CompuServe Messages

Oooh… What a question! <grin> You'll probably get lots of response to this one, but I warn you, we're all going to be biased towards the Amiga in our comments… <grin> The Amiga has very nice built in Graphics. It's difficult to place the Amiga graphics quality because it does things differently than the competition, but I would rate it slightly better than a VGA, overall. (There are third party graphics add ons which drive it to significantly better graphics, but we'll stick to standard Amiga capabilities for this message…) The Amiga built in sound quality is superb, outmatching any other micro's built in sound, and most 3rd party addons for other machines. And you can easily and inexpensively add MIDI support, so you can hook up other sound devices (like an MT-32…) with ease. As far as Video support is concerned, the Amiga is totally unmatched. It was *designed* for video from the ground up. And with NewTek's Video Toaster board, you can go where no micro has gone before… 🙂 The Amiga OS supports *real* multitasking, and does it in a fraction of the memory needed by other systems. It has both a GUI and a command line interface for the best of both worlds. Support for AREXX allows applications to talk to each other in various ways. And it's *my* favorite development environment, and I've used them all… 🙂 Lessee, lots of animation, graphics, sound, presentation, titling, games, raytracing, and similar arts type applications available. Desktop Publishing, Word Processing, Spreadsheet, and Database software is also available, but not as common. I think the ONLY advantages the other machines really have is a larger installed base (at least in the USA), and a larger variety of business software. Now, as for what to get, to get you started… If you intend to do any serious expansion in the future of any type, I suggest you go for one of the A2000 series. Even if you go for the base A2000 and a monitor (which will run you somewhere around $1500, I think… Maybe less…) [continued]