[OT] GEM, Blitter, and Atari ST (was: RE: Debian and SqueakL revisited again)

Kevin Fisher kgf at golden.net
Fri Nov 2 13:53:54 UTC 2001


On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 10:03:41AM -0000, Peter Crowther wrote:
> > From: Kevin Fisher [mailto:kgf at golden.net]
> > I still have ancient computer magazines that mention the 
> > "Lorraine", the former codename for the first Amiga.
> 
> I still have an Amiga 1000, one of the first batch of ten development boxes
> that got shipped into the UK.  *Way* ahead of its time, with huge hardware
> acceleration to help with the graphics --- a blitter, line drawer and
> polygon filler on one chip, and a scan-driven video coprocessor on another
> that allowed you to change I/O register contents as the scan passed a given
> point on the screen.  I still miss the ability to slide entire *screens* of
> information up and down the monitor smoothly.  Oh, and it had a decent
> multitasking OS instead of a DOS clone :-).

At one time I owned an A1000 as well.  I found out a week after I sold it
that the designers had all put their signatures on the inside of the case...
including "Mitchi the dog", too!

Of course I did manage to find the "hidden" messages they left scattered
throughout the OS...some were rather unflattering to Commodore, to put
it mildly.

I believe that Enlightenment (on UNIX/X11) is heavily inspired by the
Amiga.  The last stable release had "sliding screens" just like the Amiga..
although you couldn't have different resolutions for each screen, unlike
the Amiga. :)

> 
> I think the Amiga illustrates an important point for the thread about
> 'modern' games.  The designers went to a lot of effort to push common
> operations into faster blocks --- in the Amiga's case, into hardware.  This
> cost CPU cycles, as the coprocessors stole from the processor bandwidth (and
> the 68000 had no cache).  Squeak can do the same by pushing common
> operations into faster blocks --- in Squeak's case, into plug-ins that may
> then use native hardware support.
> 
> 		- Peter
> 
> 





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