Re: Exciting developments in Commodore world -- Ideas for GS dev?

[Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net>]

Ole Voss writes ...
>
> .... 
> most things can be done without involving a GUI.... and
> often things can be done very much faster when programming them decently -
> take a look at Win95.

     Win95 is like the old FireSign Theatre pickup truck someone kept
painting scenes from the Bible on-- eventually, you end up just parking
the thing off some highway and worshipping it.


     That Graphical User Interfacing is not viewed as essential by II
users could become important should we start putting out GS upgrade
prototypes. Once we scrap the FPI and other performance-killing Apple
IC's, we are likely to face an abrupt trade-off.
 
     We'll have much better speed, lots of RAM, much nicer video and
sound hardware, ..., but, PROMs that are mostly empty. Like, for the
first few months we could be starting with a Monitor display and
programming in Assem.

     Mike Westerfield's BASIC might be available for the new machine--
that would, certainly, be a _big_ help-- and, there would be an
opprotunity to go to a DOS which can handle really large volumes. A new
GUI GS/OS could take several months.


> I use it everyday for the things I do, and although I have a PII-266 stocked
> with 128MB RAM, 8MB Graphics and 3DFX card etc - it's quite a power system, it
> probably ran faster when using MSDOS..... shucks. Like I say to people I know
> laughing about the Apple II "It does what it's supposed to do faster than the
> PC!".
> Agree or not?
>

     Sometimes. The current GS isn't much of a JPEG or GIF machine. On
the other hand, I've only done one System 6.0.1 install-- several years
ago. I'm not sure how many times I re-installed Windows 95/2 before
figuring out that you stay away from a certain net browser which shall
remain nameless.

     Regarding the 8MB graphics + 3DFX stuff, it makes for very nice
displays. It also signals the end of pretending that PC is a unified
platform.  


Rubywand


P.S. By the way, Ole, your computer appears to be set on Venus Standard
Time. VST, of course, is the Sol Gal-chron Reference; however, this
makes it kind of difficult for Earther newsgroups to retain accurate
message sequencing.