daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (05/05/87)
[ Single-tasking? Just say no! ] in article <2990@well.UUCP>, ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) says: > FLAME_ON > > The lack of decent music software for the Amiga is inexcusable. I > have here a program for my poor old 2MHz 8080-based SOL-20 that does > three-voice music, and is more powerful than many currently available music > programs for nearly all machines. .... > Now, I will grant you that the music "source" code looks like > transmission line noise to the uninitiated obsever, and that the sound > quality is not wonderful (what do you want from the INTE buss line?). But > the point is, my music program is *TEN YEARS OLD*, and still beats the > stuffing out of many other so-called "professional" music systems, feature > for feature. What's more, this ten-year-old program will run in **4K OF > MEMORY!!** > So. Am I living in the dark ages? Am I expecting too much? Should > I go beat my head against a wall? Or should I translate this program to the > Amiga myself? > FLAME_OFF > ________ ___ Leo L. Schwab > \ /___--__ The Guy in The Cape > ___ ___ /\ ---##\ ihnp4!ptsfa!well!ewhac So you've noticed it too. I don't mean music specifically, but software in general. There seems to be some kind of trend in making software certainly easier (for the novice, at least) to use, but at the same time, very much less powerful than software that's existed for many, many years. About the only exception I've seen to this is painting/animation software, and that's probably because I haven't previously owned a computer that supported much in the way of painting programs (though a few C64 owners claim that even DPAINT II is missing a few of their favorite features. Maybe), and there hasn't been much software, at least at the PC level, for animation up until recently. Let's take another area, Word Processing, for example. I've used markup style languages on a mainframe and several minis, and any one of these word processing languages (Scribe on a DEC-20, nroff on various PDP-11 and VAXen) does so much more for me than the current crop of WYSIWYG word processors. I used Scribe for several large papers, way back from '79 through '83 (college). It would structure my document at various levels automatically; create table of contents and indexes, automatically; various types of nested lists, automatically; footnotes at the bottom of a page, automatically; handle imbedded greek or mathematical symbols, fully justified; provide automatic generation of bibliographies, in various standard formats, coupled to the footnotes, automatically; etc. And it supported multiple fonts and even imbedded graphics if your printer did. Most of the word processing programs I've used recently give you WYSIWYG fonts and (in a few cases) imbedded graphics. But no automatic generation of contents, headings, indexes, or bibliographies. No automatic structured lists. No document structure, or multiple-file tree structured documents. All the tabbing that you've got to play around with to replace the good features of the markup language is usually hand set, and absolute to a character position on the page. And the list goes on and on. Maybe I've been using the wrong software, but it sure seems like today's could learn alot from some of yesterday's. -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga Usenet: {ihnp4|caip|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh "The A2000 Guy" BIX : hazy "These are the days of miracle and wonder" -P. Simon
walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton) (05/06/87)
In article <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes: > >in article <2990@well.UUCP>, ewhac@well.UUCP (Leo 'Bols Ewhac' Schwab) says: > >> FLAME_ON >> >> The lack of decent music software for the Amiga is inexcusable. I >> have here a program for my poor old 2MHz 8080-based SOL-20 that does >> three-voice music, and is more powerful than many currently available music >> programs for nearly all machines. .... > >Let's take another area, Word Processing, for example. I've used markup >style languages on a mainframe and several minis, and any one of these >word processing languages (Scribe on a DEC-20, nroff on various PDP-11 and >VAXen) does so much more for me than the current crop of WYSIWYG word >processors. I used Scribe for several large papers, way back from '79 >through '83 (college). It would structure my document at various levels >automatically...[etc] I think Dave and Leo are talking about two entirely different things here. Leo's point was that better music programs than the current Amiga crop exist for much smaller and less powerful machines, on which we are all agreed. However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible. A friend of mine has Amiga TeX for example. Very nice package, but to make it useful you almost must have a hard disk and an extra couple of MB of memory; the distribution takes up 4 floppies and doesn't include many fonts which I use in day-to-day work. A quick "size" command on 4.3BSD's nroff shows it to be 700 KB long. And none of these are WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close); they are more like extremely obscure programming languages for commanding printers to produce output. Granted, more powerful formatting would be nice. But we don't have to give up WYSIWIG for it--just look at MicroSoft Word. I'd gladly pay $250 for an Amiga version (that's what the Mac one lists for). We certainly shouldn't cripple our wonderful graphics engine formatters with from text-only computers which are too big anyway. Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu AMETEK Computer Research Division, ametek!walton@csvax.caltech.edu "Long signatures are definitely frowned upon"--USENET posting rules
ali@rocky.UUCP (05/07/87)
In article <1834@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> Dave Haynie writes: > .... There seems to be some kind of trend in making software certainly >easier (for the novice, at least) to use, but at the same time, very much >less powerful than software that's existed for many, many years. > .... I've used markup >style languages on a mainframe and several minis, and any one of these >word processing languages (Scribe on a DEC-20, nroff on various PDP-11 and >VAXen) does so much more for me than the current crop of WYSIWYG word >processors. I used Scribe for several large papers, way back from '79 >through '83 (college). Most people who've used WYSIWYG word processors for any real work like you describe will agree with you... Someone on comp.sys.mac was saying it takes far too long for them to change the overall font in MacWrite when they're working on a fairly long paper and how they just can't wait for the Mac II cause it'll do the job real fast.. Etc... Solving the problem of speed by throwing hardware at it kind of thing. In any case, if you guys are interested in *real* word processing type software for the Amiga, there is TeX (and LaTex, if you've got 1 Meg or more) available, you know, with a real sharp previewer and everything. Very much like Scribe but more powerful, TeX is a real nice program for creating technical documents and books (yes, full books). Tom Rokicki (then author) loves spending all his free and not-so-free time optimizing the program and making things run faster! In any case, the availability of TeX for the Amiga is advertised as well as the Amiga itself is; so not many people might know about it... (If you're interested, you should contact Tom Rokicki, rokicki@sushi.stanford.edu. I know he is on the net as well, but he is just too busy hacking (and too modest) to say something about TeX himself... So I take the liberty.) Ali Ozer, ali@rocky.stanford.edu
rokicki@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki) (05/07/87)
Tom the Modest comes to the front. daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes: > However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE > programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible. A > friend of mine has Amiga TeX for example. Very nice package, but to > make it useful you almost must have a hard disk and an extra couple of > MB of memory; the distribution takes up 4 floppies and doesn't include > many fonts which I use in day-to-day work. Well, they are large programs, but not HUGE. The TeX executable for AmigaTeX is currently only 126,752 bytes long. (If anyone knows of *any* TeX implementation with an executable smaller than this, I want to know!) You do not almost have to have a hard disk and extra memory. If you only run Plain TeX, it runs quite nicely on a 512K machine with two floppies. (But you can't do anything else at the same time, or use a RAM disk; sorry!) The distribution is currently only 3 disks, one of which is LaTeX only. It also includes IniTeX, and all the macro sources you need to make new format packages, 91 TFM files, 144 previewer font files, BibTeX, the previewer, and the TeX source to the manual! I developed the entire package on a 512K machine with two floppies. The next release will contain many more previewer fonts (approximately 700), but will include a new font cacheing scheme, so it is still very usable on a 512K machine with two floppies. A nice environment is 1.5M, with which you can run an editor, previewer, and TeX all at the same time. > And none of these are > WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close); Thanks; it's getting better all the time. I agree with the premise of the original article, though; WYSIWYG systems *can* be very powerful, they just aren't, yet. Now a plug. TeX is not the easiest system to learn, and AmigaTeX is exactly the same as TeX in every respect. It is also not cheap, at $200 for the package. But for beautiful output, nothing compares. Nothing. And you have full compatibility with TeX's on any machine in existence that has a 20-bit address space or larger. -tom
daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) (05/07/87)
in article <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>, walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton) says: > Summary: Give me WYSIWIG or give me TeX > I think Dave and Leo are talking about two entirely different things > here. Leo's point was that better music programs than the current > Amiga crop exist for much smaller and less powerful machines, on which > we are all agreed. However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE > programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible. I see you point, but I don't think any of these are beyond the capabilities of the Amiga. TeX already exists, nroff is certainly big under UNIX; about 650K here, though most of that is uninitialized data; the code that's loaded at run time is only about 57K's worth. Sounds like it could just about run, as is, on a 1 meg Amiga, which will soon be the standard anyway. And Dr. Dobbs has been publishing a version for MessyDOS machines, written in C, these past few months, that's supposed to be very UNIX nroff compatible (is there a XENIX nroff?), and while SCRIBE is probably the largest of the three, I ran it on a DEC-20, which can "only" address 256K of memory for any one job (in 36 bit words, but still less memory than I've got on my Amiga at home). Even with 90% of the functionality of nroff, there's still room left for WYSIWYG. > A friend of mine has Amiga TeX for example. Very nice package, but to > make it useful you almost must have a hard disk and an extra couple of > MB of memory; the distribution takes up 4 floppies and doesn't include > many fonts which I use in day-to-day work. I would expect so; I want a powerful system for a powerful machine. Maybe that's the point, though; no machines in the PC market are currently shipping with a standard memory configuration of more than 1 meg. And until the Amiga, there weren't any that officially supported more than 1 meg. > And none of these are > WYSIWIG in any sense (though AmigaTeX's previewer is close); they are > more like extremely obscure programming languages for commanding > printers to produce output. nroff's certainly hard to read, though I've found many of the SCRIBE commands to be rather obvious (i.e. @Chapter(CHAPTER TITLE) versus .sh 1 "CHAPTER TITLE"). > Granted, more powerful formatting would be nice. But we don't > have to give up WYSIWIG for it--just look at MicroSoft Word. I'd > gladly pay $250 for an Amiga version (that's what the Mac one lists > for). We certainly shouldn't cripple our wonderful graphics engine > formatters with from text-only computers which are too big anyway. Certainly not. But if it can't get the job done, or you end up fighting it get your results, than all of the WYSIWYG in the world isn't worth that much. I really like WYSIWYG over markup for ease of use, I just don't think that such programs have to be 90% good-looking-text-editor and only 10% formatting-tool. Keep the WYSIWYG, but put some power behind it. > Steve Walton, guest as walton@tybalt.caltech.edu -- Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga Usenet: {ihnp4|caip|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh "The A2000 Guy" BIX : hazy "These are the days of miracle and wonder" -P. Simon
hugo@gnome.cs.cmu.edu (Peter Su) (05/08/87)
In article <1852@cbmvax.cbmvax.cbm.UUCP> daveh@cbmvax.cbm.UUCP (Dave Haynie) writes: >(is there a XENIX nroff?), and while SCRIBE is probably the largest of the >three, I ran it on a DEC-20, which can "only" address 256K of memory for any >one job (in 36 bit words, but still less memory than I've got on my Amiga at >home). Even with 90% of the functionality of nroff, there's still room left >for WYSIWYG. > The problem with Scribe is that the database that it uses to figure out how to format all your text is (about 3 Meg for version 5 under Unix, I think), and also like TeX, you have to worry about all the font files for your printers and all that mess. TeX fonts take up a LOT of room, I don't think the problem is as bad with Scribe. I've been playing with Word 3.0 on the Mac, and it is pretty impressive in terms of generating TOCs and indicies...pretty good at math too. But, none of these systems really handles BIG things well. With Word, doing the file management is hard, and keeping track of page numbers is a pain. With TeX and Scribe, keeping track of everyting is easy, but "compilation" times are LONG LONG LONG...I've just been doing a 400 page book with LaTeX, and if you need to rebuild the TOC, or something, it takes better than 2 hours to redo the whole thing...icky icky icky. Personally, I like parts of all of these systems, but none of them is really good enough. In each case, there's always something that you have to fight with. Pete -- ARPA: hugo@gnome.cs.cmu.edu BELL:412-681-7431 UUCP: ...!{ucbvax,ihnp4,cmucspt}!hugo@gnome.cs.cmu.edu USPS: 5170 Beeler St., Pittsburgh PA 15213 QUOT: "What's that I smell? I smell home cooking. It's only the river!" _ Talking Heads
sean@ukma.UUCP (05/11/87)
In article <2598@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> walton@tybalt.caltech.edu (Steve Walton) writes: >However...SCRIBE, nroff, TeX, et. al. are HUGE >programs, and running them on the Amiga is nearly impossible. Not true. troff is less than 50K. TeX will run comfortably in a megabyte, unless you're formatting a book. I've never had any experience with scribe because it is ridiculously overpriced compared to it's competition. Sean -- =========================================================================== Sean Casey UUCP: cbosgd!ukma!sean CSNET: sean@ms.uky.csnet ARPA: ukma!sean@anl-mcs.arpa BITNET: sean@UKMA.BITNET
GWO110%URIACC.BITNET@brownvm.brown.edu (F. Michael Theilig) (03/27/90)
Wanting M.U.L.E. for the Amiga made me think of something I tried to
do back in my C64 days. I loved some of the games I had for my Atari
2600, and never understood why they wern't done on the 64. What I wanted
to do was to build an interface so I could load in the binary of the
cartridges and then save them to a C64 disk. I knew a little ML, so I
intended on modifing them so that they would work on te 64. Does anyone
know what major copyright infringement means? I didn't care. I owned the
cardridges, and never intended on selling the C64 versions.
All that aside, now that I have an even more powerful machine, why
can't those games be ported here? Obviously not the same way. I would
like to see an Amiga version of Atari's Adventure. But what I want is
a total replica. Identical gameplay, identical graphics (I believe that
the Atari's had 150X200 graphics, so we could use low-res with double
wide pixels), identical color, identical sound. With all the same quirks.
(I know, I know ...)
I envisioned a menu option to go into "Amiga mode" in steps. First
standard graphics and sound, then a larger map, and so on. When people
do ports of older games to the Amiga, they can do a good job (Amiba
invaders comes to mind), but I miss the charm of the old games. On a
side note, has anyone seen a port of Activision's Ka-Boom?
Ok, I know you all think I'm sick and demented by now, and you're
probably right, but theres a lot more of us out there than you think!
/* "Come see the violence inherent in the system!"
F. Michael Theilig - The University of Rhode Island at Little Rest
GWO110 at URIACC.Bitnet
"Help! Help! I'm being Repressed!" */