🚀 go-pugleaf

Here's another brief update on things I have learned since my last posting.

* The DCTV can *not* run all software on the Amiga.  However, it is
supported by most graphics software, just not things like word
processors where it is of questionable use to process words in 18 bit
anyway.   Still though, this point bothers me a little - that it isn't
that transparent that anything can be run on it.  I think the point
here goes to the Mac, with more transparent support for graphics.

* In the current state, a Mac/68030 can *not* do full screen quicktime
animations at any reasonable speed or smoothiness.  To get this, you
have to add hardware which is far, far outside of my price range.
This point goes to the Amiga.

* Although MPEG players exist for the Mac/PC, they aren't very good
yet.  MPEG needs hardware, they say, or at least much faster CPUs.
People who emailed me about this say that it is a neat idea but not
yet practical for useful work, and needs to be given more time to get
"mature".  Neither machine wins here.

* The Amiga has special CPUs for things like sound, disk I/O, etc,
which give it a higher throughput, which is wht it was able to do
animations from HD (didn't use the CPU) whereas my 386 system of about
the same speed can't, and the Mac has trouble too.  Point here goes to
the Amiga.

* QT is scheduled for an upgrade which improves speed of animation by
2 to 3X.  Alas, this isn't enough to get full screen at high frame
rates yet.

Well, I have almost made up my mind now, and mostly because of point #2
above.  If I had infinite amount of money to spend, or at least more
than I have now, I would go with the Mac.  But since my budget is
somewhat limited, I will end up with the Amiga system, as the Mac in
that price range cannot do full screen animation in video resolution,
which is a *must* for what I want to do.

Again thanks to everyone for the help in choosing this system.  I
learned a lot about them both in the last few days, and I found the
choice was harder than I thought, because they both had strenghts and
weaknesses which made it a "fuzzy" choice.  But since full screen
animation is what I want to do, I think Quicktime isn't quite there
yet.  Maybe if I was going to buy a system in 2 or 3 years I would
make a different choice based on the improvements to QT.  But right
now, it would be too expensive to get a QT system to meet my needs.
I plan to get an Amiga 3000 with 16 Mb RAM, 120 Mb HD, and DCTV for
hardware.  Maybe I'll expand the memory later, and add a removable
hard disk, but right now I can't afford those things yet.

   /M