From: mdicker@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mike Dickerson)
Subject: Re: Buying a multimedia system
Organization: University of Denver, Dept. of Math & Comp. Sci.
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 92 14:59:49 GMT


Hello, me again.

Thanks to everyone who answered quetsions I had by email or here.

I have a few more answers now, which seem to be:

  * QT *can* double buffer from hard disk, and in fact, does this by
default.  However, no one answered my question about whether it can do
it in more than the small window the dealer showed.  I'm still looking
for whether I can animate in full screen on a standard Mac-II (which
is all that is within my price range).

  * I found out that a 68040 Mac Quadra will not fall within my
hardware budget.  But somebody indicated a 68030 Mac can be expanded
with a 68040 later.

  * About 4 billion people mailed me about the "Video Toaster".  It
sounds neat, but also, an amiga 3000 equipped like I want with a video
toaster is outside of my price range.  The toaster by itself is $2500
from the local dealer, and he said it needs a $1200 "Time Base
Corrector" (whatever that is) to be useful.  Also, I'm not sure I have
much use for the things the toaster does (real time wipes/fades/etc).
So I thank everyone for the suggestion but I just don't think this
device is all that useful to me.  THe DCTV looks muhc more useful
right now, not to mention I can afford it.

  * Someone on here posted that Amiga 3000s were limited to 9 Mb, but
I have found out this is not true.  THe dealer sells 64 Mb expansion
memory cards for it, and he says you can have more than one in the
3000 at once.  (However, they are quite expensive).

  * The Mac *can* play soundtracker modules, I found out.  And yes,
they are the same ones I have on my 386, so I can just move them over
and use them.

  * Several people told me the Macintosh dealer was wrong when he said
there was more multimedia programs for the Macintosh.

  * A raytrace renderer, unfortunately, falls out of my price range
for either the Mac or the Amiga (although there are freeware ones
available for both).  Commercially, the cheapest renderer either
dealer carried was $250, which would leave me no money for other software.

  * Several people expressed doubts that the Mac System 7 can
multitask that well.  They claimed that the reason the Mac dealer
didn't do that demo (2 renders/download 9600/word processor) is
because he couldn't.  But I find this a little hard to believe because
everything I've ever heard says that Mac System 7 is a multitasking OS.

 * A few people emailed me about an Amiga "4000", but my dealer has
never heard of such a thing, and says if it was going to appear this
year, he'd know of it.  So it will probably be too late for my needs,
and possibly too expensive.

* Someone else emailed me that even though devices such as DCTV exist
for the Amiga, you can't run programs on them.  Is this true?  He said
that for the Macintosh, you can run a program designed for, say, 8 bit
color, on a 24 bit color card, and all the software will know what to
do and work right.  He said that almost no programs can be run on the
Amiga graphics cards, which sounds strange, because what good would
they be then?  Is this true?  Can I, say, take my word processor or
whatever and run it on DCTV or other such display devices?  (Ie, any
old program)?

 * Several people emailed me that the Amiga can emulate a Macintosh
for around $300.  However, one said this was only in B&W, which doesn't
do me much good :-)

* Somebody mentioned that "MPEG" will become very important soon to
multimedia.  I know there is MPEG for the Mac, but dunno about the
Amiga - is there MPEG available there, or will there be?

That's what I've found out so far, thanks to people's kind responses.
Basically, I got a lot of mail saying to consider the Amiga more
seriously than I was.  So I am.  I am still concerned about its small
base though - just for example, in my hometown there used to be 2
Amiga dealers about 4 years ago but they have both gone out of
business and now I have to drive 50 miles to find a dealer, but there
are still several Mac dealers in town (and the required 5 billion PC
dealers :-) ).  My concern is that the Amiga is fading out, esp. since
someone sent me email saying that several major software vendors are
not porting to it any more, and that many of the "Biggies" such as
FrameMaker, Lotus 123, AutoCad, etc, don't run on the Amiga at all.

So basically, I like what I have seen from the Amiga, maybe more than
the other platforms, but mostly I am afraid that I'll be stuck with a
"TRS-80" type of machine in a few years - one that was nifty relative
to the competition, but is ignored by the industry.  If it wasn't for
that fear, I'd be more tempted.

Anyway, thanks for the information I received.  The thigns I still
need to know are:

  * Can Quicktime movies be played on a standard 68030 color Macintosh
in full screen mode at 24 fps??  I guess everything kinda hinges on
this.  If I have to stick to 2 inch windows that makes nice demos, but
doesn't do me much good :-).   If it does, I'll probably end up with a
Mac just because of the above concerns.  If not, then I'll hafta go
with the Amiga just to get full screen animations.  Info on this?

  /M "no .sig" D
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia