##59851-Eating Crow
3 messages in this thread
To All
I want to thank all of those who took the time to reply to my (Eating
Crow) message. Basically, they all said the same thing, get an Amiga. Actually
I did give that serious consideration about a year ago, when I saw a
demonstration of Imagine run on one. But the sad fact is that to get the power
and speed and video output I wanted would set me back about $4,500 to $5,500.
So when I heard that Impulse was porting Imagine to the PC, I decided to wait
and run it on my PC. Had I known of what the Amiga could do before I started
in computing I probably would have opted for an Amiga.
However, things are improving rapidly for the PC. The statement "It can't
be done on a PC ", is no longer true. The PC can do almost everything that the
Amiga can do, and do it well. And for those areas where it still lags, I
suspect that in less than a year the gap will be closed. Ten years ago the
Amiga and the PC took different paths, those paths are now closing at an ever
faster pace. The short version, I like my PC! Now if the engineers at
Commodore would wise up, and put out an Amiga card that would plug into my 486
Vesa Local Bus slot, I would give that very serious consideration.
Ralph Marbach
>>Ten years ago the Amiga and the PC took different paths, those paths are
now closing at an ever faster pace. The short version, I like my PC! Now
if the engineers at Commodore would wise up, and put out an Amiga card
that would plug into my 486 Vesa Local Bus slot, I would give that very
serious consideration.<<
Two corrections:
1) The Amiga has only been on the market for 8 years
2) Make that: "…the [engineer] at Commodore…" <sigh>
Ralph,
you are right in many areas. Imagine/PC _is_ an excellent purchase; it
offers a much wider and deeper set of functions than similarly-priced PC "toy"
renderers. And yes, video on the PC is moving forward at an impressive speed.
Consider that when the Amiga first came out, in 1985, it offered multitasking,
4-channel sound, real-time animation and 4096 simultaneous colors; most PCs
didn't have color graphics _at all_, or a mice. Heck, many PCs only had a
monochrome text display! Nowadays, PCs have fast processors, sound cards,
accelerated high-color video cards, a windowing environment and much
development work. You're still not there: witness the compatibility nightmares
which only get worse as your equipment approaches the "gee-whiz" systems
glowingly touted on magazine covers, with little coverage of their unstability;
in the meantime, the Amiga tends to perform like a champ for those leading-edge
applications. But, as you say, it's nothing that time can't fix. In a year or
two, the Video Toaster will be even more advanced than it is now, but
inferior-yet-similar products will satisfy PC owners who'll say "I don't need
all that; I'm happy with my VideoMonger board". The main thing about the PC is
its huge user base, and the fact that this user base has many more businesses
and professionals which aren't afraid of paying for performance. Ergo, lots of
R & D, lots of improvement all the time.
Blaq!