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By the early 90s the design and graphics-focused software for color Macintosh systems was light years better than Amiga. And the high-end video modes on Macs si

By the early 90s the design and graphics-focused software for color Macintosh systems was light years better than Amiga. And the high-end video modes on Macs simply worked out of the box. If you needed a Gen-locked system for your local TV station, sure - get an Amiga. Ironically the custom chips that made the Amiga so special and a natural fit for broadcast design is also what killed its ability to use interlaced video modes that didn't make your eyes bleed or require special hardware. Most folks by then didn't want to learn how to make the Amiga "do all the same things". They wanted to go to the store, buy a computer that worked like the ones at school or work and use it. Period. I have a Quadra 700 (same era as the Amiga 3000, which I also have) that can run circles around the 3000 with far less power or needed upgrades. For example by adding a decent video card the Q700 can output to dual monitors, each running their own resolutions and color depths - while multi-tasking. I can install triple-A CD-based software titles (like Photoshop or Illustrator or Pagemaker or MS Word) and on and on. The tools on Amiga pale in comparison even while the hardware was cool. In the 80s the Amiga was magical. By 1992 the way it seemingly just stood still was tragic. As previously stated, high-quality print had become a "killer app" and Amiga simply didn't get the same support. And a lot of this had to do with their native video modes. I can throw video cards and processor cards at the Amiga and make it a much more technically impressive machine. But if I want to run A+ professional software on it I basically need to run a Mac emulator. As the video points out, the gaming market by '92 was moving on in the US. For 2D the SNES and Genesis took over. For 3D the PC arms race had begun, and there was no looking back.

ngcc_hk 2y ago
Re-watching steve talk in Stanford and wondered about this calligraphy and font. But these discusssion about DTP reconfirmed how important this understanding make Apple unique. At that time and even afterwards due to the importance of fonts.
ChainOfFools 2y ago
From the same era was this oddball solution[0], which at the time I had thought was something that never got out of R&D but apparently did exist as a commercial product in laughably limited numbers. The a2024 monitor did not require any changes to the Amiga that drove it, except that software needed to be aware that it existed which naturally almost none did. It basically just used the bitplane model as a tiling frame buffer and rather than displaying four or five bits of color depth, dropped the color depth by half and interpreted different colors as shades of gray using some monitor translation profile type of thing. Again software would have to know how to play ball with this to work, but the effect was that you got a rock solid 60 hertz screen that displayed, initially, 8 or 16 shade greyscale at 1024 x 800 resolution. There was a limitation in that the individual quadrants of the screen could only be redrawn at 10 or 15hz even though the scan rate of the tube was non-interlaced 60hz. Subjectively, having seen this thing in person I didn't get the sense that it made much noticeable difference for the kinds of applications that would use it, which would be principally dtp or coding. The computed vector refresh rate of the entire display field was in general nowhere near quick enough for the raster quadrant paging to be noticeable, except in vertical scrolling. Sadly this was obviously was a desperate if rather clever hack solution to the eye-strain drawbacks of the Amigas interlaced display at high resolutions, so no software support however appeared that would have driven further work in this direction. However had that happen, and the technique applied to this monitor was updated to match the capabilities of the AGA chipset, the resolution would have been potentially as high as 2360 by 1024 at 75hz, (edit: should be 60hz. 75hz possible "only" at 1600x1200) which comfortably exceeds HD (though only in greyscale) but for 1992 would have been safely well out in front of almost anything else at any price range, let alone a few thousand dollars. Given the awkward aspect ratio, a more sensible use of that resolution would have been splitting it vertically into a dual monitor setup, although one would need two identical monitors to make that work. and the Amiga's version of multiple virtual desktops, pull-down screens, would have been impossible to make work effectively, and one wd have to do multitasking entirely on the workbench display in full-screen application windows like the Mac. But at least it would have been preemptive multitasking, which clearly was entirely worth all of the extra associated hazards of multitasking without an mmu-aware kernel. /s [0] https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863 https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Workbench had support for this mode.
Grustaf 2y ago
Sure, the mac was superior but it was also a lot more expensive, well outside what most people could afford.

ngcc_hk 2y ago

Re-watching steve talk in Stanford and wondered about this calligraphy and font. But these discusssion about DTP reconfirmed how important this understanding make Apple unique. At that time and even afterwards due to the importance of fonts.

ChainOfFools 2y ago

From the same era was this oddball solution[0], which at the time I had thought was something that never got out of R&D but apparently did exist as a commercial product in laughably limited numbers. The a2024 monitor did not require any changes to the Amiga that drove it, except that software needed to be aware that it existed which naturally almost none did. It basically just used the bitplane model as a tiling frame buffer and rather than displaying four or five bits of color depth, dropped the color depth by half and interpreted different colors as shades of gray using some monitor translation profile type of thing. Again software would have to know how to play ball with this to work, but the effect was that you got a rock solid 60 hertz screen that displayed, initially, 8 or 16 shade greyscale at 1024 x 800 resolution. There was a limitation in that the individual quadrants of the screen could only be redrawn at 10 or 15hz even though the scan rate of the tube was non-interlaced 60hz. Subjectively, having seen this thing in person I didn't get the sense that it made much noticeable difference for the kinds of applications that would use it, which would be principally dtp or coding. The computed vector refresh rate of the entire display field was in general nowhere near quick enough for the raster quadrant paging to be noticeable, except in vertical scrolling. Sadly this was obviously was a desperate if rather clever hack solution to the eye-strain drawbacks of the Amigas interlaced display at high resolutions, so no software support however appeared that would have driven further work in this direction. However had that happen, and the technique applied to this monitor was updated to match the capabilities of the AGA chipset, the resolution would have been potentially as high as 2360 by 1024 at 75hz, (edit: should be 60hz. 75hz possible "only" at 1600x1200) which comfortably exceeds HD (though only in greyscale) but for 1992 would have been safely well out in front of almost anything else at any price range, let alone a few thousand dollars. Given the awkward aspect ratio, a more sensible use of that resolution would have been splitting it vertically into a dual monitor setup, although one would need two identical monitors to make that work. and the Amiga's version of multiple virtual desktops, pull-down screens, would have been impossible to make work effectively, and one wd have to do multitasking entirely on the workbench display in full-screen application windows like the Mac. But at least it would have been preemptive multitasking, which clearly was entirely worth all of the extra associated hazards of multitasking without an mmu-aware kernel. /s [0] https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863 https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863

actionfromafar 2y ago
Workbench had support for this mode.

Grustaf 2y ago

Sure, the mac was superior but it was also a lot more expensive, well outside what most people could afford.