Invisible wrote:

> With enough preprocessing, an AGA Amiga can basically display 24-bit 
> graphics. It just has to be encoded cleaverly. Recall that at this point 
> in history, PCs were still lumbering around with EGA or maybe, if you're 
> lucky, VGA. Ooo, 16 colours. Wow. :-P

What? Back in 1990 I had a PC with a VGA and it could display 256 (out 
of 262,144) colors at 320x200. It was a Paradise card, so it could 
actually do 256 at 640x480, 16 at 800x600. Of course, sound was 
non-existent on the PC platform. I eventually had an Adlib card, which 
used the Yamaha OPL synthesis. I'm pretty sure I had this in 1991. 
Somewhere in the early to mid 1990's I discovered the demo scene, which 
did some pretty amazing things. There was a tracker called ScreamTracker 
3, which could mix 16 channels at once (It was all done in CPU, of 
course.But, you had to have the SoundBlaster, which allowed digital 
sound) There was a player around that actually tricked the AdLib into 
playing actual sampled sound. It was amazing. Of course, with a few 
resistors, you could have something that would natively play sound out 
of the parallel port.

> Oh how we laughed at those silly little PCs with their lame-ass Windows 
> 3.11 that struggled to open and close windows when we had a true 
> premptive multitasking OS with a lightning-fast GUI and hardware with 
> high-quality digital audio and video.
> 

I'll agree, Windows 3.x sucked. :)

> (Bearing in mind, my first ray-traced scene - a mesh torus with a 
> procedural wood texture and one light source - took well over 2 *hours* 
> to render at 320x200 pixels. What can I say? No FPU...)

POV-Ray was why I sought to by a math-coprocessor. Remarkable speed up 
of that app. ;)

> 
> - Sophisticated image processing software such as The GIMP can be 
> obtained *for free*!
> 

Yep. I like GIMP. It makes a passable substitute for Photoshop when I'm 
not at home.

> In fact, it seems that only high-end, professional audio and video tools 
> actually cost money any more. (I'm thinking... Cubase, Cakewalk, 
> Photoshop, Renderman, and so forth.)

If you've ever really used Photoshop, some things that are trivial to do 
in that program all the sudden become very difficult in other programs. 
Remember that video you posted on the making of that webcomic. That was 
PS. I've taken old faded pictures (some with missing pieces, where the 
emulsion was scratched or torn away) and brought them back to their 
original color, replaced the missing pieces, and got rid of the texture. 
  It would have taken me days to do that with GIMP. It only took a few 
hours in PS. Not only that, but the sometimes drastic color correction 
was performed without much degradation, due to the fact that I can 
import and edit in RGB16 instead of RGB8. There are advantages to the 
expensive packages ;)

> Today, anybody with sufficient technical bent can easily sit down with a 
> computer and cut CDs of their music, or burn DVDs of their graphics and 
> animations. It's not even expensive any more.

Heck. You can do this for free, too ;)

> We are truly living in the future, my friends...
> 

Where's my flying car? XD

Post a reply to this message