h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I know I'm a bit late, but here are a few corrections to your otherwise excellent Amiga article. (I'm a pedant. So sue me. )

>>At the same time as the Amiga neared completion, Atari were working on their own machine, the ST<<

Atari didn't want the computer to be a real computer, but Amiga Inc. kept insisting on a proper OS, keyboard, etc., so Atari dumped the project -- cost overruns, etc. They didn't start on the ST until after the Amiga was nearly ready to ship, and as a result it was rushed, used an off-the-shelf OS (GEM), and was in almost all respects inferior.

>>Very few programmers stuck with machine language, partly because it was becoming unwieldy but also because in a multi-tasking environment every program has to be reentrant<<

They don't HAVE to be reentrant, apart from shared libraries (eg DLLs in Windows), although it is nice if they are.

>>Later models of the Amiga such as the A500+ and compact A600 featured the so-called Enhanced Chip Set which had an extra mode called Extra Half-Brite which could create a second version of the 32 colour palette with half the Value4 in one more bitplane<<

All Amigas have EHB mode. The ECS added a higher (horizontal) resolution 4 colour mode, and the capacity for 2Mb ChipRAM (for GFX and audio), but not a lot else.

>>The A1200 and A4000, the last of the 'classic' Amigas, had an Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). This could display 256 colours on a realtime display, and 16777216 simultaneously using the new HAM8 mode<<

Actually, due to restrictions on the palette in HAM8, it's only possible to display 4,194,304 (22-bit) colours. (Unlike HAM6, the range of RGB modifiers is reduced, so you need to pick your CLUT colours more carefully.)

>>A novel system invented by Commodore was the Bridgeboard system. This had an almost complete PC on an expansion board for the Amiga, so that emulator software had access to a PC processor and other hardware making emulation faster<<

All the bridgeboard did was allow you to use ISA cards in an A2000/B2000/A1500.

Other than that, not bad.

Thanks, it's nice to know the article's getting read by people as perdantick (grr...) as I! However...
I'm not sure that the OCS did support EHB mode ("All Amigas have EHB mode. The ECS added a higher (horizontal) resolution 4 colour mode, and the capacity for 2Mb ChipRAM (for GFX and audio), but not a lot else."). I agree that Superhighres (1280*256/512 PAL, 1280*200/400 NTSC) came about only with the ECS chipset, because the OCS systems didn't have enough chip RAM to even consider it. Anyway, it looked really ugly. But I don't think that you could use the EHB modes on the earlier machines - to whit, I tried to run Deluxe Paint III on a 1MB A500. It would work, but Guru Meditation commenced if I tried to use a 64-colour pallette. This can't be due to using 6 bitplanes (as HAM mode works perfectly), nor due to running out of memory (as DPIII works fine on a 1MB A600, give or take the perspective functions).

Thanks for correcting me about the bridgeboard, I seemed to recall that they had an on-board 286/386SX unit. However, as I wrote this article about ten years after the bridgeboard stopped shipping, it's likely that my brain was befuddled

CtS

Thanks, it's nice to know the article's getting read by people as perdantick (grr...) as I! However...
I'm not sure that the OCS did support EHB mode ("All Amigas have EHB mode. The ECS added a higher (horizontal) resolution 4 colour mode, and the capacity for 2Mb ChipRAM (for GFX and audio), but not a lot else."). I agree that Superhighres (1280*256/512 PAL, 1280*200/400 NTSC) came about only with the ECS chipset, because the OCS systems didn't have enough chip RAM to even consider it. Anyway, it looked really ugly. But I don't think that you could use the EHB modes on the earlier machines - to whit, I tried to run Deluxe Paint III on a 1MB A500. It would work, but Guru Meditation commenced if I tried to use a 64-colour pallette. This can't be due to using 6 bitplanes (as HAM mode works perfectly), nor due to running out of memory (as DPIII works fine on a 1MB A600, give or take the perspective functions).

Thanks for correcting me about the bridgeboard, I seemed to recall that they had an on-board 286/386SX unit. However, as I wrote this article about ten years after the bridgeboard stopped shipping, it's likely that my brain was befuddled

CtS

Thanks, it's nice to know the article's getting read by people as perdantick (grr...) as I! However...
I'm not sure that the OCS did support EHB mode ("All Amigas have EHB mode. The ECS added a higher (horizontal) resolution 4 colour mode, and the capacity for 2Mb ChipRAM (for GFX and audio), but not a lot else."). I agree that Superhighres (1280*256/512 PAL, 1280*200/400 NTSC) came about only with the ECS chipset, because the OCS systems didn't have enough chip RAM to even consider it. Anyway, it looked really ugly. But I don't think that you could use the EHB modes on the earlier machines - to whit, I tried to run Deluxe Paint III on a 1MB A500. It would work, but Guru Meditation commenced if I tried to use a 64-colour pallette. This can't be due to using 6 bitplanes (as HAM mode works perfectly), nor due to running out of memory (as DPIII works fine on a 1MB A600, give or take the perspective functions).

Thanks for correcting me about the bridgeboard, I seemed to recall that they had an on-board 286/386SX unit. However, as I wrote this article about ten years after the bridgeboard stopped shipping, it's likely that my brain was befuddled

CtS

Hmm. I only ever owned an A500 (OCS, KS1.2, 0.5Mb, later upgraded to KS1.3 and a whopping 2Mb, plus an external floppy. State of the art, or what! ) and later an A1200, and I used EHB quite a lot on both machines. Never tried it in DPaint, though; I used it for faking shadows in games what I wrote; looks much nicer than a cruddy dither pattern.

Desert Strike runs on pre-ECS machines, and that uses EHB for precisely the same reason. Unfortunately I don't have the A500 any more, so I can't double check, but I'd be willing to bet a pint on it.

And re the bridgeboard, there *was* a card available with a CPU on it, but I can't remember what it was called... I chucked all my old CU magazines out earlier this year -- a traumatic experience, but I hadn't opened any of them in at least four years, and the missus was fed up with them -- so I can't go look it up now. (And whatever happened to Utilities Unlimited and the universal emulator they kept shouting about? Did it ever materialise?)

Anyhoo, Amiga Forever! etc. I'm off to play SOTB 2.

OK fair enough - but you'd better like Tetley's 'cos it's the only thing I can find for less than £1.50/pint
Also sorry about the multiple postings - my ISP are a little poo so I thought the connection had died.

As for the whole PC emulator debacle did you ever use PC-Task? I had version 3, and it was just about possible to get a console-based 1-2-3 to run on it (though why you'd want to, when Interspread was so much better...); I heard in Amiga Format around 1997ish that someone had managed to get Windows 95 to run in PC Task 4 on an Amiga 4000 - I can imagine that being a bit painful.

Cheers,

CtS.

Tetley's is fine. Normally I'm a Stella drinker, but free beer is free beer.

I used to run Turbo Pascal under PC-Task; it was pretty slow, but workable, and meant I could do uni coursework at home without buying a PC, something I resisted until I went to the US for a couple of years, and then it was unavoidable. Damned things were everywhere...

PC-Task 4 could run Win95, but as you rightly surmise it was very very slow indeed, although having a graphics card did improve things a bit. (So, a pretty accurate emulation, then. ) Bizarrely, runing a PC emulator under the Chameleon Mac emulator seemed faster sometimes. Probably my imagination...

Ah, those were the days. I don't use my Amiga much any more, sadly, as there's not much in the way of software that I need on it -- Dreamweaver, Flash, PhotoShop, etc. -- but I still play the odd game now and again, or sometimes just fire up Workbench and look at it for a while. Poor deluded fool... I still occasionally think about upgrading it, though. A nice tower case, a few Zorro slots, PPC card, lovely job!

Heh, sounds like you're of the Mac fraternity. I'd *love* to be able to afford to have a Mac - at least, now that OS X is here. I've been using NeXTs and GNUStep under Linux to get the same development environment [Objective-C is a *fantastic* language, and I keep hearing people say that some of the Amiga's kernel was developed in it too], but it's not the same. Mainly because the NeXTs have 68030 CPUs and the GNUStep's still a little buggy for the end user.

How about I swap you a pint of Stella for a Mac 8600?

Mac fraternity? Not quite, but getting closer every day!

I used to hate them, partially due to their assumption that everyone was some kind of moron. The rest of my hatred was a bit irrational: you could eject a floppy in several ways, but only one was the "right" way to do it (and if you had a Quadra AV, the power button was where a floppy eject button would be!) -- for a machine for idiots this was pretty poor!

Being a fellow Unix lover, though, I absolutely adore OS-X (apart from the FisherPrice look, but then even Windows XP has gone all bright and chunky. ) I'm torn between buying a PowerBook and an iBook -- I like the widescreen on the PB, but I prefer the price tag on the iB! Not sure about the iMac; I like the screen, but that blob at the bottom is a bit peculiar. They other problem is I'll have to re-invest in a load of software that I've only just finished paying for on the PC.

I was always intrigued by NeXT, but I've never even seen one, let alone used one. I may have to find me a copy of GNUStep; I wasn't aware such a thing existed!

Of course, I wish we could all go back to the days when GUI was what your Mars turned into if you left it out of the fridge, and if you couldn't remember cryptic commands, you couldn't use a computer. It'd keep all the [L]users at bay, anyway.

(Old Mac for beer sounds like a reasonable trade, but I think the girlfriend would kill me if I brought home one more piece of history. Don't know why she objects so much; it's our heritage, man! )

Heh, I understand the Mac OS X "gooey GUI" thing, I've only used the OS once and I turned off most of the special effects. Actually, I found an "Easter Egg" left over from the NeXT days - if you log in as ">console" you get to a CLI! Unfortunately there's only one virtual tty - and that's a shortcoming of the Darwin kernel.

I have to say on your powerbook/ibook thing there really isn't much to choose between them (Mrs. the Short has a Powerbook G3 and a friend at Uni just got an iBook) - especially as they both have USB so expandability isn't an option. I'd suppose that if upgrading's an issue it'd be easier to get at the HDD on a powerbook - IMBW.

GNUStep's more a mimic of the NeXT development environment than of the UI, but the WindowMaker for X11 is part of the project. See www.gnustep.org.

And finally, on your comment "the days when GUI was what your Mars turned into if you left it out of the fridge, and if you couldn't remember cryptic commands, you couldn't use a computer", TOO DAMN RIGHT! I wasn't even a year of age when Dad first brought a Dragon 32 home, so I've grown up with text-mode machines and BASIC programming. Yes, GUIs are useful tools but they are misused in the hands of the dumb.

CtS

I've still got a 1200, my son has a 1200 + multisync monitor and hard drive and my grandson uses a 500. Oh yes, I've got a CD32 as well.

Some years ago, before NTL took over, I used Delux Paint to create ads for local shops and such. They were put onto a program which ran 24/7 on a 500 with a stop every week to update the ads, greeting etc. Apart from an occasional crash the 500 ran for about 4 years.

Alji, of the Red Dragon (Swynwr y Ddraig Goch) (conducting a sun sign poll @ A712595)(Member of The H2G2 Guild of Wizards @ U197895 looking for wiz kids to join, though you don't have to be a wiz kid just know a bit about some subject that you think will be of interest to others or just bore the pants off them. This is an equal opportunities space open to all sexes, ages and abilities)