Mike Raiford wrote:
> 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 


It was only 91 or 92 and I had some card with an Oak chip that could do 
24bit SVGA up to 1024x768.  It didn't actually have enough memory for 
that, so you *had* to go with a lower bit depth at that resolution, but 
still :)

And it had all those fancy bit-blitting modes, as well.  I read through 
the specs once, and was astounded at all the things they thought to add in.

Of course, my Sound Blaster was the one that had two OPL chips for 
better synthesis.

And my CPU was a measly little 486sx... When I finally upgraded to an 
FPU, I was astounded to see POV-Ray trace the RSOCP with double digit PPS :)

Anyway, I think the only real problem with performance in PCs is the 
non-standardization.  Every Amiga XXX had the exact same performance 
characteristics.  Every PC was different, and had different bottlenecks. 
  As a result, some programs would run well on one PC and not another, 
and other programs would be the exact opposite.  Just like today ;)

...Chambers

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