John Kennedy gets an eyeful of the latest upgrade to a low-cost graphics enhancer.
Retina is a 24bit graphics card from the same people that brought us VLab - one of the best Amiga digitisers so far. We reviewed Retina thoroughly in the April 1993 issue, but since then the system been given a bit of a spit and polish. Even though the update is via software only, it's still quite substantial.
FASTER THAN THE
BLINK OF AN EYE
Although it offers more colours than a standard Amiga, Retina can actually speed up your graphics operations by a factor of ten or more. Yet there isn't a single Motorola 68-anything processor in sight, so how's it all done? It's due to the fact the Retina is a true 24bit board, so programs such as Art Department Professional don't have to wade through hundreds of complicated 'pick the best colour palette' algorithms to display the image. Instead, the true colour picture is displayed as soon as the 24bit image is loaded into Retina's own RAM.
But there's more to come: Retina comes with a Harlequin emulation program which means it can run all sorts of exciting 24bit software such as TVPaint. The Harlequin emulation is wonderful: for example, Real 3Dv2 comes with a Harlequin driver and it and Retina are put together, the result is one the most powerful desktop 3D rendering systems available today. Picture it: on one monitor exists the normal wireframe editing screen, whilst on the other is a constantly updating true colour rendition - it's an awesome combination.
SOFTWARE UPDATES
The software originally supplied with Retina included a monitor set-up program and a Workbench emulator - the latter provided a way of displaying the normal Amiga video output through the Retina card, very handy if you only had one monitor or you wanted to make use of a particular Workbench program.
The emulator has been improved to cope with screen depths of up to 8bitplanes (256 colours) which means your Workbench can start to look pretty neat. It's not particularly fast coping at these colour depths, but then neither is any AGA Amiga. Speaking of AGA, the Retina workbench emulator can even fake a HAM8 display, although I have to be convinced as to why you would want to.
Other improvements see the AdPro saver providing ARexx support, and the RetinaDisplay stand-aline image viewing program now supports images compressed with the JPEG format.
ANIMATION
By far the most important part of the upgrade is the addition of some animation software. MakeRACE will take images of either 6,8 or 24 bitplanes deep and crunch them into a single animation file. This means for example, that the 16 million colour images produced from an Imagine rendering session can be displayed in their full colours.
I was more than a little sceptical about this, so proceeded to render four hundred frames. In the morning, and after conversion by MakeRACE, I played back the animation with the companion program PlayRACE. The result? Bloody brilliant - full colour, darn fast images that looked so real I could have picked them out of the screen. Even in low resolution (320 by 256) the true colour means the animation possibilities are remarkable.
CONCLUSION
The more I use Retina, the more I want one - and I'm already lucky enough to have an A4000. As soon as I load any graphics software, the VLab card is used and my computer system mysteriously acquires an extra monitor, displaying my creations in full 24bit. Being able to edit files with one screen, and watch the finished appear nearly instantaneously on the other monitor is amazing. It's like having two computers in one.
Now more than ever, there is no reason why A2000/A1500 owners have to continuing to look at the AGA chipset with envy. By plugging a Retina card into a free Zorro slot, the graphic output is even better than the A4000.
Works with A1500,A2000,A3000,A4000
Needs Kickstart 2 or above for all features
Ease of use: 94%
Slot it in and click on the software. Easy.
Value for money: 98%
Instant AGA-plus upgrade, including a rock-steady flicker fixer.
Effectiveness: 92%
Improved software makes all the difference.
Flexibility: 84%
More software than ever will work with Retina.
Innovation: 94%
The animation features make this one hot piece of kit.
"Essential for A2000 stalwarts,
and all interested in graphics"
Overall: 92%
Jargon Busters
24bit colour
When an image is displayed in 24bit colour, more than 16million shades are displayed on-screen - ample to ensure an image looks as realistic as possible.
Art Department Professional
A image processing program that's so powerful and easy to use that it has more or less become the de facto standard. Whatever 'de facto' means.
AGA
The new generation of Amigas use the AGA chipset, which can provide up to 256 colours in any resolution, plus the new HAM8 mode.
HAM8
A piece of cunning trickery to allow the Amiga to display pseudo 18bit images on screen. It takes a trained eye to tell the difference between a hi-res HAM8 image and a true 24bit one.
Caption:
Now non-Amiga owners can benefit from the joys of flicker-fixed, 256 colour (morally dubious) Workbench backdrops.
