceptable or unusable! The mandril demo has lots of flicker in the visually noisy areas, and none in the 'wash' areas. Another other picture I saw (cant remember its name) was virtually all 'wash', and only flickered round the edges. Yes, the salesman tried to tell me that the flicker was due to both the lighting AND the fact that the building's power supply was noisy! Consider, - if the 640*400 display is acceptable, why doesn't the Amiga use it for its standard text display, since 640*200 is barely adequate for that purpose? e) The multi-tasking worked nicely, and "pulling-down" various running windows was fun. The "8% of the CPU being used" for the bouncing ball demo is misleading hype! Fact: When running two continuously moving demos simultaniously, each slowed down *significantly*, and I would expect, when running a graphics process and a CPU-bound process simultaneously, a similar slowdown would occur. The *data-bus* is the bottleneck here, not the CPU! Incidently, when you see the bouncing ball demo being initialised on the screen, the generation of the graphics does not appear significantly fast, and 200 line resolution is of course, not very impressive on round objects. The movement of the ball is obviously NOT being done by the usual trick of showing a sequence of preformed displays. f) When loading a window with icons, the machine was unexplainably slow, with each icon taking about 1 second to appear. Why? g) When running Basic, the screen was in a 40*25 line mode, why? Probably that was just its initial mode, but it seemed anachronistic. h) The system crashed, and had to be re-booted, four or five times during about 45 minutes of use, in particular, memory full recovery was suspect. Well, that's it. I hope I haven't blasphemed too much, but I have yet to become born-again! Ray Dunn. PC Architecture. Philips Information Systems. ..philabs!micomvax!othervax!ray
bjorn@dataioDataio.UUCP (Bjorn Benson) (10/14/85)
>a) It is externally a well designed low-profile machine, with space >underneath for a so-so keyboard - layout is ok, but (subjective) feel is >mushy. I have used the Amiga for development (not having a Sun or a PC), and I find the keyboard to be acceptable. It feels good and 99% of the keys are in the right places. No keys are missing [like the Mac]. >e) The multi-tasking worked nicely... Yes, and you can even compile in the background! [Take that Atari] I compile one program in one window and edit in another and neither process suffers (1 Human bound, 1 Disk bound). >f) When loading a window with icons, the machine was unexplainably slow, >with each icon taking about 1 second to appear. Why? Each window represents a directory. In the directory are any number of files. Any file that gets displayed as an icon has a *.info file to describe it. When the WorkBench in building the window, these files are searched for, opened and read one at a time. Ugh! My personal opinion is that the windows are nice, and they work well, but the icon based system is too limiting. I prefer the CLI interface with multiple virtual terminals. I like the Amiga, I have not tried an Atari. After progressing from RSTS/E to UNIX 4.2, any computer I own must have a multi-tasking operating system (not just the capability for one), and some decent windows. Wishing for a hard disk, Bjorn Benson
jec@iuvax.UUCP (10/15/85)
Strange that the Amiga's main deficiency is it's inability to
display readable 24x80 text. Has anyone tried hooking up a (sin of sins)
a black and white monitor to the Amiga or is it impossible? I was also
not that impressed upon finally seeing an Amiga in person. The bouncing
ball demo was not terribly impressive (except for the source) since they
did it by flipping color registers. If they had managed to do a two-axis
rotation on the ball, that would have been impressive. If you watch the
"setup" of the ball, you can see the boundaries where the color areas are.
I was fairly impressed with the sound (especially the music demo). If
anyone figures out how to do reasonable 24x80 text, please let me know.
James E. Conley Usenet: {ihnp4,pur-ee,purdue}!iuvax!jec
I.U. Dept. of Linguistics Phone: (812) 335-6458
401 Lindley Hall (812) 332-3514
Bloomington, IN. 47405young@yale.ARPA (Jonathan Young) (10/16/85)
Summary: In article <708@othervax.UUCP> ray@othervax.UUCP (Raymond D. Dunn) writes: >For my own part I was mildly disappointed when I saw the Amiga yesterday, >after all the buildup it has had. My MAIN impressions: > I just saw one today (so did Action news), and my impressions were substantially the same. My local dealer (Hamden, CT) said that his store, Computer Factory, is distributing in both the NYC and Boston areas. >b) The sound demos were very impressive, except voice which was so-so and >consonantless (presumably due to too low a sampling rate). I've heard that there exists a better one. The one we heard had very scratchy consonants - pops and stuff that shouldn't be there. Can anyone tell us what's up? >e) The multi-tasking worked nicely, and "pulling-down" various running >windows was fun. The "8% of the CPU being used" for the bouncing ball demo >is misleading hype! Fact: When running two continuously moving demos >simultaniously, each slowed down *significantly*, and I would expect, when >running a graphics process and a CPU-bound process simultaneously, a similar >slowdown would occur. The *data-bus* is the bottleneck here, not the CPU! >Incidently, when you see the bouncing ball demo being initialised on the >screen, the generation of the graphics does not appear significantly fast, >and 200 line resolution is of course, not very impressive on round objects. >The movement of the ball is obviously NOT being done by the usual trick of >showing a sequence of preformed displays. Interesting. My impression was that the ball and shadow were being moved in hardware, while the software was only writing the new x,y for the ball and changing the color scheme (so the ball seems to rotate). That sure sounds like 8% of the cpu to me. >h) The system crashed, and had to be re-booted, four or five times during >about 45 minutes of use, in particular, memory full recovery was suspect. I managed to crash the OS by putting another disk in the drive that the "desktop" disk had been in. The salesman's description of the logical disk system - you can apparently put a disk in any drive and the system deals correctly with it; you can daisy-chain any number of drives together - sounded rosy, but occasionally not checking before reading (or writing!) would be quite a thorn in the OS's side. Can anyone verify this account of the DOS? How does it work (for us non-Mac-owners)? Is this what slows down the disk I/O? All-in-all, I wasn't immediately converted, either. I'd like to see a lot more technical information before buying one (like, details on wait states...). Maybe I'll wait until Commodore starts discounting them... --- Jonathan ...decvax!yale!young@UUCP or young@yale.ARPA Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with anybody.
wen_b@h-sc1.UUCP (alvin wen) (10/21/85)
> Strange that the Amiga's main deficiency is it's inability to > display readable 24x80 text. Wait a minute! I HAVE and Amiga and its 80x24 text is extremely stable, and likewise extremely readable! I especially enjoy simulating an amber monitor with my 1070 and Preferences. I assume that the problem comes when displaying text in interlaced mode;I wouldn't know. Maybe the color intensities are too high on your default colors; try amber on black, or some other friendly combination. Alvin Wen Y.A.A.D.
johnbl@tekig5.UUCP (John Blankenagel) (10/30/85)
> > Strange that the Amiga's main deficiency is it's inability to > display readable 24x80 text. Huh, the one I use displays very good 80x24 text. > Has anyone tried hooking up a (sin of sins) > a black and white monitor to the Amiga or is it impossible? > > James E. Conley Usenet: {ihnp4,pur-ee,purdue}!iuvax!jec Yes, I have hooked a NEC JB-902M(A) with p31 (green) phosphor and composite video input to the amiga. The video quality was about the same as the 1070 monitor except that the screen was only 9" diagonal so it was marginally better looking in some cases. I also hooked it up to a 5" Motorola composite video monitor and it still looked quite good. The text was easily readable if you got close to the monitor. A person could very easily do a lot of real work on non-color-graphics programs with just a cheap (relatively) composite-video monochrome monitor. It is certainly not as interesting though in my opinion because I like color for most anything I do. John Blankenagel