CompuServe Messages

You need one of the bridgeboards to run MS-Windows on an Amiga, and you'd want to plug in a VGA card (or one of those Windows accelerator cards) in an Amiga ISA slot as well as a Windows-compatible soundblaster type card in another slot to see and hear your X-Wing game to full effect. The various bridgeboards can run MS-Windows without a video card but then at best only in 16-color or monochrome VGA. Since Windows is a performance hog, you'd have to go for a 386 or 486 bridgeboard plus set aside a big partition on your Amiga hard drive for Windows files, or add a drive dedicated for bridgeboard use. Probably better off just having two computers — a Windows-based PC and an Amiga alongside. Use a monitor switchbox and they can share one screen. Don't count too much on "true" multitasking for IBM compatibles. On the Amiga, true multitasking is economical in terms of RAM use. On a PC, it will require Windows NT, which demands gobs of RAM and hard disk space. Plus, those machines will still be constrained by the 640K DOS limit, which can be gotten by but only with device kludges. NT will not be a cheap upgrade, just as "Multimedia PC" upgrades aren't cheap, compared to Amiga alternatives. You can approach Toaster quality on a PC if you buy a dedicated, EISA-compatible system equipped with the five-slot Matrox Studio. But that comes without software, takes over the machine and costs upwards of $25,000. The Toaster is in a class by itself in terms of price vs. performance, and will stay there for the foreseeable future, as witness "Babylon 5" and Steven Spielberg's recent decision to buy 30 Amiga Toasters for his next TV series. A plain-vanilla Amiga will outperform most Multimedia PCs in terms of audio quality and (in the case of AGA-equipped models) video output, and often in terms of rendering and execution speed. For the vast majority of PCs out there, configured as they are, the only advantage over most (non-AGA) Amigas is that if they have a Super VGA card they can run 256-color high res games, of which there aren't a whole bunch. Most high-end Amiga games run in 32 or 64 colors at lower resolutions than Super VGA, but there are a couple of HAM-based games, one (so far) AGA game, and one 24-bit (16.7 million-color) game if you own Opalvision. Expect to see more in the latter two categories. The computer industry is one big game of leap frog, and in AGA the Amiga just took a big leap forward. The PC industry has a solid base of useful machines and surely will leap again soon, too. But eventually (sooner than Commodore), PC makers will have to abandon backwards software and hardware support for existing MS-DOS platforms if they are to move their offerings ahead. The underlying technology is about a decade more dated than the oldest manufactured Amiga.