[Coco] [Color Computer] RE: [CoCo] Atari and Amiga comparison

[James Diffendaffer]

I love the Coco3 and it does compare favorably... unless you consider
a few things.

1. The 68000 is 16/32 bit.  It is much faster than the 6809.  The
later A1200 had a 68EC020 and could easily emulate about any 8 bit
machine at full speed.  Even the 68000 did that but it was pretty close.

2. You can change the palette on the fly the same way as the coco and
you even have a coprocessor to do it for you.  There was also a
half-bright mode with 64 colors on screen without even using the
copper.  Half bright was on all Amigas after the A1000.  There was
also a dual playfiled mode where one playfield overlayed another. 
This let you have the background move while stuff in a cockpit stayed
still.  There were games that used it but it cut the number of colors
you could display and used a lot of RAM.  To display more colors on
the Coco3 ate CPU time.  For static images it doesn't matter but for
animation?  

3. Blitter, dual buss architecture, DMA driven sound, DMA driven disk
controller.  Disk I/O, sound, graphics blits and copper activity can
take place on one buss while the CPU continues to execute your program
on the other.  The system doesn't have to grind to a halt for disk
activity.  You can start a task to preload the next screen while you
are still messing with the current one.  Sound is actual sound
samples... what is still used today.

4. Intuition.  Open a file on a disk and you can move that disk to
another drive or swap disks and still access your file.  If a program
needs something off of another disk it will ask for the disk and
automatically detect it when you insert it.

5. The AmigaOS has most of the system calls in ROM and you don't need
to reinvent the wheel to do things.  This frees up space in RAM.

6. Autoconfig.  Plug in a card and the system automatically adds RAM
the the system or launches the driver for the device from it's onboard
ROM.

7. Hardware sprites.  

8. More colors in hi-res

9. Bit plane graphics allowed you to use 8 colors

10. CPU upgrades.  I think my last miggy's CPU ran at 40Mhz and had a
math coprocessor built in.

11. And there was that whole video syncing ability that made graphics
overlay easy with a genlock.  It was great for interactive video disk
which was still popular at that time since CD-ROMs were a rare
expensive and slow thing at the time.

I could continue but I don't really see the point.
Sorry, I owned and programmed on the Amiga and it was leaps and bounds
above the Coco3.  However, if my business hadn't paid for the Amiga
I'd have upgraded to the Coco3 or a build it yourself PC.

As for the ST... I wasn't impressed.  I thought the Coco3 did well
against the ST.  It does use DMA for a lot of I/O but the sound was
still from the 8 bit era.  It did have Midi ports built in though and
had an 8Mhz 68000 so it was faster.



-----RJRTTY was heard saying the following on the mailing
list-------------------------
People

In the course of adapting my converter to these machines I have
had to acquire them for testing purposes. Because of this I have been
able to compare them personally with the coco3. I have always wanted
one of these machines because of all the "hoopla" in the press about
them when they came out. A number of things discouraged me from
owning one at the time. Price, the fact that I already had the coco3 and
a limited amount of time available to become familiar with another
machine. Little things like that and the biggy "I just never got around
to it".

Well I have them now and I have to tell you I am not all that impressed.
Don't get me wrong. The 68000 was a great processor in its day and
these machines were great advancements to personal computing but
I think the coco3 compares favorably with them. They didn't display
more simultaneous colors than the coco tho they had bigger palettes.
The Amiga had the "HAM" mode but it was convoluted and inconvenient
to use. Sock's enhanced display modes for the coco3 are as useful
and show more colors. Great for still images like the Amiga HAM mode.

I guess they just don't live up to the mystique that surrounded them for
me at the time. In my opinion, the 6809 ( and 6309 now) was still a viable
alternative during the 68000's prime. The only thing missing in the coco3
was 8 bit task registers that could allow it to access 2 meg ram
natively and
8 bit palette registers for a 256 color palette. But even without
these the
coco3 held it own with these machines and seemed more appropriate for
the experimenters among us to use for special purposes.

The one thing I like the most about the Amiga is the internal disk
drive and
the external power supply. I think my next personal project will be to
put a
1.44 M drive into a coco3 enclosure and modify it for use with an external
12V "brick" type power supply. The same thing Bob did on his website.

What I am saying is I don't think I missed much. Looking back on it now
I am glad I was a coco person. No regrets. See you all at the fest.

Roy