From: raist@rmece02.upr.clu.edu (Ricardo Hernandez | 802-36-4453)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Avoid the Amiga 4000
Date: 13 Oct 92 20:34:03 GMT
Article-I.D.: rmece49.1992Oct13.203403.19784
Organization: UPR-Mayaguez--ASEL Lab

In article <35811@cbmvax.commodore.com>, daveh@cbmvax.commodore.com (Dave Haynie) writes:
|> In article <1992Oct7.193356.6639@news.iastate.edu> barrett@iastate.edu (Marc N Barrett) writes:
|> 
|> >   The A4000 is a totally different story.  At first, I was a little confused
|> >about the function of the scan-doubler and promoter features of the AGA Lisa
|> >I thought at first that Commodore had basically moved the Display Enhancer 
|> >internally to the Lisa chip.  I realise now that I was wrong.  The 
|> >scan-doubler is not new at all, and is present in pretty much the same form 
|> >in the ECS Denise.  In fact, it should be possible to generate the A4000's 
|> >DblPAL and DblNTSC modes on any Amiga with the ECS Denise, but with very 
|> >tight color restrictions.  
|> 
|> News flash: you're still confused.  It's your only career.
|> 
|> The Lisa's scan doubler function allows it to send the same scan line out twice,
|> in order to allows a display to use twice the number of lines it was designed
|> for.  This allows the OS to promote a 640x200 or 640x256 screen to a 640x400 or
|> 640x512 resolution while maintaining the proper aspect ratio.  The ECS chips
|> could not do this, DblNTSC and DblPAL are impossible on ECS.
|> 
|> >I have also found that the "Promoter" is not hardware at all, but simply a 
|> >function of AmigaDOS 3.0.  
|> 
|> Yeah, like Colombus "found" America.  The promotion mechanism, with respect to
|> ECS non-interlaced screens, relies on this line-doubling hardware.  It also
|> relies on the OS setting up the proper display.
|> 
|> >With 3.0, the OS can be told to intercept calls to open NTSC and PAL screens, 
|> 
|> The OS is what opens screens.  It's hardly "intercepting" calls. 
|> 
|> >   The biggest problem with the A4000 by far is its lack of a Display Enhancer.
|> >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.  
|> 
|> That's a problem with the program, not the A4000.  It's much like a PC program
|> that insists on opening a display in Hercules or EGA mode.  My recommendation
|> is that you throw such programs out (well, not you Marc, since you don't have
|> an A4000).
|> 
|> >The "Promotion" feature of the OS only works for a tiny few, well-written 
|> >Amiga programs, and no games.  
|> 
|> Actually, it works for quite a bit of stuff.  Of course, never having owned
|> such a machine or any recent software, you won't know anything about this.  It
|> even handles some games properly.  In fact, all the games that were written
|> to the OS Amiga specifications.  It's much like the set of Mac games that run
|> on the Quadra.
|> 
|> >This means that a user of an A4000 will have to put up with a flickering 
|> >display in programs such as PageStream, 
|> 
|> PageStream works great.  Open it on Workbench, version 2.2 even knows about the 
|> 8-bit palette if you have one, and it works fine in Moniterm (1024x800) or 
|> SUPER72 overscanned (890x620) resolutions.
|>  
|> >Some people might want to simply abandon the A4000 altogether, purchase an
|> >A3000 instead, and upgrade it with a third-party video card as soon as DIG
|> >becomes available for the Amiga.  
|> 
|> Other people might want to stick with their A500 and just badmouth stuff they're
|> too cheap to buy or too ignorant to understand.  Naaa, couldn't happen...
|> 
|> -- 
|> Dave Haynie Commodore-Amiga (Cool Advanced High-End Systems You Can't See Yet)
|>  "The Crew That Never Rests"  {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh   BIX: hazy
|>               "I got a pocket full of kryptonite" -Spin Doctors

    Well, another Marc Barret collection....  I think Marc Barret Blew up with this
one *BIG TIME*!  Let's see, ATARI Lynx uses Amiga chipset, Notepad 2.0 is really bad,
AmigaWorld lies about Amiga Links, the Alice chip in the A4000 can support more than
2 megs of chip ram, the A4000 was designed out of the A3000 architecture, and now this.

    I guess that Marc Barret could be an excellent congress-man, judging by the amount
of lies.  He even sticks to them for a while.

- Raist