elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) (08/12/88)
I'm looking for information about the suitability of various
computers, including the Mac II, for image processing.
First, what we are currently doing: The equipment currently being used
is a fully-decked Amiga 2000 with 68020, 5 megabytes of RAM,
Flickerfixer card, multisync monitor, and SCSI port. Image storage is
slated to be WORM drive (Write Once/Read Many laser-disk), 800
megabytes total capacity, in addition to a hard disk for ordinary data
storage. The WORM drive is currently available, off-the-shelf, from
Maxtor via C Ltd. When the Maxtor read-many/write-many laserdisk is
available, it will be substituted for the WORM drive.
The software being used: various custom image processing programs,
plus a custom Superbase Professional application which allows one to
easily maintain a picture database. The Sbase application also provides the
user interface "glue" (Sbase can call external programs, passing
filenames etc. to them).
The problem: We are having problems aquiring images. There are a
number of suitable image aquisition products promised "Real Soon Now",
but none shipping before the first of the year (which means that,
realistically, they will be actually available around May of next
year).
The solution: go to another computer system. PC clones have plenty
of image aquisition products available (for a price!), but 64K
segments take the umph out of professional-quality images (512x512x256
grey-scale). And VGA is no speed demon. I think I've convinced my boss
to avoid the 8080sux.
Another possibility is the Mac II. BUT: While the price is about
the same as the Amiga setup we were considering, can we do everything
that we're currently doing, with it? For example, is there any
database from which we can call 200Kbyte external applications? And
can you "genlock" to external video and record to video tape, for
presentation purposes?
I called a developer friend of mine in a large western city, who
has both an Amiga and a Mac II. His specialty is image processing, not
databases or desktop video, so he couldn't help with those particular
questions. Anyhow, he says his Mac II isn't much faster than his
Amiga, because it spends a lot of its time doing polling of
peripherals that the Amiga has coprocessors to handle, and that screen
display speed really bites the big one (takes 30 seconds to display an
image, if you use color quickdraw and don't go straight to the
hardware). The development environment he described as "crude",
although he praised the resource manager (let's face it, a
single-tasking operating system designed for a 128K home computer
simply doesn't hack it in today's world where multitasking is the
coming norm). Add in the fact that I'm going to have to learn yet
another operating system (sigh, and I haven't really mastered Amiga
yet), and it doesn't look too promising.
On the other hand, it does have 256 on-screen colors, and it
doesn't have leprosy (that is, people don't shy away when you mention
the Mac II, like they do when you mention the name "Amiga"). Plus, he
mentioned two frame digitizer packages besides the one from Data
Translation (?) that we were aware of from our IBM researches.
I (as designated grunt) need some info, then, on available Mac
database tools capable of handling Mac ][ 8-bit images, and capable of
interfacing to extern applications. It also needs an application
language a' la' DBASE or SuperBase. "C" development tool info is also
needed (surely there's compilers that produce better code than the
Manx compiler, which is a bit, uhm, simplistic?). Bootstrapping to Mac
is going to be harder than bootstrapping to Amiga, it seems, because
we have no local sources of Macintosh programming information (heck,
we don't even have a local Macintosh dealer -- just an IBM dealer who
occasionally sells a Mac. That, in a town with two Amiga dealers....).
Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated.
And if any of the Amiga people suddenly discover that they have a
solution to our image aquisition problem.....
--
Eric Lee Green ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg
Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509
MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste) (08/12/88)
elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green @ SciCom Systems) has posted, simultaneously to comp.sys.mac and comp.sys.amiga an invitation to war by requesting a public comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of a Mac II and an Amiga 2000. PLEASE PLEASE resist the urge to use the "f" key for your answers. We don't need another war - We're still burying our dead over in the Amiga group from our last skirmish with Atari. (Not to mention shooting at the C-64 people who keep posting here.) Please, if you cannot bring yourself to send EMAIL instead of posting, Please post independently, and TO YOUR OWN GROUP ONLY, and let Eric Green watch both groups for the answer. The last thing we need right now is a spike of useless traffic caused by another stupid "My computer is better than yours" war. If you MUST use "F", do it to THIS article, not the other. I'm posting it individually to each of the two groups. Steven C. Den Beste, Bolt Beranek & Newman, Cambridge MA denbeste@bbn.com(ARPA/CSNET/UUCP) harvard!bbn.com!denbeste(UUCP)