scott wrote:

> Looking on Wikipedia, the Amiga A600 was introduced in March 1992.
> 
> In September 1991, Acorn launched their A5000 that had a processor with 
> 14x more MIPS, up to 256 colours on screen at once at 800x600 with no 
> special trickery, 8 independent sound channels that could be assigned to 
> any stereo location, 8 bit logarithmic DACs that sounded like 12 bit 
> (apparently) and a high-density floppy drive as standard (1.6MB).

The Amiga 1200 offers up to 256 colours at once, no tricks. It was 
released in Oct 1992.

(The Amiga also offers even more colours if you use special tricks, 
ranging from the simple ones that impose very few limitations, to 
complex ones that are only really useful "for show".)

The resolution doesn't really compare, but the Amiga was targetted at 
normal TVs. The Amiga's 640x480 is quite near to modern DVD's 720x564.

> There again, it was twice the price of the A600...

Heh. Yeah. ;-)

And I'm sure if you pay even more money, you can get better specs. 
Predator was released years earlier and featured some impressive 
computer graphics; that computer had to come form somewhere. But 
certainly you wouldn't find one in somebody's *house*!

Thing is, up until this point, computer graphics had always been blocky 
things made out of a dozen flat colours. Computer graphics *looked* like 
computer graphics. Computer sound *sounded* like computer sound. And 
then suddenly there was this amazing machine that seemed to produce 
pictures and sound that were drastically closer to reality... it was a 
very exciting time!

These days, nobody really thinks about it much. Heh, the digital 
revolution isn't "here", it's "happened". Nobody even talks about it any 
more. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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