From: skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu (Skip Sauls)
Subject: Re: A4000 at WOC
Organization: University of Mississippi, Dept. of Computer Science
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 1992 01:58:41 GMT

In article <1992Sep15.123403.10793@waikato.ac.nz> dwong@waikato.ac.nz writes:
>In article <1992Sep14.052718.9878@cco.caltech.edu>, jsurace@cco.caltech.edu (Jason A. Surace) writes:
>>Well, I was at WOC saturday. Although I was somewhat depressed about the
>>A400 before I went, I left VERY impressed. The reasons are:
> 
>[Lots of opinions about AA chips and new graphics capabilities deleted...]
>
>>3) 2.1 & 3.0. A few big improvements. Disk cacheing. But mostly the
>>shared color palletes impressed me. I've often wondered why they didn't do
>>this earlier. There is now a fairly sophisticated color allocation system
>>for squeezing the most out of the chips. Pictures now dynamically share their
>>palettes, and even try to match their color to ones already used if no 
>>more are available. I saw 8 different 32-color images opened on a 64 color 
>>screen.  All of them looked very good, although by the 8th there was some 
>>minor color degradation.
>
>Now this colour management capability of 2.1/3.0 sounds great!  Besides the
>driver type interface to Intuition and Graphics libraries for DIG I thought
>that this was one of the next most difficult jobs to get done for DIG to
>materialise.  Device Independent Graphics may not be that far away after all..

DIG?  Who cares about plain old DIG?  We're going to get RTG!  :-)

Seriously though (is this allowed in this group? :-), I am als eager to
see RTG/DIG or whatever, but only if the performance is not seriously
affected.  Windows and the Mac OS are both device-independent, but both
are also very slow unless the hardware is quite powerful.  A 486-50 with
a fast SVGA board is great until lots of apps are open, each of which 
has its own color needs.  I often use scanner and paint software under
Windows and find the color changes to be irritating and distracting.  If
the Workbench also begins changing the palette without consulting me, I'm
going to be very pissed off.  The palette choices should remain under the
control of the user unless the user agrees to relinquish that control.

>It might actually make sense to forget about the concept of screens now that
>applications can share the Workbench palette.  Just have all your applications
>run on one screen...  I always admired this feature in Colour QuickDraw on 
>the Mac (okay they didn't have screens - maybe they COULDN'T have screens 8^).
>Just an opinion anyway.

No way, keep the screens.  If the resolution was 2k x 2k, I might want all
the applications on one screen, but nothing less would do, IMO.  I have 
used Macs, PCs, Suns, RS6000s, and other machines at resolutions such as
800x600, 1024x768, 1152x900, and 1280x1024, but none of them had enough
screen real-estate to satisfy me.  With the Amiga, I can have a screen for
each application and not worry about dealing with overlapping windows
stacked so deep that things can get lost.  Maybe I'm an odd case, but I'd
much rather have the screens than not.

However, multiple monitors with multiple virtual screens might be OK.  :-)

>Looks like I'll have to start saving my loose change up for this machine...

Despite the bozos who insist on comparing the A4000 with a piece of junk
486 with an ISA bus and SVGA card (whoa, real sophistication there), the
price is really great.  I've got a 485-50 with Tseng SVGA, 16M RAM, 2 
fast IDE drives, and the crappy old ISA at work.  I'll be the proud 
owner of an A4000 ASAP and will gladly run any sort of comparisons between
the two that anyone desires...

>>                                                - Jason Surace
>>                                                 jason@ipac.caltech.edu
>
>BTW, anyone have any solid hardware details on these chips?  If so, please 
>move this discussion to comp.sys.amiga.hardware, inquiring minds must know!  
>Thanks.

Keep it in .advocacy so that we can argue the merits of the system with
the PC advocates.  :-)

>| Derek Wong.                    | While we're waiting for the worm to turn, |
>| Internet - dwong@waikato.ac.nz | -- Bourgeois Tagg   

Skip Sauls
skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu

           


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