🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <jbickers.0le1@templar.actrix.gen.nz>, jbickers@templar.actrix.gen.nz (John Bickers) writes:
>
>     Lawrence is a frequent Mac advocate, and he hasn't exactly said
>     that they are _useless_ for animation. He just has some mistaken
>     information about what's involved in Amiga animation.

Which mistaken information was that? Here's a repeat of what I said in
<1992Dec10.174028.12714@waikato.ac.nz>:

>In article <Byys6D.9Ay@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>, cree@elec.canterbury.ac.nz (Mic
>hael Cree) writes:
>>
>> For animation the Commodore engineers claim that 2000 fps can be done on an
>> Amiga 4000 (25MHz 68040 based machine) through the operating system.

>What you're neglecting to mention, of course, is that those frames have to be
>in RAM first. And not just any RAM, but "chip" RAM, of which you're only allowed
>to have a total of 2MB, even on the newest machines (or so I'm told).

As far as I can determine, none of the followup postings has exactly refuted
my statement. Someone explained the capabilities of the Amiga to decompress
frame-differenced images from fast RAM into chip RAM (interestingly, I can't
recally anyone mentioning anything about decompression from disk), but no one
has claimed that this can be done at 2000 frames per second, nor do I believe
that it is possible.

That 2000 frame-per-second rate would apply if you were just changing a
copper-list register to point to a different image which is already in chip
RAM (and as someone else has pointed out, 500 microseconds is really pretty
slow for such a simple operation). Thus any claim that an Amiga can animate at
this speed for any length of time (even with unlimited fast RAM) can't be the
whole truth, and I claimed no more than this.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-7-856-2889
Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-7-838-4066
University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00