State of computer graphics when Amiga was born...

[Galahad/FLT]

Having a difference of opinion is fine, its how that opinion is put across that is the issue.

We're all adults here, yet some people think that the anonymity afforded them means they can be as rude as they like.

He got up my nose because it was obvious what his schtick was, and nothing was being done about it, to the point that I put him on ignore, deleted a PM he sent me unread, yet he was still writing posts as if I could see them. His motives to me were clear.

I don't want to be over Moderator criticial, but Vascillious made his intentions clear from the outset, inspite of several people encouraging him to be less combative, he still continued, and then had the temerity to complain when those that had given him a friendly warning to cut it out, decided they'd had enough and treated him with the same "respect" he had treated others.

Vascillious wants to rewrite history and thinks that because he owned an Amiga for five minutes in the 80's, that somehow he is uniquely placed to have a honest opinion about it, and then when its quite obvious he doesn't know much beyond perusing Wikipedia, ignores when he has been proved wrong, and tries his best to amplify the combat.

At that point, he should have had his final warning and been binned when he couldn't keep it civil.

Zarchos simply reads what he wants from posts, even when people say "yeah, the Archimedes was great for vector stuff, much better than the Amiga", he'll only focus on posts that suggest that when it comes to stuff like Beast and Jim Power, the Arc with 512K can't do it.

The latter is obviously quite irritated that the Amiga bested the Arc commercially by such a degree that he's still feeling the effects of the spanking some 30+ years later.

We have had people champion other machines on here, we've even got plenty of Atari ST/e/Falcon people on here, but its never degenerated into this shitfest that Vascillious thought it was appropriate to bring.

We are all aware of the Amigas strengths and shortcomings, its just laughable someone like Vascillious thinks he's here to tell us something new or entirely revisionist.

The PC in 1985 was...... man, it couldn't even scroll a 2 colour screen saver message without the screen tearing and stuttering!

[d4rk3lf]

Exactly,

That's why I'd personally never bothered to read anything more then few sentences (after reading his first few posts, and after realizing his goal).
It's just... there's so much more positive stuff... people.
Here on this forum, people like Tsak, Daedalus, and many others just post around with awesome tips on everything, pure gold to read.
Why would anyone waste it's time on these trolls, instead of learning valuable stuff from others?

I'll tell you why - for fun only.
No other reason.

He is being taken too serious... not by you maybe.. just talking overall... I feel bad some good people wasted time explaining troll...

Well, when I am think of it... maybe not waste of time.. it's still valuable information for many others then Vascillious.

[Weaselrama]

I'm not thrilled that people exist out there who can successfully rewrite history and convince others - younger people who have no experience with computers of that era, and who don't know any better, that the Amiga was weak compared to PCs that existed ca. 1985. Then the nonsense spreads and grows. Too many people out there willing to redact history to fit their own agenda.

Facts in service of the truth. As long as you state the facts as written and documented during the era in question, that should be the guiding narrative, along with the proof provided by keeping the Amiga alive via classic hardware or emulation. One by one, we trashed his redacted nonsense and he kept coming back for more, moving the goal posts each time. His name calling was indicative of the impotence he felt knowing he couldn't control the narrative - not here anyway. I don't think his anger was just theater - his diatribes were in the style of rage-posting complete with insults including calling us "liars."

It bothered me that he thought he could appeal to EAB moderators or that his redacted view of the microcomputer era of the early 80s had a place here.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Holly kitten in the sky.
Reading this thread after the apocalypse was painful...

I am usually anti-ban (Damien can confirm) but I am impressed at how long you creatures lasted before banning this sad person.

[BippyM]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I don't want to be over Moderator criticial, but Vascillious made his intentions clear from the outset, inspite of several people encouraging him to be less combative, he still continued, and then had the temerity to complain when those that had given him a friendly warning to cut it out, decided they'd had enough and treated him with the same "respect" he had treated others.

<snip>

At that point, he should have had his final warning and been binned when he couldn't keep it civil.

I agree however, the problem is: almost all the moderators have families and real life. I for one work 50-60hr weeks, and then have a family to dedicate time to. Moderating isn't as convenient as it was for me 10-15 yrs ago!


We rely on members reporting posts, members and threads and we will act there. As soon as I was made aware of this I reacted and banned the idiot. If reporting a post doesnt work, just PM me. I will act as soon as viably possible (usually within an hour or two)



Let's get back on topic now, and forget this idiot!

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Holly kitten in the sky.
Reading this thread after the apocalypse was painful...

I am usually anti-ban (Damien can confirm) but I am impressed at how long you creatures lasted before banning this sad person.

A cat in comparison has less lives

Anyway, on topic I often wonder/wish I were a fly on the wall to see people's first reaction to the Amiga Boing Ball demo at CES '85.

[lesta_smsc]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

Its fun to look back at these things..
Below is a link to a "Computer Chronicles" episode from 1984 about "Computer Graphics".
Now, 1984 was the year the first Amiga prtotypes were shown at CES and so on.. This is the world they were entering..

Youtube link:

[ Show youtube player ]

This makes great viewing. The incredible thing is this was 'cutting edge' at that time and even looking back at it now I am still in awe thinking this is something commonly used today and taken for granted!

[d4rk3lf]

I'll post here example of Real3D scene
[ Show youtube player ]

I also rendered this scene on my Amiga 500, with Aca500 plus.
I only disabled bump on the teapot (and I think it looked better), and the rest is the same.
If I recall correctly, it was 7 minutes render.
So, on a plain A500, it would be 15-20 minutes per frame.

For me, that's an AMAZING result for a 1985 hardware, both in looks, and render speed.

With Amiga 4000, more ram, higher resolution, Lightwave, some Lightwave plugins for particle effects, I will repeat (like on the other thread), I think Amiga was capable for effects on pair with Independence Day, and Starship Troopers.

[Weaselrama]

I often wonder if people who are new to the Amiga Retro scene, or at least, are interested to check out what the hullabaloo is about, aren't put-off by some pictures of the Workbench running at low-resolution with the original 4-color icons and horribly wide window frame components and buttons and the weird backdrop window and look no further.

When I upgraded my Amiga 1000 to the 2.04 ROM with the Insider II/Kwikstart II boards, I have to admit, I was really disappointed with how the 640x200 (?) NTSC Workbench looked. It already seemed archaic in 1992 considering how the Mac II and Win 3.1 looked. I ran it in 640x400 interlaced and bought an external flicker-fixer screen that I duct-taped over my monitor. Mind you, I didn't have a good monitor - I was still using the Commordore monitor I'd used with the C64 which effectively was just nominally better than a decent TV. But even with a proper monitor like the 1084(?) or a Multiscan that my buddy ran with his 500, those resolutions just didn't look "modern" by 1992 PC/Mac standards. Of course, this is the difference between OCS/ECS vs SVGA.

If you're going to show off the Amiga Workbench in all its glory, higher resolution and at least Magic Workbench are must-haves to make the Amiga at least seem like it belonged to the computer world of the early 90s regardless of its outstanding capabilities.

I remember being thrilled checking out the AGA Amigas that came to the computer store in 1992. Two things stand out in my memory: Being able to view pictures in their own windows on the Workbench instead of being shown alone in a separate screen, and how crisp the mouse pointer looked in Distant Suns. When I ran Distant Suns on my 1000, the pointer was at a lower res and was "squashed."

I understand that Commodore was trying to update the Workbench running in an 80s graphical environment and making it compatible with both ECS/OCS and AGA. Aesthetics meant a lot to me which is why I was floored by NeXTstep which looked great even at lower res. The Workbench can just look garish until some improvements like MWB are introduced.

EDIT: I realize the up-side to all this is that it made the Amiga extremely configurable to suit the user's tastes. And we do.

[amiman99]

Lets go on topic, here is an example of graphics in 1985 that was available to corporations, movie studios, animators, researchers.
SGI IRIS 2400 costing probably $100,000s.

[ Show youtube player ]

[Amigajay]

I thought Vascillious had a limit of $15000! Or was it $150000!?

[Weaselrama]

We really need to get off the topic of this guy and his phony specs before the thread gets locked again.

The IRIS was a phenomenal machine in its day. 5 years later, the NeXT Cube was able to offer a lot of its functionality. I think I posted this video earlier but I think it was deleted. This is Jobs demoing the NeXT Cube in 1990. Compare it with what Win95 would do 5 years later. Doom was created on this computer as was the World Wide Web. There was nothing like it's visual Objective C programming environment, an idea that was borrowed from Xerox' Smalltalk environment. The NeXT Cube was cheaper than the SGI but was still prohibitively expensive at around $4,000.00, a price targeted to college students? C'mon Steve...

I wish this video was clearer - it's the best copy I could find. Mind you, there is another video of Jobs demoing the NeXT Cube 2 years earlier in 1988 as well.

[ Show youtube player ]

[pandy71]

State of graphic was strictly related with lithography of those times, thanks to Ronald Reagan decision about starting so called "star wars" a lot of money was pumped to create lithography below 1um - this is brake trough that made 24 bit at reasonable price available for personal computers (decade later). Ubiquitous solutions like multiple upd7220 was generally not in mainstream - Amiga technology is breakthrough for personal computer market - drawing lines, bitblit, fill, PCM with decent quality was before not available as standard for mass market. This should close all weird discussions about 24 bit in Intel PC.
Vascillious mixing technology - Amiga use same memory to store program and data with graphic - this is UMA approach, upd7220 use local frame buffer (and doesn't allow CPU to access video memory (except very small amount of time), instead it use FIFO to store commands from CPU and it is relatively slow (800ns per pixel).
Never the less - some archival Byte number will shed some light on reality - 64Kb DRAM with access cycle approx 250ns this is reality of 1984, 256Kb DRAM just become to be available and fastest access cycle is like 200ns. I is not possible to create 24 bit display without sophisticated memory interleaving (it means high cost of PCB - many wires on board).