[rescue] Curses, foiled again

[Peter Corlett]

On 19 May 2007, at 02:38, Michael Parson wrote:
[...]
> The A3000 also has a seperate HD15 connector that outputs native Amiga
> graphics through the built-in flicker-fixer so you can use a VGA  
> monitor.

The A3000's flicker fixer was basically a separate framebuffer that  
sample the video output from the Amiga's custom chips and re-emitted  
it at twice the line rate. It wasn't actually VGA: PAL Amigas would  
generate a 640x512 pixel video signal at 50Hz/31.2kHz.

> The A4000 didn't have that?

No, because the AGA chipset could fake it reasonably convincingly.  
Except when you actually needed it, such as at boot time... AA also  
only improved the rate of clocking out video data but everything else  
such as the blitter still operated at legacy speeds so enabling the  
extra AGA modes would actually make video slower than an A3000.

That's why I'd prefer an A3000 over my A4000s: the flicker-fixer and  
SCSI are much more useful to me than AGA and IDE. They're also  
smaller and won't use as much of the rather scarce space on my desk.