As promised, I've spent time during October compiling an Amiga Buyer's Guide. The one thousand words turned into almost four thousand, the wealth of material got bigger and bigger, the amount of Amigas available was larger than I had realised - it's close to writing a guide for the PC! In the end, even after some trimming and refining it was too big to fit on the editorial, and too much to serialise monthly. You can read and/or download the buyer's guide from my Geocities account for the moment. (It's about 30k in size)
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/1076/buyersguide.html
I hope the guide helps potential Amiga buyers, and ex-Amigans making a return, by identifying the current options in the Amiga market, and easing an appropriate purchase. Feedback is more than welcome, and I will attempt to keep it updated in response to comments and information.
The guide also includes information for those who currently own a Windows-equipped PC and want to dip their toes in the Amiga waters, so to speak - including Amiga emulators for the PC, and the innovative Siamese options which hybridise an Amiga and a PC.
Look forward to your comments! Don't forget to pester your local dealer (particularly smaller computer stores) to stock Amiga products.
November Box
Although I'm writing for November, I'm faced with the problem that the so-called 'November Box', the controversial (to some Amiga users) PC-based Next Generation Amiga development system, hasn't been unveiled yet - but will (should) be by the time many of you read this. Veteran Amigans should already know about this development, so I'm going to briefly turn my attention to what the November Box signifies, for those new to the Amiga or the Amiga's renaissance.
The majority of next generation Amiga systems are set to use a new multimedia chip, the identity of which is a closely guarded secret. Most people refer to it as the MMC, meaning 'Magical Mystery Chip' or 'Mystery Multimedia Chip' (depending on who you talk to). The MMC has a performance which will put most current and projected developments to shame, but the price is the real key - in late 1999, when the new Amiga is released by many companies simultaneously, it should be considerably cheaper than equivalent specification systems. That's the theory, anyway.
MMC Prototype Specification:
- 5-10 Times faster than a Pentium II
- 1.2 GB per second data transfer rate
- 400 Million pixels per second 24-bit 3D rendering
- Simultaneous decoding of 4 MPEG2 (HDTV) streams
