From: keith@cco.caltech.edu (Keith Allan Schneider)
Subject: A4000 at WOC
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 1992 01:00:11 GMT


Okay, I just got back from WOC.  I played with the A4000s there for a while.

First the technical stuff.

25-MHz 68040 CPU (on a processor card)
Base machine includes 2MB chip RAM and 4MB 32-bit RAM
Up to 18MB RAM on motherboard
Upgradable CPU via 200-pin slot
120MB IDE hard disk (optional 320-bit SCSI-II controller card is available)
880KB/1.7MB internal floppy (can also read/write to MS-DOS formatted disks)
Supports four internal disk drives (two FD and two HD)
Four ZORRO II/III expansion slots
Video-expansion slot
Full 32-bit system architecture
16.8 million color palette
Up to 256 simultaneous colors, plus 256,000 colors using HAM display mode
Advanced Architecture (AA) Graphic Chip Set (Alice, Lisa, Paula)
Programmable display resolutions include 640X480, 640X960, 1280X400, 800X600
Video overscan modes supported
All color modes available in all display resolutions
Flicker-free interlaced modes
AA chip set backwards compatible with ECS chip set
AmigaDOS 3.0

Now, this is from a glance at an AmigaWORLD article.

What I learned through hands on...

Many of the modes flicker.  The 640X480 modes were okay, unless you tried
to use the 256 color modes.  Then, the screen sort of "shimmered".  That is,
it didn't flicker per se, but there was an annoying sort of shimmer that
was not present when fewer colors were used (it wasn't so bad in 128 colors,
and lower for example).  When in 256 color mode, the machine really crawled.
Just moving this icon around was horrible.  The reason for this, I believe
is that the AA Chipset, although 32 bit, is still only 7MHz or something
(to keep in sync with NTSC).  The performance was worse than a Mac with
a 68030 in 256 color mode.  At least in the workbench (using 3.0).  Maybe
there are still some bugs, but it was alot slower than expected.

The hard drive seemed slow, too.  Oh well.  I guess that is IDE.

The machine seemed compatible with the programs I saw.  DPaint worked (of course
it didn't support all the color modes).

Some of the graphics displays that I saw were pretty impressive.  When using
some VGA mode, or something, there was no noticeable shimmer or flicker.
The graphics looked like true 24bit.  There were many different graphics
modes, including some HAM modes.

AmigaDOS 3.0

This was running on the 4000's that I saw.  It didn't really seem that much
different than the 2.04 that I have here.  The main difference was that it
would support the higher resolutions and color modes.  (Again, it didn't
seem very useful to run the Workbench in 256 color mode.)  One new feature
that I noticed was the ability to specify a 256 color picture as the workbench
backdrop (instead of a pattern).  You could also assign a 256 color picture
to the window background (again instead of a pattern, if you so choose).
Although, when I assigned a different picture to the windows and the 
backdrop, the chip memory started to get eaten up really fast (it really needs
more than 2MB of chip memory, if you ask me).

Oh well, the November issue of AmigaWorld will have a full review.
The machine seemed okay, I guess.  I didn't get a change to try out any
processor intensive stuff (like animation on DPaint).  I assume that it would
be faster, due to the 68040.  But, with the things that I was doing,
the faster processor wasn't all that evident.

Oh, there was this neat animation demo... was using a HAM mode with all the
new colors.  The animation was running on its own screen, so you could pull
it down and look behind it with now hitch or glitch in the animation (which
was 60 frames per second).

That's all for now.

keith
.