State of computer graphics when Amiga was born...

[amiman99]

Originally Posted by saimon69

As far as i understand is argument is that amiga was not THAT revolutionary when he came out, forget on the price range and low market consumer availability, but:
To be honest i think he has an agenda: Ruin our prideful sense of amigans; Overall he gave us no compelling evidence, so Let him rant without bother to answer or even Lock this thread, mod, we are done !

Who cares. It doesn't matter, it will change nothing. If the argument was done in 1985 when the Amiga was released, then it would matter to some, but nobody did that, did they.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Blab blah blah.

What have you bgt?

Random shit cheap "consumer graphics".

Your argument from your first post is terrible. 24bit gfx were available on a multitude of solutions as evident by motion pictures like Tron, The last starffighter etc.
Hell the amiga only had 12bit gfx. The Amiga allowed the common person to play with 2D/3D with animation tools( if you had the memory) and allowed audio with those animations.
In '89 with an Amiga 500 i had a video capture card(90 quid), 2.5 Meg expansion( 125 quid), Audio Digitizer( 50 quid) and i loved playing about with Star Wars captured animation and creating the same in Imagine, and recording those on videotape.

I dont know anyone arguing about the Amiga being the first or best ever(who said that?) the point is the Amiga brought it to the masses, same as apple brought touch phoned to the masses, yes expensive alternatives were available for touch technology but that is always the case, you can always get bleeding edge for $$$$

Argue all you want but that is what happened and always will be the same.

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by redblade

Is this the same guy who got banned last year from the A1200 thread because they kept talking about pc chunky gfx?

No, that was the craptastic swinkamor12

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

No, that was the craptastic swinkamor12

I believe I'm correct in saying this guy didn't live or was too young during the 1985 - 1992 timeframe to really understand what was available to consumers in the way of PCs. He found a niche card and sang its specs but really has no idea what software or monitors were available for such a card. Its use and purpose were likely very narrow. He doesn't understand that 1985 - 1992 was the era of the 8086 and 8088, the x286, and at the very end, the x386. All running MS-DOS and maybe Windows 3.1 which debuted in 1992.

He wants to presume he could lay down a wad of cash - he said $15,000 for a PC that would tear the Amiga to pieces. In reality, the best he could have hoped for was VGA graphics, some nice looking games, lousy audio via the "Adlib" and similar cards. No music software to speak of and no Mods; he might have a nice .gif viewer by this time. CDROM drives were available but I don't imagine his Audio CDs sounded good on these machines yet.

He will not consider Youtube or similar vids or screengrabs. All he has to do is look up "$15,000 PC" on Youtube and he can see pretty much what was available. I found one, a x386 VGA PC for $17,000, ca. 1990. Not much better than what I just described above.

This argument ended about 3 pages ago. I don't know why he persists.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by amiman99

Who cares. It doesn't matter, it will change nothing. If the argument was done in 1985 when the Amiga was released, then it would matter to some, but nobody did that, did they.

My sentence have cases -upper to be precise

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

Blah, blah, blah, you STILL could not have put a PC together in 1985 or 1988 that could do what an Amiga did nor did the software exist for you to do it with. You are totally confusing the PC Market as it stood in 1985 with what it became 10 years later when the first cheap, packaged x486 units started popping up, bringing a multimedia experience to people well below the $2,500 price-point, with Windows 95, a CDROM, and MS Encarta.

Further conversation with you is pointless. You write about the 1985-1992 timeline exactly as I would expect someone who completely missed it but might write about it. You imagine hardware and software existed for the "PC" that didn't actually exist yet except your fancy video card with which you clearly have or had, no experience. The PC as it existed in 1985 or 1988 could not match a Commodore Amiga. It might serve a single high-end graphic function for designers or for TV, but that's about it. It wasn't a multimedia machine in the same class with an Amiga or within reach of the market the Amiga targeted.

"Blah, blah, blah, you STILL could not have put a PC together in 1985 or 1988 that could do what an Amiga did nor did the software exist for you to do it with. You are totally confusing the PC Market as it stood in 1985 with what it became 10 years later when..."

No, I'm absolutely not. You appear to be confusing me for an Amiga salesman. I'm doing nothing of the kind.

I've only given you the specification of a single PC graphics card which you could buy in 1984, before the Amiga existed.

If you want somebody who wants to compare the most highly configured Amiga you could buy in 1994, after the Video Toaster screamer was released, with an average office desktop PC from 1982 with only speaker sound and CGA graphics, it's the Amiga community you want to talk to.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by amiman99

That card can't even display 24bit images. It says in the manual it's 245760 colors out of 16.7 million.

I actually lost it, what is the original argument?

Wrong. You haven't bothered to read it. You've only seen what you want to see.

The screen buffer is 512x512 pixels and the displayable resolution is 512x480.

The figure you're quoting is the maximum number of screen pixels which can be generated at one time. If you multiply 512 by 480 you get 245,760.

It's called "honesty". I know Amiga fans won't understand that principle but it was argued back in 1985 that you couldn't have "16.7 million on screen colours" on a graphics card which didn't have 16.7 million on-screen pixels.

You still don't usually get graphics cards which can generate 16.7 million on-screen pixels today.

It was a true 24bit display with an 8bit alpha channel compatible with the RS-170 NTSC genlock.

https://linkelectronics.com/product/...rbars-1-black/

The figure you're quoting is the maximum number of on-screen pixels.

By today's standard it would make a 24bit graphics card with a 1024x768 display capable of generating 786,432 colours, because, again, that's the maximum number of unique colours you can fit on screen with that display resolution. So you're talking about a third that resolution in 1984. But it's still a 24bit display.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

Your argument from your first post is terrible. 24bit gfx were available on a multitude of solutions as evident by motion pictures like Tron, The last starffighter etc.
Hell the amiga only had 12bit gfx. The Amiga allowed the common person to play with 2D/3D with animation tools( if you had the memory) and allowed audio with those animations.
In '89 with an Amiga 500 i had a video capture card(90 quid), 2.5 Meg expansion( 125 quid), Audio Digitizer( 50 quid) and i loved playing about with Star Wars captured animation and creating the same in Imagine, and recording those on videotape.

I dont know anyone arguing about the Amiga being the first or best ever(who said that?) the point is the Amiga brought it to the masses, same as apple brought touch phoned to the masses, yes expensive alternatives were available for touch technology but that is always the case, you can always get bleeding edge for $$$$

Argue all you want but that is what happened and always will be the same.

"Your argument from your first post is terrible. 24bit gfx were available on a multitude of solutions as evident by motion pictures like Tron, The last starffighter etc"

This is false.

It's probably true for The Last Starfighter as there were probably 24bit displays by then.

Before this though, full colour cinema resolution graphics were achieved using film cameras: The final images would be rendered directly to film stock. You could get software for the PC which supported 360 million colour palettes and supported film cameras at resolutions as high as 4096x2732.

There definitely were systems which were better for cinematic effects in the mid 1980s than a desktop PC, you are right. The point is, none of those computers were the Commodore Amiga.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

I believe I'm correct in saying this guy didn't live or was too young during the 1985 - 1992 timeframe to really understand what was available to consumers in the way of PCs. He found a niche card and sang its specs but really has no idea what software or monitors were available for such a card. Its use and purpose were likely very narrow. He doesn't understand that 1985 - 1992 was the era of the 8086 and 8088, the x286, and at the very end, the x386. All running MS-DOS and maybe Windows 3.1 which debuted in 1992.

He wants to presume he could lay down a wad of cash - he said $15,000 for a PC that would tear the Amiga to pieces. In reality, the best he could have hoped for was VGA graphics, some nice looking games, lousy audio via the "Adlib" and similar cards. No music software to speak of and no Mods; he might have a nice .gif viewer by this time. CDROM drives were available but I don't imagine his Audio CDs sounded good on these machines yet.

He will not consider Youtube or similar vids or screengrabs. All he has to do is look up "$15,000 PC" on Youtube and he can see pretty much what was available. I found one, a x386 VGA PC for $17,000, ca. 1990. Not much better than what I just described above.

This argument ended about 3 pages ago. I don't know why he persists.

You keep saying "consumers" over and over again. I don't care what "consumers" had.

You don't have a case.

Your argument is basically:

"The Amiga was the best computer ever!"
"Oh yeah? What about these machines with demonstrably better performance? Such as higher colour depths and resolutions."
"Oh, you can't get them for Toys R Us prices!"

So what?

As I've said... Not everybody shares your budgetary constraints.

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

[robinsonb5]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Before this though, full colour cinema resolution graphics were achieved using film cameras: The final images would be rendered directly to film stock. You could get software for the PC which supported 360 million colour palettes and supported film cameras at resolutions as high as 4096x2732.

Speaking as someone who has experience of imagesetters in the print world, I find that genuinely fascinating. Definitely a process I want to read more about.

The point is, none of those computers were the Commodore Amiga.

I must have missed the part where someone claimed otherwise?

Originally Posted by Vascillious

You keep saying "consumers" over and over again. I don't care what "consumers" had.

And what you do or don't care about isn't really relevant to anyone other than you.

The reason the consumer space keeps being mentioned isn't price - it's opportunity, exposure and accessibility.

In the professional space you have a task in mind, you spec out the best machine for the job within budgetary constraints and you go ahead and make the purchase. Which is fine - you already know what it is you want to do, and you make your selection.

The point you seem to be missing is that most of us are here because we have fond memories of a machine which offered a well-rounded set of capabilities - certainly not the most advanced example of those capabilities, but for the time a decent and well-balanced offering - and because of that, gave us opportunities to discover and explore various computer-related creative fields that we wouldn't otherwise have had.

The Atari ST offered something similar, and a little later so did the Acorn Archimedes. In the mid-to-late 80s the kind of PC your average 10-year-old got to tinker with really didn't, no matter how advanced the hardware that was available in the professional space might have been.

"The Amiga was the best computer ever!"

Again, I must have missed the part where someone claimed that?

(Also note the difference between "my favourite" and "best". I know the PC I have to re-install tomorrow because Windows 10 shit itself during a power cut is a much better computer than my Amiga 500+. I also know which one I'd rather be using tomorrow!)

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by robinsonb5

Again, I must have missed the part where someone claimed that?

He's just babbling now. We've tried to tell him that no matter how much cash he wanted to lay down in 1985 or 1988, he wasn't going to get a PC that did half of what the Amiga was already doing and doing well. He can toss that video card he harps about right out the window because it had no practical application on the ca. 1988 PC he wants to build. For his money, he'd get VGA, a cheesy soundcard, and not much in the way of multimedia software. He could view .gifs. He couldn't even play an Audio CD when he was finished. He would, however, get some great games out of it. Try as he might, he could not build the multimedia computer the Amiga had already become in that timeframe, no matter how much money he threw at it.

1. He has no practical experience with Amigas
2. He has no practical experience with computers from the 1985 - 1992 era.

I responded to you because you had something to contribute. I won't respond to him any longer.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

He's just babbling now.

AND breaking forum rules, like making many separate posts one after the other, rather than one per hour unless someone responds.

AND still behaving like a troll.

AND finally getting on my nerves.

STFU, Vascillious!

[Weaselrama]

What's really ironic about this conversation is that in 1990 if he'd been willing to lay down about $4,000 or less, he could have had a 68040-powered NeXT Cube, the machine that built Doom, the machine that built the World Wide Web. It was, in fact, functionally and graphically better than the Amiga and could deliver a phenomenal multimedia experience out of the box, doing things that wouldn't be possible on a PC (and within a GUI) until Windows 95 came along 5 years later.

NeXTstep was eventually ported to other platforms as OPENSTEP. It was the mother of OS X.

Here's Jobs demoing it in 1992:

[ Show youtube player ]

[mcgeezer]

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Start here:

http://www.vgamuseum.info/images/doc/no9/

Note also, this is purely for the sake of putting a stake in the ground. I don't have to stick to that one. It just happens to be regarded by some as the first ever desktop microcomputer 24bit graphics card. What else had 24bit capability at that time I don't know, but one thing's for certain, none of them were the Commodore Amiga.

Yeah, and try shifting some pixels around on them cards which are all CPU driven, the Amiga architecture in comparison had a lot more tricks up its sleeve which I'll not bore you with because you don't really care.

Originally Posted by Vascillious

Amongst other people producing graphics cards for the PC at roughly the same time include TrueVision, Chorus Data Systems, Tecmar, Quadram, Vectrix, Focus Vision, Matrox, Verticom, Imagraph, Parallax Graphics.... and I could name others.

Yeah, and try shifting some pixels around on them cards which are all CPU driven, the Amiga architecture in comparison had a lot more tricks up its sleeve which I'll not bore you with because you don't really care.

Originally Posted by Vascillious

The only people the Amiga was really a "no brainer" choice for were those from families experiencing financial hardship. Which is why they repeat the same "But that's not what ordinary people could afford!". Yes, I know it wasn't and I don't care.

Yeah we, know you don't care, and we don't care that you don't care because you're probably Prince Akeem from Zamunda.

Originally Posted by Vascillious

It's a completely false metric. I'm not on a financial starvation diet. I'm NOT looking for a technical toy to go into a teenage boy's bedroom for under $1000. Those are NOT my specifications.

Utter fucking bullshit - You belong on an Elon Musk Space X mission, not on an Amiga forum - MATE.

[ Show youtube player ]

Geezer

[Weaselrama]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Geezer

I'm sorry, you cannot use the "G" word on EAB. Or call someone "manky." Ok, you didn't, but I did. That's ok, I'm certain I read it in the rules. There are no true Scotsmen here, just a bunch of Galls, Romish, Ostrogoths, and Scandanavians. English indeed.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Foebane

AND breaking forum rules, like making many separate posts one after the other, rather than one per hour unless someone responds.

AND still behaving like a troll.

AND finally getting on my nerves.

STFU, Vascillious!

It's because I'm responding to each person individually. Just as I'm about to do now, so everybody I'm responding to knows I'm responding only to what they wrote. Now I'm going to respond to somebody else. It's far more than an hour since I last posted and new posts have arrived. That's why I'm here, to respond to new posts which have arrived since the last time I was here, which is yesterday, not an hour ago. However, thanks for alerting me to the forum rules.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Yeah, and try shifting some pixels around on them cards which are all CPU driven, the Amiga architecture in comparison had a lot more tricks up its sleeve which I'll not bore you with because you don't really care.



Yeah, and try shifting some pixels around on them cards which are all CPU driven, the Amiga architecture in comparison had a lot more tricks up its sleeve which I'll not bore you with because you don't really care.



Yeah we, know you don't care, and we don't care that you don't care because you're probably Prince Akeem from Zamunda.



Utter fucking bullshit - You belong on an Elon Musk Space X mission, not on an Amiga forum - MATE.

[ Show youtube player ]

Geezer

"Yeah, and try shifting some pixels around on them cards which are all CPU driven"

They were NOT "all CPU driven". The claim you make is false. Many of them had graphics accelerators, graphics coprocessors and/or separate complete on-board microprocessors.


"the Amiga architecture in comparison had a lot more tricks up its sleeve which I'll not bore you with because you don't really care".

You are wrong again. Actually, I do care, which is why I came to an Amiga group. What better place to have my beliefs challenged? However you are also wrong to assume I don't know what "tricks" the Amiga had "up its sleeve". I am a professional computer programmer. It was a disliking for the Amiga hardware which caused me to switch from games machines to desktop computers for adults in nineteen eighties, as 286-based PCs started getting faster such that there was no longer any question that stock PCs were faster than stock Amigas. PCs also had a far larger user base. The additional "tricks" such as the sound chip, the "copper" and the "bitter" were useless for general application development. Most of the useful code in production oriented applications isn't doing raster-splits or moving sprites. Those things are great for games, but not for general applications. HAM6 was also pretty much useless for general applications.

[Foebane]

Vascillious, you DO know you're extremely unpopular around here, right? Why do you keep digging yourself a deeper hole?

[Weaselrama]

Epilogue:

By 1995, Timmy could finally build his dream multimedia PC. Windows 95 and a powerful x486 DX or perhaps with the first Pentium which had become available. The sky was now the limit on the number of software titles available to take advantage of graphics and sound. The first GPU (RTG) cards were becoming available. Oddly, one of the first, was designed for - drum roll please - the Amiga. No matter, Timmy had good stuff coming his way and it would only get better and better. In 1996, with a PPP dialer, he was off to explore the Internet via Netscape. He made a nice wall clock with one of the MS Encarta CDs and they made great coasters, too. Timmy had planned well and when Quake finally hit the shelves he was ready.

So what if 5 to 10 years earlier Timmy owned an Amiga or even a NeXT Cube to realize his dreams? No one blamed Timmy for setting those machines aside and joining the mid-90s PC revolution. Timmy went to sleep that night, his beloved PC on the desk across from his bed, illuminated by the soft glow of the Moon in the window, his Amiga 4000 a fond memory which, never dormant, would live again in emulation or with new peripherals and expansions, take advantage of new software that allowed it to do things for which it was never designed.

THE END.

[Vascillious]

Originally Posted by Weaselrama

He's just babbling now. We've tried to tell him that no matter how much cash he wanted to lay down in 1985 or 1988, he wasn't going to get a PC that did half of what the Amiga was already doing and doing well. He can toss that video card he harps about right out the window because it had no practical application on the ca. 1988 PC he wants to build. For his money, he'd get VGA, a cheesy soundcard, and not much in the way of multimedia software. He could view .gifs. He couldn't even play an Audio CD when he was finished. He would, however, get some great games out of it. Try as he might, he could not build the multimedia computer the Amiga had already become in that timeframe, no matter how much money he threw at it.

1. He has no practical experience with Amigas
2. He has no practical experience with computers from the 1985 - 1992 era.

I responded to you because you had something to contribute. I won't respond to him any longer.

"He's just babbling now. We've tried to tell him that no matter how much cash he wanted to lay down in 1985 or 1988, he wasn't going to get a PC that did half of what the Amiga was already doing and doing well. He can toss that video card he harps about right out the window because it had no practical application on the ca. 1988 PC he wants to build. For his money, he'd get VGA, a cheesy soundcard, and not much in the way of multimedia software"

You keep on repeating "multimedia" over and over again as if it's a magic word. You haven't shown me anything, as far as I recall.

As I've said already, my definition of multimedia requires moving video. Saying "multimedia" doesn't mean much when you are unable to attach it to any real-world outcome. I've already explained many times why it doesn't mean anything yet you keep on repeating it. As I've said already, you placing the Amiga into a category to which you have given no definition besides "what the Amiga did" doesn't get you anywhere. You can do the same with anything, for all it means. We can put YOU in a category all by yourself. So what? Without any real-world result it doesn't mean anything, and I think if you continue to repeat the same thing I'll just start ignoring you because I can't remember you showing me any Amiga getting any interesting result.

Show me some performance figures, for example, or accept you have nothing to say.

As we've already seen, your repeated appeal to the false comparison you're trying to force is false. It's the usual Amiga-fan process: Compare a late-stage Amiga to a C/E/VGA PC of 1982-1987, and ignore the fact there were many other options. You may be ignoring it, but I'm not.

As I have also said about the graphics card, I supplied it for only one reason: To make the point-of-fact that 24bit graphics was historically available for PC before it was for the Amiga, by a matter of about 7 years.

It also ignores high resolution cards with 1, 4, 8, 15 and 16 bit colour. It ignores all the other PC graphics cards with accelerators by NEC, Hitachi, Texas Instruments and Intel.

Also, you're ignoring the fact that if you want to talk about software availability, in the early 1980s, the Amiga has that problem far more.

What the PC definitely didn't have is a shortage of widely-used industry-standard business and office software, which is what most people who bought them used them for and, after that, probably a cheap single seat CAD workstation, after that, probably clinical imaging. Notice what they have in common? They're all applications for professionals.

As far as audio goes, you're forgetting Roland defined the Midi specifically for the connection of professional audio equipment to PCs, so the first "sound card" for the PC was Sequential Circuits' Prophet 600.

[ Show youtube player ]

So again, if you were a professional musician, you probably were still not better of with an Amiga. The purpose of four channel 8bit sound, with distortion problems, in a studio, was scarce, even then.