portuesi@tweezers.esd.sgi.com (Michael Portuesi) (03/29/90)
>>>>> On 28 Mar 90 20:36:10 GMT, seanc@pro-party.cts.com (Sean Cunningham) said: > I don't see why nobody's made a true-color board for the Amiga yet. The > market IS there...the boards are even cheap on the Mac now. > > Maybe I just want too much... The Amiga and the Macintosh use two fundamentally different approaches to its video subsystem. The Mac uses a very general approach that supports all kinds of video hardware, but sacrifices speed and special features. The Amiga provides a very fast built-in video subsystem with all kinds of special features, but does not provide system support for other video hardware other than its own. In essence, the features that have made the Amiga a graphics/video powerhouse are also the same features that are stunting its growth. The biggest problem with developing a 24-bit board and just plugging it into the Amiga is that the Amiga doesn't have a device-independent graphics library. Every Amiga application (except for games) uses the Graphics Library; Intuition depends on it to function. If you can't get the Graphics Library to talk to the 24-bit board, you're stuck hard-coding your applications to support it. That's the way the PC Clones deal with their video cards, and it's the Wrong Way to do things. Currently, the Amiga Graphics Library only supports the Amiga Chip set. There are two Right Ways for Commodore to bring 24-bit color to the Amiga: * issue a new version of the Amiga chip set and Graphics Library. This is hard to do on current machines because the CHIP RAM bus doesn't have enough bandwidth to support 24 bitplanes of color information. For current machines, it may be possible to expand the size of the color palette and provide a Super-HAM mode that can display more than 4096 colors at once. It still won't help you get more colors at higher resolutions, though. A chip set that can deliver more colors at higher resolution will require an Amiga with a faster CHIP RAM bus, pure and simple. * produce a device-independent Graphics Library, then open the market for Commodore and third parties to make 24-bit video boards. You could then shop for the features you wanted and have it seamlessly work with your favorite software. The Macintosh already supports the latter approach. This is one of the areas where Macintosh technology is superior to that of the Amiga. In any event, it's difficult for a third party company to bring out a proper implementation of a 24-bit display system without Commodore doing some ground work first. And as always, flaming Commodore is a waste of time; I'm sure they're way ahead of us on this issue. --M -- __ \/ Michael Portuesi Silicon Graphics, Inc. portuesi@sgi.com