🚀 go-pugleaf

dudley@cebaf4.cebaf.gov (John Dudley) writes:
> The Amiga on the other hand, has proprietary custom chips [...]
> The Agnus [chip] controls ALL Amiga animation.

This is a too popular misconception.  Compressed animation file playback
on the Amiga is done by the 680x0, of course, since only a cpu has the
capability of running data decompress/placement code.

The main reason why animations look good on the Amiga is because they
are double-buffered, which hides the limited cpu->display access bandwidth
and planar-layout update artifacts of the current chipset.  For similar
reasons, double-buffering is usually a desirable trait for any system.

> Lastly, I do warn you that on September 11th-13th there is a World
> of Commodore show in Pasadena California.  There, Commodore is expected

This is good advice (wait until this weekend, then check the Amiga groups).

Also, robertk@taoami.lerctr.org (Robert Kesterson) writes:
> [...] I can say that given a fast enough hard drive, you should be able
> to do full-screen DCTV animations even if *every* pixel changes between
> frames.  (The DCTV was demoed at one trade show by running several minutes
> of digitized video from the the movie "Back to the Future".  

Such demos are meaningless, especially since the normal AmigaDOS file system
was bypassed for that one.  I wish I had a dime for every person who was
told about that demo but who later found that realtime true fullscreen/motion
(especially in the highest DCTV color res) is impossible with stock setups.

Nevertheless, an Amiga/DCTV combo is inexpensive and there are ways around
any limitations.  What a lot of people do is use a single-frame-record VCR
and output their large-delta DCTV frames one at a time... this method is
often used/required on other systems as well.  An alternative I've heard of
is to use a good genlock and overlay smaller-delta frames in multiple passes.

kevin <kdarling@catt.ncsu.edu> <76703.4227@compuserve.com>