From: bmccnnll@unix1.tcd.ie (Barry McConnell)
Subject: Some random thoughts on the A4000
Organization: Trinity College, Dublin
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 22:34:51 GMT

I haven't actually *seen* one of these beasts yet (I guess they won't make an
appearance here in Ireland for a long, long time...), but I have a few
thoughts on the specs which have been posted numerous times here:

- 25MHz 68040. Boring! :-)  Apple are shipping / about to ship their 33MHz
versions of the Quadra. I dunno if 32% is such a noticeable speed increase,
but when you're talking about something as fast as an '040, I guess it adds
the processing power of another bunch of stock A500's... However, the plug-in
modules is a Good Idea, since it means shipping a faster version of this
machine in the future will be fairly painless, and also C= can charge
horrendous prices for motherboard swaps like Apple. ;-)

- Graphics. Mmm, very nice - as a friend of mine (currently doing a lot of
ray-tracing on a 7MHz A2000HD) said: "This is the exact machine I have been
waiting for." With all these new screenmodes, it will be just like an
Archimedes. :-)  (And you'll be forever twiddling the knobs on the front of
your monitor.) Now I wish someone would do some comprehensive benchmarks in
the various resolutions, alongside an A3000 (maybe with an '040 onboard?), to
see: a) How much faster it is at manipulating windows in "ordinary" ECS modes
(there *is* a speedup in the new chipset, isn't there???), and b) What kind
of slowdown you get in the more powerful modes (other platforms - Mac, Arc,
NeXT, etc. are able to manipulate windows at a very acceptable speed with
loads of colours, so: can the Amiga?).

- 2MB Chip RAM. Aghhhhhh!! 800*600 @ ~72Hz looks like a _great_ screenmode to
be in for day-to-day use, but with four of these screens open, in 256-colour
mode, bang goes all your Chip RAM! 4MB of Chip would have been just about
enough, but I can see myself running out with just 2MB.

- Monitors. Any recommendations? What modes will a typical SVGA not be able
to handle? (All of them can be output at 31KHz, right?) Will the 1950/1960
handle everything? What is the price of that in the US in comparison to a 14"
NEC? A 16" NEC? Can I buy a 19" multiscan and have a 2K*2K Workbench screen,
all viewable at once?

- Icons. Please, please, please, please Commodore, colour in all your icons,
so we can have really sexy-looking desktops if we choose to run in 16 or 256
colour mode. I had to colour in all the 2.04 ones myself, and I don't want to
have to do it all over again for 3.0.

- SCSI vs IDE. I think there is a lot more to this than meets the eye. One
advantage of SCSI is its "snob" factor. IDE is associated with el-cheapo PC
clones, and is often considered to be slow and clunky. On the other hand, we
see SCSI drives in Mac, NeXT etc., and they are ususally fairly nippy, so
it's nice to be able to say "we have that too". However, if an IDE Quantum
120MB will do >2MB/sec like the SCSI version I have in my A2000 at the
moment, while leaving lots of CPU free, I'm perfectly happy to use it
instead. (Can someone verify that it does? I'd hate to buy a new Amiga to
find it with a slower hard drive...) I would be surprised if many people
would want more than one extra drive on top of that - if you're going to have
half a dozen small drives lying around, you may as well sell them and get a
couple of large ones instead (which will be faster too). Okay, so there are
people who want scanners etc. hanging off the SCSI bus, but for those in that
minority, we are assured that there will is a 32-bit SCSI controller waiting
in the wings. For the rest of us, the smallish drop in price that IDE brings
will allow us to immediately upgrade the A4000 to something more than the
piddly 6MB it is stuck with. :^)  (And please don't tell me it requires 4MB
SIMMs to go beyond 4MB Fast RAM!! What speed are they anyway? 40ns? <grin> )

- Enhanced sound. Yes, we're waiting. :-)  I'm glad we have been told that
there *is* something coming to please us musicians. 8-bit 4-channel stereo
sound is quite nice, but I'd like to mess around with something a little more
powerful. A built-in microphone and sound sampler (heck, this *is*
supposed to be the king of multimedia machines!) would not have gone amiss
either.

- KS/WB3.0. Well, it needs background copying/deleting (I hate having
Workbench tied up when copying large files to floppy), and some kind of
memory protection. I'm sure with an '040, the speed decrease involved would
not really be noticeable. Since this has been thrashed out endlessly here,
I'll say no more about it: only that I hate having to constantly reboot the
machine when I make mistakes while programming.

- That second power connector. Is it my imagination, or are there *two* power
connectors on the back? Can I plug my monitor into one of them like on a Mac,
and then control everything with one switch?

- What on EARTH happened to the keyboard/mouse connectors? Why not put them
both on the right-hand side (when facing front) to suit the majority? Why not
allow the mouse to plug into the keyboard like on a Mac? :-)

- Can we have a slightly cut-down version without the PC slots? I have
already got this oversized hulk on my desk, with its total of eleven
expansion slots, and only three of them in use. The rest is just air! (And I
have no plans to fill them either.) I'd like a slimmer machine, more like a
NeXT, although obviously a little larger (has to have one or two slots at
least). BTW What do people think of the A4000 as regards appearance? I was
talking to one friend who claimed it looked even nicer than the A3000, but
then I got this (very smudgy) IFF of it and the inner workings, and it
doesn't look *that* great, and finally someone here commented that it looked
really awful - so who's correct?

- What applications currently support the new screenmodes and palette? How
soon will it be before we get a 24-bit 1280*512 DPaint? Have Commodore
employed Eric Schwartz to do a 256-colour "Flip the Frog" cartoon? <grin>

- What kind of incompatability can we expect? There really should have been a
68000 onboard too (heck, it would only have added a coupla dollars to the
cost of the system) for those demos and games which won't even _think_ about
running with anything better than a 7MHz 68000. I heard that the AGA chipset
has an ECS-compatible mode which could help, and can we softkick 1.3 too? Do
any MMU tools work with the '040's MMU? Will A-Max II+ run? With 32-bit Fast
RAM too?

I invested heavily in a loaded A2000 system within the past six months (call
it an A3000, only a little faster...), so I am a little reluctant to rush out
and buy the new A4000 when it's released. However, since I didn't pay for the
most expensive bit - the accelerator (thankyou SSL :-) ) - I wouldn't end up
losing money overall. Especially since I would plan to sell this machine here
in Ireland (and hence get a high price for it - the retail price for a
roughly equivalent A3000 (A3000-25/100/10MB/1950) is something like US$10,000
over here), and maybe order the A4000 direct from the US, where prices are
dirt-cheap. ($3000 for the full A4000? Sob!!)

Speaking of which, can someone give me advice on this? I'm used to ordering
stuff from our next-door neighbours England, but not from the US. Are there
any places which specialise in sending out stuff to another continent? How
much would a decent courier (say, FedEx) cost for an A4000+monitor? $200? Can
I change a jumper on the motherboard to get it to boot up in PAL all the
time? I know I'm going to have problems with the PSU (we are 50Hz over here),
but I think it is possible to sort that out by buying a new PSU/transformer;
has anyone had any experience of this?

Hmmm, there goes another 8K of bandwidth! Sorry for rambling...

Barry.
bmccnnll@unix1.tcd.ie
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy