Slashdot Mirror
Domain: amiga-hardware.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to amiga-hardware.com.
Comments · 18
-
Re:68xxxx CPU?
No, Commodore didn't (and most of their Amigas were infuriatingly low-specced), but there were expansion boards both with 680x0 and PPC CPUs. Here's one for the Amiga 1200: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=154
-
Re:Never been a problem...
6 seconds? Bah! Had you not heard of BattDisk? That would cut your time in half!
I think Dean (of DKB) has a
-
Re:Why wireless?
The lack of brackets on the number pad always confused me, as I came from an Amiga beforehand.
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/download_photos/a500_2_big.jpg (where's the apostrope key? I had this model, it must have had an apostrophe key!)
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/download_photos/a4000tkeyboard_big.jpg -
Re:Why wireless?
The lack of brackets on the number pad always confused me, as I came from an Amiga beforehand.
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/download_photos/a500_2_big.jpg (where's the apostrope key? I had this model, it must have had an apostrophe key!)
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/download_photos/a4000tkeyboard_big.jpg -
Re:Games
Your Amiga also looked great because it was connected to a monitor while the consoles of those days were limited by the TV display technology of the time
-
I claim prior-art on countermeasure!
Lemme see, "evil wavelengths" can be blocked by dichroic or peril-sensitive sunglasses...
And any disorientation and nausea caused by the flash pattern can be stopped with These Amiga X-Specs You'd just need to synchronize the LCD blanking with the "evil" patten of flashes.
Or... you could just get the bad guys to wear the X-Specs and then attack them with a nauseating 200 inch LCD projection TV image of frogger '87 or maybe the 3D version of Michael Jackson's super-bowl 27 half-time show
-
Re:quick summary
The inability to upgrade the graphics (due to the video memory and bus timings that had to fit with NTSC timings) was one of the reasons for people perceiving the Amiga as a niche machine (games and video) back then and had no little influence in its ultimate demise.
I see this a lot and I think it's a common misconception. Very early, stuff was not to expandable.
Integrated hardware was common during that era. It was cheaper and made the system tight and fast. All those chips were engineered to prevent bottle-necks. Even still, the Amiga was more modular then a lot of its counterparts (Macintosh and Atari I'm looking at you)
Further, had the chipset not been set to run on NTSC (or PAL) timings, a huge portion of the Amiga application would have never existed.
Later, you had plenty of options, much like the PC market. Maybe no one knew that, because everyone bought a cheap A500, but that's the fault of marketing.. I'll mention that latter.
The big box Amigas were highly expandable, featuring 16/32 bit ZORRO-II, III and ISA slots. You had options for putting graphics expansions into a dedicated video slot also. Later, you could expand the video via the Zorro slots, but a problem was developing retargateble graphics drivers. This was addressed and you saw all kinds of 16 and 24 bit RTG graphics cards. People preferred keeping with the chipset timings, mostly, because it was totally cool to have it work with very expensive television equipment, but there were certainly options for other applications. By the time VGA rolled around, you had all kinds of options.
If you read some about David Haynie (The designer of the Amiga 3000) you'd know that the developers and hardware engineers were all very smart and in tune with the industry. In fact, they embraced the PCI bus for the next generation Amigas. Of course Commodore did not often listen to its Engineers and funding for R&D was pitiful in the later years.
The Amiga's demise was thanks to the greedy morons that ran Commodore. The technology was still expandable and viable even later in its life. Read this sometime. No architectural or software limitation led directly to its end. -
Re:huh?
Werent the first co-processors FPUs. Arent they now integrated into the CPU?
The Intel 8086 had the Intel 8087
A whole collection of Intel FPU's is at Intel FPU's
TI's TMS34020 (a programmable 2D rasterisation chip), had the TMS34082 coprocessor (capable of vector/matrix operations)
(Some pictures here. Up to four coprocessors could be used.
Now, both of these form the basis of a current day CPU and GPU (vertex/geometry/pixel shader units). -
Re:Click click clickAll true oldschool geeks use a Northgate Omnikey Ultra. Specifically, one connected to their Amiga. Although you could use it with a PEECEE, if you had to.
Awesome keyboard, totally indestructible. Quite maintainable, too, and great keyfeel and audible feedback. Like the vaunted Model M above, except compatible (with the flip of a DIP switch) with the Amiga, a huge selling point for me back in 1990.
-
Re:How about a more scalable solution?If you're referring to the Emplant board, then it wasn't exactly as you describe. Emplant was a combination hardware/software emulation system that provided Macintosh and i586 emulation (though the latter came out MUCH later and not to much fanfare, from what I remember).
The idea of the package was that you could emulate any computer (and multiple ones at the same time, from some of the hype) and typically faster than the equivalent machine of the day. Looking at the software, it was equivalent to Shapeshifter (aka SheepShaver, aka Basilisk II), which meant that it used the native CPU and took over the system ROM functions and replaced them with native ones. Very good performance. For the i586 module, from what I remember, it was a pure software emulation.
What about the hardware? It appeared that the hardware was simply responsible for holding the actual ROM chips of the Macintosh being emulated, an optional no-frills SCSI chip, some Mac serial ports and a few other sockets for random things (an audio digitizer, from the site linked, though apparently never implemented). Basically it was a hardware dongle for a pure software emulation solution, with the ability to hook up to an AppleTalk network.
If there WAS such a board, I never heard of it. I was a very active member of comp.sys.amiga.emulation back through most of the 90's, and if it did exist, it was probably mentioned on that newsgroup. Maybe I just forgot over time.
-
Re:A play on history
Which is how the old (1986) Newtek (pre video Toaster) Digiview Digitizer for the Amiga computer worked. You had one monochrome camera and attached a filter wheel to it. The filter wheel had red, green and blue filters. You took three pics and the software combined them into a color image.
And yes kids that's how difficult it was to digitize porno mags back in the '80s. -
Re:Can it be reused ?
There actually was a time base corrector for the amiga called the Kitchen Sync. Heh.
-
Re:Discreet Toaster
was totally linear video (meaning you had to have a source deck and a record deck) it couldn't even capture video clips.
You are correct, but only partially. Yes, the Video Toaster was for linear video editing only. That is until you added the Video Toaster Flyer to your Amiga rig, which would allow you to do non-linear video editing and capture video on up to 21 SCSI disks. -
Re:Bullshit
In colour display, the Amiga beat any PC "standard" in colour depth and resolution. Commodore also had the A2410 card.
-
You lie!That's just a PlayStation2 hooked up to an SGI monitor with an Amiga CDTV keyboard.
Why you gotta lie to make friends?
-
Re:Ive seen this before...
About 6 years ago there was something similar for the Amiga.
Here's a few links:
http://www.pwr.wroc.pl/AMIGA/AR/ar410_Sections/rev iew5.html
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/vbs.html
http://www.aurora1.demon.co.uk/gadgets/vbs.html">h ttp://www.aurora1.demon.co.uk/gadgets/vbs.html (Nasty backdrop!) -
Back to co-processors and 32Bit multitasking...
the very first (though, only briefly in the marketplace) 32 Bit Game Console: the Amiga CD32 of 1993.
It had (as did ALL Amigas) a swag of co-processors, and pre-emptive multitasking.
A Mpeg1 cartridge allowed it to play VideoCD (remember that?)
Three different add-ons converted it to a full 32Bit 68k computer that had FIVE different Video-out connectors.
. -
This technique was used on DigiView for the Amiga
Some people might find it interesting that in the early days of computer imaging, Newtek actually developed a product called DigiView to be used on Commodore Amiga computers which used a standard black and white camera to produce full-color images. They used the same trick as here: 3 color filters (red, gree, blue) which the digitizing program direct you to place in front of the camera, was used to digitize the image 3 times, and then combined to form the full-color image.
Nice hack which thanks to this post I found out has a 100-year history!!!
