Re: Amelio's ouster

[nobody@REPLAY.COM (Anonymous)]

spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
>In article Toby Reiter <treiter@cs.oberlin.edu> writes...
>
>>For what most people need, a Mac handles sound as well as a PC or better.
>
>    As well or better? Explain to me how the Mac handles sound better,
>it appears your blindly praising anything with the rainbow Apple logo
>on it and assuming everything touched by Apple is better in some degree.
>
>    Music synthesis is not just for professional musicians and composers,
>it adds such flavor and feeling to a game, even excitement. There is such
>a day/night difference if I disable the background music in a game like
>Duke 3D, Blood, Arena (rather old, but neat music :), or countless other
>titles. Even thinking back, I doubt I would have taken such notice of
>games like Zany Golf or The Immortal on my IIGS had they been dead silent
>throughout the game. It's not just games either, multimedia applications
>and other software greatly benefit from music synthesis.
>
>    Again, this is a perfect example of how you blindly believe in Apple.
>If Apple does not include music-synthesis in their computers, then it is
>obviously a luxury item "said user will NEVER need" (to quote you from
>above). Apple does not know best, they haven't for years now.

To be fair to the Mac, they do have sound addons.  A couple of years back,
I saw an advertisement for a Yamaha box, sort of like a wavetable card on
a cable that plugs into a Mac.  It is driven by software and generates
32 oscillator sound.

The main problem with Mac sound cards or peripherals such as this is that
they are not very supported.  That's the danger of having some sound
hardware built in, but not very state of the art.  Programmers go for the
lowest common denominator.  It is one thing to introduce a GS with an
(in 1986) state of the art Ensoniq chip, but it is another to introduce
a Mac with a simple ADC and hope that programmers would support an
addon card that's better than it.  Either do it like the GS or do it like
the PC.

Because the GS had a state of the art chip for its time, much software
took advantage of great sound.  Because the PC has no built in sound,
software supported many sound cards of varying qualities.  But since
the Mac has built in sub-par sound, even though it _does_ have great
sound cards available, programmers mainly support the built-in (inferior)
hardware to the superior sound cards available.

>
>>Since when are Macs stuck in one OS? We can run a Mac form of Linux (don't
>>know the name) as well as a somewhat old port of Unix, AU/X (although I
>>don't know if it works on PPC processor),
>
>    That Unix port has to run inside a GUI window, and that is running
>on top of MacOS.

Luckily for Mac users, the next Mac OS will use the NeXT microkernal,
which is based on Unix.  This will solve this problem.

>
>>PPC's can run Windows NT (without emulation or extra hardware)
>>and MS-DOS, MS-Windows, and MS-Windows 95 with proper hardware or
>>emulation software. Guess that means Macs can run as many OS's as a PC and
>>then some (granted some of them quicker than others).
>
>    Emulating a PC and running Windows 95, NT or DOS doesn't quite count,
>no more than I consider my PC has ProDOS, GS/OS, Amiga Workbench, MacOS,
>Atari GEM or countless other emulated systems as alternative operating
>systems. Can you run Windows 95/NT exclusively for handling the files on
>your hardrive, doing day to day work and never have to see, touch or run
>Mac System 7.5.6 again?

SoftWindows for the PPC is not like GuS or UAE (Amiga emulator).  It is
much more optimized.  This emulation is more like the emulation the PPC
uses to run 68K Mac software, and it is good.  So good, in fact, that
for day to day tasks, you can use a fast PowerMac to do PC tasks.
Faster than even a fast '486 and maybe even matching Pentium speeds
in some tasks.

I agree, however, that GuS, UAE, or XGS are far inferior and can't
reproduce a true GS or Amiga (these computers have custom hardware,
unlike a PC).

>    Yep, this is starting to drag on and in circles it seems, I rather
>be discussing Apple II topics anyhow. :)
>

Got sucked in.  :(

-Scott G.