[Coco] Amiga Systems

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 15 January 2014 11:42:38 Mark McDougall did opine:

> On 15/01/2014 10:35 AM, Bill Loguidice wrote:
> > Of the classic Amigas, I'd recommend an Amiga
> > 1200 with a combination 68030 accelerator/64MB trap door expansion and
> > an adapted compact flash card in place of the hard drive.
> 
> If you want to experience the pinnacle of game-playing on the Amiga, I'd
> heartily agree with Bill.
> 
> If you're on a tighter budget, then a floppy-based A500 with a bundled
> game collection is a good compromise as most games will play just fine
> on it, except for the relatively few higher-end titles that appeared
> later in the machine's life.
> 
> If you're more into tinkering with the OS and utilities, you have more
> options as pretty much any of the classic models will enable you to do
> that. How far into it (and budget) will dictate whether you opt for
> higher-end hard-disk-enabled models.
> 
> Personally, I own an A1000, optioned-up A1200 and several A500's (one of
> the A500's has an IDE interface). For convenience I use the A1200 with
> hard drive and Ethernet for file xfer, but it's also very easy to whack
> a floppy in the A500 and start playing games!
> 
> And on a side note; if you're interested in a PS/2 mouse adapter for it
> (as working Amiga mice are hard to find and generally inferior to
> modern PS/2 offerings) I can hook you up with one.
> 
> Regards,

I would argue that point about the amiga mouse being inferior. The premise 
is still the best there ever was because it was absolutely lagless, but the 
mechanical implementations that were foisted off on the amiga people were 
abominable, the last "wizard" mouse being a case in point, ugly design, 
unhandy as could be to use because there was no way to push a button 
without moving it 3 or 4 pixels.  The button switches weren't held into the 
pcb when the board went thru the wave solder, so the buttons soon broke the 
pcb traces on the bottom of the board.  I must have, in the heyday of 
having a 6 pack or more of Amiga's at the tv station, spent 2% of my time 
repairing those poorly constructed aftermarket mice.

The secret was in the heavy cable. 9 wires were required because the 
signals from the photocells were sent up the cable into the decoder in the 
amiga, and without the 1200 or 2400 baud serial conversion lags, mouse 
motion was visibly faster and more accurate than any serial or ps2 mouse 
can ever duplicate.  Each axis needed 2 wires to send its A-B quadrature 
signals, so 4 wires were dedicated to that, then it had 3 buttons, plus 
power & ground, adds up to 9.

Had the aftermarket mice been designed for straight down button pushes, the 
average lightwave artist could have been 3x as productive, as it was, he 
spent 15 seconds going back and editing his last button push because the 
mouse was pulled towards the ball of the hand by the pull back it took to 
push the button.

That serial conversion lag in todays mice has trained a generation of video 
artists to move the mouse, and waste 400 milliseconds visually verifying 
that the pointer has arrived at the pixel you wanted to draw that line to, 
is the right one before pressing or releasing the button.  Truly 
experienced lightwave folks didn't need to do that, it was where they moved 
their hand to when the button was stroked.  That has been largely 
eliminated today by modern wireless optical mice where the major lag is the 
10 millisecond usb lag, so one could say they are as good.  Faster than the 
serial or ps2 versions, it all helps.

Cheers, Gene
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