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Offline Sean Cunningham

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #74 from previous page: April 24, 2014, 11:20:42 PM »
I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993.  All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines."  How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.

I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994.  Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days.   The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).
 

Offline slaapliedje

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #75 on: April 24, 2014, 11:58:12 PM »
Quote from: Sean Cunningham;763255
I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993.  All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines."  How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.

I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994.  Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days.   The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).

Yeah, it really is messed up when you think about it.  It really is a big part of why the 'PC' kept getting bigger and faster hardware, all for those extra frames in games.  Granted now it also helps with streaming video, and ripping, etc.  

Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI.  SGIs were way expensive.  

Reminds me of the Mega STe and TT030 line of computers.  Atari were 'getting serious' and trying to make a dent in the DTP market.  What happened with that?  Well Pagestream got it's start on the Atari ST, but then stopped supporting it around 2.0-2.2 or something, yet Pagestream still make an Amiga Classic version, along with OS4.  

Same thing with the big box Amigas, I think they were trying to market them toward being professional systems.  It's a shame that computers went the way they did.  The fact that something that should be fairly simple (browsing the Internet to get some information) has become this bloated mess that requires gigabytes of memory.  Just sad.

slaapliedje
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Offline Sean Cunningham

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #76 on: April 25, 2014, 01:00:44 AM »
Quote from: slaapliedje;763259
...
Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI.  SGIs were way expensive.  
...

There was some pro work being done on Macs up at ILM, a small division started by John Knoll (co-creator of Photoshop).  The Macs at the time, Quadras and later the PPC models, were as capable as the Amiga but the software just wasn't really there.  You had Electric Image and...Electric Image.  

Meanwhile, on the Amiga, you had Lightwave at the forefront which took over the low and midrange of CGI production as soon as Newtek uncoupled it from what we used to call "the dongle" (ie. the Video Toaster).  There were still some kooky folks that were diehard Imagine users and then you had Caligari make a bit of a blip.  

I really wanted the Hash software to go someplace because their spline/patch technology was pretty cool but it was wholly unreliable software and they never could produce a renderer that was worth a damn so I instead turned my attention to Real3D which was actually the only CGI software available for any microcomputer platform (at the time) that was designed and worked like high end software.  Here too, however, you had some stability issues and a fatal flaw in their animation architecture.  For all its limitations, Lightwave was solid and it gained a lot of users.

Meanwhile, at work, in the 1994 time frame the SGI Impact at my desk was about $55K and the SESI Prisms license that was my weapon of choice until they released Houdini was $20K per seat.  I think Softimage was $60K at the time and a full-on Alias Power Animator could run as much as $90K depending on options.  My A4000 wasn't cheap, and cost more than the base price of the current PowerMac if I recall, but at the same time a Quadra 700 was about $6K or $7K, keyboard extra.

A couple years after Amigas started disappearing Windows NT started eating at SGI from the bottom up, eventually killing their hold on the workstation market like SGI killed the mini and super-computer market in the '80s,  and for a couple years the platform of choice was based on the DEC Alpha + Lightwave and pretty much everything else from the Amiga that got ported, until all roads led back to Intel.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2014, 01:08:19 AM by Sean Cunningham »
 

Offline slaapliedje

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #77 on: April 25, 2014, 03:23:58 PM »
Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.  

I find myself looking at PPC macs so that I can get a MorphOS machine, if they had something like the Sam boards in a laptop, that would be better, since I would rather not own anything ever made by Apple...  But most of it is just so I can say that I own a PPC... Now if they ported MorphOS to something like the Raspberry Pi....

slaapliedje
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Offline Sean Cunningham

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #78 on: April 25, 2014, 03:46:39 PM »
Quote from: slaapliedje;763290
Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.  
...

That could very well be true but sooner or later folks had to get passed engineering and design infatuation and accept reality.  Faster + cheaper trumps fetish (if you're out there trying to run or create a business or be competitive, I don't apply that to taking interest in things for their own sake as a hobby or pleasurable pursuit).

When my Amiga blew up I got a DEC Alpha because it meant I could run some of the software I still wanted to use at home and wasn't Intel.  It was RISC so that was cool.  I was even able to justify Windows-NT because they were kind of a marginal group at MS at the time and it used a kernel based on MACH, like NeXT (though NT 3.whatever was painfully ugly).  There was even something exceedingly cool about how FX32 worked, the engineering behind it, that let me run Intel apps at full speed (eventually, the more you ran it the faster your performance as it refined the emulation).

Back then the DEC machines killed anything Intel on floating point, which meant everything for CGI.  But Intel closed the gap and then surpassed DEC even here, until the Alpha solution was no longer slightly more expensive with much more performance, it was more expensive and slower in every respect.  Ultimately, DEC didn't even care.  They weren't really interested in being competitive long term or in desktop applications anymore than Motorola + IBM would be in later years.  Engineers with no lasting ambition or at least none sympathetic to what desktop users wanted.

We (Digital Domain) absorbed the "NT Group" from Amblin who came in with their DEC Alphas so I got to see the transition go down in a serious way.  What I had at home was kind of incidental because I never had the time or inclination to do anything but plink around at home.  But the ugly transition from IRIX to everyone having Intel based Windows-NT, including horribly designed, failed attempts to stay relevant by SGI, was a sad era at the company.  

Eventually we moved to LINUX and the hardware simply ceased to matter because "who cares?".  It either works or it doesn't, is fast or slow, basically.  The hardware isn't sexy anymore or interesting.  It's all about what software you want to run and how much of a pain-in-the-ass you're willing to put up with to use it.  

I got enough exposure to LINUX at work to know I wasn't going to put up with that at home so I've been mostly Mac since NeXT took over.  I was sad when Apple dumped Motorola.  My Mom worked, over the years, at Motorola, at Freescale and at the Apple-Motorola-IBM facility (Somerset) during the early days of PPC development.  But those people were and are complete boneheads, the folks controlling the keys to the PPC castle, and their inability to get their act together meant Apple had no choice.  They gave Intel the knife and stretched out their own necks.  Lumbergh in Office Space might as well be based on the management culture of Motorola.  When that movie came out I got the impression from Mom that it might as well have been a docudrama, they were that incompetent and wasteful.  And look at them now.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2014, 04:10:11 PM by Sean Cunningham »
 

Offline slaapliedje

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #79 on: April 25, 2014, 04:17:32 PM »
Ha ha, that last bit about Linux is is so true.  Supports all the architectures out there, and it really gets to the point where you just pick and chose some hardware based on how well it works under Linux, slap it together then it's all about the software stack.

I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.

I'm still kind of curious about putting System V on my TT030, but since I don't have any graphics card in it, it'd basically just be another terminal, not to mention no network connectivity.

slaapliedje
A4000D: Mediator 4000Di; Voodoo 3, ZorRAM 128MB, 10/100mb Ethernet, Spider 2. Cyberstorm PPC 060/50 604e/420.
 

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #80 on: April 25, 2014, 04:29:55 PM »
Quote from: slaapliedje;763296
I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.

Back in the day I tried it on my 50mhz 68030 with 48mb ram and it was so slow it was just pointless, so I think you made the right choice.
 
Linux on the PS2 was equally disappointing.
 

Offline Sean Cunningham

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Re: Atari vs Amiga article
« Reply #81 on: April 25, 2014, 06:04:34 PM »
X-Windows, unless you have serious GPU and CPU, is the suck in many cases (and in my case I wasn't interested in being an IT manager at home).  Back when Personal Irises were still running IRIX with the NeWS interface, which was Display Postscript like NeXT and snappy and pleasant to look at, X was mostly an academia thing.  

NeWS made working on even a PI25 doable and a PI35TG was the bomb.  Then they came out with the Indigo and dumped NeWS for X and the ugliness of Motif and all of the sudden workstations that used to be seriously comfortable workstations felt instantly old and slow, necessitating the purchase of the newer hardware because anything less than a top of the line Iris was now a complete dog.
« Last Edit: April 25, 2014, 06:12:29 PM by Sean Cunningham »