jet@karazm.math.uh.edu (J Eric Townsend) (06/19/91)
In article <2561@gold.gvg.tek.com> johna@gold.gvg.tek.com (John Abt) writes: >Some of us do not know anything about the Amiga. Could someone >post, in simple terms, devoid of BS, just exactly what it is about >the Amiga that makes it a good multimedia platform? Ok, I think I'm pretty impartial, since I use lots of "real" machines at work but own an Amiga A3000 for play. The following are items that exist on *ALL* Amigas, from the lowly A500 (usually found for < $500) to the full blown units. 0. NTSC master clock/NTSC video. The Amiga family can sync to an external NTSC clock. This makes for inexpensive genlocks or really good not-so-cheap genlocks. 1. blitter. Not as amazing on a 25Mhz 68030 equipped unit, but my 68000 based Amiga could play back animations from memory much faster than anything else I've used. My 3000 plays back color animations faster than my Sparc-2. 2. Stereo 4-channel sound. 'nuff said. 3. Multiple hardware graphics mode/dedicated graphics hardware. The graphics memory is accessible both by the CPU and the graphics hardware. This makes it easy to hand off animation tasks while the CPU takes care of managing the machine. 4. Several top-notch animation/multimedia packages. Want to build an interactive system that includes graphics overlays on top of laserdisc output with sound? No problem. 5. Multitasking OS. You might not think you need this, but it's really nice to be able to write a paper while your raytracer cranks out frames in the background. 6. User support. The Fred Fish collection (at almost 500 disks, now) is an organized collection of all sorts of cool free stuff (utilities to games to demos to applications) for the Amiga. 7. PC and Mac compatibility. There are hardware emulators for both the PC and the Mac. I get a big kick out of running Mac software on my 25Mhz 68030+882 machine for which I paid $3000. Mac compatibilty costs around $350. 8. The combination of the above. Find an Amigoid and get them to show you some of the many demos/animations put together. Eric Swartz (sic?) has a large number of 2d anims with sound that are nice (but occasionally sexist). The "Walker" demos are *really* impressive. Mixture of 2d animation, 3d digitized images, stop motion and digitized sound. 9. The price. I've used a IIfx (stands for "Too Fucking eXpensive" :-) with a RasterOps board, loads of memory and hard drive and nice software. It also cost more than 4 Amiga 3000s, each w/ 25Mhz 030-882, 50Mb hard drives and 2Mb of ram. If you're going to spend a *lot* of money, buy an SGI machine or something. I'm not trying to start a flame war, I'm trying to explain why I went with an Amiga instead of a PClone or Mac. -- J. Eric Townsend - jet@uh.edu - bitnet: jet@UHOU - vox: (713) 749-2126 Skate UNIX! (curb fault: skater dumped) PowerGlove mailing list: glove-list-request@karazm.math.uh.edu