We've all hear this annoying term called 'upgrade'. It's one of those terms that when it's mentioned, the first word that pops into your mind if PC. Well, i'm actually gonna talk about upgrading today, but not for PCs.
The Amiga used to be renown for being a machine that you hardly ever needed to to upgrade. You got yourself an A1200 with a Hard Drive, and you had a top-of-the-range machine. However, now a days, that isn't the truth. The average machine now is an A1200 with an '030, a Hard Drive, and about 8Mb of RAM. This has helped quite a lot for the Amiga to catch up with the modern PCs, but unfortunately, it hasn't been enough.
The Amiga has been stuck with the AGA chipset for quite a while now, and AGA is slow compared to today's system. This is why us, the Amiga community, have to catch up. The way to go ahead is Graphics Cards. Picasso IV and Cybervision 64/3D being the lead of the competition.
Unfortunately, as the A1200 seems to be the most common machine, it also brings a lot of problems for upgrading. The A1200 was designed to be as a home system, and Commodore never thought that people would like to upgrade their A1200's as much as we'd like to. They didn't include Zorro slots, and that proved to be a fatal error. Zorro is the base for any machine that has to be upgraded. Graphics cards need Zorro slots, and it's a damn shame they do.
If we all had Graphic cards, the Amiga community would be much better off. Developers would be able to make games for the graphics cards, and they would be very nice looking games indeed. Combined with the PPC boards, the Amiga could become an amazing games platform, and could very easily catch up with the PC and Console market. This would bring new life into the Amiga.
So this brings me to the subject of Gateway 2000. If they are to design any new Amiga systems, they will have to include Graphics cards, PPc boards and Towers as standard. This is the only way the Amiga is going to catch up with the current market. Otherwise, we are going to get stuck with the usual "ah, but you're machine is out of date" from those annoying friends.
I'd just like to dedicate this last paragraph to Princess Diana, who died earlier on in a car crash in France. Rest In Peace, and I hope you go to a better place.
Alvaro Thompson | |
| alvaro@enterprise.net |