Switching to Amiga

[Hyperspeed]

Whilst I agree that the web is a difficult area for the Amiga I would say IBrowse2.3 is still fighting fit and very capable for most things.

A GFX card has always been out of the reach of most desktop Amiga owners and I find this a little daft.

I wonder how many people run their PPC + BVision in the desktop case - I for one would like to try that. I don't like the idea of throwing away the custom A1200 'wedge' for an identity-less OEM case with badly colour-coordinated front panels and fluroescent, glow in the dark fan lights.

:-)

[Hyperspeed]

For some strange reason my A1200 could display Super Hi-Res Laced (1280x512) on my SCART TV.

Yes, it was interlaced and flickery but all the pixels were displayed. I can't get this to run on my Scandoubler/FF on a SVGA monitor!

For normal use though I would reccomend NTSC if your TV can take 60Hz vertical refresh. PAL, particularly with games is 17.5% slower and this may be noticed on the web too.

[Hyperspeed]

The wedge case is sacred!

A PC style case is not elegant or space efficient, it's just full of fresh air!

Damn have I seen some ugly Amiga 1200s in PC cases, even ones designed specifically for the Amiga.

[Hyperspeed]

An old Commodore adaptor for Amiga 23-pin RGB video port -> PC 9pin VGA

[Hyperspeed]

I've seen a mod where someone's put a slimline CD drive in the A1200 desktop and sprayed the case metallic red. I can't remember if they had transplanted the motherboard into an A500 case though...

As for burning CDs on '030 - you'll need a Blizzard 1230-IV I'd say. SCSI is a lifesaver on '030 since it uses less than 5% of your CPU time due to DMA. MakeCD has an option to burn CD tracks to disc simply by giving it an MP3 file but that will be too slow 'on-the-fly' with an '030.

However, burning CDs needn't be real-time as you can first make an image file then later burn this to CD at full speed (since your hard disk will send it straight without the CPU having to work out things). I've heard of problems with PowerFlyer but with SCSI it's hassle free.

Playing DVDs is out of the picture, as is movies on '030. Your only hope of real time video is Commodore's own format CDXL(?) and earlier AVI/Quicktime files. MPEG, due to it's compression, is only really possible full-screen on '060+GFX card.

The Amiga CD32 could play full motion video on '020/14 with an optional FMV Video-CD cartridge and you can burn Video-CD with MakeCD+VCDGear, but you'll only be able to play these discs back very jerkily with a registered copy of Frogger. Best bet is to get a 30 GBP DVD player for playback if you don't want to buy a big box Amiga.

[Hyperspeed]

MP3 playback isn't up to scratch even on the 50Mhz Blizzard 1230-IV. For some reason the FPU version of the mpega.library slows things down considerably with no audible benefit to sound quality.

You'll be using 80-100% CPU, maximum of 22KHz, 200kbit, and possibly stereo will be out of the picture too. It's only when you get to '040 40Mhz does MP3 become realistic. However, if you can live with 22Khz that's still radio quality, if not 44KHz CD quality.

Probably best to have the MP3 loaded into RAM: first or streamed off SCSI.

[Hyperspeed]

Tomas: I was just going to suggest a MAS player!

:-)

Plugs onto the parallel port and plays MP3 without needing an '060!

I also heard Executive mentioned, this really is good. If you load it up during sluggish moments it will instantly start making things speed up. Disable it for Quake though or it'll throttle it.

128MB may seem overkill on an '030 but it can still offer advantages - you will be able to surf most of the day by caching to Ram Disk: and you'll be able to make massive quality scans.

[Hyperspeed]

Yeurgh!

DblPal is going to drain your ChipMem bandwidth like Multiscan productivity, you'll be crawling!

[Hyperspeed]

Your screen update will be arthritic, no... paraplegic.

Try NTSC in maximum overscan. You'll get a pseudo-widescreen viewable area, low 15KHz bandwidth needs and a smoothe 60Hz vertical refresh.

If you put NTSC into 640x480 you'd get a 4:3 screen ratio (this means pictures of people won't look fat or thin onscreen) and games/demos will swap to PAL 50Hz anyway.

60Hz is what console gamers choose nowadays, it might even be PAL 60Hz if your machine is UK.