State of computer graphics when Amiga was born...

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

I accept that reasoning.

So why is the Amiga Worse than technology which comes before it?

Here's the Amiga Juggler from 1986:
[ Show youtube player ]

Here's "Adam Powers, the Juggler", by MAGI, from five years previously, before the Amiga existed, which it was based on:
[ Show youtube player ]

My earlier point about BUDGET is still a contributing factor: whilst the original juggler in your second video was done on expensive professional rendering hardware for a few companies, the Amiga juggler was on a relatively INexpensive home computer for the masses. I'm sorry I forgot to include that in my post that you quoted.

EDIT: Oh, and Doom Eternal is a SHITTY game, I hated everything about it. And the RTX 3080 launch was a disaster, too.

[Juz400]

This 1986 Advert from Byte magazine still stands, the Amiga was AFFORDABLE to the Mass-Market, gave people a taste of what could be achived with a computer.

[IMG][/IMG]

At the end of the day, if you wanted something to do graphics, unless you read Magazines like Byte to see what was available you were at the mercy of Bob at your local supplier.
HE was the expert in what was available to provide you with a solution.
HE would sell you whatever made him the most commision.

None of those graphics were `rendered` in real time, unless you spent Silicon Graphics money.
Like the Amiga, it was a pre rendered slideshow played back at 50-60 fps

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Foebane

My earlier point about BUDGET is still a contributing factor: whilst the original juggler in your second video was done on expensive professional rendering hardware for a few companies, the Amiga juggler was on a relatively INexpensive home computer for the masses. I'm sorry I forgot to include that in my post that you quoted.

...and I said, literally with the first lines of my first post in this thread:

The Amiga world is replete with an argument which goes:
"The Amiga was the best computer in its time for graphics!"
"How about this better one?"
"No that other computer costs more so it doesn't count!".

As I Also said previously, how do you think that works?

It's a falsehood you're using to delude yourself.

I don't have your budgetary constraints. When I bought my first PC, after upgrading my Amiga, I paid £4000 for it, and we're talking almost 30 years ago.

I thought nothing of it. I wanted the most powerful home desktop I could buy at the time. When I later called Gateway about an upgrade the engineer who took the call told me "When you bought that computer it was among the most powerful desktop computers in the country". So, he's probably biased, but it was a 90Mhz Pentium on the day they became avialable

That isn't the point, the point is, I paid $4000 for it.

When my computer graphics suite was installed where I worked the budget was £21,000,000.

An uncle was a draftsman at AVEVA (then CADCentre). His personal desktop computer was always whatever the latest SGI was. His own deskside computer was an SGI Crimson back when Crimsons were brand new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aveva

When my dad bought his first PC he installed a SPEA graphics card which could render 30,000 polygons a second.

http://www.geekdot.com/the-spea-cards/

Anybody with cheaper hardware can make exactly the same price objection about the Amiga.

"The NES is the best platform for home games!"
"No it isn't, the Amiga is better"
"But that doesn't count, it's so much more expensive".

OBVIOUSLY better hardware is more expensive. What do you expect? The idea that somehow eliminates it from consideration is stupid.

"I can't afford it" isn't a technical specification.

The people buying those much more expensive computers could afford them they weren't better of buying Amigas.

When other people were buying and successfully using more powerful computers what makes you think "I can't afford it" means anything?

They can afford it.

How about looking at it from the perspective of people who DON'T share your budgetary constraints? How about looking at it from the perspective of people who CAN afford it?

[ Show youtube player ]

When you already own a dedicated CAD system, and you're using it to design oil refineries, you don't look at an Amiga and think "Look at all the money I could have saved", you look at it and think it's a piece of Walmart junk.

"I can't afford it" isn't a technical specification.

[Vascillious]

The Commodore 64 was even more affordable, if cost-cutting is a valid argument, why not buy one of those instead?

If cost-cutting is a valid argument then the Amiga is eliminated by cheaper computers.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

The Commodore 64 was even more affordable, if cost-cutting is a valid argument, why not buy one of those instead?

If cost-cutting is a valid argument then the Amiga is eliminated by cheaper computers.

Because people CHOOSE to buy Amiga??

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

I don't have your budgetary constraints. When I bought my first PC, after upgrading my Amiga, I paid £4000 for it, and we're talking almost 30 years ago.

I thought nothing of it. I wanted the most powerful home desktop I could buy at the time. When I later called Gateway about an upgrade the engineer who took the call told me "When you bought that computer it was among the most powerful desktop computers in the country". So, he's probably biased, but it was a 90Mhz Pentium on the day they became avialable

That isn't the point, the point is, I paid $4000 for it.

When my computer graphics suite was installed where I worked the budget was £21,000,000.

An uncle was a draftsman at AVEVA (then CADCentre). His personal desktop computer was always whatever the latest SGI was. His own deskside computer was an SGI Crimson back when Crimsons were brand new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aveva

When my dad bought his first PC he installed a SPEA graphics card which could render 30,000 polygons a second.

http://www.geekdot.com/the-spea-cards/

...

How about looking at it from the perspective of people who DON'T share your budgetary constraints? How about looking at it from the perspective of people who CAN afford it?

[ Show youtube player ]

When you already own a dedicated CAD system, and you're using it to design oil refineries, you don't look at an Amiga and think "Look at all the money I could have saved", you look at it and think it's a piece of Walmart junk.

"I can't afford it" isn't a technical specification.

Oh, so the truth comes out: you're just an arrogant rich snob thumbing your nose at the poor peasants, and you're showing off.

[Vascillious]

Amiga fans it's ALWAYS the same thing. That's why it was the first thing I said.

The Amiga world is replete with an argument which goes:
"The Amiga was the best computer in its time for graphics!"
"How about this better one?"
"No! That other computer costs more money, so it doesn't count!".

There's ALWAYS a more expensive computer. There's ALWAYS a cheaper computer. What your own personal budget can stretch to is NOT a limiting factor on computer performance.

Things still haven't changed.

Today things have moved on from CGI because most of the growth problems have been solved. Now it's AI.

Can you do AI on the computer you own? Yes! Do you want to? Probably not! You probably want to play games and browse the web for a price you can afford.

Here's the Nvidia DGX Station.

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configura...ng-workstation

It costs $69,000, or £50,000.

Can you afford it? No! Do the people who use this at work care that you can't afford it? Do Nvidia care that you can't afford it? No. You aren't the target market. People wealthier than you are with business requirements are the target market. Nobody who makes or uses them cares that you can't afford it. It isn't relevant information.

Here's the Nvidia DGX-2.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/pny-...petaflops-fp16

It's £380,000. More than a quarter of a million pounds each.

Can you afford it? No.

Does anybody care who makes them or uses them that you can't afford it? No.

Is it relevant information that you can't afford it? No.

Here's the Nvidia SuperPod:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasr...e-dgx-superpod

They cost $30-40 million, each.

it's way, way out of your price range. It costs more money than you will ever see in your lifetime. Does anybody who makes or uses those machines care, even slightly, that you can't afford it?

Price is the most bogus objection. Your poverty is not how computer performance is defined.

Affordable? Affordable to whom?

Affordability is NOT an objective concept.

When the Cray-1 was released it weighted 5.5 tons, drew 115 Kilowatts, and cost $7.9 million.

Could you afford it? No. Did they sell any? Yes, over 100 of them. They sold them to people who Could afford them.

In fact, to stay ahead globally in their research areas, some of the research and governmental institutes who buy supercomputers probably can't afford NOT to buy them.

Do you get it? Nobody who buys computers for performance reasons goes into it refusing to purchase something broke people can't afford to buy.

The reason you lean on that argument is you don't have valid technical reason.

The real reason you like the Amiga is because it's cheap.

The whole argument is stupid. It's claim which begins by boasting of how powerful the Amiga is but sweeps all those nasty contradictory technical specifications under the bar of what broke people can afford.

You were boasting about how powerful it is. It's a pretty empty argument which when you unwrap it really amounts to "It's the most powerful computer you can buy a penny arcade".

Do you get it? Who cares what you can afford? It isn't a technical specification.

I met a tramp who thinks Mario Cement Factory is the most powerful graphics computer on the market. He claims anything less powerful is tat and anything more powerful doesn't count because it's more expensive.

You can say the same thing about ANYTHING.

[Juz400]

Why did you buy a Gateway Pentium 90 if Money was no object?

I was a purchaser at a Network card manufactor during that time, I knew what was on the Market in the mid 90`s, I bought them to test and develop our products in.
We were circa £500 million a year in sales at that time.
Your Gateway system like the Amiga was a cheap MASS-MARKET machine.

DEC Alpha, SUN Sparkstation or Silicon Graphics systems were more powerfull when the P90 was new, why did you not buy one of those?
We had them, we knew they were more capable than the Intel based stuff.

This is going to go round and round as a pointless argument.
You buy what you can afford end off.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Foebane

Because people CHOOSE to buy Amiga??

Fine, then by the same principle of choice you can eliminate the Amiga, because of all those billions of people who chose Not to buy it.

You still don't have a reason to select the Amiga.


You can select cheaper computers than the Amiga and more expensive ones based on the same budgetary objection.

Most people bought Japanese consoles for games. Same rationale you're using the for Amiga: They bought what they did because they thought it was better than the cheaper consoles and cheaper than the better consoles.

Can you see where this is going? You can use the same price/specification objection and base it around ANY price point.

"I had ten million to spend. I bought a Cray-1. I didn't buy an Amiga because it's wasn't powerful. I'm doing nuclear power plant simulation".

You haven't found a reason to choose the Amiga.

When you analyse your argument it's a totally arbitrary choice except for the fact it was cheap so YOU could afford it.

Don't you see? You don't have a technical argument for the Amiga. Your preference is fused to what YOU can afford. It's nothing whatsoever to do with power. Your choice is wedded to the fact you have £/$1000 to spend.

Your own dire personal budgetary limitations is NOT a performance-based technical reason.

When it comes down to it your reason for preferring the Amiga is NOT because of its power, it's because of its price.

You don't love the Amiga because it's powerful, you love it because it's dirt CHEAP.

[Vascillious]

"Why did you buy a Gateway Pentium 90 if Money was no object?"

I can't stand people who talk bullshit. I wouldn't have bought a Gateway Pentium 90 if "money was no object" and I never claimed that's the reason I bought it. I bought it because I had £5000 to spend. So you've just proven you're happy to just say any old stupid crap. Be serious of forget it.


"DEC Alpha, SUN SPARCstations or Silicon Graphics systems were more powerful when the P90 was new".

Yes, I totally agree.

What's your point? You don't seem to be making one.

[d4rk3lf]

@Vascillious
Interesting thoughts.

Could you elaborate a bit?

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Juz400

This is going to go round and round as a pointless argument. You buy what you can afford end off.

I know. I'm not denying it. You're talking to completely the wrong person. Tell the Amiga fans that, they're the ones who don't understand it.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

It is true they may be cheaper than expected and in fact the reason for it is the Amiga world is replete with an argument which goes:

"The Amiga was the best computer in its time for graphics!"
"How about this better one?"
"No that other computer costs more so it doesn't count!".

They shrink-wrap what they'll accept around the exact technical specifications of a Commodore Amiga, so of course the choice they go with eventually will hone in on the Commodore Amiga.

Amiga's owner always forget that "I have an Amiga, what can I get that has all the same ease-of-use features for under $1000?" is NOT the question many people actually using a computer for graphics asked in 1985. What they asked was "I want to do CAD / visualisation / image processing. I have $20,000 to spend. What is available?". There's no purchasing law that says "Nothing counts unless it matches the specifications of a Commodore Amiga".

Was the Amiga better for animation? Amigas were not popular in animation houses. People working in animation houses were not choosing between a Commodore Amiga and an desktop IBM PC to do their work on. Look at Dragon's Lair, it dated from 1983. What do you think this was done on? How long was it before people were doing animations to this standard and fidelity on an Amiga? Ever? People doing this sort of work were obviously not using an Amiga.

[ Show youtube player ]

Even if you are to concede that the Amiga was better in the animation field, a dubious claim because there was never a time when there were not much better platforms than the Amiga for that application if professional animation is what you wanted to do, it still doesn't make a lot of difference as far as people purchasing PCs for computer graphics were concerned because people buying PCs for graphics were not interested in the sort of toy animation program Amiga users liked. They were professional scientists. It was used for oceanographic and seismic surveys and medical imaging. It was used for CAD and CAE applications.

Take these examples:

The Parallax graphics 600 & 1200 PC range offered graphics resolutions up to 1280x1024 at 60Hz non-interlaced. Much higher resolution than any Amiga of the same time. It offered up to 25 megapixels per second draw rate, bit blitting at 12 megapixels per second, and bit blitting included hardware scaling.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...0%20pc&f=false

The Number Nine Revolution 512x32 you mention was the one of the first 24bit graphics cards available for any desktop system. It was available before any Amiga was released. It predates even the Amiga 1000. It allowed images to be loaded at DMA speeds. The colour output quoted by the company of 245,760 on-screen colours which you noted was only quoted as that number because it was the maximum number of screen pixels at any one time in 24bit mode, at 512x480 non-interlaced resolution. 512 * 480 = 245,760 screen pixels. It was in fact a full 24bit graphics mode, with an additional 8 bits which could be used for Alpha channel or Z-buffer.

This is the sort of application it was used for:

"The National Environmental Satellite, Data. and Information Service (NFSDIS) manages the Nation's civil Earthobserving satellite systems, as well as global national data bases for meteorology, oceanography, geophysics, and solarterrestrial sciences. From these sources, it develops and disseminates environmental data and information products critical to the protection of life and property, national defence, the national economy, energy development and distribution, global food supplies, and the development of natural resources"

So, if you'll excuse my French, its purchasers didn't give a shit if it could be used for sprite animation. They wanted it for a much more serious application.

The Revolution 512x32 was also fitted with an NEC µPD7220 graphics accelerator.

The sad fact about the eternal argument that the Amiga was a missed opportunity is that the PC was a much bigger missed opportunity because most of its potential was buried behind the spreadsheet and databased applications it was famous for. Accelerators with 16.7 million colour graphics were available for the PC before the Amiga was even released.

The only thing really convincing Amiga fans the Amiga was better for graphics is ignorance.

Most of your post is utter redundant nonsense, and the repetition needs to be trimmed, there is no need for all your responses to have the same thing quoted time and time again.


If anyone is claiming the Amiga was the best graphics solution in 1985, then they are emphatically wrong, there were superior systems around, but they were typically not for your average home user because they were so massively more expensive.

However, if someone is claiming that the Amiga introduced a level of graphics for the home user at a much cheaper price and being compared favourably against much more expensive systems, then that is entirely correct, because that was a fact.

But its wasn't just the home user that appreciated the capabilities of the Amiga, some professional organisations that simply didn't have $20,000 to spend on a system, felt that what the Amiga offered was good enough to meet their needs.

So it seems quite self evident that the Amiga helped usher in an era where decent quality graphics were no longer the preserve of those with deep pockets.

What I will say to you Vascillious is you need to tone your rhetoric down a touch. You're a new member here, and you seem content that being as blunt as possible with people under the guise of "well, its the truth" is both welcome and warranted.

I find that people are far more willing to listen when decorum and plain old being POLITE are employed.

Bluntness? Not so much! Insulting? Even less so.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

When it comes down to it your reason for preferring the Amiga is NOT because of its power, it's because of its price.

You don't love the Amiga because it's powerful, you love it because it's dirt CHEAP.

I chose the Amiga because I am a huge fan of Jay Miner, the talented computer designer genius who designed the Amiga, and is in fact considered the "Father of the Amiga", who was also behind the Atari 8-Bit series of computers which I also owned in the past. His designs were elegant yet sophisticated, and they all revolved around custom hardware for the various jobs the computer had to do, leaving the CPU free for other tasks, not to mention the (at the time) advanced graphics and sound and multitasking capability for a home computer in 1985 compared to the home computer market competition. THAT is why I chose it.

[Amigajay]

I smell a disgruntled troll...

And the argument with price works both ways, it gets boring... i will pick an Indigo Workstation, X68000 and Neo-Geo....good day to you sir.

[lilalurl]

There are interesting points being discussed here but also there is quite a lot of tension. I'd prefer not locking the thread, so I hope everyone can get a bit calmer.
Perhaps stay away from the thread for a day or two if you feel some great injustice stated in a post or two.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by lilalurl

There are interesting points being discussed here but also there is quite a lot of tension. I'd prefer not locking the thread, so I hope everyone can get a bit calmer.
Perhaps stay away from the thread for a day or two if you feel some great injustice stated in a post or two.

Why bother even threatening to lock the thread? We're all adults here. Nobody is being bound down and forced to participate. If they keep responding it's reasonable enough to assume they're content to continue. If they don't like it, they don't have to participate. It's entirely their choice.

All you achieve by blocking threads is stopping communication from occurring, and that's a far worse result than a heated discussion where communication has a chance of taking place.

[grond]

I'm not sure anyone would claim that the Amiga was technically the most powerful hardware available in 1985 in any niche one may come up with. That would be rather silly. The Amiga surely didn't have the highest number of colours, the highest resolutions, the best sound, the fastest processor etc. But it sure was one very attractive package of graphics, sound, processor and a 32bit preemptive multitasking operating system. Find us a 1985 computer that did better in all those aspects combined. The contemporary hardware that did better in just one of these aspects already cost 10x the money of an Amiga, how much did one cost that was better in all these aspects?

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Most of your post is utter redundant nonsense, and the repetition needs to be trimmed, there is no need for all your responses to have the same thing quoted time and time again

Yes, they can be shortened for concision but not for recurrence of the same single idea which is so often repeated. The repetition is there for a reason. It's exactly what I predicted would happen at the start, and it's happened again and again since. The point is to communicate why price objection is meaningless.

It's always the same, that's why repetition occurs:

The claim in contention is the claim the Amiga was a remarkably powerful graphics computer or was remarkable in any way except it meant people with shallow pockets could cover a bunch of bases for about $1000.

The point is they don't see that isn't the recipe for a graphically or computationally powerful computer. It isn't even a recipe for a historically interesting computer. Other computers before and after have brought new features to the consumer.

The problem is the persistent myth the Amiga was special in any objective way. The people who like it don't like it because it was tremendously powerful, they like it because they had one in their room when they were young.

It's a purely emotive result which occurs as a result of contact with something in ones formative years, and it's linked to price, not power: They liked it because they had at an impressionable age, and they had it because they could afford it, or their fathers could afford it.

Notice none of those influential ingredients cite performance.

That's the problem.

People are incorrectly commuting their excitement and satisfaction with their new favourite toy to belonging to the realm of general computational or graphical power.

"I own this thing and I love it" isn't a technical specification. It's a personally reflexive expression of satisfaction. It's isn't a computational benchmark.

[frank_b]

The card specs look impressive. Interfacing to a 24 bit frame buffer over the ISA bus must have been fun though. it's not exactly high performance. It crawls updating a 320*200 8 bpp display. I suspect the card was useful for still images and that would be about it. A moot point probably since there was no viable GUI for the PC back then. Did they document the card? What software ran on it to take advantage of the features? What's the point interfacing a high colour depth video card to a machine with such a poorly designed architecture and no software that can take advantage of it? The CPU on PCs of the day was brain damaged. The rest of the architecture was brain damaged too. Two simultaneous interrupts would lock the machine up requiring a reboot. I remember IBM boasting about this "enhancement" on their PS/2. It could handle it. If you had the money to burn back then, better spend it on something with viable software, like a Unix workstation. The GUI was the game changer. No GUI? No point. PCs of that era are where they belong, in a landfill.