4 Jul
2001
4 Jul
'01
3:16 p.m.
Jeff Hellige skrev:
>I hope you've managed to scrounge enough ZIPs
to accomodate the OS and
>applications.
It supposedly has 14meg total, which was enough to
do most
anything I wanted to before. I was never one to run a bunch of Magic
WB stuff and whatnot. It'll be cool having an ECS machine to run all
the old Eric Schwartz animations off of his CD though! A lot of them
didn't like AGA on the A4000 and neither my A1000 or A500 have enough
RAM for a lot of them.
Well, you can't go much further than that on the mobo IIRC.
>The A4000 is more spacious inside, and requires
less screwing around (with a
>screwdriver).
One thing that always annoyed me about the A4000 is
that they
didn't make the 5-1/4" drive bay just a fraction of an inch longer so
that most any drive would fit properly. That and the horrid RAM
access times. The A4000 also needed the A3000's scandoubler. The
A3000's problems were primarily due to chip revisions and once those
were updated, the machine was quite solid while the A4000's design
was compromised in a number of places. Given that it and the A1200
have been in production so long, I would imagine there are a great
many more of them around.
You mention the points which IMO makes the A3000 prettier. The A4000, for all
its shortcomings, is somewhat easier to handle, though. You can fit a CD-ROM
internally, although it's cramped. At the usergroup, we had one A4k with a CD-
ROM protruding some cm out of the bay. Not a pretty sight. =)
Similarly, the RAM may be hideously slow, but at least it uses SIMMs. Getting
hold of ZIPs is a bloody pain in the neck (are there any list members out
there who happen to have any to spare? =).
The A1200 is common, but it is essentially a closed architecture. Unless
you're adventurous and put it in a tower with a slot card and all that, but it
still turns out as a mediocre imitation of a real big-box machine. Still,
given a PCI backplane, it turns out a rather cheap solution compared to a
similarly equipped Zorro Amiga.
>The Spectrum is no speed demon, but
everything's better than the onboard
>graphics. You'll probably not run EGS, though, but either CyberGFX or
>Picasso96.
Pretty much everything I did though ran well enough
under
EGS. I didn't have the need for anything that was Cybergfx-specific.
I used it because it came with the board, which was in production at
the time under the original GVP. It being a ZIII board, it's faster
than a good many other graphics boards out there, including the more
popular Picasso II. I guess if I wanted speed, I'd go with something
like the Cybervision or Retina boards. Does OS 3.5 or 3.9 ship with
RTG software or do you still have to get it seperately? Still, I
like the way the Spectrum passes through the onboard video modes.
The fact that the newer OSes ship with either RTG system mention above is why
I said you'd probably run those instead of EGS. Especially if you'd like to
run new software, though I'm not familiar with EGA myself. Didn't it deviate
somewhat from the usual WB look? ISTR screenshots in mags with gadgets which
seemed to come from a Motif system.
I didn't know that the Spectrum was a ZIII board, and thought it was very
similar to the Picasso II in performance. I run a Retina ZIII myself, and
while it doesn't put up much of a match against newer boards, it is competent
enough. Certainly better than the PII.
>The TCP/IP stack of 3.5 is just a demo of Miami,
whereas Genesis, a new
>version of AmiTCP, is included in full in 3.9. I own a registered Genesis
>but since it's just a GUI shell for AmiTCP 4.5, I'm still running my old
>pirate copy of 4.5. =)
The last time I ran AmiTCP was version 4 and it was
terrible
setting it up. None of the graphical front ends worked like they
were said to either. I'll likely go back to Miami then. Thankfully,
I just found a disk that purports to be my backup registration disk
for various Amiga programs! I should still have my WB 3.1 disks here
somewhere...I'll just need to get the ROMs.
Version 4 had an Installer-based setup program which worked fine enough for me
when I was a newbie (once I had learned what to input where =). Genesis has a
full MUI GUI which I don't think is any worse than Miami, although I've
always avoided that stack (first due to its dependence on MUI, then because
I've grown to like AmiTCP). But since you've got a Miami licence, go ahead and
use that if you like.
If you're used to UNIX systems, you'll feel right at home with AmiTCP, since
it essentially is half a BSD. =)
It's sad to see how many of the old 3rd party
companies have
gone under or exited the Amiga area. I've got like 3 years of
'Amazing Amiga', right up until it went under, and the last issue of
'Amiga World' around here in a box somewhere.
Yes.
BTW, you do have a CD-ROM, don't you?
--
En ligne avec Thor 2.6a/AmigaOS 3.0.
VIRGO (Aug 23 - Sept 22)
You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is
sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and
sometimes fall asleep while making love. Virgos make good bus
drivers.