23 Apr
2002
23 Apr
'02
12:26 p.m.
There are a few distinctions that have to be made here.
It's probably true,
though certainly not the case here in my house, that games/entertainment are a
major purpose/function of the PC. The folks who scorn gaming on PC's are
overlooking the benefits due to volume that they derive from the resulting
sales to non-computing-users of PC's.
The gamers are the single largest driving force behind the
more capable video and sound cards. I would imagine that they are
also one of the factors that has caused broadband internet
connections in the home to grow so fast...afterall, playing Quake or
Unreal Tournement over a modem connection doesn't work very well.
Attempting to speed up Windows used to be one of the catalysts behind
video card innovation, but not at this point. Even resolution, which
has only recently reached that used by graphics workstations of 10+
years ago, and color depth are no longer the big selling
points....polygon fillrate is.
The AMIGA was, indeed, in some of its forms, and with
considerable extension
of its native equipment, a very capable graphics tool, particularly for
low-end and educational broadcast material editing/development. Most AMIGAs
that I've seen, however, were not terribly well equipped, hence, were not
particularly capable. They didn't use inexpensive conventional (yes, that
means PC-compatible) peripherals, either, notably printers. A local guy here
made a small fortune with an adapter that allowed the use of inexpensive
(EPSON) printers with the AMIGA and some other systems.
Compared to more recent machines a base Amiga isn't that
capable but at the time they were new and still being developed they
were much more impressive. They were used for quite a bit of
high-end video and animation work as well. Compared to a 1987 PC
running MS-DOS on a 386-16, the Amiga 2000 and 500 more than hold
thier own. As for the printers, the only machine I'm aware of that
might have had a problem with a regular parallel interface printer is
the Amiga 1000 with it's slightly 'off' parallel port.
Jeff
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