The Amiga Turns 25 289
retsamxaw reminds us that yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the Amiga. "[The Amiga] debuted to rave reviews and great expectations — heck, InfoWorld said it might be the 'third milestone' in personal computing after the Apple II and the IBM PC. ... Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit, but it splurged on the Amiga's introduction. The highlight of that Lincoln Center product launch was a demo in which pop art legend Andy Warhol used an Amiga to 'paint' Blondie's Debbie Harry. The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command, but it was heady stuff... Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux... But Amiga nuts of the 1980s and early 1990s... remain the ultimate fanboys, even though it hadn't yet occurred to anyone to hurl that word at computer users."
I'll freely admit to it (Score:2)
I'm a fanboy, still have my A500 an A1000 and an A2000HD - never have been able to get a SCSI cd-rom working in the 2000, unfortunately.
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I thought at the time the web was unbearably slow w
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600 - this one was almost like a laptop.
(hey, don't laugh; it was quite nice machine - and the price helped in some parts of the woods)
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Back in the day, I would have killed for an A1200, even now I'll consider maiming for one. My other machines (besides the A500) I've come across at garage sales, but I've never seen an A1200 in the wild.
ebay (Score:2)
They do sell Amiga 1200's on ebay. They sell even now for a couple hundred dollars.
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Just download an emulator. All of the fun ... none of the diskettes.
(Ok, you won't be able to program any PWM effects on the 'power' LED, but hey...)
Re:I'll freely admit to it (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? The A1200 was kind of...meh. Seriously, the Amiga 1000 was revolutionary when it came out in 1985! The Amiga 500 was revolutionary when it came out in 1987 because it made the Amiga affordable. After that? Nothing much. The Amiga 1200 came out in fall of 1992 and what kind of specs did it have?
Sure, the 68EC020 at 14MHz was of course an improvement over the 68000 at 7MHz, but c'mon! It's five years since Amiga 500!
Only 2MiB of chip RAM (and no fast RAM) - once again, it's been five years!
Graphics were kind of braindead, just adding two bitplanes and making a total mess of the color registers. Could have gone with a chunky mode instead.
Blitter is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000 for goodness sake!
Sound is exactly the same as the old Amiga 1000...
Remember that in 1994, the Playstation came out. Compared to Amiga (and especially CD32 which came out a year earlier) now that is revolutionary again!
Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy. Luckily, it wore off (even though I still actually have two A1200 and one A600 in my closet somewhere); for some people, it's chronic. Just go to amiga.org and watch some deluded people, not in jest or in irony, argue that the Amiga is, in 2010, a better computer than a PC. Oh, the humanity!
Re:I'll freely admit to it (Score:5, Funny)
AGA was stop gap (Score:4, Interesting)
The AGA chipset in the A1200 and A4000 was a stop gap chipset, a quick mod of the ECS chipset. It was supposed to plug the gap between the ECS and AAA chipsets.
So both the A1200 and A4000 were just stop gap machines, but sadly nothing ever was released after then.
People may go on about the A1200 not being much faster than the A500, but have a look at your history books. PCs were faster in specs but they were using Windows 3.1 still back then. Slow, 16-bit code and cooperative multitasking. DOS was still used for games!
Also, a PC would cost you about 4 times as much.
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The A1000 is the one true Amiga - gotta love the tuck-away keyboard design (and the nice keyboard).
The A500 was an amateurish-looking waste of desk space. I'm sure that's partly what killed it off as a 'serious' computer. Put one of those side by side with an IBM PC (and model M keyboard) and see which one gets chosen for 'business'.
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500 for home, 2000 for office ;)
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I sold my Amiga 1000 in the early 90's, and I am sooo sorry I did. Best computer ever.
I remember feeling a genuine sense of loss when I sold my 500 and later my 1200. I have never felt the same emotional connection to any of the PC's I have owned since. I will always have a soft spot for the old Amigas.
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I loved my Amiga 2000, it was an amazing machine, light years ahead of apple macintosh....
It wasn't untill I installed OS/2 on a 486 that I had another truly multi-tasking machine.
Then Linus Torvalds came along.
Thank Bog!
jaz
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Which version(s) of AmigaDOS?
Which drives have you tried?
Are you using an A2091, or something else?
I have a Toshiba/Sun 2X that works just fine, although finding the DB-25 to SCSI cable was a bit tricky.
IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Informative)
The big, not-often-told truth is that IBM PCs sucked donkey ass, compared to the Amigas. I remember the huge hype that surrounded the IBM PC, so I wanted to have a look. I was spoiled on Amiga's full-fledged GUI (G for Graphical!) that permeated all the applications present on the Amiga. When I saw the apps on the IBM PC, I couldn't believe my eyes - in the most negative way possible: the poor ASCII graphics sported by the apps present on the IBM PC were a colossal turn-off. And the computers were considerably more expensive than the Amigas, even without soundcard and color graphics. And "colour" on the IBM PC meant 4 colours (CGA)! Of course, CGA cost you an arm and a leg.
I mean, c'mon! IBM PCs and Amigas? No comparison. The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Insightful)
in the end, open architecture and expandability won
No, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" won, just as "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" tends to win today. It's really amazing to me how people continue to try to come up with technical justifications for behavior that's clearly driven by non-technical concerns.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:4, Insightful)
That was even probably more general - "nobody got fired for buying non-toy computers" won. One of the problems of Amiga was probably how inexpensive they were ("it can't be good for that little!"), and in large part sold via toy shops...
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That was true. I was friends with the local Southwest Florida Amiga dealer. He expressed that very issue to me almost 20 years ago.
It was a fascinating time though. I even got to meet Jay Miner once and later talked to him through his BBS called "The Mission"
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That was a killer weakness for the Amiga: You went to Computerland to buy an IBM, but you went to Toys-R-Us to buy an Amiga.
(The other killer weakness was Commodore, but that's a different rant).
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Insightful)
It was not openness that won. It's never openness that wins.
Very visible continuous progress is needed to become popular. Visible continuous progress is better then openness. Openness can be a way to obtain continuous progress, but openness is neither required nor sufficient.
Amiga was advanced, but it did not develop anywhere, it was so advanced but somehow no-one could be found to take it the next step forward. So it became stagnant while PC developed. We can see the same thing with Apple, a 1995 Mac was nearly identical to that of 1985. Only after Jobs came back, taking with him a whole team from NeXT, did the Mac go anywhere fresh. We even have seen this with Microsoft IE 6, which started out great, but then nothing No-one there to take the next step.
To many who want conserve what they have, and not enough who want to move progressively forward. To take the next step, especially with a successful, advanced product is scary and the results are uncertain. One needs to have amazing self-confidence to be able to take the next step again, and again, and again Most people's fear, uncertainty and doubt will prevent them from making the next step consistently, often waisting millions of dollars and many months on aimless research and development in the process. Sometimes even leading to products which are then canceled with in a few months.
The best strategy seems to be to take the next (often obvious) step with a product on a regular schedule (every few months, at most once a year). Occasionally this step should be a leap, but it does not have to be every time. If you are able to, it also seems to help to only talk about actual deliverable products and implemented features: Don't announce products which are not ready for production, don't talk about features not yet implemented (anyone remember Longhorn?). Any progress is better then no progress, even minimal progress is better then the disappointment of vaporware. So keep your plans private/secret until you are ready to deliver an actual product.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Interesting)
The innovations in the PC came mostly from external development outside of IBM to the open PC architecture. If you were there in the old days you would remember the competing video and audio standards, memory specifications etc. 3rd party hardware was instrumental in creating the PC we know today.
When Jobs came back he leveraged the established PC standards to move the the Mac forward. Apple used to be a company that used only internally developed hardware (stuff like Nubus and Appletalk). Jobs pushed the company to use standards such as USB and eventually transitioned Mac to commodity processors and busses (Intel and PCI/PCI express).
A single company can't compete with unique hardware vs commodity hardware, that's the story of the PC platforms domination and the transformation of Apple.
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You can't make a universal rule out of what happened in one particular market over one particular time frame.
For example in the 1980s, before the PC was inexpensive and featureful enough to compete in the home computer market, various companies with unique hardware dominated. MSX was a commodity design, many of the commodity electronics companies tried la
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A single company can't compete with unique hardware vs commodity hardware
Yet all video game consoles of this generation use unique hardware.
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The first mac to come with PCI slots were the Powermacs 7200, 7500,8500, and 9500 (all introduced in August 1995). Apple purchased Next (and the services of Steve Jobs) on December 20, 1996. Besides, Nubus was developed outside of Apple [wikipedia.org]
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especially given how many buy from the fruit because of the "experience".
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Parent needs to be modded up sky high.
At home, it's often the person with the most technical know-how that makes the decisions, but in business, it's the people whose job it is to make business decisions, and those are usually not the people who understand or appreciate technical specs. But they do know who the business leader is, and tend to go for the safe choice, big name, with managers/sales people who talk the talk and know how to play golf (or something).
And once people got used to something at work,
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:4, Informative)
And the slightly less sceptical version of what you're saying is that there are other concerns with buying technology other than the performance and cost of the technology itself- support contracts, training costs, supplier relationships, interoperability concerns (real or imagined, technical or otherwise).
I'd love to see my business upgrade from XP to a Linux distro, for example, instead of Win7. But I can barely imagine the cost of retooling the entire company, retraining the whole staff, rehiring half the IT department with newly skilled sorts, and burning bridges with MS (who really do give a pretty VIP service to our company, being a pretty big buyer).
Calls of "switch to the better, cheaper products ffs!" from we on the lower ranks really don't account for the half of the corporate shenanigans that go on.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Insightful)
Complete and utter rubbish.
The effect that you are refering to only happened in the business market, and the home market was where Commodore made most of their money and sales.
What killed the Amiga was stagnation. Sure it was way ahead of the competition when it was released, but it didn't improve enough, quickly enough. By the mid-90s the Amiga was competing against chunky 256-colour display and faster processors.
Doom killed the Amiga. Comanche killed the Amiga. Every step that the PC took towards being a commodity marketplace for hardware killed the Amiga.
And by the time the Voodoo was released it was already dead.
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Are you sure? Maybe if you had a big box Amiga with 68060 and a Zorro graphics card.
The Amiga was built for sprites and scrolling, it just wasn't up to the job of 3D.
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Bullshit. While bitplane graphics gave the Amiga the edge during the days of 2D sprite graphics, as soon as we started working out how to fake 3D it was the death of the platform. Raycasting and voxels require chunky displays to hit high performance. This is because data-locality (keeping all of the bits of the colour in the same location) reduces memory bandwidth when you are spitting out graphics one pixel at a time.
The only two ways around this were to perform a costly chunky -> bitplane conversion a
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The Amiga was every bit as expandable as the IBM PC [wikipedia.org] and way more open. I think you are making a huge disservice to computer history, if you think IBM PC won because of "expandability and openness", and disregard the importance of the three magic letters.
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Where were the clones?
Yes, I know it was, sort of, an oversight on the part of IBM - still it happened; probably would be much harder with the hardware of Amiga; and the OS wasn't from some 3rd party manufacturer happy to supply it to anybody.
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i wonder if the PC clones was one reason. That way, one could run a el-cheapo at home, using the same software and hardware as the official IBM, with whatever support agreement the workplace had with IBM and so on, at work. Heck, the managers may even look the other way on someone copying those programs, if it meant the person could work at home if "needed" (more like demanded).
basically, the hardware platform turned commodity. And thanks to microsofts deal with IBM, they where free to sell their software t
Only on Slashdot... (Score:2)
Why do they mod (+3, Informative) a post with a link proving exactly the opposite of what the post says?
You say "The Amiga was every bit as expandable as the IBM PC and way more open"
Your wikipedia link says "One expansion port for add-ons (memory, SCSI adaptor, etc), electrically and physically identical to the Amiga 500 expansion port (though the Amiga 500's version is inverted)"
Excuse me, but my IBM-PC had seven expansion slots. And, much more important, I could go to any computer store and actually buy
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try the A2000, launched at the same time.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga_2000 [wikimedia.org]
5 zorro 2 slots, 2 16-bit isa, 2 8-bit isa. Sadly, it was sold only by way of specialist retailers, and so had less exposure then the A500.
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sadly i never really got beyond the A500 (still have it stashed in some basement, wanted a HDD and a 3xdisk addon tho).
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The Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 had multiple internal expansion slots. I'm not sure on the 3000, but the 2000 (which I owned) and the 4000 had both CPU and video slots as well as multiple general expansion slots.
I agree with you in that saying the Amiga was "as expandable" is incorrect. However, no third party developer managed to creat an Amiga video card upgrade that was an accepted standard (at least not until the PC was well on it's way).
PC clones gave the platform marketplace penetration. Third party har
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You really think this?
The Amiga was tied to the custom chip set. Even ROM revisions broke software.
Only the more expensive Amigas allowed for video expansion and that was commonly used for flicker fixers or toasters.
There was never a method to upgrade an ECS Amiga to an AGA one, either from Commodore or from a third party.
The majority of Amiga sales were of the lower end 500 series which only had the side expansion bus.
Later on post-Commodore there were certainly a number of expansions made to the architect
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Interesting)
If you stuck the Amiga 1000 (ignoring the later models) next to an IBM of the time, it was obvious IBM would win because of those three letters. But if you looked at features and capabilities, the Amiga was better in almost every single aspect except for the amount of software available. It had poor expandability, but the Amiga 2000 was released shortly after that which matched and exceeded the IBM, and had plug and play long while the PC world.
And you didn't need an Atari ST... That was silly. Maybe first ever release of Amiga had some tools problems, but it shortly got very good. Yes many people booted off of floppy, but Amiga 2000 improved on that as well. Plus many Amiga developers continued booting off floppy instead of hard drive because it was faster for them; recoverable RAM disks made for a faster environment than PCs or STs.
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Decent video quality counted for a lot, though, and there is much more to video quality than the size of the color palette. Graphics on the Amiga looked like C64 graphics but with more color. Text on the Amiga looked like C64 text, but with more color. Low-resolution, fuzzy NTSC-grade raster all the way. This was a bigger deal to more users than either Commodore or Atari appreciated.
Sure, CGA graphics on the IBM looked awful by comparison with the Amiga's color capability, but text was a different story
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To be fair, hardly anybody was buying those 68040 models - what for, when much cheaper ones were constantly offered, even introduced, and vast majority of most important software was running on them just fine?...
PowerPC even moreso, it arrived when the Amiga was already dead; and even then the transition wasn't smooth, with the new chip acting sort of as a coprocessor for a long time.
Model M was worth something, in regards to hardware. Hell, it still is :P
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Amiga was better in almost every single aspect except for the amount of software available
So? The Acorn Archimedes was better than the Amiga in almost every single aspect ... except it had even less software than the Amiga. At the end of the day it's the software that counts (this fact was demonstrated many times during the 1980s with many worthy machines dying on the store shelves due to lack of software while 'inferior' machines sold in the millions...).
And you didn't need an Atari ST... That was silly
That was a joke.
Sort of - I did most of my Amiga coding that way and lots of people grabbed copies of my homebrew dev. system. The main factor
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Towards the end of the Amiga's lifetime the PC had 386 CPUs, VGA graphics and Soundblasters whereas the Amiga had stood still. Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it.
The Amiga could do fancy scrolling effects but at the end of the day it was really only 16 color graphics in a plasticky box with no real sign that it was evolving into anything better.
If you stood it side by side with a PC in 1987 it was obvious which of the two was going to 'win'.
You're not just a troll, you're a liar.
Floppy disk boot was required only with ancient rom versions.
Even the oldest Amiga, the A1000, was able to display 4096 colors simultaneously.
PC in 1987 was mostly CGA with some people using EGA. It used DOS, was expensive and its sound was worse than of a 8-bit computer.
It was fun to write 'demos' on them though...
(So long as you had an Atari ST at the side to edit/assemble the 68000 code - using AmigaOS for work was a nasty experience)
An Atari ST troll here? Go back to the 1980s, loser.
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Amiga had 32 color palette and actually, depending on what you needed to do, you could make even the older Amiga systems do 4096 color graphics using hold-and-modify and extra-half-brite mode would give you 64 colors (32 plus 32 half-brite shades):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold-And-Modify [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_Half-Brite [wikipedia.org]
Systems with AGA could have up to 256 color palette or 18-bit in HAM mode.
My A500+ would easily toast my top-of-the-line 386 in just about every aspect of computing life from
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Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU.
IIRC the HAM and EHB modes completely blocked the CPU during the active display time (ie. most of the time).
was dismayed by what I faced in the PC world by comparison at the time.
I dunno...for screen-scrolling games the Amiga was definitely king but things were starting to go 3D around that time. The PC was way better at 3D than the Amiga.
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All Kickstart ROMs newer than 1.3 (released 1988) had the ability to boot from hard disk. It was one of the main differences between version 1.2.
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:4, Informative)
It's impressive to find a post with so much BS in it.
"Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it"
You didn't need a floppy to boot off a hard drive with an Amiga. I had a Amiga 500 that booted straight off the HD attached. I also had a 2000 that did the same. This is with 1.3 of the ROM not 2.0 or higher.
Graphic modes in 320x200 (320x256 PAL) were 32 color base, 64 color with ECS due to half bright mode. And there was HAM (up to 4096) for (mostly) static graphic scans. 16 color was for the 640x200 (640x256 PAL). And yes you could interlace the modes for 320x400 or 640x400. There would be flicker however unless you had a flicker fixer.
The ST by comparison had 16 colors in 320x200 mode out of a palette of 512 instead of 4096.
A good PC in '87 had EGA graphics. Animation on PCs at the time as poor vs the Amiga's blitter.
The only way in '87 you could call the PC as being superior to the Amiga was in terms of business market penetration.
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Something tells me you mean MB, not GB, for all those hard drive sizes..
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Whilst I agree with everything you say, the Amiga OS was also an insecure hell. OK, as coders we got absolute control over everything, but had the Amiga 'won', the whole OS would have had to go through a total re-write to implement a whole lot of protection in order to prevent a gross malware bloom.
Well, virus situation was bad at some times but that was mostly due to very active piracy and copying floppies to trade games. It really wasn't worse than MS-DOS/Windows3.1 at the time - the only difference was that MS-DOS had less games and kids traded them less.
As for the absolute control - the lack of MMU on 68000 (A500, A1000) and the 68EC020 (A1200) meant that a rogue application could indeed crash the whole OS easily and while the OS had pre-emptive multitasking it had only little protection against i
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This is absolutely true.
The OS innovated for it's era (especially in terms of multitasking) but memory protection didn't exist and modern concepts of OS security were non-existent.
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But in the end, open architecture of PCs proved beneficial, also / especially to us. It was at least good enough in some areas at the beginning, and vastly improved in the meantime. Even MS wasn't so bad - for all their faults, they mostly succeeded in commoditizing the hardware; that made OSS easier, too.
Amiga...well, for a long time now its zombie focuses on outrageously milking what's left of their fans.
Not saying they weren't great in their time; and really affordable, also in places where PCs would pro
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Not to mention jumpers for configuring expansion cards?!? Amiga was plug and play all the way. The zorro bus even went from 16-bit to 32-bits without needing a new slot format, they just multiplexed it by having an addressing cycle and a data cycle.
The bus was also asynchronous, it wasn't clocked, although the custom chips on the motherboard were clocked at about 25Mhz.
PC architecture has always been a case of "that is just about good enough" and it still continues today with USB3 (requires CPU intervention
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Back in the day (okay, I was only in high school at the time), we used to say that IBM stood for "I've Been Mislead".
Yes, this captures quite accurately the disappointment that Amiga users felt when seeing the expensive and over-hyped IBM PC running in command line mode, and having ASCII graphics apps. I thought the world must have gone mad.
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...having ASCII graphics apps...
Hey, such could be the necessity to get roguelikes really going. And without them, where would we be?
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And (at least in the early days of the Amiga), don't forget the sound. Then again, before soundblaster cards, the bleeps and bloops of a PC speaker couldn't compare to a C64, let alone the Amiga...
Even when Sound Blaster appeared it was really bad. I had a Sound Blaster Pro and its PCM output was very noisy.
Only when Sound Blaster 16 appeared it began to sound "right", and only with 16bit output (I guess the 8bit output had the same circutry as old Sound Blasters?).
Not to mention that PCM back then output drained a lot of CPU.
And even during Sound Blaster 16 era, those cheaper Sound Blaster-compatible cards people bought sound horrible.
Oh, and when installing the sound card you had
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas (Score:5, Insightful)
The sound blaster wasn't just bad because it was noisy. The Amiga could mix 4 sound channels in hardware, whereas all the early sound-blasters had only 1-2 channels and so the PC was mixing in software. That sounds trivial today, but churning through multiple samples with decent sample rates and bit depths on old CPUs took time. So while your PC was busy rendering audio, the Amiga was running your game/app code.
The design of the PCs of the time, compared to what you got out of the box with an Amiga really was pretty poor. Almost everything the Amiga's hardware could do in terms of sound and graphics would chew CPU time on the PC.
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The Amiga could mix 4 sound channels in hardware,
Kind of. The Amiga had four channels with two physically connected to each audio output channel, without any panning effects. You might say that the Amiga had four half-channels.
The design of the PCs of the time, compared to what you got out of the box with an Amiga really was pretty poor. Almost everything the Amiga's hardware could do in terms of sound and graphics would chew CPU time on the PC.
Sure, but the Amiga also made some wicked tradeoffs to accomplish this that limited the hardware. If you got an upgraded video card so you could actually have decent graphics (was there ever an Amiga with more than 8MB chip?) then you basically stopped using the custom chips, and all their video-related functions had to be reimpleme
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To be fair, the Amiga wasn't exactly "home free" while sound was taking place. It had just 512KB of memory from which all DMA could take place, and it had LOTS of DMA clients. Just the audio system meant four DMA channels active, and that's not counting the actual display, blitting, sprits, floppy access etc, all using DMA to the same memory as the CPU.
Since most Amigas of the time only had 512KB of RAM, that meant that the CPU had to compete with 20 or so other DMA controllers over memory access. An Amiga
Sigh... (Score:2)
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me too but I sold mine to purchase a 486SX, I even waited to finish Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis on my new (used) PC because I could not take the constant Floppy swapping anymore.
It took me forever to save the money for my PC but when I finally had it, I loved it.
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I had two external floppy drives for my A500. Great for games that were smart enough to check all drives for the next disk.
Moved up to an A600 that I bought off a friend for £30, then eventually my parents got me an A1200 with 68030EC, 16MB RAM and a 200MB HDD. Those were the days :) I really wanted a 680x0 processor with an FPU, or a PPC board, but I couldn't afford it and we eventually ended somehow up with a 486 (which I guess I loved simply because I could play Quake on it), then a PIII.. with Win
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I had two external floppy drives for my A500. Great for games that were smart enough to check all drives for the next disk.
I think the whole concept of how disks were addressed was the underlying reason for this. Having the disk name be one of the accessors was key. ATLANTIS10: was ATLANTIS10: whichever drive it was in, or whereever it was Assigned to. The HD installer for FoA was simply a series of:
Copy FD0:* HD0:Indy/
Assign Atlantis#: HD0:Indy/
That was also a key thing for people to remember when implementing the early days of copy protection: your disk name is not a unique butterfly, it can be moved.
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I hope I didn't regret getting rid of my old Apple //c, its 8.25" floppy disks (LOGO, games, etc. -- no idea if they still worked) and its external drive, ImageWriter, II, etc. a few years ago when being evicted from my home. I did check eBay and Craig's list to see the prices but they pretty low. Maybe in 100 years, they will be. :( I assume these old Amigas are worth a lot. I also was told that Texas Instrument 99/4A is worth a lot these days.
Its worth mentioning AROS.... (Score:5, Informative)
Given the persistent failure of Official Management of the remains of the Amiga, Its OS, there are those who decided they can do without such management...
The Status page [sourceforge.net] and News page [sourceforge.net] of the open source project AROS [sourceforge.net]
Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry (Score:3, Interesting)
And just a month and a half ago, I came into possession of an Amiga 2000, with all the parts and manuals. Unfortunately, it seems not to be in working order, as nothing appears on the screen after a power-on. Ah, someday, maybe...
Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Having been there (still have a bunch of Amiga's - that I never use anymore sadly - including an A4000 with a Phase 5 233 MHz PPC board and video toaster/flyer) I don't think it was a marketing issue until the early to mid 90's when Commodore started to face serious problems.
In the early days of the Amiga I recall 4 or 5 magazines, one official one, TV ads, ads in 3rd party magazines (I remember vividly seeing ads for the machines in various video/multimedia trade journals). IDG - with Amigaworld shows you how big it was really - this is the same company that publishes Macworld and Infoworld to this day (and consequently I knew the writing was on the wall when one of the editors for Amigaworld - now writes for Macworld).
I think the problem was a bit more deep sadly - one of mindshare more than anything. When I started working in video part time with a friend - this was in 91-92 when the A4000 came to market many of our colleagues used to think it was hilarious we took the machines seriously. Never mind we were the first shop in town to do editing via disk, (5.25" Quantum SCSI disks :)), and the only shop in town that could do 3D graphics for a long time (long before the flyer we used the DPS Personal Animation Recorder - it rocked). The 3d animations from the demo reel we worked on back then still looks pretty nice today (despite being only on VHS). It was a serious computer developed by some really smart and talented software and hardware engineers, but people didn't see it that way.
At the local computer club most ms-dos/mac users used to decry Amiga users with statements like who needs multi-tasking (the claim back then was "I'm far more productive doing one task at a time thank you very much"), and oh all those wonderful animations and graphics/sound we could do too with the right hardware.
Sadly Amiga met the same fate as NEXT, SGI, Apollo and almost Apple (yes if Steve didn't come back - they would be a topic in some history book right now).
Also I should mention - out of all the companies who have bought Amiga - Commodore was the only company to actually release marketable hardware and advertise said hardware. I think while they mismanaged their entire business down the toilet - they certainly did a much better job than most have (managing the Amiga that is).
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There were hard drive interfaces for the Amiga 1000 as well. I have one called a FastTrak from Xetec.
Electronically, the Amiga 1000's side port was identical to the Amiga 500. It was physically flipped upside down.
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Wow, look at you with the misinformation. It's like I'm back on the FidoNet Amiga Echo.
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Commodore wanted it to be a 'serious' machine but it never stood a chance against IBM (eg. adding a hard disk to an Amiga and getting it to boot from it was a joke).
Yeah, it was to easy to setup it was a joke.
I remember installing the OS in A1200: boot the OS from floppy, click " install". Really hard.
Same thing with old hardware: A590 (hard disk + ram expansion) in an A500, same as above.
If they'd sold it on it's strengths it might have done better - ie. sell it to hacker types and compete with Atari/Nintendo's closed systems instead of taking on IBM.
I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
Despite Commodore utter incompetence, it sold well because it was an excellent machine, expansible, with stereo sound, excellent video and a multitasking graphic OS.
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I'm still not sure how Commodore managed to go from selling 50 million machines to bankruptcy in a couple of years.
A man named Jack - have a read: http://www.commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_portcommodore.htm [commodore.ca]
The Amiga was a blast to program (Score:5, Interesting)
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WE'RE NOT WORTHY!
King of Chicago was one of the first five games I had for my A500 back in the day. It's the game that prompted me to get (read:beg my parents for) the RAM upgrade to play like it was meant to be played. Wow, how did we ever manage those loading times? Still waiting for a remake :)
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I was one of those 50k. :)
Props to you and Cinemaware. Not always 100% successful, I appreciated trying to push the computer game further. A long time since I still see the influence in current games. Thanks for your work.
Software patents and the death of the Amiga (Score:5, Interesting)
Software Patent ended CD32 and Commodore Amiga [xcssa.org]
It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
Read it, it's interesting. I didn't realise this and've read more about Commodore than many. If you're interested in the history of Commodore, and it is interesting, try "On The Edge [variantpress.com]", which describes it very well. The book is sold out in many places but I imagine it will be possible to locate copies.
Cheers,
Ian
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I'm not so sure since my local Amiga retailer had CD32 machines for sale among the A3000, A4000, and A1200 machines.
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It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR. They owed $10m as a result, and were also prohibited from bringing CD32 into the US. Since Commodore had bet large on the CD32, this was a fatal blow.
First time I hear that.
Any confirmation from an ex-Commodore engineer?
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If you can't find the book but still want some Amiga history, Ars had a good series [arstechnica.com] a few years ago.
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Digg are currently running this story, and there's a post on there leading to this:
That post seems to be nonsense, because you could buy a NTSC CD32 in various shops in the USA. But betting large on the CD32 would have been a failure no matter how you sliced it because there were not enough titles to sell as a games console, and the system was too expensive anyway. But maybe someone could corroborate it.
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Reading the Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org], it seems those were Canadian stock brought across the US border. That entry also bears out the XOR patent story, and searching around on the web seems to confirm multiple sources for it.
It's news to me too - only learned about it today. But it does seem to have validity. Agree with the rest of your post though - betting big time on the CD32 would have been...well....interesting
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Reading the Wikipedia entry, it seems those were Canadian stock brought across the US border.
That doesn't really seem like a big problem, does it? AFAIK there was no such thing as an Amiga shop that wasn't totally rinky-dink (Software Etc. only sold A500s so they don't count) and having to order from Canadian suppliers wouldn't have even slowed them down. All I know about the CD32 is that when it became available in the US (At, I believe, cheaper-than-UK prices... I don't have any of my old Amiga rags any more with their teensy-tiny-type price lists) it STILL cost more than it ought and I sure coul
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Even when you are right, even when you have prior art, even when any idiot can see that you will win, it can cost you multiple millions to fight, and sometimes even medium sized corporations can't afford to defend themselves, as the only thing they will get at the end is the status quo. If you are doing the suing however, you stand to gain millions in awards, so it is easier to get a team of lawyers to take it on a contingent basis.
One megabyte of Chip Memory (Score:2)
One megabyte of "Chip" Memory made me fall in love. Custom chips and the Blitter were decades ahead of everyone else.
Why Amiga? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I call bullshit. Even some of the most simple Flash games would be impossible to re-create on a (then) mid-range Amiga.
The Amiga would struggle even with a 'match-3' game where any case arose that the grid full of symbols all had to fall down at the same time. You've got to remember that the Amiga didn't have enough graphical horsepower to move even a 16-colour 320x256 screen full of objects around at 50 or 60fps. Oh, it could move the entire screen around as one object, but the Blitter couldn't shift actua
Re:Why Amiga? (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy cow! Have you never played Armour-Geddon? This was a game in a completely 3D environment. You could use 6 different types of vehicles to move around the very large environment. You could fly a jet fighter, a bomber, or a helicopter. You could drive a heavy tank, a light tank, or a hovercraft. You could use up to 6 vehicles at a time (set a waypoint and then hit F1 through F6 to jump into the drivers seat of another vehicle).
The gameplay was fantastic. You were trying to prevent the computer controlled enemy from gathering enough energy to fry everything on the planet surface. The power gathering was represented by 3d towers that had light beams going from them to the next tower in line until you got to the gathering point of all the towers. These "powerlines" were ditributed all over the surface.
My friends and I played this game for YEARS. I would love to recreate it. We almost perfected beating the game. Our strategy was to run a mission (we created the parameters for it. It was not a mission required by the game) where we would fly a jet equipped with a laser, a night sight, and a drop tank for extra range. We would fly low to avoid radar and start following power lines to junctions, destroying the towers on the way to the junctions (you had to start at the end of the powerline as each tower was more difficult to destroy when it had more power flowing through it). Flown (very!) carefully, a single jet flight could darken most of the map and return.
The next step were bomber missions where we would either pick up missing neutron bomb parts or drop teleport devices. One mission was called the Swooping Bat Mission because we flew a bomber across the landscape (low, to avoid radar) and picked up a bomb part that was surrounded by pyramids. There was no way in other than through the air. The trick was to stall the bomber just above the part so you could pick it up and then punch the engines to full throttle so you could climb enough to miss the sloping slides of the pyramids. (this was so difficult that for months, we were convinced it was impossible to do!)
Near the energy gather point, there is a line of "mountains" (pyramids again) with a valley. We called that cocaine alley because when you flew through it, you could not shoot fast enough to destroy everything. We usually took a laser, a rack of rockets, and a rack of guided missiles. The rockets were to destroy the "stubborn" towers and the missiles were for the jets. You would end up with a LOT of jets chasing you and guided missiles were the best weapon for shooting down other planes... however, (near cocaine alley) I once shot a jet down with a tank using a normal artillery shell!
Meh, this is all tl;dr I am sure. My point is that all of this was possible on my Amiga 500 with only 512k of chip RAM and a 7mhz processor. Your claims about the graphical weakness of the Amiga are not true. How else could a simulated 3D enviroment like that, with such possibilities (shooting down a jet with an artillery shell!), be created?
The Amiga was just plain awesomeness. It had multi-tasking all the way down to its hardware. The Agnus chip could be blitting crap across the screen while the CPU was busy calculating crap elsewhere. Anything that required raw CPU horsepower was slow, but since each chip could do its own thing, you could have tons of crap going on at once.
While I am it, I really really miss DPaint IV. Heh, with its name, you would think it was just a paint program like Microsft Paint. No. That thing had all sorts of tools that I have not seen in any one package since then. It would more realistically be called an animation program. You could make animated brushes and move them through time with just a few keystrokes. It was awesome. I really miss my Amiga. Modern computers are nowhere near as fun and useful and cool.
strike (sad)
Still cruisin' after all of these years (Score:3, Interesting)
I came late to the Amiga party. Eh, just before Commodore tanked and I began my migration from BBSs to the Internet. I am still rockin' and rollin' 18 years later (holy shit, it really HAS been that long?!) Even my nick/handle/alias is homage. Got my trusty A4000D and several "classic" companions, and a recently-acquired MacMini running MorphOS 2.5. Good times had then, and still yet to be had.
I am sure a lot of people know by now, what with Google and all, but there are a good number of Amiga sites and enthusiast groups, as well as MANUFACTURERS (yes, we get new, modern hardware, too!) amiga.org is a good place to start, though there are many other sites. And let us not forget AmiWest (maybe I will finally make it this year...)
Whatever happened to Bill McEwen? (Score:2)
That guy is a walking train wreck, I worked with him long ago.
I can't believe anybody would do business with him. There must be a lot of gullible fools out there.
Proud Amiga user since 1993. (Score:4, Interesting)
Useful? (Score:2)
Sure they are cool and retro and all that, but what are/were they actually good for? I mean activities that one might actually get paid for.
The only time I ever saw an Amiga actually doing something useful was at a live show, where an Amiga was used to generate the (admittedly cool looking) video images projected behind the performers. Everything else seems to be just games and standard applications available on any normal computer.
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Sure they are cool and retro and all that, but what are/were they actually good for? I mean activities that one might actually get paid for.
The Amiga had a pretty good DTP suite from what I hear, but you had to have a video card to make it useful for anything. So that knocked out about 99.99% of the potential market; you could buy a mac for what it cost to get an Amiga capable of doing justice to business applications. Then again, if you just wanted to be able to run some Mac software, you could buy an Amiga 2500 and an emplant board and get the same CPU as a IIci, yet still get better performance while running Mac programs, because the Mac II
My Amiga Memories (Score:5, Interesting)
I got one of the first A1000s. I bought the white ROM Kernel Manuals several months before I got the machine. I learned C by reading the RKMs and K&R.
Several months later I bought one of the first memory expansion boards (the Insider I think) from a small computer shop called Michigan Software. They ran a BBS that I frequented.
I spent thousands of hours with Amiga Paint, Aegis Animator (I think) and a music program (can't remember the name). Once I recorded a version of GhostBusters that I hand edited in the music software, than I added vocals using the speech synthesizer. I was 15.
The next year in high school I wrote a molecular modeling program for the science fair. You could load models and rotate them with a joystick. I remember being frustrated that I wanted BlitMaskBitmapRastPort() which allows you to blit an image through a mask, but my ROM kernel didn't have it. Eventually the new ROMs came out and I could finally finish it. Took me all the way to Puerto Rico for the International Science Fair and I won first place in computer science for it, as well as several awards for photography, for taking long exposure pictures of the computer screen in a dark room. My father had an Anvil Case custom built for the trip, and I remember when we got to the hotel room I unpacked the Amiga to make sure it had survived, and it wouldn't turn on. My sponsor was freaking out. I quickly popped open the top case, re-seated the memory board, and it started up fine. My sponsor thought I was a genius.
I was at a SIGGRAPH in 1989 and met several of the Amiga inventors (RJ Mical, Dale Luck, and some others). We ended up at RJ Mical's house (I think, it might have been Michael Bittner's house) talking about what it would take to build a 3D accelerator. Copper Bittner was there - I always thought she had a cool name. I was honored, at 18, to be taken into the fold.
I made a lot of pizza money in college selling my Periodic Table of the Elements program through Fred Fish (rest in peace) disks. I still have some German Deutsch-marks that someone sent me from Germany.
I remember the first time I tried closing a door on one of those walking plant things in Dungeon Master, and watching it get crushed to death, and laughing my ass off, spewing Jolt and M&Ms everywhere.
Later I sold a bunch of programming articles to Amigaworld Tech Journal. Those were fun times.
Eventually I sold my A3000, all my disks, peripherals, manuals, everything for $500, because I wanted to buy a PC to play Ultima Underworld. It's probably just as well, as I'm now sitting on several SGI machines in the basement that aren't worth anything either.
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Cheers,
Ian
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Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings — most notably OS/2 and Linux
More revisionist bullshit on Slashdot. To set the record straight, Amiga users are nothing like Linux users. We weren't huge assholes. We were not obsessed with Free Software. We knew the shell was useful, but also knew a solid GUI was the future. We were in love with the hardware, not just the software.
Nah, let's be fair: fanatics of Amiga and OS/2 were really terrible.
Linux fanatics are manageable. I find Apple and BSD fanatics way more annoying.
BTW I've had Amigas up to an expanded A1200, PC with OS/2 2.0/2.1/3.0 and I've been using Linux as my main OS for years.
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While I agree that pretty much nothing comes close to a true Amigahole, I never thought the OS/2 fanatics were that bad. Mind you since there were only three of them maybe it was just that people barely noticed them.
The Linux fanboys have become somewhat less annoying over time, and I don't find the Apple fans that annoying. I think it's because of the fo
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Amiga: 4 channels, later 8 channels.
AppleIIgs: 15 channels, 16 if you perform timing on the CPU.
Then there was the AtariST which was king of MIDI.
PC users sure ate up 4-channel MOD files when they finally got software mixing players for their SBPro's... but the IIgs boys were still laughing at both Amiga and PC's and continued laughing until the Gravis UltraSound hit the scene with support for 32-channels (only 14 at 44.1khz tho)
Hint: The Gravis UltraSound used a li