watters@penguin.cis.ohio-state.edu (david r watters) (01/15/90)
I think some of the people saying that the Black Belt Box is a kludge are people that use the amiga just to play games and call up a few boards. I am a professional animator and I use 2 2500's in a very expensive edit bay but that desn't mean I have the funds to run out and buy a targa board. If anyone has ever seen 320x400 HAM that has been recorded with a single frame controller (it looks great!), they would not doubt such a device. The tv standard in America is extremely poor, and this hides a lot of the roughness you see in lo-res on you crisp RGB. With 200K+ colors, or what ever, that will become even less of a factor since the dithering and banding will be even less visable, better anti-aliasing. One problem with frame buffers is that they are very downstream of the anim creation path you can't touch up any frames in a 24-bit animation. However, if only one paint program, PD or commercial, works with this box, it will already be more usefull than a buffer. For some of my low-end work, I can charge up to $500. With almost no overhead I can buy this thing for one specific job and still make a profit. I have paid more for software that I've never used. One more important note. This box is not for desktop publishing, so please stop comparing it to the Flicker Fixer, it is meant for Video and for Video you have to have interlace. As a matter of fact I thank God for that "annoying flicker" it helped the Amiga become a valuable inexpensive video tool otherwise I might own a MacII instead. As for the anim speed, Ram animations' play rate depends mostly on the amount of change from one frame to the next. 320x200 anims can get extremely slow if you have 80 moving objects close up or an observer move coupled with a checkered ground. Any anim in any format slows when it is played from ram, the only real way to deal with this without limiting your actual anim is to single frame record it, at least until Newtek's solution to the pain of single frame recording is completed, OOPS! But of course that is a secret, sorry Alan Hastings.