Power Computing
by Eric Schwartz, AmiTech-Dayton Gazette, June 2003
We approach the threshold of the next generation of Amiga computing. The Pegasos machine and MorphOS are out and moving forward nicely, it would seem. A new set of screen-shots showcasing the GUI of Amiga OS 4.0 appear rather nice eye-candy-wise, though it remains to be seen if the foundation of the revamped OS will match its shiny facade. It's interesting to think back on the infancy of Commodore's Amiga, when the vast majority of machines had one megabyte of RAM or less, and were lucky to have more than one floppy drive, let alone a hard drive. I'm amazed that I was able to do as much with a system like that as I have, producing animations with jokes and stories, capable of running on a one-meg machine and living on a single DD-floppy disk. Recently, I've taken on the task of converting several of my old animations from the Amiga-only Moviesetter and ANIM formats to the more universal MPEG standard. As part of this, I've been loading and modifying my old anims to facilitate this process, shuffling the frames like cards. The Amiga I've been using to do this has 64 megs of RAM, and a few gigabytes of hard drive space, very modest by any modern standards for computer hardware, but I realized that I'm easily and routinely doing things with animation I wouldn't have dared to even conceive on my older machines with their smaller capacities and slower processors. That machine isn't even my best one.
There are a number of things that PC owners do easily that we can't or can do with some stubborn determination. We've been aware that Amiga has been behind in the realm of simple specs and horsepower for years, but not all of us may know how much of a difference that horsepower can make, even if no other facets of our Amigas were changed. The Amithlon emulator for PCs has given us a taste of what it's like to take the raw speed and storage of the garden-variety PC and apply it to an Amiga. PegasOS and (presumably) the Amiga One will do much the same, adding some new dimensions to the Operating system and its relation to the hardware. With some software applications that allow users to make the best of the power of the machine, we'll really see something special, enabling creativity at a level undreamt of by today's Amiga users. I'll warn Amiga and Genesi now, I have some pretty big dreams.