Which 24bit Card
3 messages in this thread
I think that the time has finally come to consider buying a display card
for my A2000. But am somewhat lost in the sea of the new crop of famous
painters, magicians etc.
I will be most grateful for any info and help in deciding what to buy. My
uses are mainly 3D (REAL3d & Vistapro 3), but can't rule out DTP and 2D
animations. My son plays a lot of games.
I would like to retain an upgrade path i.e have a ZorroII/ZorroIII
compatible card.
If I buy a non AGA emulation board can I still use all the 256 colours of
Pro-Page, and other such AGA compatible programs?
Do any games work on the AGA cards?
Should I go for RTG as well as AGA or instead of?.
Is my Amiga chip RAM still required for music sampling etc?
So far I've considered Merlin, Picasso & Spectrum.
Your opinions and help are received with my thanks.
Dave Kay
David,
I don't know about the SPECTRUM at all; PICASSO II seems to be a nice
little board which is (at least up to now) limited to only 2Megs of
video RAM which is ok if it does its Workbench emultation by ways of
copying the contents of the Amiga's ChipMem area to the board for
display but then you have to consider that big colourful screens eat
up your chipmem in no time so you should consider a board that does
Intuition emulation without using the Amiga's ChipMem. At the moment,
I don't know of any(!). RETINA is said to do its Workbench emulation
by chipmem-copy, too (but it can have up to 4Megs of Video RAM and
works with VLab for video digitizing), and MERLIN's Intuition
emulator still uses Chipmem as of v1.36beta of 30 Sep 1993. But we're
promised the new version will make do without ChipCopy. X-Pert have
put all their effort into the new feature called Screen-In-Window,
which in effect means that you can have a program with its own screen
running in a window on Workbench. It's one their new PIP tricks, we
already have an ILBM PIP-Show and a JPEG PIP-Show ;v) where you can
display pictures up to 256 colours on a 4-colour Workbench… I'd
rather they'd have gone for the things that bother ME, namely getting
rid of ChipMem dependency (the 'real' emulation is still disabled…
:v( )
The EGS-28/24 SPECTRUM does not use any ChipMemory when running Workbench! It
redirect all display data and functions to use the onboard display memory of
the EGS-28/24 SPECTRUM board and returns the ChipMemory to the free list for
audio or other use.
Gary Nush