SGI's and amigas

[rednova]

Dear Friends:

I used to have a nice working SGI O2. I was very happy with it, and it had original lightwave installed. One day it completely died, but it was good for one year.
Now I have a powerful pc system with lightwave 9.6 and I really love it, so I do not need
another SGI. Today, instead of another SGI, I rather have another amiga.
The new pc is much better than SGI, and i rather have a great amiga instead of the SGI.
I don't need another SGI.
I would love to get a better amiga, like a 4000 desktop.
Love !!!

[TeamBlackFox]

I understand and respect your opinion, but I firmly disagree that Amiga is anywhere superior to an SGI.

You're looking at opposite ends of the same market: the Amiga was the low end of the market whereas the SGIs were the high end. I have an SGI Octane2, an upgraded version of the original Octane which came out in the later 1990s.

Maintained till 2004, the Octane2 boasts an UW SCSI bus with dual channels, up to 8GB RAM, up to 128MB V12 Odyssey graphics which are broadly comparable to a GeForce of the same vintage, built in 100Mbit Ethernet, a PCI-X cage, up to dual R14000 600MHz MIPS CPUs, which are as powerful as a low end Pentium 4 or a high end Pentium 3 alone.

The hardware of the SGI is well optimised and integrated, similar to the Amiga. They're broadly similar in architecture and the SGIs are still plenty useful for today. I would rather use it than a Windows computer with the latest in 3D technology because Windows makes me want to take  sword and chop my own junk off.

My Octane2 is just as useful as a Pegasos II running MorphOS while many times as powerful due to being 64-bit, having 8 times the max RAM and an OS that's just as easy to use as MorphOS.

[ferrellsl]

@TeamBlackFox

I think you're misunderstanding his post.  I don't think he implied that an Amiga is superior to an SGI. He just says that his SGI failed and that his PC is performing the duties once handled by his SGI and rather than getting another SGI, he'd like to have an Amiga added to his collection.

[SACC-guy]

@rednova
Good show. I own and use other pc's. I too prefer Amiga!

@TeamBlackFox
Please remember this is an AMIGA site (walk softly)
     sales and talk of other pc's just -once- in a while

M

[rednova]

@teamblackfox
I hope you don't lose sales because of my post, i did not mean amiga is superior
to SGI. I do believe in fact, that SGI is superior to amiga.
But as I have a great pc that is superb with lightwave 3d, and I have no use for an
SGI anymore, I rather have an amiga computer, which I really love, instead of an SGI.
I love amigas, and I rather play with amiga than with SGI.
I will be happy to make new amiga animations for fun, and use the pc/lightwave
for serious animation work.
I hope you can really sell your SGI.
Love !!!

[TeamBlackFox]

I see. The tone of your post was totally off, and coincided with my sale of my Octane, so I thought you were somehow criticising my sharing of sales of SGI gear on here, when it was the amount of discussion sparked under the Other OS category that compelled me to do so. I am glad that is not the case.

For the record, I love Nia, my A3000. Its just rather useless currently without any additions. I do plan to add a network card and other things to it eventually

If anyone has any complaints about my sharing of sales in the Marketplace, then the Site Adkins should create an Off-Topic Marketplace and I will be happy to move my further sales about SGI there.

[rednova]

Dear Amigans:

I believe SGI's are great computers for animation, much superior than amigas.
If you never had an SGI, you will really love to get these systems.
You can keep your amiga computer for great fun, and acquire an SGI to complement
your collection.If you have an SGI on top of your amiga, it will be a great thing.
I just wanted to make a point that I rather have another amiga instead of an SGI.
I did love my SGI when I had it...but since I do not need it, I rather have an amiga.
If you have an amiga, an add an SGI, it will be really great.
And keep on using those amigas!!!

[agami]

Ah yes, the venerable A4000. The machine I should have bought.
In a an odd turn of pricing coincidence, in late 1992/early 1993, the prices of new AGA Amiga's in Melbourne were equal to their model numbers. I had saved up A$5,000 I was willing to spend on computing gear. I really wanted the A4000 but it was A$3,999 which left little for other things. Instead I bought an A1200 for A$1,199 and then purchased a memory expansion card with 4MB SIMM for A$800, the new AGA version of Deluxe Paint IV, and a couple of other titles,  and I also bought a Citizen Colour Dot Matrix Printer for A$700.

I loved that A1200 but the printer was a waste of money. I should've bought the A4000.

[stefcep2]

^^^ Ahh yes "the model number equals the price" Amiga period in Australia

We tend to forget how expensive stock Amiga's were.  

You could install a new kitchen for the price of stock A4000, and renovate the bathroom for the price of an A1200.

Luckily I only got in to Amiga in 1995, everyone was getting rid of them.

 One of the joys was reading through the Melbourne Trading Post, and having your pick of Amiga hardware- mostly A500 with boxes of software, but plenty of '030 A1200's ( DKB stuff mostly), plenty of wedding videographers A2000 with genlock's.

Eventually picked up an A4000 with Cyberstorm 68060 with cyberscsi and 6 gig scsi drives, CV64, NEC 3D monitor, boxed Imagine 4, Dpaint 5 and Brilliance 2 and DopUs4, Wordworth Office, boxes of ahem game back up discs.

$700 Aus ie $400 US


Good times.

[Sean Cunningham]

Ah yes, the venerable A4000. The machine I should have bought.
...

I wouldn't be so sure.  There are lots of folks with A1200s that continue to work to this day.  A4000s, not so much.  They were neither designed or built well.

I bought one shortly after launch because the A1200 wasn't fast enough by a long shot (or faster than the A3000 I already had) and I wasn't content to wait for all the oodles of accelerators and expansion options that would come available.  I chose poorly, because I was still paying for my A4000 after it had already died and I watched in horror as, almost like dominoes, the collection of A4000s my company bought started to fall down and fail.

The Amiga, at the time, had some cool software though, even compared to the highest of the high end of what was available on SGI.  Lightwave and Imagine weren't really in the same league as Wavefront, Softimage, Alias, Prisms, etc. but there would occasionally be a feature or some experimental bit of tech that would show up in Amiga apps that weren't available in any high end software.

Lightwave's quickly cliche addition of lens flares as options were ahead of its time.  The way Hash's Animation:Journeyman and then Animation:Master let you do skeletal type animation with spline curves was pretty phenomenal, not to mention bringing parametric modeling to the micro platform first for animation (too bad they couldn't actually code the application itself well enough for it to be usable).  

But it was Real3D that was the one package most like real, highend production software.  It had a major flaw in that the coding team didn't understand the need to put conventional animation controls in and held it back by insisting on geometric transforms for so long (with a rabidly ignorant fellow heading up the beta team) but there was so much good in there.  It had a fully multi-threaded, multi-tasking interface the likes of which even today most packages don't have.  It was procedural in a way that only packages like Prisms and Symbolics were at the time.  It handled true volumetric materials and CSG modeling and added RBD and SBD before these were offered in the high end packages.  And it had a fully, completely customizable UI that I just know Houdini owes a bit to.   There was nothing else for the Amiga like it either and only Blender now, based on feature set, given Lightwave is a very basic system.

And before Fori started working for NewTek he wrote a 3D app that did MetaNURBs on the Amiga, before they became a part of Lightwave+Modeler and before any commercial software for SGI had subdivision surfaces as options.  This was years before Geri's Game and subd became the New Big Thing, finally making NURBs an unpleasant thing of the past for most applications that didn't involve manufacturing.  And MetaNURBS might have never happened for Lightwave if our software team at DD hadn't thought he was lying during his interview about what he was coding.  They blew him off and NewTek picked him up.