cdh@bbncc3 (09/07/85)
From: "Carl D. Howe" <cdh@bbncc3.ARPA> I saw an Amiga here at BBN, and I got to play with it a week or two ago (although not in any significant way). I thought people might like to hear some subjective reactions I had, particularly since I usually use a Mac. 1) In terms of text resolution, it's not as nice as my Mac. I guess this is because text display is done in 640x200 mode. It also looks like it is poorer resolution just because the Mac display is so small and the Amiga display is 30% bigger. Nonetheless, I don't think the characters were nearly as pretty to look at. Of course, there's nothing to stop you from using better fonts (other than not being able to fit a full 25X80 screen). 2) The bit mover coprocessor provides an incredible feeling of smoothness and transparency to window moving. When I move a window on my Mac, I can see it redrawing the outline of the window as I move it. The contents remain blank until I've placed the window. On the Amiga, the whole window moves as an entity with absolutely no hesitation or flicker. When we moved the 640x400 picture of the baboon out of the way to get back to the desktop, it was like pulling down a windowshade with a baboon painted on it. The interaction of the mouse and the graphics is so good, you would swear they were physically connected. 3) I saw the famous "bounce" program and was blown away. For those who haven't seen it, this is an animation of a beach ball bouncing in a room. The beach ball is red and white patchwork, and rotates on its axis as it moves. It also has a shadow which follows it across the floor and the background. If you close your eyes, you can still locate where the beach ball is, because the stereo sound of it bouncing tracks its location on the screen, complete with gymnasium type reverb sound effects. The really impressive thing about this demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something only 8% of the time. That means it's 92% idle! 4) The desktop needs some work to make it really pretty. Strangely enough, the use of color on the desktop makes it look cheap somehow. No shadows are provided for windows, nor is there any differentiation between the blue desktop and the blue text background. Red characters on a blue background are very hard on the eyes (this color scheme is used occasionally on the desktop). I don't know if the color choices are customizable or not. 5) The command line interface seems really quite usable and is a great feature. It feels a lot like a cross between MS-DOS and UNIX. The ability to multitask is quite impressive and makes me feel differently about the machine. Always having a command window waiting for me to type something, even when the machine is doing something else makes me feel like the machine is waiting for me rather than me always having to wait for the machine to get around to talking to me. 6) The 640x400 graphics were very impressive. The ubiquitous baboon (I think it is really called a mandril) was truly beautiful and had no obvious flicker. In general, I was impressed by the lack of flicker on the screen because I am very sensitive to it (I'm constantly annoyed by the 60 Hz flicker of the background on my Mac; I've often wished it had a longer persistence phosphor). On the other hand, the demo graphics may have been tweaked to avoid obvious horizontal lines in interlaced mode. But my suspicion is that the Amiga monitor has a phosphor that persists somewhat longer than most other monitors. I'd be curious to compare it with another monitor (like a PGS HX-9 for a more fair size comparison to my Mac). Finally, a comment about the "hello world" program that circulated today. Just from looking at that program, it appears that the interface provided to the programmer is a little nicer than that on the Mac. When I was writing some C code for the Mac (admittedly using SuMacC), I seem to remember it was much more painful to get a window set up in such a way as to be able to print things in it, resize it, etc. On the other hand, once it was set up, you had lots of options of how to deal with various events that occurred. This may just be a tradeoff of power vs. ease-of-use. I'd be interested in seeing more code examples as they become available. Sorry this is so long, but given the scarcity of Amigas in the world at the moment, I though people would be interested. Carl (chowe@bbncc3)
eve@ssc-bee.UUCP (Michael Eve) (09/10/85)
> > 3) I saw the famous "bounce" program and was blown away. For those who haven't > seen it, this is an animation of a beach ball bouncing in a room. The beach > ball is red and white patchwork, and rotates on its axis as it moves. It also > has a shadow which follows it across the floor and the background. If you > close your eyes, you can still locate where the beach ball is, because the > stereo sound of it bouncing tracks its location on the screen, complete with > gymnasium type reverb sound effects. The really impressive thing about this > demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something > only 8% of the time. That means it's 92% idle! > I've heard these numbers before and am a little skeptical of what they really mean. The numbers seem to imply that the Amiga 68000 could do 12.5 times as much work without slowing the demo down. In reality, I suspect the bus may be so busy with the graphics that any increase in 68000 processing will slow down the graphics. Can anyone shed some light on this? -- Mike Eve Boeing Aerospace, Seattle ...uw-beaver!ssc-vax!ssc-bee!eve
hunter@oakhill.UUCP (Hunter Scales) (09/12/85)
In article <368@ssc-bee.UUCP> eve@ssc-bee.UUCP (Michael Eve) writes: >> gymnasium type reverb sound effects. The really impressive thing about this >> demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something >> only 8% of the time. That means it's 92% idle! >> >I've heard these numbers before and am a little skeptical of what they really >mean. The numbers seem to imply that the Amiga 68000 could do 12.5 times >as much work without slowing the demo down. In reality, I suspect the >bus may be so busy with the graphics that any increase in 68000 processing >will slow down the graphics. Does anyone *know* (not guess) if the Amiga has an 8-bit or a 16-bit processor bus? I counted 8 RAM chips in the photo of the board that was in the byte article. This would be consistent if the board uses 256k x 1 chips and has 256k bytes on it. If this is the case, the Mac will outrun the Amiga during non-graphic operations. I hope I have something wrong because I would really like to believe that there will be a 68k-based machine with hardware graphics that is within my financial reach. -- Motorola Semiconductor Inc. Hunter Scales Austin, Texas {ihnp4,seismo,ctvax,gatech}!ut-sally!oakhill!hunter (I am responsible for me and my dog and no-one else)
huxham@ucbvax.ARPA (Frederick Huxham) (09/13/85)
> > gymnasium type reverb sound effects. The really impressive thing about this > > demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something > > only 8% of the time. That means it's 92% idle! > > > I've heard these numbers before and am a little skeptical of what they really > mean. The numbers seem to imply that the Amiga 68000 could do 12.5 times > as much work without slowing the demo down. In reality, I suspect the > bus may be so busy with the graphics that any increase in 68000 processing > will slow down the graphics. > > Can anyone shed some light on this? I went to one of the Amiga "World Premieres" a few weeks ago. After the presentation, I was able to play with one of the machines for a couple of hours. One of the disks I had contained a number of simple graphics demos. Each demo drew multiple lines, shapes or dots in it's own window. They were drawn in color with no sound. I would have one demo running in a 2 inch square window and start up another. This would cause the first demo to slow down quite a bit, starting up a third and you could almost hear the machine asking for help. If a fourth application was started things almost came to a standstill, the response time from moving the mouse until the cursor moved on the screen was a couple of seconds. The fourth or fifth application was generally sufficient to crash the machine. I liked the machine anyway, I want one to play games on. Fred A. Huxham huxham@ucbcory.arpa huxham@BERKELEY.arpa
jlh@loral.UUCP (Belly Up) (09/13/85)
> > 3) I saw the famous "bounce" program and was blown away. For those who haven't > seen it, this is an animation of a beach ball bouncing in a room. The beach > ball is red and white patchwork, and rotates on its axis as it moves. It also > has a shadow which follows it across the floor and the background. If you > ....... > The really impressive thing about this > demo is the amount of work the 68000 is doing; it's actively doing something > only 8% of the time. That means it's 92% idle! > I saw this running on a monitor at SIGGRAPH and the demo was pretty impressive. However, one should realize that for the show a lot of manufacturers spent several minutes drawing a picture, then saved the picture to disk or videotape. Do this several times and you have an animated feature. You'll never guess what they showed during the demo. Thats right, they showed the canned pictures. If the amiga was drawing this beachball as it went then this is one helluvan impressive system, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially if that 8% number is correct......
ewa@sdcc3.UUCP (Eric Anderson) (09/14/85)
In article <918@loral.UUCP> jlh@loral.UUCP (Belly Up) writes: >> >> I saw the famous "bounce" program and was blown away. For those who haven't >> seen it, this is an animation of a beach ball bouncing in a room. The beach >> ball is red and white patchwork, and rotates on its axis as it moves. It >> has a shadow which follows it across the floor and the background. >I saw this running on a monitor at SIGGRAPH and the demo was pretty impressive. >However, one should realize that for the show a lot of manufacturers spent >several minutes drawing a picture, then saved the picture to disk or videotape. >Do this several times and you have an animated feature. You'll never guess >what they showed during the demo. Thats right, they showed the canned >pictures. If the amiga was drawing this beachball as it went then this is >one helluvan impressive system, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially >if that 8% number is correct...... Actually such a program is no big deal. several small images of a beach-ball in various stages of rotation are saved in memory and then copied onto the screen with a block move. when used in order, the ball appears to be rotating. No big deal, and very little processor work. E. Anderson, UC San Diego {elsewhere}!ihnp4!ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcc3!ewa
papa@uscvax.UUCP (Marco Papa) (09/16/85)
> In article <918@loral.UUCP> jlh@loral.UUCP (Belly Up) writes: > >> > >> I saw the famous "bounce" program and was blown away. For those who haven't > >> seen it, this is an animation of a beach ball bouncing in a room. The beach > >> ball is red and white patchwork, and rotates on its axis as it moves. It > >> has a shadow which follows it across the floor and the background. > >I saw this running on a monitor at SIGGRAPH and the demo was pretty impressive. > >However, one should realize that for the show a lot of manufacturers spent > >several minutes drawing a picture, then saved the picture to disk or videotape. > >Do this several times and you have an animated feature. You'll never guess > >what they showed during the demo. Thats right, they showed the canned > >pictures. If the amiga was drawing this beachball as it went then this is > >one helluvan impressive system, but I wouldn't count on it. Especially > >if that 8% number is correct...... > > Actually such a program is no big deal. several small images of a beach-ball in > various stages of rotation are saved in memory and then copied onto the screen > with a block move. when used in order, the ball appears to be rotating. No big > deal, and very little processor work. > > E. Anderson, UC San Diego {elsewhere}!ihnp4!ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdcc3!ewa I saw the demo at Sighgraph on a giant screen and it was impressive. I would like to know whether a Demo Tape (VHS format) that contains "the Mandrill", "Robocity", and the "Bouncing Soccer Ball" is available from any source. Has anybody transfered these demos on tape? If you have done such a thing let me know. I need this as a good example of microcomputer graphics and animation for a seminar here at USC. I'll pay for the tape and the postage. Marco Papa USC - Computer Science Dept. UUCP: ...!{{decvax,ucbvax}!sdcsvax,hplabs,allegra,trwrb}!sdcrdcf!uscvax!papa CSNET: papa@usc-cse.csnet ARPA: papa%usc-cse@csnet-relay.arpa