From: copes@cs.curtin.edu.au (Simon Cope)
Subject: Re: Avoid the Amiga 4000
Organization: Curtin University of Technology
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 04:25:29 GMT

barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:

>   Over two and-a-half years ago, when the Amiga 3000 came out, many people
>remember how much I flamed the system because of the few improvements it 
>offered in the overall characteristics that make the Amiga an Amiga.  But to

You flame anything that comes out.

>   The A4000 is a different story.  With the A4000, the only substantial
>improvement is color.  And it becomes clearer every day at just what the costs

Do not forget it is 4x as fast...

>have been to improve the color capabilities.  In the key area of display 
>resolution, the A4000 is substantially inferior to the A3000, do to the fact
>that the A3000 has a Display Enhancer and the A4000 does not.

Pardon Me?

>   The Display Enhancer in the A3000 is arguably its best feature.  It allows

With respect to the C= engineers who designed the display enhancer, at its
best it is a hack, at worst a nuisance.

>all resolution modes (except for the Super HiRes modes, which are limited in
>color capability on the A3000 anyway) to be boosted to a high-quality 31Khz
>display.  

Or the Euro72 and Super72 modes.

>Resolution modes that were non-interlaced before are improved
>substantially by removing the scan-lines.  And interlaced modes are now totally
>flicker-free.  Because of the Display Enhancer, the A3000 is usable with lots
>of very high-quality monitors.  I know one person who found a bargain on a
>19" workstation monitor which syncs down to 31Khz, offers a brilliantly sharp
>picture with lots of colors (as many colors as any computer can put out),
>and just plain works beautifully with the A3000.  With the Display Enhancer,
>the user never has to worry about whether or not his or her monitor can sync
>down to 15Khz because it never has to.

Anything over 16" is really a waste of space on a machine limited to 768x580 
res graphics.  And you should buy a monitor to suit the machine, not the ego
of the owner.  A good monitor for the Amiga is one that syncs from 15-32 Khz,
not "down to 31 Khz".

>   The A4000 is a totally different story.  At first, I was a little confused
>about the function of the scan-doubler and promoter features of the AGA Lisa
>video chip. 

Not very surprising, you're a very confused and deluded person. 

>I thought at first that Commodore had basically moved the 
>Display Enhancer internally to the Lisa chip.  I realise now that I was wrong.

Very.

>The scan-doubler is not new at all, and is present in pretty much the same
>form in the ECS Denise.  In fact, it should be possible to generate the 
>A4000's DblPAL and DblNTSC modes on any Amiga with the ECS Denise, but with
>very tight color restrictions.  

Yes.  Its basically called Productivity Mode.

>I have also found that the "Promoter" is not
>hardware at all, but simply a function of AmigaDOS 3.0.  With 3.0, the OS
>can be told to intercept calls to open NTSC and PAL screens, and open DblNTSC
>and DblPAL screens instead.  

Gee, you got something right.

>The biggest problem with the A4000 by far is its lack of a Display Enhancer.

Its actually one of the best things about it.

>With the A4000, it is no longer possible to purchase a monitor that will only
>handle scan frequencies of 31Khz and up.  

You we're stupid to buy one in the first place.

>If an Amiga problem insists on 
>opening a standard 15Khz NTSC or PAL mode screen, the screen will be opened
>at 15Khz no matter what.  The "Promotion" feature of the OS only works for 
>a tiny few, well-written Amiga programs, and no games.  This means that a user
>of an A4000 will have to put up with a flickering display in programs such
>as PageStream, and games such as SimAnt and SimEarth that can open interlaced
>screens.  And there will be nothing that the user will be able to do about it
>until the software is updated to support the A4000.  Additionally, all games
>will have scan-lines on an A4000.

Promotion will work on any intuition program that has been written to C=
guidelines.  The things it doesn't work on are badly written programs that 
tried to cheat on the rules, and will now suffer.  Not scandoubling games is
probably a good thing.  Its pretty hard to shoot something that is ghosting
all over the screen because it is moving more than 15 times per second...which
is what happens on the A3000 with a deinterlacer due to the way they work.  If
you don't believe me then more the mouse pointer round fast, then compare it
to the A4000 one.

>   What would this mean to someone such as the person I mentioned above, who
>already has a monitor that cannot sync lower than 31Khz?  

It means they should have read the manuals.

>   In short, many A3000 owners who have been using high-quality monitors will
>have to replace their monitors with inferior ones usable on the A4000.  I have
>thoroughly checked to monitors that can handle frequencies as low as 15Khz,
>and few such monitors have ever been manufactured.  Many of the ones that
>were developed have been discontinued since I checked for them over two years
>ago.  The Commodore monitors are just about the only monitors available now
>that will work with the A4000.

That's called marketing strategy, something you obviously haven't heard of.  And
As for not many being made, I'm sure there are many Nec 3D owners who would 
disagree.

>A3000 instead, and upgrade it with a third-party video card as soon as DIG
>becomes available for the Amiga.  (The A4000 retrogrades in more than just the
>area of display resolution, though.  Due to its use of IDE instead of SCSI,
>the A4000 retrogrades in the area of HD access and HD speed as well)

The cost of an 040 card more than outways the difference between the A3000 and
A4000.  And seeing you're in love with games, DIG wont do you much good.  I 
also seem to recall you were one of the whingers who told C= to cut the costs
of their machines, and advocated an IDE HDisk.  Talk about two faced...

Soft promotion if far superior to the old deinterlacer.  C= have saved you
having to reach around behind your machine to switch of the deinterlacer every
time you play a fast game or use a 24khz graphics mode.

>---
>| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu
>--------------------------------------------------
>           Amiga 4000:  JUST SAY NO!!!!
            Gimme one NOW!!!!

--
copes@cs.curtin.edu.au

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc,comp.sys.amiga.applications