I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain. Eh, that rings a bell; and I don't suppose it really matters. It'd be trivial to generate the waveforms manually, store them in a small amount of memory and point the sound chip towards them.
things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right) That's an improvement, but hardly Amiga-beating.
Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course. That's Atari's fault; on its launch (1989?), the STe was briefly sold in place of the STFM at the same price. Whether it was originally intended that it would replace the STFM or they just ran short of the latter, I don't know. But they then sold the STFM at its old price again, and charged more for the STe. It wasn't until mid-1991 that the STe properly replaced the STFM in the line-up, and the ST market was already seriously declining by then. In the meantime, people like me had bought the STFM because it was cheaper; and if we'd had more money, most of us would have bought Amigas, not ST-Es. Actually, I sold my STFM after just one year and got an Amiga instead.
If the STe had directly replaced (same price) the STFM when it came out, there would have been enough sold to make selling enhanced software worthwhile. It had some "nice" improvements, but nothing radical, the kind you'd expect as *standard* from a company that wanted to keep its market share.
And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Yeah; the Falcon came out around the same time as the A1200. I was considering replacing my A500, and although the Falcon had some rather impressive sounding specs for the price (better than the A1200), I didn't even consider it; it was clear that it was going to fail.
Why? Atari were crap and couldn't sell ****. Plus, it was essentially a next generation ST. The ST had already lost its position to the Amiga when that machine came down in price. And by this stage, the Amiga itself was starting to seriously lose ground to cheap PC clones. It would've taken a miracle for the Falcon to be a success in the face of this, and it just wasn't going to happen.
Although examples of recent films were given, the MGM name (and its back catalogue) is most strongly associated with films made during its heyday, which ended around the late 1950s. (The company was a pale shadow of its former self from the 1960s onwards).
Because of this, MGM is particularly associated with.... musicals! If the "Apple is teh ghey" trolls were actually smart, they'd have connected the dots and pointed out that Apple users would just *love* being able to watch The Wizard of Oz on their Apple TVs.
Then again, film rights are one of those things that change hands a lot, so someone else probably has the rights to those films. Cue lots of Apple fans short-circuiting their iPods with tears as they realise they won't be getting Judy Garland after all...
Most of the colorizing was a hack job so it's hard to say if the original prints or negatives of a lot of the films were preserved. Colorizing during the 1980s (which is when I believe it started en masse, and when Turner did it) would still have been a far from trivial task. I expect that they would not have done it on obscure films, and that they certainly would *not* have destroyed the original prints/negatives of well-known films.
AFAIK, also digital colorisation that appeared during the 1980s was video based, and this assumes that they would have discarded high-quality film prints in favour of far lower quality video copies. Even then I assume they would have realised that this was stupid.
..if Commodore hadn't stolen the Amiga from them. Commodore didn't steal the Amiga from Atari, they simply out-manoeuvered them. Jack Tramiel (who had left C= and purchased Atari's computer division by this time) thought he had the Amiga company by the balls and could push them into surrendering the company/rights to him; he was wrong and he didn't succeed. But I'm sure it wasn't for wont of effort.
Can't say I give a toss; it went to court, and he lost. Call it bullying or not, but Tramiel was/is the type of guy who would use any means, fair or foul to get what he wanted. Synapse, a developer of countless classic Atari games went bankrupt because they signed a contract with Atari to develop some software, when Atari was owned by Warner. When Tramiel took over, he acted as if they contract was no longer binding upon him (with no basis AFAIK), paid Synapse nothing and rightly assumed that Synapse wouldn't be able to afford to take it to court.
As an ex-Atari owner (well, actually, I still own my 800XL and 130XE), who still has some residual loyalty to the badge (if nothing else), I'll still say this... Even if we were to accept that the Amiga was "stolen" from Tramiel's Atari using legally dubious and devious techniques, who gives a toss? He was no better. That's the exact type of thing he did himself all the time; beaten at his own game. It's business, and no-one owes him or Atari any sympathy.
Amiga was a nice computer, but I can't say I ever gave a toss about Commodore either, though.
You're looking from a US-centric perspective. The Amiga did very well in Europe, particularly after the mass-market A500 came out. It only started to fail there in the early 90s, when C='s failure to keep the Amiga's spec up-to-date in the face of competition from PCs on one side and 16-bit consoles on the other proved its undoing. (Long version).
The Amiga also used to be common in TV/3D production, and that only really changed (so I believe) after C= went bankrupt, I assume because relying on a dead platform is bad practice, and also (I again assume) because it made no sense when PCs were becoming more powerful.
ALL of Psygnosis games had the reputation of copy protection vampires: they wouldn't launch from Workbench, wouldn't copy easily (in case your Amiga ate the originals) and they were touchy as hell (couldn't run on A1200s or A500s or visa versa). To be fair, most other Amiga games didn't run from Workbench either, and Psygnosis were far from the only company that had compatibility issues when the A1200 (or even A500 Plus) came out, due to games "hitting the hardware" directly for the performance boost.
I would say that Psygnosis did the classic Lemmings; but then again, maybe not. They just distributed it- it was DMA Design (now Rockstar North) who actually created/wrote it.
The Amiga died in about 1995... the CD32 and A1200 had poor performance compared to the 486 PC. The Amiga was better during the PCs 386, but not the 486, and many people held onto their Amigas until the Pentium. Thing is, the A1200/CD32 were also a lot cheaper than the 486s you describe, and had they been released before the cheaper PCs (above them) and the 16-bit consoles (below) got more of a toehold, they might have done quite well.
The "cheap" PCs were *not* cheap by today's standards; however, they came with a VGA monitor, hard drive and 256-colour VGA graphics. Adding those to a base Amiga would have been pretty expensive (I never had a hard drive for mine); so I guess that was part of the attraction.
I should also have made clear that the Amiga was also hit at the lower end by the rise of the 16-bit consoles. In Europe where the Amiga was popular, the 8-bit NES never did big business (it was outsold in the UK by Sega's Master System!), and the market had remained much more 8/16-bit computer-based.
However, this changed with the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES in the early 90s. The Mega Drive in particular was better at side-scrolling parallax/plane effects, and again, the Amiga was no longer the cool machine that everyone wanted.
I still own two Amigas, but were there really ANY "influential" Amiga games? I mean, games that were unique to the Amiga platform Well, plenty of Amiga games were converted. Does this disqualify them?
I think the marketplace has spoken pretty loudly on this topic: if there HAD been any influential games, Amiga wouldn't have been extinguished. By the same logic, there were no influential C64 games because that machine is also dead... huh?!
The Amiga was extinguished because Commodore did too little to improve its specs in the face of competition from commodity PCs. By the early 1990s, PC prices were falling rapidly, and their specs were vastly improved over the text-and-CGA-if-you're-lucky crudeness of mid-80s PCs (when the Amiga launched).
(Of course, the Amiga was never *that* popular in the US, but here in Europe it did very well during the late-80s/early-90s.)
The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and it's probably fair to say that it was the first true mass-market multimedia computer. 4096 colour graphics in HAM mode? Amazing. Sound? Amazing. Pre-emptive multitasking OS? Beat the living *heck* out of MS-DOS, and even Windows 3.0/3.1's co-operative multitasking wasn't as good (locked up if one application refused to cede control). And that came out five years later(!) Yeah, it was expensive when it first came out, but that's life... remember that all this was back in 1985.
Sadly, Commodore rested on their laurels; the A500 was much cheaper and still cutting edge, and proved very popular. However, until 1990, even the "serious" Amigas were just more expandable versions of the basic 68000/original-chipset design (IIRC some had accelerators slapped in). 1990's high-end A3000 was 68030-based, but very expensive and not radically new technically.
It wasn't until the A4000/A1200 were announced in late 1992 that "true" next generation Amigas came out. Put simply, they were too late; the A1200 was a good machine, and had it come out 18 months earlier at a similar price it might have done well... but by 92/93 the Amiga market had already started to seriously decline. In little over a year, the focus at my school had shifted from exchanging pirated Amiga games to PC games.
I should make clear that Commodore also- apparently- went bankrupt because of some dubious business practices and milking of the company that would have been illegal under US law (by this stage C= was based in the Bahamas). Everyone points at the CD32 as a flop console that put the nail in C='s coffin, but actually it was selling quite well. Nothing exciting, just an A1200 with CD drive and no keyboard, but it was a decent cash-cow in Europe. Unfortunately, everything else just went belly-up; C= weren't even very successful at commodity PC manufacture.
Innovative sound? Sorry, but I got my Amiga in part to play with music and the 8-bit stuff is what eventually kicked me over the PC world Hello? The Amiga came out in 1985; what was there in the PC world that was remotely comparable at the time? I remember seeing an Amiga on TV in 1986 and being absolutely blown away by the quality of the sound. The first FM-synthesis/sample-playing Sound Blasters didn't come out until 1989.
And why do we still care in 2007, 15 years after Amiga's peak? Why do we still care about anything in the past regarding computing? There's a temptation, because the current standard is the PC, to draw the line back that way and see history from a PC-centric perspective. Fact is that the Amiga was a significant machine in its time; it's dead now, and I think it should be left in peace, but if we're discussing history it has an important place.
It was better on the ST- if you system linked an ST to an Amiga with a NULL modem cable the ST and let the CPUs battle, the won due to it's slightly faster CPU speed (8MHz compared to 7.09MHz (PAL)). That may have been true on computationally-intense games, but the Amiga's custom sound and graphics hardware would have more than compensated in most cases due to them taking the load off the CPU. The ST lacked in those departments. In particular it used a variant of the same off-the-shelf sound chip as found in many 8-bit computers; the Amstrad CPC, the later ZX Spectrums (128K models) and even the Oric 1(!).
It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.
We can probably apply similar arguments to the graphics.
Hmm.. I might be misremembrin', but I'm pretty sure that the idea of birds evolving from dinosaurs was commonly accepted much earlier than when Jurassic Park came out. IIRC, I had a book when I was pretty young, at least ten years before Jurassic Park came out (i.e. early 1980s) that described birds as the descendants of dinosaurs.
Cheat or hoax, you can *not* write to normal CDs
on
Can CDs Be Recycled?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
How it worked or whether it was a hoax is anyone's guess. If this was real, then I'm going with what one other user suggested; it wrote updates to the hard disk (or some other reusable medium). I saw software like this for the Amiga. And although it's a useful idea in the context of its time, it's misleading to suggest that this is actually writing to the CD itself.
If that wasn't the case, I'm pretty sure it's a hoax. Why? Because commercial CDs aren't like CD-R/RW; the latter have crystalline layers that respond to heating changes from the laser to form reflective/non-reflective areas, the former are actually *stamped* with 3D pits and lands.
Both reflect/deflect the reading laser beam in the same way (in most players), so the discs can be read in the same machines. However, there's no way you're going to *change* the contents of a stamped CD in anything like the same manner as you would with a CD-R. It's about as likely as a floppy disk drive's magnetic head being able to rewrite the grooves of a 7" vinyl single.
In fact, you'd actually have to (somehow) melt or reconfigure the plastic of the CD itself, and since it was never designed for this, I've no idea how you'd do it accurately. It would likely be a horrifically expensive (and pointless) lab curiosity at best, and no-one in their right mind would try to market it in the face of CD-R.
Read the Financial Times article you stupid son of a bitch, users joining in this program are compensated by Sony. Please point out exactly where the article states that Sony will "agree to eat the cost and replace my machine if it fails. not fix, REPLACE" it, as the original poster specifically asked.
Oh.... they didn't? Looks like he wasn't the one who was a "stupid son of a bitch" around here then.
$30k worth of games? $30k "worth" (at RRP) of cracked games. Which actually cost him his monthly broadband subscription and a couple of stacks of own-brand CDs from Computer World, or whatever....
OTOH, he still probably sat on his Cheeto-fattened backside for days on end, trying to get them to download and install.
Its not our fault sheep can't say no. all they do is stand around baa'ing seductively in our fields There's one Slashdotter whose signature used to be
"If God didn't want us fucking livestock, why did he make them so sexy?"
Possibly the best "OMG I can't believe you put that in your sig" so far... unfortunately, they changed it. No, it wasn't mine:-O
In fact, I tried to get Nortel to implement something similar on their Meridian phone systems back in the early 90's. Of course, I was blown off. That sounds like quite a novel bonus scheme. Was the girl cute, or did they just save money by getting your boss to do it?
It's not enough that we have jobs where we sit down all of the time, now we have a computer that's also a deep-fryer. If they sell one of these computers in Scotland, I guarantee you some ned will try to eat the deep-fried motherboard; it's not like there's anything we *won't* deep fry here...
Can't he just try to suspend them for a few days or make them clean the school toilets with tooth brushes? If I were him, I'd make them to that. Albeit with their own toothbrushes, and then make sure that they had to use them to brush their teeth afterwards, and that everyone knew about it. Ha ha:-)
Bush Sr. was probably the least interventionist president we've had in twenty years The laughable thing is that at the start of Bush Jr's presidency, there was a lot of talk about it being ultra-isolationalist. No, seriously...
GoToGoatse - The extension takes you to that famous page everytime you click a link. That's not a website, that's just a side-effect of Goatse itself. You see, the horrendous, erm... black hole at the heart of Goatse is in fact an actual black hole at the heart of the web. Get too close to it and you'll be sucked beyond its event horizon; once this happens, there is no escape.
Worse still, many of you will have passed this point without realising it. I don't want to dwell on your fate, but I've heard that encountering the Goatse singularity is likely to be very unpleasant.
You're possibly right; I'd forgotten about Flash. That having been said, I'll still eat my underpants if the online version of Photoshop is much more than PhotoDeluxe: The Next Generation.
Jane Randomdesignercunt and Joe Windoseexpeelamer Those wild and wacky European surnames....;-)
Ha ha... knew someone would mention that as soon as I heard mention of PS. I'm willing to bet that the online "Photoshop" will be extremely limited and wizard-based; at best it will use the core PS engine. I'm not saying it'll be bad, but it certainly won't compete with the full PS, nor even Elements; in fact, I doubt it'll even be as sophisticated as the now-defunct Photo Deluxe (a nice, but very limited PS-based product).
I used to have a no-brand hard disk based player that would cause a horrible screeching noise in the earphones whenever the disk spun up. The company returned this guy's iPod with the following message: "Not faulty. Supposed 'horrible screeching noise' turned out to be My Chemical Romance's latest single."
I think we can assume that Apple are using H264 or one of the other MPEG-4 codecs instead of the far less efficient MPEG-2 that DVDs use. Therefore, it's more than reasonable to assume that the downloads you describe would be at least comparable with standard DVDs.
Slashdot Mirror
If the STe had directly replaced (same price) the STFM when it came out, there would have been enough sold to make selling enhanced software worthwhile. It had some "nice" improvements, but nothing radical, the kind you'd expect as *standard* from a company that wanted to keep its market share. And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Yeah; the Falcon came out around the same time as the A1200. I was considering replacing my A500, and although the Falcon had some rather impressive sounding specs for the price (better than the A1200), I didn't even consider it; it was clear that it was going to fail.
Why? Atari were crap and couldn't sell ****. Plus, it was essentially a next generation ST. The ST had already lost its position to the Amiga when that machine came down in price. And by this stage, the Amiga itself was starting to seriously lose ground to cheap PC clones. It would've taken a miracle for the Falcon to be a success in the face of this, and it just wasn't going to happen.
Although examples of recent films were given, the MGM name (and its back catalogue) is most strongly associated with films made during its heyday, which ended around the late 1950s. (The company was a pale shadow of its former self from the 1960s onwards).
Because of this, MGM is particularly associated with.... musicals! If the "Apple is teh ghey" trolls were actually smart, they'd have connected the dots and pointed out that Apple users would just *love* being able to watch The Wizard of Oz on their Apple TVs.
Then again, film rights are one of those things that change hands a lot, so someone else probably has the rights to those films. Cue lots of Apple fans short-circuiting their iPods with tears as they realise they won't be getting Judy Garland after all...
AFAIK, also digital colorisation that appeared during the 1980s was video based, and this assumes that they would have discarded high-quality film prints in favour of far lower quality video copies. Even then I assume they would have realised that this was stupid.
..if Commodore hadn't stolen the Amiga from them. Commodore didn't steal the Amiga from Atari, they simply out-manoeuvered them. Jack Tramiel (who had left C= and purchased Atari's computer division by this time) thought he had the Amiga company by the balls and could push them into surrendering the company/rights to him; he was wrong and he didn't succeed. But I'm sure it wasn't for wont of effort.Can't say I give a toss; it went to court, and he lost. Call it bullying or not, but Tramiel was/is the type of guy who would use any means, fair or foul to get what he wanted. Synapse, a developer of countless classic Atari games went bankrupt because they signed a contract with Atari to develop some software, when Atari was owned by Warner. When Tramiel took over, he acted as if they contract was no longer binding upon him (with no basis AFAIK), paid Synapse nothing and rightly assumed that Synapse wouldn't be able to afford to take it to court.
As an ex-Atari owner (well, actually, I still own my 800XL and 130XE), who still has some residual loyalty to the badge (if nothing else), I'll still say this... Even if we were to accept that the Amiga was "stolen" from Tramiel's Atari using legally dubious and devious techniques, who gives a toss? He was no better. That's the exact type of thing he did himself all the time; beaten at his own game. It's business, and no-one owes him or Atari any sympathy.
Amiga was a nice computer, but I can't say I ever gave a toss about Commodore either, though.
You're looking from a US-centric perspective. The Amiga did very well in Europe, particularly after the mass-market A500 came out. It only started to fail there in the early 90s, when C='s failure to keep the Amiga's spec up-to-date in the face of competition from PCs on one side and 16-bit consoles on the other proved its undoing. (Long version).
The Amiga also used to be common in TV/3D production, and that only really changed (so I believe) after C= went bankrupt, I assume because relying on a dead platform is bad practice, and also (I again assume) because it made no sense when PCs were becoming more powerful.
I would say that Psygnosis did the classic Lemmings; but then again, maybe not. They just distributed it- it was DMA Design (now Rockstar North) who actually created/wrote it.
The "cheap" PCs were *not* cheap by today's standards; however, they came with a VGA monitor, hard drive and 256-colour VGA graphics. Adding those to a base Amiga would have been pretty expensive (I never had a hard drive for mine); so I guess that was part of the attraction.
I should also have made clear that the Amiga was also hit at the lower end by the rise of the 16-bit consoles. In Europe where the Amiga was popular, the 8-bit NES never did big business (it was outsold in the UK by Sega's Master System!), and the market had remained much more 8/16-bit computer-based.
However, this changed with the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES in the early 90s. The Mega Drive in particular was better at side-scrolling parallax/plane effects, and again, the Amiga was no longer the cool machine that everyone wanted.
The Amiga was extinguished because Commodore did too little to improve its specs in the face of competition from commodity PCs. By the early 1990s, PC prices were falling rapidly, and their specs were vastly improved over the text-and-CGA-if-you're-lucky crudeness of mid-80s PCs (when the Amiga launched).
(Of course, the Amiga was never *that* popular in the US, but here in Europe it did very well during the late-80s/early-90s.)
The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and it's probably fair to say that it was the first true mass-market multimedia computer. 4096 colour graphics in HAM mode? Amazing. Sound? Amazing. Pre-emptive multitasking OS? Beat the living *heck* out of MS-DOS, and even Windows 3.0/3.1's co-operative multitasking wasn't as good (locked up if one application refused to cede control). And that came out five years later(!) Yeah, it was expensive when it first came out, but that's life... remember that all this was back in 1985.
Sadly, Commodore rested on their laurels; the A500 was much cheaper and still cutting edge, and proved very popular. However, until 1990, even the "serious" Amigas were just more expandable versions of the basic 68000/original-chipset design (IIRC some had accelerators slapped in). 1990's high-end A3000 was 68030-based, but very expensive and not radically new technically.
It wasn't until the A4000/A1200 were announced in late 1992 that "true" next generation Amigas came out. Put simply, they were too late; the A1200 was a good machine, and had it come out 18 months earlier at a similar price it might have done well... but by 92/93 the Amiga market had already started to seriously decline. In little over a year, the focus at my school had shifted from exchanging pirated Amiga games to PC games.
I should make clear that Commodore also- apparently- went bankrupt because of some dubious business practices and milking of the company that would have been illegal under US law (by this stage C= was based in the Bahamas). Everyone points at the CD32 as a flop console that put the nail in C='s coffin, but actually it was selling quite well. Nothing exciting, just an A1200 with CD drive and no keyboard, but it was a decent cash-cow in Europe. Unfortunately, everything else just went belly-up; C= weren't even very successful at commodity PC manufacture. Innovative sound? Sorry, but I got my Amiga in part to play with music and the 8-bit stuff is what eventually kicked me over the PC world Hello? The Amiga came out in 1985; what was there in the PC world that was remotely comparable at the time? I remember seeing an Amiga on TV in 1986 and being absolutely blown away by the quality of the sound. The first FM-synthesis/sample-playing Sound Blasters didn't come out until 1989. And why do we still care in 2007, 15 years after Amiga's peak? Why do we still care about anything in the past regarding computing? There's a temptation, because the current standard is the PC, to draw the line back that way and see history from a PC-centric perspective. Fact is that the Amiga was a significant machine in its time; it's dead now, and I think it should be left in peace, but if we're discussing history it has an important place.
It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.
We can probably apply similar arguments to the graphics.
If that wasn't the case, I'm pretty sure it's a hoax. Why? Because commercial CDs aren't like CD-R/RW; the latter have crystalline layers that respond to heating changes from the laser to form reflective/non-reflective areas, the former are actually *stamped* with 3D pits and lands.
Both reflect/deflect the reading laser beam in the same way (in most players), so the discs can be read in the same machines. However, there's no way you're going to *change* the contents of a stamped CD in anything like the same manner as you would with a CD-R. It's about as likely as a floppy disk drive's magnetic head being able to rewrite the grooves of a 7" vinyl single.
In fact, you'd actually have to (somehow) melt or reconfigure the plastic of the CD itself, and since it was never designed for this, I've no idea how you'd do it accurately. It would likely be a horrifically expensive (and pointless) lab curiosity at best, and no-one in their right mind would try to market it in the face of CD-R.
Hoax, hoax, hoaxy hoax....
Oh.... they didn't? Looks like he wasn't the one who was a "stupid son of a bitch" around here then.
OTOH, he still probably sat on his Cheeto-fattened backside for days on end, trying to get them to download and install.
"If God didn't want us fucking livestock, why did he make them so sexy?"
Possibly the best "OMG I can't believe you put that in your sig" so far... unfortunately, they changed it. No, it wasn't mine
Are all these shortages the reason I keep hearing small children in my local supermarket yelling "Mummy, Mummy, I need a wii!"?
Worse still, many of you will have passed this point without realising it. I don't want to dwell on your fate, but I've heard that encountering the Goatse singularity is likely to be very unpleasant.
Ha ha... knew someone would mention that as soon as I heard mention of PS. I'm willing to bet that the online "Photoshop" will be extremely limited and wizard-based; at best it will use the core PS engine. I'm not saying it'll be bad, but it certainly won't compete with the full PS, nor even Elements; in fact, I doubt it'll even be as sophisticated as the now-defunct Photo Deluxe (a nice, but very limited PS-based product).
I think we can assume that Apple are using H264 or one of the other MPEG-4 codecs instead of the far less efficient MPEG-2 that DVDs use. Therefore, it's more than reasonable to assume that the downloads you describe would be at least comparable with standard DVDs.