Ow,
Amiga. Blitter chip, DMA. Hmmmm. I wanted an A500 soooo bad when I was in
college for my CS degree. But my dad made me buy a PC (8088) instead because it
was 'more compatible'. Sure enough I could port c from an IBM RT to Turbo C but
other than that it was hopelessly boring. Played with AutoCAD and found it
impossible to work with.
And my
buddies with Amigas were playing the coolest games with color and sound that was
revolutionary. I didn't buy another PC until I could get a P3-233 with a decent
3D and sound card.
And
then there was video toaster on Amiga that was used for early B5 episodes.
Awesome machine. If that had been picked up by Microsoft who knows where we'd be
now. Yikes, I guess I'd better hide now :-)
Sander
-----Original Message-----In one of the very early versions of Lightwave, one of the default viewing modes in the perspective view window in modeler was a wireframe that gently rocked back and forth continuously as you worked. It was very nice and it used some double-buffering techniques which at the time could only have been done easily on the Amiga, with it's blitter chip and DMA memory access. (easy to do as a background task that wouldn't slow you down on a 7mhz 68000 processor that is) That option hasn't been there since 3.0 (the software is up to 7.5 now) but occasionally I see a use for that feature and miss it. It has been mostly outdated by the ability of OpenGL to render the object on the fly as you twirl it around with your mouse (used to become a bounding box until you finished moving/rotating it, back in the day).
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Mike Massee
Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 10:05 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [ERPS] CAD programs
