gary@cirl.UUCP (Gary Girzon) (10/02/85)
I received my development system two and a half weeks after
mailing Commodore the check. The system came with the 1070 monitor,
which does not have composite video input, nor stereo ability. However,
it does have a finer pitch and greater bandwidth ( 12 mhz ) than the
1080 monitor claimed to have.
Software: ABasic, Lattice C , Assembler . Also Lattice C and
Assembler for MS_DOS for cross-system development.
Has anyone tried to hook up an Amiga and a PC?
Also the Kaleidoscope Arts demo disk.
Documentation:
Intro to Amiga and ABasiC received, plus the
developers manuals.
Based on a few days use, the C compilation - linking process
seems a little slow. Actually, the compile time is ok, but linking
object modules takes a long time! The linker [ Alink] was written by
Metacomco, same people that wrote AmigaDos. For example, the sieve
benchmark [ used by Byte ] took over two minutes to compile and link. Most
of the time was used up by Alink. I should say I have been using the
'make' template provided; also, all files are on disk. Taking advantage
of RAM disk (it is built into the DOS) should speed things up. As soon
as I have more quantitative results, I shall post them.
I have also managed to get a text display in interlace. The
demonstration program in the Intuition manual for creating screens
must be modified for interlace and hires (note that the bit pattern
for interlace mode is LACE, not INTERLACE as described ; i.e. one must
set
screen.type = LACE | HIRES /* interlace at high resolution */
to get 640 by 400. ) The demo program then creates a screen ( and
window ) with text in it. The strange thing is that all the screens
now become interlaced as well. When you pull down the demoscreen, the
CLI or Workbench screens also become interlaced. The effect on text
is that the fonts become double stuffed with consecutive scan lines being
the same. This eliminates some of the 'black line' background problems.
The text in the demoscreen, however, is not double stuffed - the fonts
remain at 9 scan lines (or whatever they were). Thus the characters are
only half as high. I am not sure why all the screens become interlaced,
nor why there is a change in text.
The bad news is that there is sufficient flicker during interlace
mode to cause problems. Perhaps some people can tolerate it; I had
problems. The flicker varies with colors on screen and background lighting,
as well as what is on screen ( thin horizontal white lines being the
worst). I think interlace mode is great for graphics, such as animation,
but it is out of the question [ for me, using the RGB monitor ] for text.
Too bad. This is probably the Amiga's weakest point, having a
non-interlace screen resolution worse than the Mac or ST. Sofware like
MacWrite will just not look as good on an Amiga. But reaction to interlace
varies from person to person, so it is best to judge it (if you can
get a hold of a developer) for yourself.
One solution for using sofware like MacWrite on an Amiga is
to get a second, high persistance monochrome monitor. I have not heard
of any reasonably priced RGB high persistance monitor. I have seen the
SONY KV1311 TV/monitor interlaced, and it suffers from the same problem.
Overall, the Amiga looks like a solid machine. The documentation
only lacks in hardware detail. If the Mac was released with such
developer support, it would have a lot more software available much
sooner.
Gary Girzon
UUCP: {harvard,ihnp4}!think!cirl!gary