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)
steve@dcdwest.UUCP (Steve Meloche) (08/14/88)
Nah, the Amiga doesn't have leprosy, people just can't get the name right.
"It's an Amiga!"
"Oh yeah, I read about the Omega once. You've got one, eh?"
"No, it's called an Amiga. Yes, I've got one."
"Oh, sorry, the amoeba. Do you like it?"
"Yes, a lot, but it's called the AMIGA!"
"A-Mega, O.K.! Don't get sensitive. Is is PC-compatible?"
"AAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!"
_____ _____ _____ Steven Meloche
| ` | ' ` | ' ITT Defense Communications Division
| | | San Diego, CA
__|__ | | steve!dcdwest!ucsdhub!...oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) (08/15/88)
Scanners: check out the August issue of Publish! magazine. It is devoted
to high quality image scanners for the Mac and the IBM pc. If you decide
you want to go to ultra-high resolution color, consider Barneyscan, here
in Berkeley.
Image processing: Take a look at ImageStudio and others. Once again, the
adds in Publish! will help.
Database: Macintosh pictures are stored in standard PICT resources (which
contain not only bitmaps, but also structured graphics, and can contain
postscript.) All the top databases (4th Dimension, DBase, even hypercard
and the Acta outline editor desk accessory)
support storing PICT resources in records. All the page layout programs,
and all the word processors let you paste them into pictures.
Genlock: it is available. Consult the individual display board
manufacturers. (A mac II will accept a wide range of display adapters, and
because the o.s. provides such a high level interace to the display,
programs can use the full power and size of displays invented after the
program was written.)
Color quickdraw: is heavily tuned. I doubt you'll be able to do much
better. In addition, if you write directly to the screen memory, your
programs will break with some hardware that may exist in the future that
runs the display in a not-normally accessible part of the memory map.
Software development: I think you'll find Macintosh Programmer's Workshop,
(available from APDA), Lightspeed C 3.0, and 4th Dimension, each in its
own way, are as advanced as anything you'll find on any system. (I prefer
LightSpeed C 3.0 to anything I've seen on any unix machine.)
Get a copy of Inside mac Vol 5. and read about the color manager, the
palette manager, and Color Quickdraw.
With each system release (and they come about every 6 months) Apple adds
more goodies to the programmer's toolbox on this machine. It is great to
be working on a system that is moving into the future so fast.
--- David Phillip Oster --When you asked me to live in sin with you
Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --I didn't know you meant sloth.
Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.educ60a-6dd@web7c.berkeley.edu (Rob Pfile) (08/15/88)
In article <25639@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) writes: >Color quickdraw: is heavily tuned. I doubt you'll be able to do much >better. In addition, if you write directly to the screen memory, your >programs will break with some hardware that may exist in the future that >runs the display in a not-normally accessible part of the memory map. I beg to differ slightly here. Color QuickDraw was slow enough in 8-bit deep mode to prompt Andy Hertzfeld to rewrite most of the time consuming loops (in pattern fills and CopyBits, for instance), resulting (in some routines) in speeds approaching 300% of the original loops. I believe that one ColorQuickDraw patch resulted in something like a 700%-1000% speed increase. This was originally released as an Init, called "QuickerGraf". Granted, Apple has built this patch right into the System release 6.0. However, I was greatly disappointed in the display speed of my ][ in 8-bit mode. Luckily, since QuickerGraf patched some of the frequently called traps, I was quite satisfied after installing the Init. -Rob ________________________________________________________________________________ Rob Pfile //|@ @|\\ Domain: c60a-6dd@web.berkeley.edu JAEG- \ \ ) / / UUCP: {ucbvax | lilac}!web.berkeley.edu!c60a-6dd just another | |0| | Internet: c60a-6dd%web.berkeley.edu@ucbvax.berkeley.edu eecs geek! \_/ "You never know, you know?"
farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren) (08/23/88)
elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green) writes: > 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. Why? How about buying a (relatively) cheap clone system with a smallish hard drive specifically to do image acquisition. Then, you can port the data over to the Amiga any number of ways (Ethernet if you wanna get real snazzy and expensive, parallel port to parallel port if you want fast and cheap), and process it there. -- Michael J. Farren | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just {ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}! | dogmatize it! Reflect on it and re-evaluate unisoft!gethen!farren | it. You may want to change your mind someday." gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame