Boy does this bring back the memories! [sits back and has fond memories of his old Amiga Toaster]
*sigh* And yes, Babylon 5 and Reboot were primarily done on old off-the-shelf (well, at least as "off-the-shelf as you can get with a computer that you have to have a couple laying around of for spare parts) Amiga boxes (primarily 4000's) running Lightwave. Lightwave 3D, interestingly enough, was originally written for the Amiga, and is now the de-facto standard for 3D on most platforms. If any of you remember the initially good (and degrading to horribly bad) SeaQuest series, the special effects and all underwater sequences were rendered using Lightwave on Amiga's. The company that did Reboot, Mainframe Entertainment, also did the short-lived War Planets (which was surprisingly good and had a very sophisticated plotline...kind of a "Titan AE" tv precursor) and the current 3D incarnations of Transformers. Whether or not Mainframe still uses Toasters I don't know, but I do know that Netter Digital still does. Rumor even has it that there's a whole room full of them over at ILM that their 3D people do a lot of their protyping on...but that's just rumor. Gateway was even going to release a new version of the Amiga OS for a while...they worked on it for more than 2 years and then killed the project just a couple months before BeOS went under. And while we're on the other-than-linux OS front...rumor is rife (although unconfirmed yet) that next summer's MacWorld is going to be one to watch. Jaguar got finished early because Apple supposedly hired *alot* more programmers, who haven't been laid off now that OS X 10.2 is done. The prevailing rumor, which one can almost believe outright based on Apple's hardware moves over the last year-and-a-half, is that all these extra programmers were brought in to write hardware drivers for the OSX port to Intel hardware. It wouldn't be available for at least another year yet, and the hardware would be limited, but it's possible. Of course, Palm could always enter the fray too, since it owns Be lock, stock, and barrel. Well, enough of that for one night, I think. :) Jon 8^) Ken Hawkins wrote: >AMIGA VIDEOTOASTER! > >too bad they went belly up...played with back in the old days (94?) >had A/B/C tape editor control, transition effects, 3D animation with a >whole sh*&load of models and sets, character generator, stereo sound etc >etc etc; essentially a whole studio at your desk. > INCREDIBLE machines. If people bought computers based on quality and >capability rather than con-job, MS would be history, and we would be all >animating complete movies on our desktops. WHILE checking email, >printing War & Peace, balancing our checkbook, and pumping tunes. > >I dream of a time machine and a wooden stake with the initials B.G. on >it...... >Ken > >PS FWIW, Babylon 5 and (i think) ReBoot were done on essentially >off-the-shelf Toasters > > >
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