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OK, so last night my dad set up his old Amiga 1200 (which has been
somewhat modified), and we played some games.
Unfortunately, attempting to play Zyconix resulted in an immediate Guru
Meditation Number. (Who the hell came up with THAT name??)
I spent some time playing a game known only as "Putty". This is actually
the first Amiga game I ever saw, running on my dad's Amiga 600. Try to
imagine my reaction: It's the early 1990s, and I've spent most of my
life playing games on a Commodore 64. And then I come home one day and
find everybody sat round the TV, playing this thing.
For those who don't memorise such details, let me throw in some
technical specifications.
- C64: 16 colours available, up to 16 on-screen at once. (Like old VGA.)
- A600: 4,096 colours available (!!), up to 32 on-screen at once.
- C64: monophonic subtractive synthesis, 3 notes polyphonic.
- A600: stereophonic digital playback, 8 bits/sample, arbitrary sampling
rate (i.e., not just a choice of a few preset rates) up to over 50,000
samples/second. 4 independent channels. Hardware sample looping.
The A600 also boasts lots of tricks and gizmos that can be used to work
around these limitations to give even more impressive results.
In other words, in principle the A600 can produce almost photographic
images, and nearly CD-quality sound. These levels are seldom reached in
a *game* though - it has to fit on a reasonable number of double-density
floppy disks.
(Double-density being the 800 KB disks that came *before* the
high-density "1.44 MB" disks we use today - so it's actually more
limiting than it sounds. And JPEG wouldn't be invented for another
decade or so yet - even if there were a machine powerful enough to
handle it!)
In practice, on a cheap CRT TV with blurry picture and weak sound... it
looked damned-near photographic and sounded very impressive. Certainly
obliterating anything the C64 could muster, by a significant margin.
As some kind of comparison, take a look at the C64 classic "Uridium":
http://www.mobygames.com/game/c64/uridium/screenshots/gameShotId,169121/
Now compare to "Putty":
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/putty/screenshots/gameShotId,33172/
You can see why I was so damned impressed! The hike in graphical quality
is very significant. Check out the Putty logo screen:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/putty/screenshots/gameShotId,33168/
With a tiny amount of blur the dithering and aliasing isn't really
apparent, and it *appears* to be a hyper-snooth image.
Putty is a platform game. Once you get over the fact that it's a
platform game, and how old-fashioned and boring that seems and just PLAY
the game for what it is... it's actually quite interesting. Even today.
Obviously the graphics are rather blurry, and the sound is mildly grainy
in places - but it's not nearly half as bad as you'd expect. It's
actually quite *good* in fact.
The game involves controlling a small sphere of blue putty. It has two
eyes, and when it moves, the underside develops two small lumps like
"feet". It's quite comical to watch. It can also jump, and stretch short
distances. This little guy manages to be surprisingly expressive; he's
only got eyes, but with just his eyes and eyelids he manages to convey a
seemingly wide range of emotions.
Controlling this lump, you must do battle against various foes. There
are small red and white mushrooms with eyes that jump around
rythmically. There are little snails who's shells jiggle up and down as
they saunter along. And so forth. There's an organce carrot with a green
spikey hairdoo who yells "uzi ninty millimeter" in a chipmonk-style
voice and fires bullets at you. And various kinds of birds and bird
chicks flying or waddling around.
Most of these can be killed by "absorbing" them. Press down and the
putty ball plattens itself over the floor. Anything that steps on the
sheet of putty gets absorbed, causing the putty to return to its normal
ball shape.
Certain enemies can also be "punched", which turns them into little pink
babies (together with a rythemic "wah! wah! wah!" sound). If you absorb
these, you get additional points. If you're not quick enough, they
eventually vanish. If you don't quite get there in time, a cat's head
bursts through the platfield (as if it were paper), and a grainy sample
plays: "Too bad, juuuuuust missed em... HAHAHAHAHA!"
[It appears to be a sample of Screwy Squirrel. I saw the cartoon
broadcast about 10 years later while casually watching TV, and he said
that exact line.]
The spatial resolution isn't so hot, but even today the colouring looks
pretty smooth. My dad's composit video lead seems to introduce a lot of
ghosting - maybe it's not shielded right or something. But I'm playing
this game on a *vast* 40-inch LCD panel, and the colours look smooth and
seemless, even if the edges look rather grainy. The putty is a deep
blue. The mushrooms are red and white. The snails are bright green, with
golden brown shells. And so forth.
It all looks very smooth and slick. More to the point, every single
individual character is just *packed* with character. They all have
their own characteristic movement. The whole screen is so full of life,
it's really quite entertaining just to watch.
The sound is pretty neat too. If the putty touches another creature, it
makes a strange "squawking" sound, and it's eyes bulge. However, when
the putty absorbs a creature, you get a combination of a high-pitched
"plink" and a burp. When you complete a level, you hear a bubbling sound
followed by a coocoo clock. It's all quite zaney and strange, but it's
once again full of character. (And a far cry from the bleeps and buzzes
the C64 can manage.)
Eventually I got frustrated with Putty. (Although I did play it for a
rather long time.) My dad's joystick seems to be slightly worn out.
(Hey, when was the last time you heard the word "joystick"? Much less
*used* one...)
I spent some time playing "Cool Spot". But that was just annoyingly
difficult to control.
Another neat game is "Push Over". This involves domino puzzles. You
start a level with a given configuration of dominoes, and you have to
rearrange them in such a way that by pushing a single domino, all the
dominoes fall. Once every last one has toppled, the level exit door
opens. But you've got a time limit, and various dominoes have "special"
features - they're impossible to knock over, they have a delay before
they fall, they continue to roll over and over forever, etc. It's great
fun, and the later levels are *definitely not* a push-over!
But then I cound an old CU Amiga coverdisk, containing the full-version
of the very excellent shareware game "Cybernetix". This is your standard
"you fly around in a space rocket shooting asteriods" type thing - but
done *well*. Watch out for the enemy ships trying to attack you!
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/cybernetix/screenshots/gameShotId,254396/
I most especially like the music too. I think I'm going to have to wheel
my CD recorder round to my dad's house to make some serious recording! I
used to have a tape somewhere, but I've long since lost it, and most
games won't run on my heavily modified Amiga any more. (In particular,
I've got the updated Kickstart ROM.)
While we're on the subject, the Amiga 600 features the Enhanced Chip Set
(ECS), which is a slightly improved version of the Original Chip Set
(OCS) as found in, say, the Amiga 500. However, the Amiga 1200 features
the formidible Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). Let's compare specs:
- ECS: 4,096 colours available (i.e., 4 bits per RGB channel), up to 32
colours on-screen at once using normal indexed bitmaps. (Various special
tricks allow far more, but with restrictions.)
- AGA: 16,777,216 colours available (i.e., 24-bit colour like on all
modern video systems). Up to 256 colours on-screen at once using normal
indexed bitmaps. (Again, lots of special tricks available to exceed this
limit, some of them unsuitable for games programming.)
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
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.
Unfortunately, then the Amiga's hardware stood still for 20 years. While
it was once a shining example of hardware far ahead of its time, it has
long since been left in the dust. I don't really understand how it
happened, but Commodore ended up in all sorts of financial trouble.
Commodore was good it making great hardware, but hopeless at marketing it.
(Having said that, there was one cheeky thing they did. They put a
30-foot poster showing an Amiga CD32 - directly outside Sega's UK
headquarters. The caption read "To be this good will take Sega ages".
The Amiga CD32 is basically an Amiga 1200 with a CD-ROM drive.)
There were persistent rumours of a new chipset dupped "the AAA chipset".
(I forget what that's meant to stand for.) If the rumours are to be
believed, they had "running silicon" for a true 24-bit graphics
subsystem. That is, it could display 16,777,216 colours at once without
trickery. It also had hardware to copy and combine graphics blocks
without CPU intervention, and various other sophistications.
Reputedly the sound hardware got a tweak too. (The sound capabilities of
the OCS, ECS and AGA were all identical.) Details of this were scant though.
Month after month, Amiga magazines [of which there used to be many]
phophesied new hardware hitting the shelves "soon". Ultimately, this
never occurred. It was a very upsetting time for us all.
Then, one by one, all the Amiga magazines shut down. I still remember
the day CU Amiga shut down, and Amiga Format promised that "Future
Publishing is in a different position to CU Amiga, and we can promise
that AF wil never shut down". A year or so later, when AF had become
little more than a thin pamphlet, they finally announced their decision
to shut down.
Looking back through the pages of old issues of AF, it's amazing what
for a device called a "digitiser" which transforms analogue sound into
the digital form that the Amiga can then play back. (Modern sound cards
throw this in for free!)
sound editing package. TechnoSound Turbo even came with a minimal
sequencer! These packages would load and save multiple file formats,
edit sound down to the sample level, program in sample loops, apply very
basic filtering and so forth.
Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D,
Expert 4D Jr, Cinema 4D, et al. Most of these just render polygons with
texturing and light sourcing, but Imagine offers configurable procedural
textures, and Real3D offered sophisticated *ray tracing* and CSG. The
more expensive machines (the ones that *didn't* appear as cover disks)
offered particle systems and inverse kinetics, and so on and so forth.
It sounds old-hat now, but seeing for the very first time a home
computer produce a realistic 3D image out of nothing was a truly
astonishing thing. Sure, Hollywood had been doing it for a while. But a
home computer? A *home* computer?? Wow.
(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...)
Then there were coverdisks and commercial programs for drawing fractals.
Fractuality was famed. I actually got to own this one. I played with it
on my dad's Amiga the other day. It took 30 minutes to laboriously draw
a Mandelbrot image - you could actually watch the individual pixels
appear near the edge of the set, while further out it was quite fast.
The program comes with a complement of demo parameters. Some of them I
couldn't actually see, because the rendering was just so ridiculously
slow. Watching my dad's Amiga struggle to produce this image yesterday,
I realised that it's not even a particularly deep region. Xaos zooms
past it IN REALTIME on my 2.4 GHz Athlon64 X2 at home! How far we have
come...
Then there was Amiga Format's landmark inclusion of several versions of
OctaMED over the years. Originally some Finnish guy (why was it always
Finnish guys?) write the Music EDitor, MED. Then, alone amounst the
"tracker" genre of programs, he added *8 channel mode*, thus creating
OctaMED.
This breakthrough feature essentially uses software upsampling and
mixing to play 8 independent channels of sound even though the Amiga
actually possesses a mere 4 hardware channels. The result brings an 7
MHz Amiga 600 to its knees. (It's quite tame on a 12 MHz Amiga 1200 though.)
The software gradually become a commercial enterprise, and feature after
feature was added. A very early and unique feature was a simple
software/hardware "synthesizer" engine. No other tracker had it. Also
MIDI support, unique amount trackers.
But then, the astonishing OctaMED Sound Studio came out. This completely
tore up the rulebook. Unusuable on anything less than an Amiga 1200,
this allows an *unlimited* number of channels! And each with *arbitrary*
stereo location! And many of the tight restrictions from OctaMED's
8-channel mode were removed. And Amiga Format put this legend of sonic
power on a coverdisk!
In the blink of an eye, suddenly if you had the CPU and the storage
space, you could record chunks of digital sound, edit it, and produce
complex, layered symphonies of sound. And in another astonishing move,
OctaMED Sound Studio allows rendering *to disk*. So if you happened to
real CD* out of your music! Previously this was an unthinkable achievement.
Using more than about 20 channels started to slow the system down quite
a bit (especially if you were really *using* all those channels), but
the possibilities seemed vast. If nothing else, now you could load up
all your old songs and edit the stereo staging to sound less irritating.
Suddenly you felt like a "real" musician!
It all sounds a bit silly today. We tak such things for granted. Look:
- The cheapest, nastiest motherboard you can buy is virtually guaranteed
to have 52-channel super-hyper-mega-ultra surround sound, and will have
analogue and maybe even digital audio *inputs* as well.
- *All* graphics cards can trivially display 24-bit graphics.
Specialised high-speed bitmap copying hardware is unecessary due to the
speed of the other components.
- Sophisticated image processing software such as The GIMP can be
obtained *for free*!
- 3D graphics rendering requires nothing more than a copy of POV-Ray.
- Complex sound editing software such as Audacity is *free*.
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.)
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.
We are truly living in the future, my friends...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Unfortunately, then the Amiga's hardware stood still for 20 years. While
> it was once a shining example of hardware far ahead of its time, it has
> long since been left in the dust. I don't really understand how it
> happened, but Commodore ended up in all sorts of financial trouble.
> Commodore was good it making great hardware, but hopeless at marketing it.
The management at Commodore should take all of the blame for the fall of
Commodore. Developing killer new technology should have been top
priority. Hindsight being 20-20, they should have designed the OS with
the highest possible degree of resource management (IE, not assume that
all graphics would be 8-bit forever), and then opened up the hardware
architecture and allowed clones.
As it was, some of the later CEOs did nothing more than collect their
salaries.
Regards,
John
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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
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> For those who don't memorise such details, let me throw in some technical
> specifications.
>
> - C64: 16 colours available, up to 16 on-screen at once. (Like old VGA.)
>
> - A600: 4,096 colours available (!!), up to 32 on-screen at once.
>
> - C64: monophonic subtractive synthesis, 3 notes polyphonic.
>
> - A600: stereophonic digital playback, 8 bits/sample, arbitrary sampling
> rate (i.e., not just a choice of a few preset rates) up to over 50,000
> samples/second. 4 independent channels. Hardware sample looping.
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).
There again, it was twice the price of the A600...
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Mike Raiford wrote:
> I'll agree, Windows 3.x sucked. :)
I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably
slowly while my little "14 MHz" Amiga 1200 ran rings around them. It
wasn't until I started doing seriously compute-bounded work that I
actually *believed* that the numbers weren't lying. The Amiga just
seemed dramatically faster in every respect.
(On the other hand... You know how Linux is supposed to be "fast"? I
tried running Debian on my Amiga 1200. Waiting for Gnome to start up
is... well let me put it this way. It makes a 486 SX look like greased
lightning. From typing "startx" to having a usable desktop takes about
20 *minutes*!! Not kidding!!)
>> (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. ;)
Oh hell yeah. I can remember adding a 20 MHz FPU to my Amiga and
watching Fractuallity suddenly get an order of magnitude faster. ;-)
"Wow, it's so fast!" I cried.
Watching it yesterday, with FPU and all, there didn't seem to be much
"fast" about it!
>> 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.
I'm sure. (E.g., colour seperations...)
> Remember that video you posted on the making of that webcomic. That was
> PS.
I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
> 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.
I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
> There are advantages to the expensive packages ;)
I won't deny that. ;-)
>> 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 ;)
Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>> We are truly living in the future, my friends...
>
> Where's my flying car? XD
Yeah, I'm still wondering about that...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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John VanSickle wrote:
> The management at Commodore should take all of the blame for the fall of
> Commodore. Developing killer new technology should have been top
> priority. Hindsight being 20-20, they should have designed the OS with
> the highest possible degree of resource management (IE, not assume that
> all graphics would be 8-bit forever), and then opened up the hardware
> architecture and allowed clones.
Well, let's be fair here. The Amiga 1200 already has 24-bit colour and
up to 12 bits per pixel. And it's still register compatible with the old
chips.
If you had the money, there *were* in fact boards like the famous
Piccaso that give you true 24-bit graphics. (Damned expensive though!)
All "properly-written" applcations would transparently use this without
even knowing it. What more resource management do you want?
The *problem* was all those games that bypass the OS and hit the metal
directly to wring every last drop of speed out of the system.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as you change any hardware, all your games
break. (Or at least the vast majority of them.)
> As it was, some of the later CEOs did nothing more than collect their
> salaries.
Apparently so.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Invisible wrote:
> Mike Raiford wrote:
>
>> I'll agree, Windows 3.x sucked. :)
>
> I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably
> slowly while my little "14 MHz" Amiga 1200 ran rings around them. It
> wasn't until I started doing seriously compute-bounded work that I
> actually *believed* that the numbers weren't lying. The Amiga just
> seemed dramatically faster in every respect.
>
> (On the other hand... You know how Linux is supposed to be "fast"? I
> tried running Debian on my Amiga 1200. Waiting for Gnome to start up
> is... well let me put it this way. It makes a 486 SX look like greased
> lightning. From typing "startx" to having a usable desktop takes about
> 20 *minutes*!! Not kidding!!)
>
>>> (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. ;)
>
> Oh hell yeah. I can remember adding a 20 MHz FPU to my Amiga and
> watching Fractuallity suddenly get an order of magnitude faster. ;-)
> "Wow, it's so fast!" I cried.
>
> Watching it yesterday, with FPU and all, there didn't seem to be much
> "fast" about it!
>
>>> 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.
>
> I'm sure. (E.g., colour seperations...)
>
>> Remember that video you posted on the making of that webcomic. That
>> was PS.
>
> I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
>
PS Elememts is ... meh .. It lacks some key features, such as Masking.
Hell... lacking that alone is grounds for death IMO. You're better of
with GIMP. ;)
>> 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.
>
> I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
>
Depends. Small tears and missing chunks are really easy using clone and
heal tools. Larger tears and missing chunks require a more "creative"
approach. See the attached images.
>> There are advantages to the expensive packages ;)
>
> I won't deny that. ;-)
>
>>> 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 ;)
>
> Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>
Well, assuming you already have the PC... If you don't you can still
accomplish your goal for under $1000.
I've seen someone actually make a pretty impressive short film using
Windows Movie Maker and a $50 pocket camera.
Post a reply to this message
Attachments:
Download '003banda.jpg' (144 KB)
Download 'banda7.jpg' (145 KB)
Preview of image '003banda.jpg'
Preview of image 'banda7.jpg'
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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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Invisible wrote:
>
> 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*!
>
What amazes me about the Amiga is how frequently it was used for digital
effects in a number of TV shows. I just skimmed the Wikipedia article. I
guess at some point they were running Lightwave, which is a very
expensive professional rendering package, on it.
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>> I own Photoshop Elements now. It's not very impressive.
>>
>
> PS Elememts is ... meh .. It lacks some key features, such as Masking.
> Hell... lacking that alone is grounds for death IMO. You're better of
> with GIMP. ;)
I got it free with my shiny new Wacom tablet. ;-)
>> I have no idea how that's even theoretically possible.
>
> Depends. Small tears and missing chunks are really easy using clone and
> heal tools. Larger tears and missing chunks require a more "creative"
> approach. See the attached images.
OK, that's just absurd. The sofa and the rug are *exactly* the same
colour. How the hell can the machine tell them apart? Additionally, how
on earth can it tell what colour they were originally? That's impossible...
>>> Heck. You can do this for free, too ;)
>>
>> Not really. You still have to buy the PC. :-P
>>
>
> Well, assuming you already have the PC... If you don't you can still
> accomplish your goal for under $1000.
Well, yeah. I mean, if you just want to render some 3D scenes with
POV-Ray and stick them on a DVD, you don't even need that much. You can
probably buy a PC with a DVD burner and some movie authorising software
anything with such a slow CPU, but if you wait long enough it'll do it.
> I've seen someone actually make a pretty impressive short film using
> Windows Movie Maker and a $50 pocket camera.
That makes no sense. I can't get Windows Movie Maker to do *anything*
useful...
(But then, I can't get 3D Studio Max to do anything beyond rendering
polygon meshes either, and yet it's ment to be "the most powerful
modeller in the world"...)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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