#BYTE Previews A3000
11 messages in this thread
I suppose most of you have seen the cover article in the latest BYTE
magazine about the Amiga 3000. It's very interesting; I wonder how close
the actual product will be to that described. If past BYTE preview
articles on Amigas are any guide, it'll be fairly close.
The article mentions support for Adobe fonts and rescalable fonts as new
features of the "OS 2.0" that will be standard on the 3000. I like the
sound of Adobe fonts and rescalable fonts, but "OS 2.0" sounds a little too
much like something else we hear a lot about….
I was pleasantly surprised by the over-all balance of the article
-comparing the 3000 very favorably to a Mac II (similar performance at
$3000 less cost) but pointing out the (as yet) unmet need to integrate 8
and 24 bit graphics modes while maintaining compatibility with existing
software. The author sounded quite enthusiastic about the 3000. The
pictures of the computer and a sample WB/Preferences screen looked good,
too.
Far out! Haven't gotten my BYTE yet, durn it! I knew it'd make the cover,
just didn't know when. Thx for the notice!
It's really a nice "preview" article, IMHO. It explains briefly, but
relatively well, how the new Zorro III bus standard works and it also
explains how the new noninterlaced video modes work. I didn't realize
before that the 3000 will have a 31.5 kHz output for use by ordinary VGA
monitors in all video modes as well as the 15.75 RGB port found in earlier
Amigas. Other stuff described that I hadn't heard about before mentioned
in the preview included a descripotion of the backplane expansion board
system, the "Ramsey" fast memory controller which decides for you whether a
memory access should be "ordinary" or burst mode, the ability to have up to
16 megs of fast memory (in addition to a two meg maximum chip memory) on
the motherboard, the 200 pin CPU expansion slot (I liked the comment in the
caption to the motherboard picture: "Food for thought: The 68040 comes in a
179-pin package), and the suggested retail price (including 50 meg 17ms
SCSI drive) of $3495 for the 3000/16 (16 mHz '030 and '881) and $3995 fot
eh 3000/25 (25 mHz '030 and '882).
Darron,
I haven't received my sub copy yet. Did you get your copy from a newsstand?
–Tom
Tom,
Yes, I got my copy off a news stand. I also got email from Bob
Ryan, the author of the preview article, asking me where I got my copy of
the magazine. It appears that the May issue was not supposed to be
released until next week so the article could appear at the same time as
CBM made its official product announcement. Byte wants to track down the
folks who got their magazine on the racks early. I guess no good deed goes
unpunished.
Darron
Kevin,
I am actually quite surprised that it would make the cover. After all, it
only has a couple extra graphic modes, and a few things built-in, more
memory capability, smaller footprint, and so on.. not at all like the usual
revolutionary stuff they usually put on the cover, like yet another clone,
with a slightly higher clock speed.
-larry
Larry,
What extra graphic modes (resolution and # of colors) does Byte say
the A3000 has?
–Rocco–
Rocco,
Sorry.. can't remember. I haven't seen it myself, and only read reports
of the contents. Pretty much what was expected I think.
-larry
With any luck, someone with the article will leave this
information.
Rocco–
The 3000 has all the new denise modes we've been hearing about, but
it deinterlaces all of them, even 640×960.
— Ethan
Ethan, simple mathematics shows that this cannot be true. To display 960
lines 60 times a second would require a monitor with a horizontal scan rate
of approximately 60 KHz. Such a monitor has never been proposed for use
with any Amiga. It seems to me that there is no need to add to the
confusion caused by two years of rumors about the ECS. Peter.