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 
used to pass for "impressive". Back then, you had to pay out £80 or so 
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!)

To be fair though, for your £80 you'd also get a very full-featured 
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 
have £500, you could buy one of the new-fangled "CD burners" and make *a 
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:

- A CD burner is a trivial matter of £10 or so.

- 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. 
Again, where Imagine 4 retailed for £800, POV-Ray is *free*.

- 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*

Post a reply to this message

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

Post a reply to this message

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

> 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...

Post a reply to this message

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*

Post a reply to this message

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*

Post a reply to this message

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'

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. ;-)

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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.

Post a reply to this message

>> 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 
for, like, £200 or something. It'll take a while for POV-Ray to do 
anything with such a slow CPU, but if you wait long enough it'll do it.

Kinda different to the £2,000 they used to want for a Piccasso card to 
display 24-bit graphics. ;-) And the £300 by dad paid for 8 MB RAM. And 
£300 for Imagine 3. And so forth...

> 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"...)

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> 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.

Check your history. Lightwave *originated* on the Amiga platform! :-D

(It was originally a value-add product for NewTek's "Video Toaster" 
video editing hardware, but eventually became a stand-along product due 
to extreme popularity.)

It always was freakishly expensive, but regarded as "cutting edge" in 
every concievable way. Every time it was reviewed, it got awards. Amiga 
Format rated it Gold more times than I can count. It was showered with 
accolades. Seeminly every new version added serious new features that 
wowed the critics and boggled minds.

All the Amiga magazines repeatedly claimed that the Amiga was being used 
in Babylon 5, Seaquest DSV and Startrek Voyager. There are episodes of 
Red Dwarf where you can see an Amiga 500 on the wall. And so on.

LOL, I like Wikipedia's comment about the Video Toaster: "It was the 
Emmy-Award® winning product that single-handedly signaled the desktop 
video revolution."

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
4885d747$1@news.povray.org...

> That makes no sense. I can't get Windows Movie Maker to do *anything* 
> useful...

Really, you should make a list of all the common, entry-level software that 
anybody can use except you so we can figure out what they have in common ;)

I just had to use WMM a few days ago, never having done movie editing 
before, and I was able to create a 2-hour DVD out of 5 hours of Mini-DV 
tapes, complete with nice-looking transitions effects and titles, all this 
in a short time and with very little trouble (it didn't like one transition 
and got stuck until I removed it). Clearly not a professional application 
due to its limited set of features, but very user-friendly and more than 
sufficient for home usage, like editing family movies.

G.

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Invisible wrote:

> Check your history. Lightwave *originated* on the Amiga platform! :-D
> 
> (It was originally a value-add product for NewTek's "Video Toaster" 
> video editing hardware, but eventually became a stand-along product due 
> to extreme popularity.)
> 
> It always was freakishly expensive, but regarded as "cutting edge" in 
> every concievable way.

Update: Er, yah, it's *still* damned expensive! ;-)

http://www.onevideo.co.uk/index.php?manufacturers_id=26&osCsid=nq146ak8cdsqmj1edokfd8qih5

Although not as expensive as I'd imagined... (I was thinking more like 
£25,000 or something.)

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Gilles Tran wrote:

> Really, you should make a list of all the common, entry-level software that 
> anybody can use except you so we can figure out what they have in common ;)

Thank you. Now I feel *so* much less inferior. :-}

Hmm, let's see now. I can operate POV-Ray, a program who's "user 
interface" consists of a text editor and a button that makes it go, but 
I can't figure out 3D Studio Max, a supposedly superior program. Maybe 
it's just that POV-Ray has *a manual*, whereas the illegal pirate copy 
of 3DSM I found didn't have one?

On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM 
do things it's not designed for?

I can't seem to make Photoshop do much, but then I can't figure out the 
GIMP either, so that's about even. (I had no such trouble with 
Photogenics, but that doesn't do very much.)

I spent years using OctaMED, but I'm having trouble figuring out Cubase. 
Maybe because it's just more complicated? IDK.

What else is there? Ooo, I can't make styles work reliably in Word.

I think that's about all... :-P

> Clearly not a professional application 
> due to its limited set of features, but very user-friendly and more than 
> sufficient for home usage, like editing family movies.

Yeah, well, it's free. You wouldn't expect miracles. ;-)

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> 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.

The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely 
programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a TV to 
a high resolution monitor.  Even when I got my first LCD monitor I plugged 
it in and it worked!  If you found some weird monitor that didn't quite 
work, chances were that someone could help you out and write the config file 
for you.

> 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.

Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10 
years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32 
colours.  I would have expected a lot more.

Post a reply to this message

>> 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.
> 
> The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely 
> programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a 
> TV to a high resolution monitor.

Yeah. The Amiga defaults to TV scanrates, but you can program it to run 
at whatever you want. (Within reason.) The tricky part is figuring out 
what you need to program it to do. (And getting it to do it when you 
can't see a display!)

The *other* tricky part is that ALL games will run at TV scanrates, and 
there's nothing you can do about it...

> Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10 
> years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32 
> colours.  I would have expected a lot more.

16 colours out of 16, verses 32 out of 4,096? Seems like a fairly big 
difference to me. ;-)

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> 16 colours out of 16, verses 32 out of 4,096? Seems like a fairly big 
> difference to me. ;-)

Yeh saying that, we've been stuck at 2^24 out of 2^24 for a while now... ;-)

Post a reply to this message

scott wrote:

> Yeh saying that, we've been stuck at 2^24 out of 2^24 for a while now... 
> ;-)

Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)

(Similarly, "CD-quality audio" was invented, what, 20 years ago? And it 
still hasn't changed to this day...)

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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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"Invisible" <voi### [at] devnull> a écrit dans le message de news: 
4885e130$1@news.povray.org...

> On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
> work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
> together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
> can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM do 
> things it's not designed for?

On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done by 
pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more precise 
control. I'll grant that it's never very precise, but then it's a 
no-brainer, made for people who don't read manuals and don't like to type 
numbers in little boxes with funny names.

Perhaps you just don't get purely visual interfaces? GUIs tend to have their 
own paradigms and figuring them out can take time. Sometimes we put the 
blame on the interface (and rightly so, but I won't tell names...) but it 
may be that people differ in the way they can grasp certain visual paradigms 
and not others (no excuse for Word styles though).

G.

Post a reply to this message

>> On the other hand, Virtual Dub has no manual yet I find it quite easy to 
>> work, and yet I couldn't get WMM to do anything except glue video clips 
>> together. (Maybe that's all it does? Oh, and the transitions that you 
>> can't control or adjust in any way.) Maybe I'm just trying to make WMM do 
>> things it's not designed for?
> 
> On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done by 
> pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more precise 
> control. I'll grant that it's never very precise, but then it's a 
> no-brainer, made for people who don't read manuals and don't like to type 
> numbers in little boxes with funny names.
> 
> Perhaps you just don't get purely visual interfaces? GUIs tend to have their 
> own paradigms and figuring them out can take time. Sometimes we put the 
> blame on the interface (and rightly so, but I won't tell names...) but it 
> may be that people differ in the way they can grasp certain visual paradigms 
> and not others (no excuse for Word styles though).

IIRC I spent about 15 minutes trying to figure out how to make the 
sequence fade to black. I got it to fade, but it was a 2 second fade and 
I wanted 10 seconds. I couldn't find any way of altering this.

I also utterly failed to figure out how to insert a pause.

In the end I just got so thoroughly frustrated with the thing that I 
gave up. To my horror, next time I opened it, it had somehow magically 
"remembered" where all my video files are, and nothing I could do to it 
would make it "forget" that information. At that point I decided to give 
up for good.

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

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> Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)

True, and it's a shed load more than 256 levels.  The attached photo 
demonstrates nicely, see how with only 8bits/channel there is almost no 
detail in the clouds at the top, nor in the dark wall and radiator at the 
bottom? I can assure you in real life I can see a lot more detail.  Once we 
get display devices with higher contrast then higher bpp will surely follow 
to better replicate what we see with our eyes.  IIRC cinema projectors use 
16 bit/channel already.

> (Similarly, "CD-quality audio" was invented, what, 20 years ago? And it 
> still hasn't changed to this day...)

That's because not many people can hear higher than 20 kHz.  Add in 10% 
margin for the anti aliasing filters, and with a 22 kHz nyquist frequency 
you get to 44 kHz sample rate.  There isn't much incentive to go higher, 
although DVD uses 48 kHz.  16-bit per sample is also probably ok, because 
that correpsonds (IIRC) to a roughly 100 dB range of sounds, which is about 
what the ear is sensitive to while listening to music.  (OK if you wanted to 
reproduce a pin dropping and then a jet engine in your living room, you 
might need more than 16 bits to get it sounding good...)

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'img_0298.jpg' (101 KB)

Preview of image 'img_0298.jpg'

>> Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)
> 
> True, and it's a shed load more than 256 levels.  The attached photo 
> demonstrates nicely, see how with only 8bits/channel there is almost no 
> detail in the clouds at the top, nor in the dark wall and radiator at 
> the bottom? I can assure you in real life I can see a lot more detail.  

There's a good reason for that: every time you point your eyes somewhere 
else, all the exposure settings automatically change! ;-)

That's why it's so damned hard to find a good exposure setting on a 
camera - one that reveals as much detail as the human eye. The human eye 
doesn't use just *one* exposure setting, but a constantly changing level.

> Once we get display devices with higher contrast then higher bpp will 
> surely follow to better replicate what we see with our eyes.  IIRC 
> cinema projectors use 16 bit/channel already.

Well, we'll see.

>> (Similarly, "CD-quality audio" was invented, what, 20 years ago? And 
>> it still hasn't changed to this day...)
> 
> That's because not many people can hear higher than 20 kHz.

Indeed. No real point going higher.

> There isn't much incentive to go higher, although DVD uses 48 kHz.

Now there's interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard, 
DVD audio typically has lossy compression applied to it...

> 16-bit per sample is also probably 
> ok, because that correpsonds (IIRC) to a roughly 100 dB range of sounds, 
> which is about what the ear is sensitive to while listening to music.

Heh. It sounds OK to me! ;-)

[I gather there is a thing called "Super Audio CD", but it hasn't really 
taken off because nobody can hear the difference.]

> (OK if you wanted to reproduce a pin dropping and then a jet engine in 
> your living room, you might need more than 16 bits to get it sounding 
> good...)

Hope - because you'll be *deaf* after the jet! :-D

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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> There's a good reason for that: every time you point your eyes somewhere 
> else, all the exposure settings automatically change! ;-)

Of course, but it doesn't affect the fact that 8bit/channel is nowhere near 
enough to give a realistic looking image.

> That's why it's so damned hard to find a good exposure setting on a 
> camera - one that reveals as much detail as the human eye. The human eye 
> doesn't use just *one* exposure setting, but a constantly changing level.

That's why people take HDR images (by quickly taking several images in 
sucession with different exposures) and then combining them into one HDR 
image.  On your computer you can then vary the exposure and reveal all the 
detail that would have been impossible to capture in a single 8bit image.

> Now there's interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard, 
> DVD audio typically has lossy compression applied to it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video#Audio_data

> [I gather there is a thing called "Super Audio CD", but it hasn't really 
> taken off because nobody can hear the difference.]

Or rather, in the majority of hi-fi systems it is not the 16bit/44kHz source 
data that is the limiting factor on the quality.

> Hope - because you'll be *deaf* after the jet! :-D

Yup - but you wanted an accurate reproduction in your living room of that 
scene where someone is run over by a jet taking off ;-)

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Mike Raiford wrote:

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

> I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably 
> slowly

  False memories. Windows 3 was already used in 6 MHz 286 computers.
If Windows 3 was "unbearably slow" in a 66 MHz 486, I can only imagine
how slow it must have been in a 286.

  Obviously given that it was used in practice, it was not that slow.

> (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 

  Gnome is not linux.

  Try porting gnome to your beloved AmigaOS and let's see how fast it is
there.

> 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!!)

  Why would you even want to use gnome in a slow computer? Use a lighter
window manager.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>> There's a good reason for that: every time you point your eyes 
>> somewhere else, all the exposure settings automatically change! ;-)
> 
> Of course, but it doesn't affect the fact that 8bit/channel is nowhere 
> near enough to give a realistic looking image.

Well... it looks fine to me, that's all I'm saying. ;-)

>> Now there's interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Last I 
>> heard, DVD audio typically has lossy compression applied to it...
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video#Audio_data

OK, well that's pretty weird. I wonder why they suddenly changed it to 
48 kHz then...?

>> [I gather there is a thing called "Super Audio CD", but it hasn't 
>> really taken off because nobody can hear the difference.]
> 
> Or rather, in the majority of hi-fi systems it is not the 16bit/44kHz 
> source data that is the limiting factor on the quality.

Not by a *long* shot! ;-)

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> I was always astounded that "66 MHz" PCs would crawl along unbearably 
>> slowly
> 
>   False memories. Windows 3 was already used in 6 MHz 286 computers.
> If Windows 3 was "unbearably slow" in a 66 MHz 486, I can only imagine
> how slow it must have been in a 286.
> 
>   Obviously given that it was used in practice, it was not that slow.

Ah, OK. Spending 20 minutes waiting for Access to load each time I 
wanted to work on my assignment at college must be a false memory then...

>   Why would you even want to use gnome in a slow computer? Use a lighter
> window manager.

Because Gnome does the same thing that AmigaOS does, and lighter WMs don't.

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Ah, OK. Spending 20 minutes waiting for Access to load each time I 
> wanted to work on my assignment at college must be a false memory then...

  Microsoft Access for the AmigaOS was hugely popular, I suppose.

  "Hey, Blender for linux takes hours to create an image, while MS Paint
is blazingly fast. Clearly Windows is much faster than Linux."

> >   Why would you even want to use gnome in a slow computer? Use a lighter
> > window manager.

> Because Gnome does the same thing that AmigaOS does, and lighter WMs don't.

  Now you are an expert on window managers, I see.

  Exactly what is it that Gnome does that no other window manager does?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> Ah, OK. Spending 20 minutes waiting for Access to load each time I 
>> wanted to work on my assignment at college must be a false memory then...
> 
>   Microsoft Access for the AmigaOS was hugely popular, I suppose.

Nope. But other database products were.

The real point is more that on a PC, just switching from one window to 
another always seemed to take forever, whereas on an Amiga it was 
instantaneous unless the machine was under heavy load.

>   "Hey, Blender for linux takes hours to create an image, while MS Paint
> is blazingly fast. Clearly Windows is much faster than Linux."

OK, forget it. This conversation is over.

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:49:10 +0100, Invisible wrote:

> 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...

Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.  The way this 
works is by using white balance.  I've done it myself many, many times 
with old photos in the GIMP.

But the sofa and the rug aren't exactly the same colour - the rug is 
darker than the sofa (? looks like a chair to me).  Adjusting the white 
balance of the photo involves picking out something that actually is/was 
white (like the white on the baby's shirt).  That gives the computer a 
reference to make the adjustments from.  When photos age, they tend to 
age consistently and the colours adjust with consistency.  The computer 
basically is doing an "undo" on the age effect applied by real life.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:47:20 -0500, Mike Raiford 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.

Yep, I remember selling the Amiga for Software Etc. - we had a local TV 
station bring in their setup to do a demo.  Pretty cool stuff.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

>> 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...
> 
> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.

Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.

> Adjusting the white 
> balance of the photo involves picking out something that actually is/was 
> white (like the white on the baby's shirt).  That gives the computer a 
> reference to make the adjustments from.  When photos age, they tend to 
> age consistently and the colours adjust with consistency.  The computer 
> basically is doing an "undo" on the age effect applied by real life.

But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can 
amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by 
noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd 
have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:13:38 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> 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...
>> 
>> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.
> 
> Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.

See my explanation below. :-)

>> Adjusting the white
>> balance of the photo involves picking out something that actually
>> is/was white (like the white on the baby's shirt).  That gives the
>> computer a reference to make the adjustments from.  When photos age,
>> they tend to age consistently and the colours adjust with consistency. 
>> The computer basically is doing an "undo" on the age effect applied by
>> real life.
> 
> But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can
> amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by
> noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd
> have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...

Except that's clearly not the case.  There is blue in the photo, though - 
that's clearly visible by looking at a breakdown of the RGB channels 
using something like the GIMP.  There's certainly more red and green in 
the photo, but just look at the outfit the baby's wearing and tell me 
there's no blue there - on the shoulders and the matching "pants" (don't 
know the word for that part of the outfit).  Along the baseboard to the 
left of the chair - that's a purplish colour there, blue is a component 
of that.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> Ah, OK. Spending 20 minutes waiting for Access to load each time I 
> >> wanted to work on my assignment at college must be a false memory then...
> > 
> >   Microsoft Access for the AmigaOS was hugely popular, I suppose.

> Nope. But other database products were.

  Yeah, and they are comparable like Blender and Paint are completely
comparable.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

On 22-Jul-08 15:33, scott wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> The video chip on the Acorn was actually pretty cool, it was completely 
> programmable so you could pretty much drive anything you wanted from a 
> TV to a high resolution monitor.  Even when I got my first LCD monitor I 
> plugged it in and it worked!  If you found some weird monitor that 
> didn't quite work, chances were that someone could help you out and 
> write the config file for you.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Well, to be honest, I don't see the *huge* leap between my BBC B from 10 
> years earlier that could do 640x256 and 16 colours to 640x480 and 32 
> colours.  I would have expected a lot more.
It is not only the number of colours, There was also the hardware to 
animate them at 25 frames per second.

Post a reply to this message

andrel wrote:

> It is not only the number of colours, There was also the hardware to 
> animate them at 25 frames per second.

Or, indeed, 576 scanlines per frame. ;-)

-- 
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http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 22-Jul-08 13:54, John VanSickle wrote:
> 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.

The Amiga was the de facto standard for television quality broadcasting, 
as many have also mentioned. What they should have done was pair up with 
one of the groups that were defining HDTV and force a new TV standard. 
That should have gotten rid of the deadlock that nobody was buying HDTV 
sets because there was no broadcasting. Just make the displays first for 
computers in that format. Create movies in that format that can be 
played on that machine. Then build a settop box that can receive 
broadcasts. I still think we could have had HDTV 10 years ago in this 
way with a logical path to internet connectivity. Today, TV standards 
are still a mess and not ready for the 21rst century.

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That was a compelling monologue. You brought us from the pits of 
computational hardship all the way to the clear mountaintops of current 
home computing. Good job!

Invisible wrote:
> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D, 

Ugh, not Real3D! That was my *first* introduction to 3D graphics, and 
let me tell you I was *not* impressed. Back in '97-'98 it had no 
raytracing support, and the other features were all very disappointing. 
'Refraction' was simply an environment map applied to the inside of an 
object... no attempt was made to distort pre-rendered objects behind the 
refractive one. And then there was the problem of surfaces shadowing 
themselves. Strange, dark-gray lines running along a surface when you 
want it to be smooth can really piss you off, especially when it takes 
so long for the program to compute and render the image in the first place.

> - 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. 
> Again, where Imagine 4 retailed for £800, POV-Ray is *free*.
> 
> - Complex sound editing software such as Audacity is *free*.

Thank goodness for the open-source movement!

> 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.)

Since you mention Cakewalk in your list of commercial apps, let me 
mention JazzWare as a free alternative to it. ModPlugTracker is another 
one, though it's quite different.

Sam

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stbenge wrote:
> That was a compelling monologue. You brought us from the pits of 
> computational hardship all the way to the clear mountaintops of current 
> home computing. Good job!

Why thank you! I'm glad somebody enjoyed me slacking off for the entire 
morning as much as I did. ;-)

> Invisible wrote:
>> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D, 
> 
> Ugh, not Real3D! That was my *first* introduction to 3D graphics, and 
> let me tell you I was *not* impressed. Back in '97-'98 it had no 
> raytracing support, and the other features were all very disappointing. 
> 'Refraction' was simply an environment map applied to the inside of an 
> object... no attempt was made to distort pre-rendered objects behind the 
> refractive one. And then there was the problem of surfaces shadowing 
> themselves. Strange, dark-gray lines running along a surface when you 
> want it to be smooth can really piss you off, especially when it takes 
> so long for the program to compute and render the image in the first place.

Mmm, interesting. I never had any problems with it. I still have the 
coverdisk laying around somewhere I think. And the little manual they 
gave away with it. (Written by Amiga Format, not Real Software Inc.) It 
was my first introduction to ray tracing and CSG. (And basically 
modelling without triangles.)

Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do 
POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a 
cylinder... the CLI has plus points! ;-)

Unfortunately I can't find it anywhere online, but Real3D had a rather 
nice set of glassware showing off the refraction capabilities.

Now Imagine 3D was another matter. You had to add objects to the scene 
in a certain order (!!) in order for them to reflect. As in, the 
reflective objects had to be added last. Any object added after the 
reflective one would cast no reflections. God only knows what happens if 
you want recursive reflections...

> Thank goodness for the open-source movement!

Yeah - I'm still puzzled by all that. The Amiga had a strong "shareware" 
scene, but I'm puzzled by this sudden new craze of giving away 
fully-supported commercial-grade software (sometimes that *was* 
commercial!) for free. It suddenly seems to be the "trendy" thing to do, 
and I'm not really sure how that happened.

Not that I'm complaining about it mind you!

>> 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.)
> 
> Since you mention Cakewalk in your list of commercial apps, let me 
> mention JazzWare as a free alternative to it. ModPlugTracker is another 
> one, though it's quite different.

I already own Cubase, but thanks. ;-)

Actually, if anybody knows of a good freeware software synthesizer and 
sequencer that's easy to set up (ideally zero-install) and runs on 
Windoze, I'd be interested. Sometimes when you're using a strange PC, 
it's nice to be able to just throw out a few bars of music using only 
what you have on your USB stick...

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

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> Invisible wrote:
>>> Then there were ground-breaking AF coverdisks like Imagine 2, Real3D, 
>>
>> Ugh, not Real3D!
> 
> Mmm, interesting. I never had any problems with it.

Oops, my bad. I was thinking of "Extreme 3D," by Macromedia. That's the 
one. It's horrible. I don't think I've ever crashed a program so many times!

> Now Imagine 3D was another matter. You had to add objects to the scene 
> in a certain order (!!) in order for them to reflect. As in, the 
> reflective objects had to be added last. Any object added after the 
> reflective one would cast no reflections. God only knows what happens if 
> you want recursive reflections...

I'm glad there are so many choices these days. I don't ever want to 
resort to using faked raytracing effects, unless of course, I'm making a 
video game or something.

>> Thank goodness for the open-source movement!
> 
> Yeah - I'm still puzzled by all that. The Amiga had a strong "shareware" 
> scene, but I'm puzzled by this sudden new craze of giving away 
> fully-supported commercial-grade software (sometimes that *was* 
> commercial!) for free. It suddenly seems to be the "trendy" thing to do, 
> and I'm not really sure how that happened.
> 
> Not that I'm complaining about it mind you!

When the result is something like what Blender has become, who can 
complain? Oh yeah, those people who hate Blender's interface; they 
complain. I don't think it's that horrible...

> Actually, if anybody knows of a good freeware software synthesizer and 
> sequencer that's easy to set up (ideally zero-install) and runs on 
> Windoze, I'd be interested. Sometimes when you're using a strange PC, 
> it's nice to be able to just throw out a few bars of music using only 
> what you have on your USB stick...

Have you tried searching for browser-based apps in that category? It's a 
slim chance you'll find one, but it's worth trying.

Sam

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At some point in prehistory, you may all recall the level of hysteria 
around a revolutionary technology known as "multimedia". For several 
years, suddenly everything was multimedia-this and multimedia-that. I'm 
not sure exactly why, but after a while everybody sort of forgot about 
it and went back to their normal lives. But anyway, the Amiga at one 
point had several "multimedia construction kits".

One well-known one was Scala. This started out as a simple (but 
"powerful") video titling system, to be used with a genlock device. 
(Look that up if you don't know what it means.) It later evolved into a 
complete system where you could script sounds and animations together to 
produce interactive multimedia applications. (Or just do more 
complicated video editing, if you desire.)

I recall there was a Scala coverdisk, but I couldn't figure out how to 
make it do anything Oh well!



Then there was a program called Vista. (No! Wait! Come back!!) This was, 
quite simply, a fractal landscape generator and renderer. You import a 
"DEM" (Digital Elevation Map) and Vista adds some fractal noise to 
generate a landscape. Vista will then either output this as a polygon 
mesh the size of a small planet, or it will render it for you itself.

The native renderer wasn't fantastic, but it was OK. The images 
certainly were nothing like "photorealistic", but in later versions of 
the software, they started to come moderately close. Indeed, the last 
few versions even had trees and other vegetation, and streams running 
down the valleys, etc. (The trees were, of course, fractally generated 
once again.)

Again, there was a coverdisk containing an early version. While the 
graphics it produced weren't sensational, they were fairly fast (e.g., 
10 minutes to render a vast complex landscape), and it was quite fun to 
"explore" the islands you created. (The program could *build* DEMs as 
well as import real ones, IIRC. But that was disabled in the coverdisk. 
Well they gotta make you buy the real thing somehow!)

(Unfortunately, I don't have any images to show you. Suffice it to say 
that only later versions featured polygon smoothing, and I don't think 
any version had texture mapping or radiosity.)



And then there was AMOS (AMiga OS). I forget how many different editions 
were produced - AMOS, Easy AMOS, AMOS Professional, etc. In spite of the 
name, it wasn't actually an OS at all. It was a a programming language.

When you buy AMOS Professional, what you get is

- An interpretter for the AMOS language.
- An extensive IDE.
- A set of multimedia tools inclusing almost everything but the kitchen 
sink, *all* written in AMOS itself.
- No less than *seven disks* stacked full of multimedia files and demo 
programs.

Technically, AMOS is just another dialect of BASIC. It doesn't have line 
numbers, does have GOTO and GOSUB, and has procedures and functions, 
uses "$" and "#" to distinguish variable datatypes, and IIRC has local 
variables if you want them. The core language is no more powerful than that.

However, it has VERY strong multimedia capabilities. If you imagine the 
most feature-encrusted lump of software possible, AMOS was like that, 
but with bells on.

Want to load a Protracker module and put it on looping play? Two 
commands. Want to load an IFF image and cycle the colour map? Two 
commands. Want to create 3 independent framebuffers and overlay them? 
That's 3 commands. Want to load an animation and play it until the user 
presses a mouse key? That's one command.

The thing comes with a paperback manual the size of a Linux bible. (!!!) 
One time I did sit down and count the number of commands in the command 
index. I checked twice; 809 unique commands, not including the multiple 
syntaxes for each command. (!)

There was an entire seperate sublanguage called AMAL (ANimAtion 
Language) just for moving sprites around the screen. There was a tool 
for capturing and editing mouse movements to make a flight path, and 
AMAL could then animate one or more sprites along that path. AMOS also 
implements "software sprites", a trick that allows the 8 hardware 
sprites to be multiplexed into two-dozen apparently independent elements 
onscreen. Automatically.

(Alternatively, BLOBs (BLitter OBjects) do the same thing, with a 
different set of restrictions, using the Amiga's specialised BLITER 
(BLock Image TransfER) hardware.)

There was also a sprite editor, supporting sprite animations and so 
forth. Both the path editor and sprite editor were written in AMOS.

There was also another completely seperate language called... actually, 
do you know, I can't even remember! But basically, there was a large, 
complex GUI painter tool (written in AMOS), and you could attach short 
scripts in this UI sublanguage to every possible mouse event on the GUI. 
You paint your GUI, save it, and code your application to load it and 
attach scripts to it (by putting the scripts into strings). The scripts 
could change visual elements (e.g., make a button change colour when you 
click it) and invoke AMOS procedures and so forth.

The vast library of software that came with it included a sprite editor 
and animator, a fairly sophisticated sample editor, a GUI painter, an 
animation path capture and edit tool, a "resource editor" (you could put 
program strings into a file to enable easy localisation), and probably 
several other things I've forgotten.

They also apparently ran a competition for users to submit interesting 
AMOS programs, and AMOS Professional comes with several disks full of 
the results. There was several fractal generators (L-system and 
Mandelbrot/Julia), parallax scrolling demos, infinite ball trails... One 
natty little program loaded a song and played it, showing some animated 
VU meters. (There was a function to get the current intensity of any 
channel. Unfortunately, this is just the note on/note off signals, not 
actual audio loudness...)

Another even more snazzy program drew a set of disco lights and made 
them flash to the rhythem of the music. I immediately took the code 
apart to see how it managed to work so well... I discovered that the 
colours of the lights were actually *completely random*, and their 
apparent synchronisation with the music was completely psychological! 
It's amazing what the human brain can do, eh?

There were also at least 3 complete computer games written in AMOS.

- There was a standard "fly a space ship through a cave without getting 
killed" thing. (But half way through, the ship rotates and the direction 
of scrolling changes. And the levels are actually very large!)

- There was a straight-fowards Tetris clone. (But with some neat 
graphical touches. In particular, the screen showed several hundred 
colours using Copper trickery that AMOS could do for you automatically. 
And as you played the game, these colours slowly scrolled, looking 
something like a sunset in the background.) There was even a savable 
high-score table!

- There was a board game called Quatro. I forget how you play it, but it 
featured an AI that was actually quite hard to beat!

There might even have been more games than this, I can't remember.

AMOS was explicitly designed to allow 3rd party "extensions" to be 
written. (In fact the user manual contains detailed step-by-step 
descriptions of all the main AMOS data structures involved.) My dad 
purchased a few of these:

- CRAFT (Colours, Requesters, Animations, Fractals, Text) added commands 
for automatically generating colour blends (think FractInt's palette 
editor) and colour-cycling multiple subranges simultaneously. It also 
added the ability to invoke AmigaDOS requestors with arbitrary text. But 
most of all, it added built-in commands for rendering Mandelbrot/Julia 
fractals. (And, obviously, very much faster than interpretted AMOS 
code!) There were also some string-processing commands added.

- TOME (which we never actually owned) was ment to provide a tile-based 
level editor and commands to make it trivial to build platform-style 
computer games.

- IntOS added the ability to use the Amiga's native Intuition UI system 
rather than AMOS's own system. (AMOS was very nice, but it basically 
took over the whole machine for itself while running, and wouldn't play 
nice with other applications.)

Later the makers releated AMOS The Compiler, which my dad bought. It 
came with a selection of compute-intensive demos, which all sped up 
drastically when compiled. It also ment you could give your AMOS 
programs to people who don't have AMOS. (But the program will basically 
hog the whole machine while it's running.)




In the other corner was Blitz Basic. I never really used this very much, 
but I did try out an AF coverdisk containing a stripped down version. 
While AMOS liked to control the machine itself, Blitz had an explicit 
command to completely disable the OS and hit the metal directly. (Hell 
only knows what would happen on a modified Amiga!)

As the name somewhat implies, Blitz was designed to be *fast*. There was 
a Doom clone written in Blitz at one time. It was called Gloom.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/gloom/screenshots/gameShotId,71050/

As you can see, the graphics utterly sucked. I actually bought this 
game, and was very dissapointed by it. The Amiga Format review praised 
the game for being a technical milestone, but basically had nothing else 
positive to say about it. I think it got a rating of about 49% overall. 
For comparison, the excellent Flashback got 97%.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,74063/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,2983/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/jaguar/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,27498/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/snes/flashback-the-quest-for-identity/screenshots/gameShotId,117925/

On a blurry old TV, those shots look pretty amazing. And the character 
animation is rotoscoped - the first time an Amiga game had had this. The 
resulting movement is increadibly fluid and life-like even to this day!

[Yes, I know none of those are Amiga shots. They don't have any. Trust 
me, it looked more or less the same.]

The later Universe game was similar:

http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32843/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/universe/screenshots/gameShotId,32844/

Looks horribly dithered now, but on my dad's old TV it really looked 
like half a million colours. I was astounded that it could look so 
real... how times have changed, eh? (I only played a short demo from a 
coverdisk.)



And then there was The Settlers.

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,74247/
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/serf-city-life-is-feudal/screenshots/gameShotId,147479/

(Again, the Amiga shots don't show any actual gameplay, but this is more 
or less what it looked like.)

Man, you could spend *hours* playing that game! It was rated Gold by 
Amiga Format, and rightly so. There have since been several PC versions, 
which me and my dad still play. (Although sadly since going to a 
dual-core PC, none of them function for me any more... It was becoming 
quite buggy and unreliable anyway.) I still dream that some day I'll 
write my own game along these lines...




More nostalgia as I think of it!

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

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> 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...
>>
>> Except it clearly isn't impossible, because it was done.
> 
> Well yeah, OK, I rephrase: It defies explanation.
> 
>> Adjusting the white balance of the photo involves picking out 
>> something that actually is/was white (like the white on the baby's 
>> shirt).  That gives the computer a reference to make the adjustments 
>> from.  When photos age, they tend to age consistently and the colours 
>> adjust with consistency.  The computer basically is doing an "undo" on 
>> the age effect applied by real life.
> 
> But surely no scanner on Earth has sufficient resolution that you can 
> amplify a signal by many orders of magnitude and not be swamped by 
> noise? The photo posted contains almost no blue whatsoever, so you'd 
> have to apply a ridiculous amount of gain to that channel...
> 

The picture is an older, sorta analogue media, it does not fade it's 
colors the same way a bitmap would if bitmaps actually faded. It is so 
predictable, in fact, that baring strange papers and processing, it is 
very easy to correct for. Just treat the picture as if the lighting it 
was shot with was different from normal daylight of around 5500 K.

In effect, the computer doesn't boost the blue channel, it uses a damned 
"nonlinear colourspace transformations".

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Gilles Tran wrote:
> On the version I got with Vista controlling the transitions is just done
> by pulling them with the mouse and zooming in the timeline for more
> precise control.

If I understand correctly what you're describing... Same in XP, FWIW.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Yep. There's only so much that human senses can perceive. ;-)

I can see banding in grayscale POV-Ray renders. I checked with an image
editor and there is no color level skipped. So I see the difference between
rgb(42,42,42) and rgb(43,43,43).

Post a reply to this message

Invisible wrote:
> Now there's interesting. Do you have a reference for that? Last I heard,
> DVD audio typically has lossy compression applied to it...

It does, so what. It's 48kHz anyway. MP3 is usually 44.1kHz, DVDs use 48kHz
MP2 audio.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do
> POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a
> cylinder... the CLI has plus points! ;-)

Of course that's possible with a point-and-click interface. I never used any
remotely-decent modeller, but I'm sure Google SketchUp lets you do that.

(in my opinion, the CLI *still* has plus points; but you're wrong about that
specific feature)

Post a reply to this message

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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> Well... it looks fine to me, that's all I'm saying. ;-)

But "fine" is nowhere near what you see in real life.  While there is still 
an obvious gap between real life and what you can reproduce, there will no 
doubt be improvements in the future.

> OK, well that's pretty weird. I wonder why they suddenly changed it to 48 
> kHz then...?

Well don't forget, that there was nothing widespread before DVD that 
recorded films in a digital format.  For some reason 48 kHz was pretty 
standard in the music recording industry, even after CD came along with it's 
lower sampler rate.  I guess in the film industry they stuck with 48 kHz (as 
films were obviously never put onto CDs), but then when DVD came along it 
made sense to have a 48 kHz soundtrack if everything was recorded at 48 kHz 
anyway.

Post a reply to this message

> Of course, using a point-and-click interface, it's not possible to do 
> POV-Ray style tricks like positioning a sphere exactly at the end of a 
> cylinder...

Of course it is.  You can even tell it that the sphere is referenced to that 
point on the cylinder, and to make the radii equal.  So when you change the 
cylinder length or radius, the sphere changes position and radius to match.

You've never really used a modeller have you?

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> For comparison, the excellent Flashback got 97%.

Oh I loved flashback, I think it was one of the first games that I actually 
spent a long continuous amount of time playing until I finished it.  But I 
got stuck right at the end (I think I said that before in here and someone 
told me what I missed).

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> The real point is more that on a PC, just switching from one window to 
> another always seemed to take forever, whereas on an Amiga it was 
> instantaneous unless the machine was under heavy load.

Yeh, I remember my friend had a 33 MHz PC, and just closing a window it took 
several seconds for his desktop wallpaper to repaint itself, slowly scanning 
down the screen line-by-line.  I think the difference was, that Windows was 
always designed to use the hard disc as additional RAM, whereas the Acorn 
was specifically designed not to do this.  Of course it meant you sometimes 
had to quit applications if you ran out of RAM, but it also meant that you 
never got slowed down by the OS thrashing the hard disc.  In fact, if you 
didn't want anything extra loaded at startup, the hard disc wouldn't be 
accessed at all.

They also ported some really cool vector art package that was originally 
written for the Acorn (I think it was called Artworks on the Acorn and Xara 
on the PC).  At some computer show I went to they had both packages running 
on a latest Acorn and PC at the time, and of course the Acorn was something 
like 8x faster at drawing complex shapes with lots of graduated fills and 
transparency.  It had fininshed drawing the entire picture, while the PC was 
still drawing the background fills.

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