mjp@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Portuesi) (08/06/87)
I am in the process of consulting for a researcher here who may wish
to use an Amiga in his work. Basically, he is in involved with runs
of experiments involving display of stimulus on a computer screen for
precise periods of time. Some of this work will be performed on
campus, other work at off-campus locations. He has written a lot of
code for the IBM PC (with an EGA I believe) to display stimuli on the
screen for precise periods of time. He has a lot of C code written for
general database manipulation and data-crunching, which would port
pretty easily. The display stuff, however, will not port easily, and
his concern is that PCs are universally available for experiment runs,
while Amigas are not. I informed him of the Amiga's superior display
abilities, including the wonderful things the Copper could do for him,
but he has already coded a large portion of his software for the PC
and does not wish to convert.
I informed him that the Amiga 2000 offers PC compatibility, and that
he could plug in an EGA card and run his stimulus software. He was
especially interested in the Amiga's sound capabilities, as he wishes
to include digitized spoken text with his stimuli in future
experiments, something that can be done with no additional hardware.
But he wants to synchronize the two. Is it possible to synchronize
events occurring between the Amiga's 68000 and the 8088 in the PC
card? Does this involve massive amounts of pain and heartache, or
does the janus.library (or whatever it is called) provide support for
communicating with a PC task?
There could be a programming job in this for me no matter what he
selects, but I (obviously) would prefer using an Amiga.
--M
--
Mike Portuesi / Carnegie-Mellon University Computer Science Department
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