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Amiga

'Turn an Old PC Into a High-End Amiga with AmiKit' (amiga.sk) 76

Posted by EditorDavid from the back-to-the-future dept.
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!"
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'Turn an Old PC Into a High-End Amiga with AmiKit' More

'Turn an Old PC Into a High-End Amiga with AmiKit'

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  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by narcc ( 412956 )

      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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • It's pretty much impossible to get a Raspberry Pi right now, unless you're willing to pay extortionate prices to the Amazon resellers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          That's fair, though it's not unreasonable to assume that someone here would have one or more just lying around.

        • Just buy a Minimig or a real Amiga. If you just want to play games, then get a real Amiga500 and install Gotek as well as an RGBtoHDMI. Yes a standalone PI are hard to source in some parts of the world. But you can find complete RGBtoHDMI kits on eBay. Then you have a real Amiga that are future proof. And for the PSU, you can always do a MeanWell mod.
      • Raspberry and every other emulation-solution sucks, compared to the real hardware, Minimig and Sidewinder-FPGA solutions. Just like C64 emulation that sucks compared to real hardware. Slowdowns, lagging and mostly wrong sound quality is what you find with emulation.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by narcc ( 412956 )

          , 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)

    by Brain-Fu ( 1274756 ) on Sunday May 29, 2022 @09:34PM (#62576230) Homepage Journal

    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?

    • I was also shocked as how antiqued the games nowadays look as compared to my memory of them. On the one side I should leave my memories intact, but on the other side, maybe I should play a round of "impossible mission" (think it was called like this).

      • 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

        • 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

        • You are somewhat close to the correct answer.... It is not just about CRT. Yes. Games used tricks, that usually are invisible on CRT monitors. But it is not just CRT, because that is just a fancy word for a tube and not flat panel. And the refresh rate are not just one specific rating. No.... There are LCD monitors that are fully Amiga compatible. You can hook them directly up to an Amiga with the use of a 23-pin to 15-pin adaptor. A few Amiga models need a buffered version of the adaptor, other Amiga's n

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gavino ( 560149 )
      Totally in the same camp. I remember absolutely loving the Amiga 500 as a kid - doing tricks on the half pipe in California Games, dualling people and lopping their heads off in Barbarian, and winning battles in North vs South. I look at those games again now on YouTube and go "hmmmm". I really must have been bored back then! I guess it was better than hitting a round hoop along the ground with a stick. But yeah - games are so much more engaging nowadays.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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

    • Why go back you ask? It is not about going back. Just like people tinker with 1960's US cars, then Amiga is a hobby. It is and will never be about going back at all. Amiga users are using Mac, Windows or Linux for the daily and modern needs.
  • Your modernish computer could be used to emulate something else. If you want to run a hobby OS, there are a lot of those available too, and those aren't necessarily outdated like Amiga.

  • The Amiga was a sad story (Score:5, Informative)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @03:07AM (#62576738)
    of what could have been.

    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)

      by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @05:23AM (#62576884)

      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 80x86 chips that IBM DOS/Windows PCs used.

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by BigZee ( 769371 )
        If you wanted RISC from Motorola, they had the 88000 for that.
      • I meant "R" compared to even uglier complicated chip architectures/machine languages like the 80x86 line. Relatively "R", and relatively orthogonal, as in, many if not all instructions could use all of the different addressing modes. etc.

    • Re:The Amiga was a sad story (Score:4, Interesting)

      by havana9 ( 101033 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @06:41AM (#62576924)
      The failure of Commodore and following this the Amiga was mainly caused by terrible management and the fact that MOS technologies hadn't the resource to use more advance silicon technologies. So at a certain point VGA cards and IBM compatible PC become better and faster to play games.
      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)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @07:39AM (#62577010) Homepage Journal

      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)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday May 30, 2022 @08:38AM (#62577102) Homepage Journal

      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...

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

      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

      • 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

      • Don't let the typo give you a heart attack.

        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

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

          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

  • As an Amiga user... (Score:5, Informative)

    by damnbunni ( 1215350 ) on Monday May 30, 2022 @09:12AM (#62577190) Journal

    ... 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Please! A similar Atari ST extended of course to run the latest emuTOS and more.

  • 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

  • Emulation can never turn a computer into an Amiga. For a computer to be an Amiga, you have to at least run the OS directly on the hardware. Personally I have no use for emulation, because I have a nice small collection of Commodore branded Amiga's.

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