It seems most Americans prefer to live in quiet, unassuming places. If you live in rural areas you really don't have to worry about crime that doesn't involve someone you know. Most burglars aren't going to end up at your specific residence unless they know what they are looking for. But for those who don't want to live so far from a town center, suburbs provide a similar feeling of anonymous security. Endless streets with similar looking houses reflecting when that neighborhood sprung up, and everyone driving similar cars because they have similar incomes. As far as open world games go, I've always found their absence glaring. I want to get lost. I want to randomly stumble upon the house with a hundred garden gnomes within a labyrinth of cul de sacs, I want to see the residents peeking out of their windows when I trip their security lights. But more importantly, I want more things in the world that have nothing to do with my character or my objectives. We too often see the "Miniatur Wunderland" version of places, all the recognizable landmarks with none of the bland repetition in between.

It's the system footprint. PS1 looks positively tiny compared to when it was released. Everyone recalls the original XBox being too large for the Japanese market. Sony designed the first PS2 to be work in either orientation and have done that with every launch version since. It may be the marketers who insist on this but I imagine a fair share of their domestic market now expects it.

They had a few notable talents in the '80s... John Mathieson went from Sinclair to Flare where he designed chips for Konix and then Atari. He then led the team which produced the NUON, essentially the equivalent of a PSX+DVD player on a chip. Unfortunately, all of these companies had the wrong affiliations. Apple and the clone makers (which had few in-house custom chips) sided with players from the PC ecosystem, usually nVidia or ATI. Japanese companies were generally reluctant to build devices which competed with Sony in the market place. The corporate alliances of 20 years ago (Apple, IBM and Motorola collaborating on PPC) decided where we'd be now more than the best ideas of that time.

If all of the developers identify as men it doesn't need to be inclusive.

I have to assume that most people who didn't use an Amiga regularly assume the community exists because people can't let go of that "30 year old technology". No wonder people think Amiga fanatics are all idiots. What they are holding on to, and still find generally superior, is the experience of using an Amiga. My 50MHz Amiga 4000 from the mid '90s feels just as responsive as the Win10 Ryzen workstation I'm writing this on, it just lacks the computing muscle for modern audio/video/CG tasks. Lack of memory protection was really the only big thing missing from the OS at the time... But again, it's not about the technology. It's about the user experience, and this is where the Amiga really shines. I could look in any folder on my HD and tell at a glance what was in there. There was no registry, there were no hidden processes running, there were never random things happening in the background. Programs running on other screens wouldn't pop up windows in front of what you were doing. Programs didn't nag about available updates or advertise specials on unrelated products. It was very user-centric and never nagged. Contrast that with my Windows PC which still insists on telling me that there's a Flash update every time I reboot, or begins installing an update when I am trying to power down as a storm approaches. Hell, I never even wanted Windows 10. I opted out of updating until one day the option was ghosted and two days later my computer installed Windows 10 in the middle of the night. And if that's all you've ever known it might be hard to appreciate how using an Amiga felt compared to a more "modern" computing experience.

Yup. My first thought when I read this post. I did just learn from the trueSpace forum at www.united3dartists.com that there may be some proprietary code they are unable to open-source. That should not prevent them from decoupling that code and open-sourcing what they do have the right to release. Anyway, still hoping to see it eventually freed some day.

Like the stuff that cats will stare at moving around the room but which we can't see?

I just hang around in case someone posts about how great the Amiga was or that it's finally coming back. I didn't know I had to be a sysadmin.

I wasn't referring to MPEG noise reduction or TNR, but rather motion smoothing/automatic frame rate conversion which I believe to be distinct from those. Either way, it's not a limitation of available TV technology but rather an unwanted side effect of technology designed for a more typical subject when applied to fireworks.

Whenever I hear that something real looks like CG on a modern TV (never ever heard that during the CRT era) I assume it has something to do with motion smoothing. Fireworks aren't persistent objects, which is what motion smoothing works best with. They appear, and can change, almost in an instant and tend to have a lot of noise/sparkle. Smoothing out both of these traits seemingly should make them look less lifelike.

That's a little too passive for me. Also, it might tend to end up in a feedback loop like Youtube recommendations, unable to bring in novelty and just homing in on what it thinks it you are looking for specifically until everything it provides you is indistinguishable. I'd like to be able to breed my media. Take say Star Wars and combine it with Smokey and the Bandit, and see the different ways it would turn out. Would you get Smokey and the Bandit in space or Star Wars with car chases? Who would the AI replace each character with? How would a symphonic version of "Eastbound and Down" sound if it were conducted in the style of John Williams? Similarly, I want to be able to play through a game like GTA and at the end have it cut a movie of arbitrary length that edits my highlights into a cohesive narrative. And then to be able to use sliders to adjust the tone from light to dark, to choose if the movie is a drama, a comedy, a buddy flick... Choose from various film stocks, lenses, directorial styles etc. None of this is any fun to me if I'm not somehow involved in the process.

I think they could have dragged it on a bit running multiple instances of a lightened Amiga OS in multiple sandboxes and passing data from each via AREXX. A 3D program could have used one instance of AmigaOS for example on the main interface and its widgets/icons. A rendering task could be launched in a separate instance of Amiga OS. Each would have been as prone to crash as before, but would be less likely to bring down the other or separate applications/services with it.

Oh it was. It was hard to 3D with enough resources left over for game logic etc., so the best Amiga 3D was always found in scene demos. Most used a lot of pre-calculation for things that are now typically done on-the-fly I'm fairly sure. Lapsuus (Maturefurk) - Amiga Scene demo (HQ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Amiga Scenedemo - Starstruck by TBL (Assembly 2006): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Are you referring to the Amiga 500 with its single expansion port? Because the Amiga was quite expandable and easily customized. There were external audio digitizers, internal sound cards, internal and external framegrabbers/digitizers, internal and external graphics cards/enhancers, CPU expasion cards with sockets for FPUs, the frakkin' Video Toaster... All of those could be problematic when the software went to the metal though, as e.g. memory registers could change. And when video cards debuted for the Amiga based on XVGA chips from the PC world, they did in fact lack the blitter and copper functions of the Amiga's custom chips. Essentially you are right that the Amiga as a games machine was too tightly integrated to be upgraded in the same manner as a PC. It was essentially a console with a keyboard. But the Amiga as a workstation was at least as expandable as the other desktop platforms, even if the options were fewer.

It's true that a modern of Amiga would probably be much more like other modern computers. Competitors copied the things about it that their markets wanted, and many of those things (high color display, smooth multitasking, etc.) were inevitable. Had Commodore management backed the Amiga instead of hedging its bets on 8-bit machines, consoles, and PC clones the Amiga could have entered the 3D era a viable competitor... But what I truly miss about the Amiga is the user-centric nature of the Amiga experience. A program in the background was unlikely to pop itself to the front while you were actively doing something else. Reminders and notifications didn't interrupt your work or demand your attention. When a program was installed it was very easy to find and remove, not littering dependencies and whatnot everywhere. There was no ever-expanding registry which slowed the computer down over time and little likelihood of a program installation sneaking in other unrelated applications or services. And while it might innocently crash the Amiga never told you to stop what you were doing so that it could install an update or finishing configuring a software installation. The Amiga user always felt in control of their machine and confident in what it might be doing at any time. There weren't occasional hiccups in system responsiveness as mysterious tasks were executed, and network interruptions/mysterious loss of disk space as the OS and programs downloaded updates in the background. I won't say the modern computing experience is fundamentally flawed, but it is one in which the user is constantly being interrupted or distracted by notifications and prompts from applications and OS services. I open Firefox to a message from Adobe urging me to update... I run CCleaner and it tells me I'm 15 versions behind and offers an update button... I run Vegas and get a pop-up detailing a special offer for the newest version... I try to power down because a storm is coming through and Windows decides it's time to install a system update. None of those things were part of the Amiga experience, and IMHO would not have originated from that community.