Re: New IIgs owner.

[Roy Miller <millers@inetnebr.com>]

Supertimer wrote:

> Roy Miller <millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:
>
> >Blake Patterson wrote:
> >
> >> supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) wrote:
> >>
> >> > The Apple IIGS is most similar to the Amiga 1000 in the C= world.
> >> > It doesn't have a 68000 processor but in every other aspect, it is
> >> > more Amiga-like than C64-like.  The ideal memory range of the
> >> > IIGS is 4MB to 8MB of memory which is direct accessed, not
> >> > page flipped.  The IIGS also has a display palette of 4096 colors
> >> > up to 3200 of which can be used in a display at once.  The sound
> >> > chip was the most advanced in its time - 32 channel wavetable
> >> > synthesis (the oscillators are doubled up for higher quality sound
> >> > resulting in 16 voices if you use the OS tools).
> >>
> >> The video / graphics situation with the IIgs makes it more like an
> >> Atari ST than an Amiga.
> >
> >The first ST had fewer on screen colors at 320x200 than the GS did at 640x200.
> I think the GS, in the
> >color and sound department was roughly in the same league as the first ST and
> first Amiga, but let's face
> >it, the 65816 at 2.8 mhz is blown away by the 68000 at 8 mhz.
>
> There was a time when I could have spent the entire day arguing the
> point but I no longer have the time to waste on such luxuries.  ;-)
>
> Suffice to say that I have used an Amiga 500 before and the IIGS'
> processor is not nearly as slow as its Mhz will lead you to believe.

Was this caused by CPU power/speed, or OS/GUI overhead? In otherwords. Were the two
chips at those two different speeds really nearly equal, or was the Amiga forced to
do more than it's CPU should have been asked to do? OR, was it a matter of RAM, so
that the 512K of the Amiga was forced to go to disk too much?

>
> Sort of similar to how the Athlon XP processors are faster than
> much higher clocked Pentium 4's.

Well, I do know that the 6502 family was/is a very efficient design. But I had read
that the 68000 family was also.

>
>
> Graphics I might agree with what you are saying.  The Amiga had
> the edge on the other two though when it came to MOVING
> graphics thanks to a blitter chip.  Sound,

I don't think we would have a disagreement here. My comments were directed to color
and resolution. I think the GS beat out the Atari here, and was somewhere between
the ST and the Amiga.

Roy

> however, is another
> matter.  There is no way either the Atari ST or the Amiga 1000's
> built in sound can be anywhere near comparable to the advanced
> sound of the IIGS in its day.  The IIGS had a professional sound
> chip of its day inside.  How many channels did the ST and the
> Amiga have?  How was the wavetable synthesis of either (hint:
> there was a hack job that allowed the Amiga to do some
> wavetable synthesis but that halved its already meager voices
> compared to the IIGS).  And external sound you ask?  Sure,
> the Atari ST had MIDI but the IIGS serial port accepted MIDI
> boxes designed for the Macintosh.  I bought one myself for my
> IIGS.  The IIGS also had a full suite of notation and MIDI
> software for composing.
>
> Give credit where credit is due.  The IIGS was a milestone in
> computer sound.  I liked the Ensoniq chip so much that when
> I found Creative sound cards with more advanced versions of
> the same technology (Audio PCI), I bought them for all my
> PCs.