Hi,
Lets get down to facts, the Amiga was designed at first as a super fast game machine that was converted to a computer, because of its superior chipset at the time (paula, agnes and gary) the kernel which is the same as a BIOS was very individualized to this computer. Its video, sound and disk access could be programmed to do things on their own. Also Jay Miner used a different type of video so that you could use the Amiga on a TV, this led to sort of a round pixel instead of a square pixel (round pixels sort of blend in better when moving a video around the screen I think, I could be wrong on this one but I am to LAZY to dig through my old Amiga boxes to verify this) but, since most of you Amiga guys where crying about how smooth the Amiga seems, I loaded up the new Amiga Forever 2006 disk yesterday and played a few videos that they give you on the AF disk, I noticed that these movies really sucked video wise on the PC, whenever the sound got to complex they lagged, and the jaggies (due to square pixels) really ruined the delight of watching the movie. Then I pulled out my Amiga 4000 and loaded in the same movies, the sound and the video where immaculate even though the Amiga did not have the shading, and texturing as my PC nvidia card, now I did notice that the Amiga video seemed to play slower than the PC but the video and sound where still immaculate compared to the PC, now this could be because the PC was trying to emulate the Amiga OS, so windows played the video faster, but tore up the video due to pixelization (square pixels) even with anti alizing on. Then to test out my theory, I started to play some of the mpegs off of Aminet 18, I used my Ubuntu OS for this, the mpegs played super fast, and the video was super compared to the Amiga, but there was no sound on these. The point is the PC sound system is not as good as the Amiga, the PC stutters when there is a complex waveform, this is probably due to the Amiga sound chip. Then I loaded in beryl on the Ubuntu system. I watched a DVD movie on one screen, a mpeg movie on the other, played some chip tunes from Aminet on the other, and loaded in a web page on the other, beryl displays a cube on the screen that can be rotated as you turn the center wheel on the mouse, nothing slowed down, the sound didn't stutter, and everything looked great. My analysis is this Windows Vista sucks, Ubuntu is close to and just about as much fun as the Amiga, and the Amiga with the slower 68040 processor still reigns supreme for these features due to its special chip set. Now remember this PC computer I am using is a new intel E6600 running dual core at 1.86 ghz with a near top of the line nvidia card.
Now also I tried playing a dvd movie in the Amiga by using a converter to burn a movie to cd rom. Due to this transfomation the video was degraded some. The Amiga played the movie but stuttered and slowed down. Frame rate was slower probably due to CPU overload.
Now I don't usually use my Amiga anymore, except for my checking account and old games, it does have OS 3.9 on it, it is an A4000 with a 68040 card. It took me close to 3 hours to get the cd to play the movie due to setting up the movie player, maybe I am an idiot, but I felt like I was in an early stage of Linux trying to get full color out of the Picasso II card, and I never did do it, and B&W is not good especially for how much it stuttered. Will look into this matter more.
The Amiga's age is starting to show.
smerf
