From: skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu (Skip Sauls)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: Unreal demo!
Date: 8 Sep 92 19:49:26 GMT
Organization: University of Mississippi, Dept. of Computer Science

In article <1992Sep8.180147.29982@ctr.columbia.edu> jerry@connection.prospect.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu (Skip Sauls) writes:
>>>You can't, but you can get a 386 box (no HD or monitor) for that price.  And
>>>don't tell me that the 386 can't compete with the A500.
>>
>>It can't when it comes to EuroDemos.  Unreal on anything less than a 486
>>is not comparable to an A500.  Of course, when it comes to real world
>>(read boring) things like word processing, spreadsheets, and that sort
>>of thing, the 386 shines.  :-)
>
>I've seen Unreal on a friend's 486/50 and my 386/33.  There was very little
>difference.  I suspect ISA is the limiting factor, not the CPU.  After a
>couple of runs, however, Unreal is no big deal except the excellent music,
>anyway.  Wing Commander II has animation which is more impressive than
>Unreal's vector part.  My personal favarite part of Unreal is the one where
>they have the spheres moving behind the "glass-like" lettering.

I also realized after I posted that the 486s that I'd been using had 
Tseng boards, while the 386s had dirt-cheap VGA cards.  The 386 machines
also had slower hard drives and possibly other factors which led to the
perceived slowness compared to the 486s.  

As for Wing Commander II, I'm more impressed by the sheer volume of
animation, sound, and graphics than anything else.  While I believe
that it would be possible to create an Amiga version of the game, I
doubt that it would be popular given that it needs ~20M of hard disk
space to run.  A CD-ROM version of the game would be nice on either
the Amiga or the PC, but given C='s idiotic policies concerning the
drives for the Amiga, the PC version is much more likely.

I downloaded a few Amiga EuroDemos over the weekend and didn't see
anything that was more impressive than Unreal, but most were on par
with it.  Of course, there are supposed to be some really amazing
demos out there, but the little morons who write the things seem to
ignore the fact that there are machines with such things as 68030s,
>1M Chip RAM, Fast RAM, hard drives, etc.  

>>Well, given that the motherboard for a 486 is not that much different from 
>>any other Intel machine, I'd bet that the chip is $400 and the motherboard
>>is $75.  The A500 is selling for less than $300, so the 486 chip is indeed
>>more expensive.  :-)
>
>$300 for an A500?  Where?  That is a great deal.

A company called Tenex or something like that sells them for $299.
These may be the 512k versions with the 1.3 ROMs, so they may not
really be that great a deal.  I'm not a business type, but I don't
see C= selling any of the A600s stateside unless the prices are
much less than rumored.  At $199, an A600 might look like an attractive
alternative to the SNES and Genesis, both of which are around $99,
I believe.  Of course, this also assumes that C= attempts to market the
things and we all know how unlikely that is.

>>
>>Skip Sauls

>+-------------------+-----------------------+--------------------------------+
>| Jerry J. Shekhel  | Molecular Simulations | Time just fades the pages      |
>| Drummers do it... | Inc.  Waltham, MA USA | in my book of memories.        |
>|    ... In rhythm! |     (617) 890-2888    |              -- Guns N' Roses  |
>+-------------------+-----------------------+--------------------------------+
>|           ...! [ princeton mit-eddie bu sunne ] !polygen!jerry             |
>|                            jerry@polygen.com                               |
>+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Skip Sauls
skip@tacky.cs.olemiss.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.emulations