Nice try, and I'm sure you can impress a few kids who never experienced the Amiga era, but to me you only look like a fool. You know what was really cool at the time?
Yeah. Having an Emplant board. I've owned several Amigas, and hung out with several other Amiga owners. Blow it out your arse sideways.
do you think too much fish can be a factor in demotivating people from learning to use the fish pole?
Yes, but alas, the situation is much more complicated than fishing.
would you then agree that its important to help folks both with fish _and_ fish poles?
Yes. That is in fact precisely how I feel about it. Teaching 'em how to use the pole is right in there as well. It's woeful what the education system in this country has become. It's awful how entitlement programs are designed to self-perpetuate by cutting off recipients when they just begin to get their shit together. And it's awful how we don't actually permit people to be self-sufficient in this country; grow your own food in your own backyard and you just might get a visit from the cops.
Ranty McRanterson, I know. But seriously, at the rate at which we shit upon the disadvantaged in this country, it's a wonder we ever even hear from them, let alone see or smell them.
I'll have you know, drinkypoo, that looking up your signature lead me to read Snow Crash to begin with. Great book!
Well, at least there's that to make all this time spent Slashdotting worthwhile. If I am an anything fanboy, I am one for Neal Stephenson.
As much as people fawn over computer nostalgia, they forget how much the pre-plug-and-play era actaully kind of sucked on a day to day basis. Sure, it got you job security, but today I enjoy unboxing my SATA drive, plugging it in and moving on to whatever it is I wanted to do with the new drive.
I had very few problems with termination on my Amiga. It seemed to work fine with any termination I used. Macs were where I had problems. And the Amiga was in fact the first computer that really had great plug and play. It had a microkernel-based OS and the drivers could be loaded from option ROM on the cards automatically, and then later they could be replaced in memory with a newer driver loaded from storage. In spite of this, Amiga themselves actually released at least one storage controller (MFM+SCSI) with no autoconfiguration; I had one in my first A2000 running a ST225 and later, a SQ135.
My largest complaint about the A2000 is that it included the same 68000-8 processor clocked at 7.1MHz as the A500 and A1000. It would have been advantageous to have included a 68000-16 processor clocked at 14.2MHz for the more strenuous workloads that A2000 users tended to perform.
Yeah, for those users, Amiga offered the A2000 with an accelerator, and called it the A2500. You probably recall.
It might have also discouraged programming that relied on a 7.1MHz clock.
That's why they didn't do that. They wanted to maintain the library of software that would run on the A500. Without that, the A500 would have been a sad joke. At $600 as a package with a TV encoder, it was cheaper than most accelerators. You couldn't expect people to ever add anything but a memory upgrade.
I had a friend with an AdSpeed accelerator module (68000@14) for his A2000 and it made a significant difference. After spending considerably more for an A3000-16, I ended up regretting the decision given the costs versus the benefits.
That difference is minuscule compared to having an '020, let alone an '030.
Since you're the one telling people they really want that Mac emulation board, can I ask you again why?
Because it was the thing to have, not just for the coolness factor or the utility of being able to run MacOS (and faster than it would run on the Mac, too) but because it added more I/O including some highly credible serial ports. You're going to use your serial port for a MIDI interface, right? Given that nearly all you need is some level-shifting hardware, since it has a 31,250bps mode? And if you have two Amigas, which is not unlikely since you might well want one with the old chipset and one with the new, your parallel port is likely to be used for PLIP. It's actually fairly speedy. Then you only need one egregiously expensive ethernet card.
I mean, if you're not messing with the Amiga to recapture the past, then what are you doing? Most of the classic games run in emulators, and there's really no point to using the hardware any more except as an affectation. It would be fun perhaps to use the Amiga in a nerdy stage show, but there's no point to trying to do "real work" with it. It's an amusement.
"telescoping scopes"? It's scopes all the way down?
I suppose you could use spokes.
Smartwheels are made of telescoping scopes which depend on future-tech materials science, and this will require different future-tech materials science to be practical, so clearly it's totally different.
Seriously though, it is totally different. Smartwheels can track over broken surfaces with full traction, these cannot.
Actually, timing-dependent code is a gross violation of Commodore's published Amiga programming standards.
When you give people the schematics to your computer you're implying comfort with a high level of hackery. A friend added his own Zorro II slot to an Amiga 500. He always wanted to add a Video Toaster to a 500, all the signals were there, but nobody ever wanted it done for obvious reasons
indeed it would be if the minimum wage was enough to subsist at a level they've been conditioned to think was sufficient.
All thoughts come from our conditioning.
Why would I really want a Mac emulator in an old Amiga? What would be the point?
What would be the point of owning an old Amiga?
But appearently they urgently needed the 32bit processing capability and were using selfdeveloped Zorro cards for the signal reception and processing.
Makes sense. Amigas were some of the last well-documented computers, down to schematics.
Actually, the accelerator and the genlock slot are both special-purpose slots.
What you really want to find inside of your Amiga 2000 is an '030 accelerator and an Emplant board with some Mac IIci roms on it, as well as a boatload of RAM (1 or 2+4MB, maybe?) with a fat or fatter Agnus, and some 2.1 ROMs. If you don't have all of those things, then you will always be tempted to blow more money.
All of this has made me wonder if I can score an accelerator or at least RAM expansion for the A1200 for a reasonable amount of money, though. That would be a fun casemod (separating the keyboard and the rest of the machine) and I've got one lying around. I was supposed to give it away but crap happened.
But unless it comes packed with a video card and an accelerator, there's not much point to even messing with it today. What you really want if you don't actually care about Amigas is a CDTV and/or CD32, which takes up minimal space, looks minimally crappy, and runs most of the respective software library depending on whether you want the old or newer chipset.
Neutrinos have bad breadth.
