MiAmigo wrote:
bloodline wrote:
Modern PC's are the technological evolution of the Amiga idea.
My Gfx card and sound card are computers in their own right!
I would tend to disagree. Even though I, too, use these 'newfangled' PC cards, I would compare them in this way, to what I feel the Amiga would have/could evolve in to: basically, the difference between Bruce Lee (the Amiga) and Hulk Hogan (the PC).
The problem is that The Amiga's hardware addressed the Graphics and Audio problems of it's time... It didn't do anything that spcecial, but did do what it did for an extremely low price.
The Graphics of the era centred around moving large rectangular blocks at 50fps, at about the resolution of a TV. They had to do this using the least amount of memory as memory was very expensive... and minimal CPU intervention was requires as CPU's weren't very fast and wern't that good at shifting around large chunks of Data.
The solution was to use a Blitter Chip (To move the blocks of graphics without the CPU), sprites (for fast moving gfx) and planar graphics (to allow scalable colour depts in low memory situations). The Amiga also had the Copper (with various memory saving uses) and Ham modes which allow more colours without extra memory load too.
Modern Graphics revolve around generating extremely high definition 3D environments, and they have to do this between 60 and 120 times every second. They do no have to worry about Memory (it's cheap!), so the Solution is to build a 3D graphics processor with a Blitter/2D acceleration on to a card with it's own memory.
Unless a new game is invented that requires something other than 2D or 3D graphics, The Modern gfx board is the only solution.
