4 Jul
2001
4 Jul
'01
1:05 p.m.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757