22 July 2020, 13:30 | #181 | |
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22 July 2020, 13:36 | #182 |
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The Amiga colour model was going to be Hue, Saturation and Luminance/Value (HSV or HSL depending on your preference) according to some interviews for Commodore: The Amiga Years. HAM would make much more sense if you hold two of HSV and modify just one, compared to RGB...
It was hacked to RGB and left in, and I'm very, very glad it was. Incidentally, I've been trying without much success to find out more about the HSL model proposed as the base in the amiga: it would still have used bitmaps, and indexed colour, however dff180 (and 1 ) would be storing HSV, not RGB... Maybe that makes sense of OS1.x colours ;-) |
22 July 2020, 13:43 | #183 |
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I read somewhere* that orange/white/blue/black is actually a very good colour combination (though you and I might disagree ). It supposedly had to do with two things, the first was that these colours are relatively good fits to composite video which allows for the image to be sharper than many other combinations. The second was that the colours are a good fit to our eyes as well, meaning they cause less eye strain than black letters on a white background.
The latter was (allegedly) also why so many of the old PC coding environments (and stuff like Word Perfect when displayed on a colour monitor) had a blue background. So there may have been method to the madness there *) It was rather long ago, so I can't recall exactly when & where |
22 July 2020, 13:44 | #184 |
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22 July 2020, 14:12 | #185 | |
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What made cooperative multitasking so bad was exactly this; You could pretend you were multitasking until you actually needed to multitask. |
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22 July 2020, 14:17 | #186 | |
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In a single-task game setting, allocating the small block of fast memory for fast operations works fine. In a multitasking OS, you immediately reach contention of the limited fast memory and every task started afterwards will be relegated to slower memory. It would also mean that programs would be written in a way that would be too concerned with memory types instead of treating all memory as equal. |
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22 July 2020, 14:24 | #187 |
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The ST also has an advantage in its cheap monochrome high resolution screen with a steady 72 Hz refresh rate. Perfect for a sequencer and without any annoying 15 kHz squeal of a (more expensive) 1084.
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22 July 2020, 14:37 | #188 | |
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There is no "pretend" multitasking on the Amiga. |
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22 July 2020, 14:54 | #189 | |
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The Atari ST has a custom chipset consisting of GLUE, MMU, Shifter and an optional Blitter. What is not custom in the ST is the sound chip (off the shelf Yamaha YM2149) and chips which Commodore would have been better off not making themselves, such as the Motorola 68901 multi function peripheral Notably, the X68000, which has a "custom" reputation, also used the 68901 and an off-the-shelf Yamaha sound chip. So the ST certainly had a custom chipset — there were no off-shelf parts you could use to build an ST in 1985 — it just was not as advanced as the Amiga's. |
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22 July 2020, 14:55 | #190 | |
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22 July 2020, 14:59 | #191 | |
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If you meant something different, forget what I wrote |
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22 July 2020, 15:08 | #192 |
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The Workbench lacks multi-threading where it counts, just as the classic Macintosh lacks multitasking where it counts.
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22 July 2020, 15:12 | #193 | |||
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If they're already committed to a redesign for the A500 and A2000 models then this is a great time to update it. 68HC000 parts would surely be cheap enough by 1987/88, perhaps not quite down to jelly bean levels, but enough not to affect the price of a £500 computer? Although, the price of necessarily faster ICs for Chip RAM, admittedly would have. Adding Fast RAM, too, would be ideal, of course at additional expense. If this new Agnus chip could have a 14mhz blitter inside it, that would have been fantastic. That's a machine that would leave absolutely no doubt, in anybody's mind, about which home computer/game system was top dog out of all the options available at the time. None of this sounds to me to be technically much of a leap over the original Amiga. Merely updating an existing design to operate a bit faster, as opposed to creating a whole new beast from scratch. Surely all it would take is the will to do so among the management at C=, along with money and time? B |
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22 July 2020, 15:21 | #194 | |
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Things did change when harddrives became available. I beileve it counts a lot that you can start another program while another one is still running. The Mac Finder could not do that. You need to quit the running program to return to the Finder. MultiFinder allowed that, but only later on (but in a kludgy way). |
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22 July 2020, 15:32 | #195 | ||
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Because in that case I agree with you and I also kind of disagree. As in: yes, I agree the Workbench (but not OS) does not have multithreading. And I'd also agree that now (in 2020), that seems like a serious oversight. But back in 1985? Well, no... I kind of disagree that it misses out on this feature, because it didn't actually matter all that much (IMHO). WB was advanced enough when it first came out and still did better than competing options at the time for many tasks. Mainly thanks to offering multitasking and moving some of the basic actions into separate programs. This way, at least you could copy/format disks etc, while doing other stuff using WB. There also was a usable workaround - if you really somehow needed to copy files (or something like that) while keeping WB available, the OS offered the CLI (which generally is a much better way of dealing with file management anyway), which would happily do the tasks while you went on using the WB. But to be clear: you are correct that WB did not offer multithreading and it would be nice if it did. I just personally don't feel it was all that big a deal back then. Quote:
Now, I'm no expert on hardware by any stretch of the imagination, but to me that indicates that it may be harder than we think to increase these clockrates (even the suggested AGA+ still had the chipset run at the same 3.5ish MHz). It would've been great to see though! Last edited by roondar; 22 July 2020 at 15:38. |
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22 July 2020, 17:58 | #196 | |||
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Feature wise, the only substantial change happened with AGA. Fat agnus just integrated glue logic without changing anything - ok, one extra bit for memory refresh. Second generation added one additional bit for each DMA engine and moved some hard decisions about the video timing into registers. Third generation brought a lot of changes. Now think of what you ask for: This would require a new DMA slot allocation scheme and a new bus design. Approximately the same change made on the bus and the DMA engine as made for AGA. That is quite a task. But it's quite a development cost attached to it. For a computer system the company just bought, with unclear return of investment, I understand very well why that change was not made. |
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22 July 2020, 18:39 | #197 | ||
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Useful for whatever some programmer, out there in the world, decided when writing some piece of software. Chucking grenades in Cannon Fodder, without having to hold down both buttons seems like a good idea.
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B Last edited by Old_Bob; 23 July 2020 at 13:03. |
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22 July 2020, 21:57 | #198 | |
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22 July 2020, 22:02 | #199 | ||
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The fact that multitasking is claimed proudly on the packaging while the main interface does not multitask internally is also a bit embarrassing for Amiga users. |
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22 July 2020, 22:52 | #200 | |
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A standard two-button Amiga mouse has 8 wires, and mouse cables need to be both thin, flexible and durable, since you move it around all the time – much more so than a joystick cable. Sourcing such a cable with 9 wires that is both thin, flexible and durable can be quite difficult. |
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