CompuServe Messages

Kelly, (One small nitpick… in the current 640-wide, 3-plane mode, there's chip bus contention to the tune of 40-50% cpu slots used up by video DMA.) An easy "fix" is to either take Steve's idea of a latch to allow grabbing 32 bits at a time; or to take advantage of the page-mode in today's DRAMs to grab two 16-bit video DMA chunks… bam-bam.. in the same amount of time. The future: One thing to remember is that the low-end systems are the most popular. 24-bit color on those is unlikely for a long while yet. Another sidenote is that I was surprised to find that many Amiga owners expect to get a new chipset that will backfit into their current system (unlikely, tho possible if not much is done). Therefore I see the best bet as to simply improve base gfx to 8-planes in lores mode, and then to also come out with bus-based video cards for the mid and higher end machines. I also don't think that being a niche machine is something too terrible. We know it was when we bought it, yah? 🙂 PS: It is known that Commodore is working on device-independent graphics… but that will no doubt take some time to complete. – kevin