rblewitt@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (Richard Blewitt) (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? > >Just curious, John Abt There are several things that make the Amiga an excelent platform for multimedia. First the hardware: The graphics on the Amiga are based on the video standards (NTSC and PAL), so the Amiga can handle the full video field including overscan, and works with the interlace of the video signals. The Amiga also has custom graphics chips which allow for very fast and clean animation by using N buffering, and timing the switching with the vertical refresh. The graphics chips are also capable of other effects which I am not familiar enough with to discus. On the audio side, the Amiga has built in 4 channel stereo sound. The expansion bus also fits in with the multimedia design (the simplest way to describe it is that it is like the I*M microchannel design, only a bit faster). Please note that the design of the Amiga allows graphics, audio, disk and bus activities to go on simultaniously with only a minimal use of the CPU. On the software side of things, the operating system is a real-time multitasking OS, with strong support for interprocess communication. The upshot of all this is that is it very easy for the Amiga to have everything going on at once, which is the essence of multimedia. I hope this constitutes a reasonable discussion of the multimedia features of the Amiga without BS or hype. Rick p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p built in sereo sound _____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________.sig____________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ The generic .sig Rick Blewitt rblewitt@ucsd.edu