Well, PC 2D hardware isn't as featureful, but that's because most of those features simply aren't necessary for good 2D graphics today. With CPU and bus speeds so fast, there's no need for a Copper. I assume the hardware blitters in today's graphics cards are way more advanced--especially when you can blit 24 bit graphics etc. Also, there's no need for hardware sprites anymore. As far as AAA goes, I never understood why it was never released. I remember reading at the time that Commodore actually lost the designs to the ECS/OCS chipset and AGA was the result. I dunno. My all time favorite Commodore blunder has to be when the Fat Buster (I think?) chip was found to be faulty like 3 years after it was released in the A3000. Nobody knew because nobody actually released a 32-bit Zorro III card until the A4000 came out in '92. And that's when the flaw was discovered. Ah the memories. I kinda miss my A4000/030.
"strict control of hardware" (I assume you mean integrated sound and graphics hardware in the system spec) sort of hurt Amiga in the long run.
Commodore was notoriously slow in developing their future chipsets. They held us over with minor enhancements such as the ECS chipset while the PC were gearing up with increasingly more powerful plug-in graphics adapters.
For the Amiga, there was really no choice--you had to wait for Commodore's latest offering. And when they did come out with a new chipset, you couldn't just upgrade. You needed a new machine.
Sure, you had cards like the OpalVision, etc. but since the regular chipset was included in the system spec, everyone wrote directly to the hardware and bypassed the OS. So your brand spankin' new card was useless except for the included applications and maybe some rare OS-friendly software.
Sure, the PC had a bazillion different graphics cards and such, but this allowed the PC to evolve while we had to wait for a single company to provide the new graphics solutions.
The fact is, the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, it took until about 1993 for the PC to catch up to what was essentially 1984 technology.
That year, Commodore introduced their new 'revolution' in graphics--the AGA chipset. What a joke--it was almost unchanged from ECS.
I'm in a digital video camera frenzy right now, having scoured the net to find the 'perfect' digital video camcorder. When I first saw the Discam at Circuit City I almost went into cardiac arrest. It was so cool! However, from what I gather, the resolution of the video is lower than most miniDV camcorders, and there's no FireWire port. Sure, it has ethernet and a USB connector (I think), but FireWire is really convinient. I won't buy any digital camcorder without a 1394 link. Also, the new high-density mini-discs are like $15 a pop. It has awesome in-camera editing features, but these are almost useless to me since I'd rather edit on my computer. What I want is a high-density mini disc (MD View) drive for my computer. They can store way more data than Zip disks (640 MB), and are much more convinient to lug around. Also the MD View discs would be great as a PDA storage solution. It could be Sony's MicroDrive. But Sony is trying to get the world to use over-priced Memory Sticks at the moment.
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Well, PC 2D hardware isn't as featureful, but that's because most of those features simply aren't necessary for good 2D graphics today. With CPU and bus speeds so fast, there's no need for a Copper. I assume the hardware blitters in today's graphics cards are way more advanced--especially when you can blit 24 bit graphics etc. Also, there's no need for hardware sprites anymore. As far as AAA goes, I never understood why it was never released. I remember reading at the time that Commodore actually lost the designs to the ECS/OCS chipset and AGA was the result. I dunno. My all time favorite Commodore blunder has to be when the Fat Buster (I think?) chip was found to be faulty like 3 years after it was released in the A3000. Nobody knew because nobody actually released a 32-bit Zorro III card until the A4000 came out in '92. And that's when the flaw was discovered. Ah the memories. I kinda miss my A4000/030.
"strict control of hardware" (I assume you mean integrated sound and graphics hardware in the system spec) sort of hurt Amiga in the long run.
Commodore was notoriously slow in developing their future chipsets. They held us over with minor enhancements such as the ECS chipset while the PC were gearing up with increasingly more powerful plug-in graphics adapters.
For the Amiga, there was really no choice--you had to wait for Commodore's latest offering. And when they did come out with a new chipset, you couldn't just upgrade. You needed a new machine.
Sure, you had cards like the OpalVision, etc. but since the regular chipset was included in the system spec, everyone wrote directly to the hardware and bypassed the OS. So your brand spankin' new card was useless except for the included applications and maybe some rare OS-friendly software.
Sure, the PC had a bazillion different graphics cards and such, but this allowed the PC to evolve while we had to wait for a single company to provide the new graphics solutions.
The fact is, the Amiga was so far ahead of its time, it took until about 1993 for the PC to catch up to what was essentially 1984 technology.
That year, Commodore introduced their new 'revolution' in graphics--the AGA chipset. What a joke--it was almost unchanged from ECS.
I'm in a digital video camera frenzy right now, having scoured the net to find the 'perfect' digital video camcorder. When I first saw the Discam at Circuit City I almost went into cardiac arrest. It was so cool! However, from what I gather, the resolution of the video is lower than most miniDV camcorders, and there's no FireWire port. Sure, it has ethernet and a USB connector (I think), but FireWire is really convinient. I won't buy any digital camcorder without a 1394 link. Also, the new high-density mini-discs are like $15 a pop. It has awesome in-camera editing features, but these are almost useless to me since I'd rather edit on my computer. What I want is a high-density mini disc (MD View) drive for my computer. They can store way more data than Zip disks (640 MB), and are much more convinient to lug around. Also the MD View discs would be great as a PDA storage solution. It could be Sony's MicroDrive. But Sony is trying to get the world to use over-priced Memory Sticks at the moment.