From: ggiles@cie.uoregon.edu (Gregg Giles)
Subject: Re: A Study in Balance
Organization: University of Oregon Campus Information Exchange
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 92 01:54:10 GMT

In article <1992Sep15.175733.25962@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:

>but the sound capabilities, the blitter, copper, and chip RAM addressing 
>have not been upgraded at all.  

   Today's lesson, grasshopper, is "bandwidth". Lisa can do a 64-bit fetch
during a single Chip RAM bus cycle. Denise could do 16-bits/cycle. (Correct me
if I'm wrong Dave, I'm going on memory here.) The bandwidth moves more data
in a single cycle than it used to - it's not being crammed down a 16-bit bus
faster. Remember: "Bandwidth".

>This is more than 10 times as much data as the 320x200x6
>mode, still the most common mode used in games. 

   Bzt. I'm sure I can say with some degree of accuracy that most Amiga games
are still no better than 32 color. There do seem to be more EHB games coming
out now, but the lesser color games still appear to outweight the EHB ones.
(For instance, the only Dynamix games that support EHB are A10 1.5 and Nova 9.
Those came out within the last four months. And I worked on both of them in
case you want to debate me on them.) 

 Yet the chip RAM has been
>improved by only a factor of four from the A1000, and the floppy disk 
>storage has been improved by only a factor of two. 

   I could live with 2MB Chip RAM. But Marc, keep in mind that the original
chipset had reserved two megs of memory for Chip RAM - even in 1985 they knew
that 512k might not be enough. Don't you think Commodore foresees a day when
2MB won't be enough? Did you ask anyone about this before you flamed? 
   As for 1.76MB disks, what do you want? It exceeds both the MS-DOS and Mac
high density disks by at least 300k. I expect next you will complain that they
are too slow for you - perhaps they're not "instantaneous" or something.

>   What I wanted from a next-generation Amiga, in short, was a new system
>as well-balanced as the A1000, and which offered the same level of improvements
>throughout the system.  I wanted to see sound capabilities improved to 16-bits,
>a new copper capable of handling all of the new palette registers with the
>same ease that the copper in the ECS handles the palette registers in that
>chipset, a new blitter that can blit data with the same fluidity in 
>1280x400x8 that the old blitter did in 320x200x6, much greater chip RAM
>addressing (preferably to 24-bit), improved resolutions on the same level
>as the improvements in everything else, and the adoption of the floptical
>drives to keep pace with the new storage needs from the improved video.

   Get 'em, Dave. (Someone sell Marc a BLAZEMONGER!)
 
>   I am dissatisfied with the A4000 primarily because it is not a well-balanced
>system that offers balanced upgrades across the board.  The improvements that
>the A4000 offers are almost entirely in the area of color, with few 
>improvements in anything else.

   Then don't buy it. Just give us a break.

-- 
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Gregg Giles (Dynamix, Inc.)                 BIX: ggiles 
All opinions expressed are my own.          Internet: ggiles@cie.uoregon.edu
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Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics,comp.sys.amiga.misc