From: fihsu@athena.mit.edu (Hsu I-wei)
Subject: Re: Avoid the Amiga 4000
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 8 Oct 1992 05:51:26 GMT

In article <1992Oct7.193356.6639@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
>
>[stuff about the A3000]
Yes, the A3000 is a cool machine.  :)

>
>   The A4000 is a different story.  With the A4000, the only substantial
>improvement is color.  And it becomes clearer every day at just what the costs

Did you forget the improvement in graphics speed??  In graphics modes
existing on former Amigas, you're talking about 3-4x speedup.  This is not
insignificant in the least.  The fact that a 16-color hires-interlaced
WB on an A4000 runs at comparable (or faster!) speed to a 2 color one on an
A3000 is very appealing to me.  :)  And talking price, some may consider the
A4000's street price ($2800-3000 at the moment) expensive, but the fact is
that it is close to, if not, the cheapest 68040 machine on the market.  I
consider the graphics speed to be a substantial improvement, and the price
to be quite reasonble.

As for the rest of your article...

>have been to improve the color capabilities.  In the key area of display 
>resolution, the A4000 is substantially inferior to the A3000, do to the fact
>that the A3000 has a Display Enhancer and the A4000 does not.
>
>   The Display Enhancer in the A3000 is arguably its best feature.  It allows

If I had to pick between the display enhancer and Zorro III (or built-in
SCSI), guess which one I would take?  :)

>[about the hardware deinterlacer in the A3000 and the benefits]
>[the OS is responsible for equvilant deinterlaced modes in the A4000, which
> lacks the hardware deinterlacer in the A3000]

>and DblPAL screens instead.  This has lots and lots of problems, though, which
>I will get to in a bit.
>[alot of current software which bypass the OS or do not follow the guidelines
>set by C= will have potential problems with the A4000, the least of which
>is putting up with interlace flicker]

>[alot of repetition, which is covered by the following paragraph]
>With the A4000, it is no longer possible to purchase a monitor that will only
>handle scan frequencies of 31Khz and up.  If an Amiga problem insists on 
>opening a standard 15Khz NTSC or PAL mode screen, the screen will be opened
>at 15Khz no matter what.  The "Promotion" feature of the OS only works for 
>a tiny few, well-written Amiga programs, and no games.  This means that a user
>of an A4000 will have to put up with a flickering display in programs such
>as PageStream, and games such as SimAnt and SimEarth that can open interlaced

>
>   What would this mean to someone such as the person I mentioned above, who
>already has a monitor that cannot sync lower than 31Khz?  If this person were
>to "upgrade" from an A3000 to an A4000, he or she would have to borrow a
>monitor that can handle the 15Khz frequencies just to boot the machine.  This
>is because the A4000 probably defaults to a 15Khz 640x200 NTSC mode as it is
                      ^^^^^^^^
>configured out of the box.  The user would have to borrow a low-frequency

As you are not sure about this, I will take your statement to mean:
  If this person were to "upgrade" from an A3000 to an A4000, he or she _might_
end up having to borrow a monitor that can handle 15kHz just to boot the
machine.

I hope that someone will confirm/deny the above speculation.

>monitor just to adjust the preferences to yield a Productivity screen, so
>that the system would be at all usable.  And even then the system would be
>only marginally usable, as every other program and all games produced a
>garbaged display on the monitor.  
>
>   In short, many A3000 owners who have been using high-quality monitors will
>have to replace their monitors with inferior ones usable on the A4000.  I have
>thoroughly checked to monitors that can handle frequencies as low as 15Khz,
>and few such monitors have ever been manufactured.  Many of the ones that

Why don't you do people who still want the A4000 a favor and help them out by
telling which monitors do.

>were developed have been discontinued since I checked for them over two years
>ago.  The Commodore monitors are just about the only monitors available now
>that will work with the A4000.

Just about, but not quite.  :)  I agree that there will be some _major_
problems with old and even currently avaiable software from running properly
on an A4000 + monitor which can't sync down to 15kHz. However, it is quite
clear that C= does not want future applications to bypass the OS. Their
decision not to public hardware specs on the graphics chipset is an indicator
of their determination to impose strong guidelines/standards on future
software.

>[rest of article worthy only of .advocacy deleted]

If you absolutely must have a > 14" monitor, and can't afford to upgrade/buy
new software then I agree that you should wait at least for a hardware
deinterlacer of some sort to come out. If your current software investment
isn't heavy, then take a good look at the A4000.  :)

To those who are going to purchase an A4000 and a 14" size monitor, I can
already offer an alternative to the C= 1950 or 1960 monitors.  I bought an
NEC 3DS for my A3000 over a year ago. It works with all screenmodes (ie. syncs
down to 15kHz). I haven't had any problems with the 3DS, and I'm sure you can
get one for less than either of the Commodore monitors. There have been
several posts in the past listing multisyncs which support 15kHz, so if
anyone is intersted I'm sure the list can be posted again. :)

>
>---
>| Marc Barrett -MB-  |  email: barrett@iastate.edu

Francis


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