Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!psuvax1!vu-vlsi!cheung From: cheung@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU (Wilson Cheung) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga Subject: Blitter vs. 80386 Keywords: Which is faster? Message-ID: <1800@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU> Date: 10 Aug 88 18:18:24 GMT Organization: Villanova Univ. EE Dept. Lines: 35 Recently I got in 3 Zenith 386 PC's. Well I installed windows 386 and was surprised how quickly it updated its windows after resizing. I was able to quickly flip back and forth through all pull down menus at random and windows was able to keep up. Then I ran a line drawing demo, similar to the one for the Amiga; the lines in windows seemed to just flash on the screen simultaneously rather than sequentially. This rather impressive speed causes me to wonder which is actually faster in animations, a 16 Mhz 386 with no wait state 32- bit memory and a 256K EGA card or the blitter on the Amiga. Ah, remember the days in which I was proud to own a hot machine called the Amiga. Now a days I am embarrassed to say the name Amiga in the same breath of IBM PC. Being an EE student mentioning the Amiga is seems a sure ticket for some substantial joking ridicule. "Oh, and here is my 386 machine with 287 coprocessor, 2 Meg of RAM, VGA card and Zenith flat screen VGA monitor. Hey what's that sorry linking terminal in the corner." : a a a its an amiga Hey isn't that one of those game machines. Say what's it doing in your office your supposed to be working not playing! : And in a futile attempt to show the serious side of the Amiga I pop up WordPerfect, Diga, and Maxiplan Hey why does that display look so crappy. Why is the disk drive so slow? Why is text so slow? The windows and multi-tasking hardly gets noticed and they walk away losing interest. Well, I'm getting a bit sidetracked. The question I'd like to post for discussion is whether an Amiga could hold up to a 386 computer with proper NTSC interfacing and similar animation software.