'Turn an Old PC Into a High-End Amiga with AmiKit' (amiga.sk) 76
Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) writes:
AmiKit is a compilation of pre-installed and pre-configured Amiga programs running emulated on Windows, macOS, and Linux (as well as running on classic 68K Amigas expanded with a Vampire upgrade card).
Besides original Workbench (Commodore's desktop environment/graphical filemanager), AmiKit provides Directory Opus Magellan and Scalos as desktop replacements and its "Rabbit Hole" feature allows you to launch Windows, Mac or Linux applications directly from your Amiga desktop! Anti-aliased fonts, Full HD 32-bit screen modes and DualPNG Icons support is included and this package comes with exclusive versions of the Master Control Program (MCP) and MUI 5 (Magic User Interface).
The original AmigaOS (version 3.x) and Kickstart ROM (version 3.1) are required, also the recently released AmigaOS 3.2 is supported. You can also get the needed files from the Amiga Forever package(s). It even supports emulating AmigaOS 4.x (for PowerPC) easily through Flower Pot.
Here's an extensive overview video by Dan Wood. An Amiga Future review of an earlier 2017 version can be read here.
"Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother," explains AmiKit's developer.
"I was 14 years old..." Fast forward to 2005, the AmiKit was born — an emulated environment including more than 350 programs. It fully replaced my old Amiga and it became a legend in the community over the years.
Fast forward to 2017, a brand new AmiKit X is released, originally developed for A.L.I.C.E., followed by the XE version released in 2019, Vampire edition in 2020 and Raspberry Pi in 2021. The latest & greatest version was released in 2020.
When someone, who has never heard about Amiga before, asks me why I would want to turn current modern computer into something retro and old fashioned, my short answer is: "Simply because I love Amiga!"
Besides original Workbench (Commodore's desktop environment/graphical filemanager), AmiKit provides Directory Opus Magellan and Scalos as desktop replacements and its "Rabbit Hole" feature allows you to launch Windows, Mac or Linux applications directly from your Amiga desktop! Anti-aliased fonts, Full HD 32-bit screen modes and DualPNG Icons support is included and this package comes with exclusive versions of the Master Control Program (MCP) and MUI 5 (Magic User Interface).
The original AmigaOS (version 3.x) and Kickstart ROM (version 3.1) are required, also the recently released AmigaOS 3.2 is supported. You can also get the needed files from the Amiga Forever package(s). It even supports emulating AmigaOS 4.x (for PowerPC) easily through Flower Pot.
Here's an extensive overview video by Dan Wood. An Amiga Future review of an earlier 2017 version can be read here.
"Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother," explains AmiKit's developer.
"I was 14 years old..." Fast forward to 2005, the AmiKit was born — an emulated environment including more than 350 programs. It fully replaced my old Amiga and it became a legend in the community over the years.
Fast forward to 2017, a brand new AmiKit X is released, originally developed for A.L.I.C.E., followed by the XE version released in 2019, Vampire edition in 2020 and Raspberry Pi in 2021. The latest & greatest version was released in 2020.
When someone, who has never heard about Amiga before, asks me why I would want to turn current modern computer into something retro and old fashioned, my short answer is: "Simply because I love Amiga!"
Almost tempted to fix my Winbox just for this. (Score:2)
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The summary says that a version for the Raspberry Pi was released last year. That might be easier or more convenient to get up and running.
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It's pretty much impossible to get a Raspberry Pi right now, unless you're willing to pay extortionate prices to the Amazon resellers.
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That's fair, though it's not unreasonable to assume that someone here would have one or more just lying around.
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, lagging and mostly wrong sound quality is what you find with emulation.
Lol, No. Things are pretty good these days.
Such nostalgia. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have so many fond memories of my Amiga. The games I played. The hobby code I wrote. The Bulletin Board Systems I signed on to.
But why would I go back? The games I have now are so much better in every way. The editors I have available for hobby and professional coding are years beyond what I had then. And multiple thriving online communities are always just a mouse click away (for better and for worse). The world has moved on. Those memories have their place in my past, but I have bigger-and-better in my future.
But that's just me. If people want to hold on to those quaint legacy interfaces, who am I to judge?
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The problem is CRT. Graphics were made for much lower resolution CRT screens, which have very different characteristics than modern LCD/LED/OLED monitors. Screen refresh rates are also very different on a CRT monitor.
The difference between game graphics represented on a CRT and a modern monitor is staggering. The modern monitor is far better equipped to show crisp graphics, while CRT images used the color 'bleeding'-effect of CRT monitors to make very appealing graphics.
Of course, there is also a (not so) h
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too much hand-holding going on.
There are quite a lot of games that have difficulty as a major selling point. I think it IS true that many AAA and indie games alike have been designed to appeal to a very casual games market, since that's the biggest market, but it is ALSO true that there is a devoted group of gamers who want a real challenge, and that group is large enough for games to be made for them. The Dark Souls series is famous for this, and on steam there is a "difficult" tag you can use to search
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Older games needed more effort put into them to get rewards, that's true. But I also prefer the style of older games to newer ones. As an example, the only game I ever play on Switch is Mario Maker, which is a 2D platformer similar to the original 1985 Super Mario Bros game.
Sure it has some quality of life improvements, and the physics and controls have been tweaked a bit, but it's a 2D game using a tile grid system just like we had back in the day.
In comparison I don't find most modern 3D games that appeal
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Why not just go the whole way and turn /. into k5 v2? LMAO
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Why is this news?
"Amiga" even has its own icon on /. Anything with "Amiga" in the title is news.
"Everything began in 1994 when my parents bought an Amiga 500 for me and my brother,"
1994? Did they get it in a charity shop for $10?
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"Amiga" even has its own icon on /. Anything with "Amiga" in the title is news.
The word "news" implies that what you're reading is new. The latest release of this 17-year-old emulator, according to the summary, is around two-years old!
1994? Did they get it in a charity shop for $10?
I can easily see getting one in 1994 over something like an IBM Aptiva, which is what I got that same year. The price difference was likely significant, with the Aptiva coming in at around $2000, iirc. There was also a ton of high-quality software and impressive looking games for the Amiga that could be had for a reasonable price.
It's not like they ha
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Why is this news? This isn't about a new or particularly notable release. From the summary: "The latest & greatest version was released in 2020."
The latest version is actually from earlier this month.
Software News : AmiKit XE updated on all platforms! Posted by AmiKit on 2022/5/23:
https://www.amigans.net/module... [amigans.net]
Re:Who? (Score:5, Funny)
Who is paying is for all these lame Amiga stories?
I confess, it's me -- whenever I see a lame crypto story in the queue, I pay Slashdot $50 to replace it with an Amiga story instead. It's a bit of a drain on my wallet, to be sure, but I'm happy to chip in to support the mental and emotional well-being of the Slashdot community.
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I guess they are getting lots of views and comments. Of interest to us old timers. I imagine the Slashdot reading demographic is on the older side these days.
I'm not sure about this. I used to have a very powerful Amiga, a real one. But now most of my interest is in the stock machines, for the challenge of writing code for them. There aren't really any reasons for me to run a powerful AmigaOS system, all the apps I used to use have long since been replaced by more modern ones.
Or... (Score:2)
The Amiga was a sad story (Score:5, Informative)
It was a technically superior machine to the IBM PCs of the day, but somehow, the growing business market for computers couldn't tell the difference, so whichever one (60x86 PCs with DOS then Windows) took the early lead in the market just kept growing by the network effect (every business needed a compatible computer with compatible software.)
But for a computer insider, who understood the multi-dimensional technical superiority of the Amiga to DOS and early windows PCs, it almost made you want to cry.
Amiga used the Motorola 68000 line of CPU chips which was a 32-bit processor supporting a uniform unsegmented memory addressing architecture, and a simple uniform elegant orthogonal (RISC, basically) instruction set.
This processor was a marvel of elegant simplicity and power, compared to the monstrously hacked together, weird instruction set, segmented memory architecture 8/16 bit 60x86 chips that IBM DOS/Windows PCs used.
AmigaOS had pre-emptive multi-tasking FFS, back in 1985, when the competition was the primitive DOS operating system with MS-Windows 1.0. Not Even Windows 3.0 (1990), but 1.0. Windows PCs didn't have comparable multi-tasking 'til 8 years later with the release of Windows NT in 1993.
And lastly the Amiga had a proper and simple to program multi-tasking windowed graphics system that was far superior to the MS-Windows of the day.
Think how much more elegant and simple and powerful the personal computer and business computer software applications of the late 80s and early 90s could have been, if the hardware architecture and OS design pioneered by Amiga had prevailed.
That's why Amiga is still relevant. It shows us what could have been. It might even have prevented the monstrosity which is MS-Word. As an example. But VHS beat Betamax, and gruesome 60x86 architecture PCs beat elegant 680x0 ones, and somehow, we hobble on.
Re:The Amiga was a sad story (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, the 68000 series was very CISC.
It had been much inspired by the DEC PDP-11's elegant instruction set, especially in its addressing modes -- that were more complex than on early RISCs.
With its CISC architecture, the first in the series was actually mostly 16-bit internally despite being able to do 32-bit operations. The series didn't get truly 32-bit until the 68020 in 1984. And it introduced even more complex addressing modes.
I learned programming in assembly language on the Amiga. When I wanted to learn x86 assembly, and borrowed a book, and I was horrified at what I read.
I have later heard that the 8086 was supposed to have been a "stop-gap" product at Intel, developed quickly to fill a gap in the market while they were developing the Intel iAPX 432. The latter was supposed to have been their answer to the 68000 line but which was a technological and market failure.
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Re:The Amiga was a sad story (Score:4, Interesting)
Commodore built IBM compatible machines, putting the eggs on more than one basket, so the failure was of the Commodore management and not of the Amiga itself.
On the other hand Apple biult an Amiga killer the Apple IIgs, but because people preferred it to the Macintosh line, especially because was almost totally compatible with Apple II games and software and was easily expandable, was stopped.
Re:The Amiga was a sad story (Score:4, Informative)
The 68000 was a 16 bit CPU, although it did support 32 bit operations natively. Internally it had a 16 bit ALU and bus, so when you used 32 bit instructions like say add.l it would actually do two 16 bit additions using microcode. It ended up taking twice as long as doing a 16 bit add, give or take. Same with any memory operations, the external bus was also 16 bit.
It was a brilliant design though because when the fully 32 bit 68020 came out it was fully binary compatible with 68000 code. There was no need to transition from 16 to 32 bit code like we had to do with the move from 32 bit to 64 bit, because the code was already 32 bit.
There were a few exceptions, like the fact that the 68000 only has a 24 bit address bus despite having 32 bit address registers, so some people would use the upper 8 bit of those registers for data. It was pretty rare though.
As you say, the 68000 was a very clean and forward thinking architecture.
Re:The Amiga was a sad story (Score:4, Insightful)
Amiga's problem was the same as its benefit over other machines. Its approach to computing didn't scale. At the time all the special custom chips made sense because the bar to entry was low because of the clock rates of the day, and because Commodore owned its own semiconductor design and fabrication company so they could envision, design, and fabricate their own custom chips. But that plant was always problematic (it became a superfund site in fact, because Commodore managed the plant incompetently) and it wouldn't likely have been able to go forward even if Commodore hadn't been mismanaged straight into a hole. By the Pentium era and PCI-based PCs, the Amiga had lost its reason to exist completely. If you accelerated your Amiga enough to kind of sort of keep up with a PC (which was essentially impossible because of the inferior bus, Zorro III delivered less than half of its theoretical maximums in the real world) then you were basically just using the machine as a backplane and I/O controller. The accelerator contained the disk controller and the bulk of the RAM, and the bus was used mostly to send data to the graphics card... poorly. You'd struggle to do high-res streaming video even if you had enough CPU. Also, memory protection on AmigaOS was notional. In order to carry on into the modern age the Amiga would have had to have given up everything that it was anyway.
VHS beat Betamax, and gruesome 60x86 architecture PCs beat elegant 680x0 ones
Motorola couldn't afford to push clock rates higher until after collaborating with IBM and Apple on PowerPC. Ironically, Apple actually had a multicore processor under design in the 80s [archive.org], but it never went anywhere. Without IBM and Apple there would never have been another competitive Motorola-branded processor. One might argue that the last really great Motorola processor was the 68030 because '040s and above were too expensive. The '030 was an absolute monster in its day and underpinned the Sun3 series for example, and many other Unix systems of the day. The '040 offered too little price-performance. Though at the same clock rating it was much faster than a 486, it came at a price premium, and the 486 achieved very good speeds at very low prices by the end of its lifespan. When the Pentium (and to my mind for the value proposition, more importantly, the Am586) came along the writing was on the wall. PowerPC was a valiant effort, but today its legacy is all in embedded.
That's why Amiga is still relevant. It shows us what could have been.
For a more current example, we've got BeOS. And that's still being knocked off as Haiku. Nerds do love their irrelevant but technically sweet operating systems...
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It was a technically superior machine to the IBM PCs of the day, but somehow, the growing business market for computers couldn't tell the difference, so whichever one (60x86 PCs with DOS then Windows) took the early lead in the market just kept growing by the network effect (every business needed a compatible computer with compatible software.)
No, at the time amiga came out you could buy clone XT's for half the price and those had a entire suite of software to run, meanwhile on computer chronicles they get asked "how does all this advanced graphics and OS help me in the business world", which they responded "let me show you a space shooter". The big ole mean IBM compatible didnt steal Amiga's lunch ... they never knew how to market it, as they had never made a computer that was not a toy sold at K-Mart.
Amiga used the Motorola 68000 line of CPU chips which was a 32-bit processor supporting a uniform unsegmented memory addressing architecture, and a simple uniform elegant orthogonal (RISC, basically) instruction set.
Absolute made up bullshit, and plenty of oth
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When the Amiga came out, it cost as much as a PC clone, but it was a LOT more capable. And when the A500 came out, it undercut the PC machines in cost and capability.
The sole advantage the PC had was running PC software. And sure, that was quite an advantage, but it wasn't really until the 90's that this became a crippling difference. In the late 80's serious business software was running on many platforms, including the Amiga.
Multitasking mattered, and TSR's and other solutions were hot. In Europe, the Ami
Careful there (Score:2)
Also,
I would argue that people only ran one program at a time, in green and black text usually, because their computer architecture and OS sucked compared to what was possible at the time.
That was kind of my point.
I was on Sun3 workstations and Symbolics Lisp Machines at the time (from '86 onward) so the IBM PC stuff looked brutal in comparison. The "affordable" closest thing to the well-designed and power-user-functional computers I was working on would have been
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I would argue that people only ran one program at a time, in green and black text usually, because their computer architecture and OS sucked compared to what was possible at the time.
That was kind of my point.
I was at the very tail end of that period, as a kid we had an Apple //e from pretty much when it went on sale to late 94... when I was not playing or dicking with it as a nifty, it was "hey I need to write a book report" inserts PFS write, write some stuff, save and power off, when done print
why do I need a playfield 4096 color options and sprites to use a computer to do what even today are simple text based computer tasks ...
I love playing with computers, I have a pile of well cared after vintage home comp
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As an Amiga user... (Score:5, Informative)
... AmiKit blows. It installs a ton of crap that did *exist* for the Amiga, yes, but it tries to make it feel non-Amiga-ish.
A Windows taskbar (without removing the Amiga menu bar, mind you, so you have it top and bottom), bad transparency, and hideously gaudy icons.
And it's not even complete. They charge 30 to 80 euros for it, and it doesn't include the ROM files you need to run the damn thing.
If you're going to buy an Amiga emulator, just get Amiga Forever. It's $10 to $40 depending on version, and has legal ROMs and Workbench disks.
Now let's do the same for the Atari ST (Score:1)
Please! A similar Atari ST extended of course to run the latest emuTOS and more.
I bought an Amiga 2000 and dumped it (Score:2)
Amiga offered a discount to engineers where I worked, the Video Toaster was getting good press then, so I bought one.
Out of the hundred plus computers I've obtained, the 2000 was the only one that I got rid of within a few months, with no regrets.
I actually felt bad about taking money from the person that I sold it to.
Workbench windows, fonts, and icons were (and are) ugly. The dev tools were primitive.
Sales and support was nearly non-existent. It just wasn't worth devoting any time to it.
A machine with no
Uhmmm... What? (Score:1)