From: kholland@hydra.unm.edu (Kiernan Holland)
Subject: Re:  X-Pert Systems Domino Board
Date: Sat, 12 Sep 92 06:27:31 GMT
Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

In article <root.02d3@rkamiga.UUCP> root@rkamiga.UUCP (Rick Kelly) writes:
>In article <1992Aug28.151818.22693@ctr.columbia.edu> jerry@connection.prospect.com (Jerry Shekhel) writes:
>>davidme@qdpii.comp.qdpi.oz.au (David Meiklejohn) writes:
>>>>
>>>>Next year, you just by an accelerated 24 bit board for $59.95 and plug it in
>>>
>>>Into an AT bus?  No thanks...
>
>There are some things going on in PC/AT video that most people don't realize,
>even when they see it.
>
>Go to a hospital and get a CAT scan, and then go look at the results.  The
>viewing equipment is usually a 386 or 486 PC with a $2000-4000 1280x1024
>video card.  These systems can show a realtime video of your skull as it
>is rotated through 360 degrees.  These videos can be made up of the info
>from thousands of xrays that were taken by the CAT scan.  It is not jerky
>at all, and is as smooth as a movie.  Since the PC is normally mounted in
>a fairly anonymous cabinet, and the monitor is located on a console, it
>isn't obvious that there's "Intel Inside".
>
>These boards are starting to drop in price.  Some of these boards have 16 megs
>of memory, but memory prices are dropping.  And the price of processor chips
>is dropping.
>
>A flight simulator running on one of these boards would be great.
>
>--
>Rick Kelly		Rick's Amiga		Framingham, Mass.
>
>		think!unixland!rmkhome!rkamiga!root

Really, all you need is a JPEG decompression/compression chip 
from C-cube and a graphics board with a super fast 
graphics accelerator. You can do fast animations on any computer system 
with something like that. From an article I read from a few years back, 
C-cube claimed that their 33mhz JPEG chip could convert 15 million 
pixels per second, with the capability of processing 300 instructions 
at once. I think that CBM could essentially create such a board for 
the Amiga, but damn CBM is money hungry and us dreamers can 
never hope for something like that from a compnay with a strong business
sense. 

Heck, the NeXT Color NeXTStations come with these chips 
and look what CBM has, a dinky TI34010 and Amiga UX at 1024x1024 in 
8-bits. Everybody and their dog does this stuff on the PC. 

I have had many second thoughts about kepping my Amiga, but 
the PC's still have a way to go before (getting close) 
they can replace my Amiga. 

I'd ask all the Amiga users to follow the things going on 
with the Local BUS. It is suppost to do for the PC's what 
the 3000's bus does for the DMI Resolver and such. 

I am reaching a point of being neutral with all computer 
platforms and caring not about which I'm using. 
Given the tools, I'm sure I could make any of them shine, 
but it is cheaper to do it on the PC's, and easier to do it on the Amigas, 
and it is friendlier on the MACs. 

PC's are faster for some things, but very few programs are 
written to use the PC's graphics on a assembly level. 

I think the PC developers theory is "if every thing is getting faster and cheaper, 

we don't need to work extra hard to get more efficient code. 

Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics