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Hi,

You mean something like this.

An article on his experiences making Suzanne can be found in the October 1997 edition of CU Amiga Magazine.

See: http://amiga.emugaming.com/suzanne.html

"Suzanne"

"Suzanne A600 Specifications

Amiga Standard A600 system,

Memory 2Mb Chip RAM upgrade, 4Mb Fast RAM

Processor Apollo A620 28MHz

Drives 8x IDE CD-ROM drive, 880k disk drive

Display LCD VGA display

User input Glidepoint finger pad, keyboard, mouse port for standard Amiga mouse

Regards, Michael

aka rockape

I opened my old Amiga 500, and for some reason Rock Lobster was on my motherboard!

IMO Microsoft made computing cheap

No. Computing already was cheap.
This was not Microsoft's doing.

Of course, you can argue if some of the prices listed there can really be classified as cheap, but OTOH some of the others can. Sure, they're not down to today's prices, but they're certainly heading that way.

No, the aforementioned grandparent chose a phrase that was confusing at best, and completely wrong at worst.

"defaulted to allowing" implies that the "allowing" was an optional setting that could be disabled.
That's nonsensical unless you interpret the sentence as meaning "defaulted to using"

The correct wording would have been "Most Amigas allowed 4096 colors at a time out of a palette of 65536."

However according to this page there's no such 4096/65536 mode at all.
So it's wrong no matter how you interpret it.

Take a look at this page for other Amiga easter eggs.

The easter egg fiasco caused some major problems. RJ Mical told me that Commodore recalled all unsold machines in the UK and replaced the ROMs, resulting in a 2-3 month delay.

ok, i'm way too uninformed. apparently amiga produced a version of the A3000 that came with UNIX System V. this was the A3000UX, shown here and here. If someone has any bits of information in recollection of this machine could you inform us all. This is very interesting, I never knew this existed.

For those who are interested in the Virtuality/Amiga link - check out this page on the original Vituality 1000CS - (as an interesting aside on the Virtuality pods - the original standup pods are named 1000CS, while the sitdown units were named the 1000SD. The monitor stands also had a unit designation, but I don't remember what. Anyhow, when the 2000 series came out, the standup version was names the 2000SU, and the sitdown was named the 2000SD - I have yet to hear what the "CS" stood for on the original version).

BTW - you make the system sound worse than it actual was, if you check the link I just gave. Remember, this was 1991 - and these boxes were running on top-of-the-line Amiga 3000's with two (2 - one for each eye) custom graphics cards, spitting out a fairly high number of polys per second for the day. Furthermore, tracking was done with some form of Polhemus tracking system (perhaps serial based). In 1991, the Amiga 3000 was the best Amiga you could buy - it wasn't until a few years later that the 4000 and the 1200 came out. When the Virtuality 2000 series came out, they used what were basically 486's with custom graphics cards.

I can pretty much say for certain that the Amiga 3000 wasn't as stressed as you make it out to be. They may have even used a custom extra processor board to boost the speed some as well, but anyone who has ever owned and played with an Amiga knows that even with the stock graphics hardware, it was capable of doing things in 1985 that weren't being matched by PC's until the early 90's at best. This isn't fanboy posturing, either - it just wasn't until the availability of the 386, good VGA cards, and Gravis sound/cheap soundblasters that PC's and DOS could start to catch up. Basically, the Amiga was a nicely designed and integrated multi-processor computer, which had custom graphics and memory processors to offload processing from the main CPU. The PC up until the early 90's still was a mostly monolithic system where the CPU had to do everything, and until the appearance of cards that some of the processing could be offloaded on to, could not match what the Amiga was capable of. I am certain that if it could have, that W Industries, Ltd would have went with a PC solution (as they did - albeit after becoming Vituality Inc - with the 2000 series).

Finally - I must agree with you on the boom mounted "FakeSpace-like" arcade system - this is a much better design for the market that the Virtuality pod was aiming for. Virtuality was trying to become a market unto themseleves, becoming a location-based entertainment venue, similar to the Battletech entertainment centers. Unfortunately for the Virtuality pods, they required much more operator handling and cleaning, etc - whereas the Vortek V3 is pretty much a "step-up and go" type system, much more inline with the original Battlezone game system, with a bit more freedom. In other words, it intergrates better with standard arcade layouts than do the Virtuality pods, and requires less operator intervention. Still, there is the hygeine issue, but this is unlikely to ever go away unless a different approach is used...

Ask and ye shall recieve

http://amiga.emugaming.com/paws.jpg

You missed a few devices.

If someone told you that the PSP is a portable gaming device, shoot these people. The PSP is not a portable gaming device, it is really a convergent portable entertainment device.

Right, because the history of convergent entertainment devices is long and illustrious. They would be fools to not want some of this action.

And going with a brand new disk standard that nobody has and nobody sells as a medium for selling movies? It's a brilliant maneuver from some of the industry's best minds.

I should say that the Sony reps I've worked with about other things have been completely with it and didn't lose sight of reality. So what happened to this guy?

I remember a mate of mine used to take his Amiga 600 with him everywhere in a rucksack. Pretty cool little machine that...

I remember SCSI scanners from back then, which would connect to any modern computer of the day (provided they had a SCSI port).

I even seem to remember hand-scanners for the C64.

If the Mac was responsible for an imaging revolution, that must have been later. Adobe Photoshop was initially developed as a specialized tool to edit scanned images and was released in 1990.

When the Commodore Amiga was launched in 1985, Andy Warhol made a painting of Debby Harry by feeding a video still into the Amiga and painting over it, so there were alternative technologies of getting real life images into microcomputers.

hardware needing to get to a certian point.

Amiga. Blitter (bimmer!). Copper (co-processor!). 1980s. Cool.

Boing Ball

I have never heard of a dual CPU machine with different architectures

Have a look at this then.

The Amiga wanted to make the same 68K to PPC transition that the Mac had done, but rather than move straight to PPC and use emulation, a 3rd party PPC co-processor board was produced. PPC software ran on this processor and 68K software (which was most of the OS) ran on the 68K. So, you would have processor intensive stuff (like the decoding done by movie players) farmed out to the PPC.

Not an elegant solution, but it gave the platform a much needed shot in the arm as the limitations of the processing power of the 680x0 series were become ever more apparent.

Alright! AGA!

Yeah, I've got a couple of those old Addison-Wesley books here. Remember though that C= stopped documenting their custom chipset goodness when they wanted everyone to write clean API (non hardware-bashing) friendly code.

Remember: " We made Amiga, They fucked it up "

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

People can get a better idea of the Amiga's trials & tribulations by visiting the Amiga History Guide.

There is a large section on the original Amiga Inc., Commodore, Escom, Gateway and the later Amiga Inc.. Most people also forget that Atari were also one of the bidders for the Amiga technology.

It is also interesting that the businesses that own the Amiga follow a pattern - A(miga Inc.), C(ommodore), E(scom, G(ateway 2000), A(miga Inc), K(MOS). Admittedly this series of coincidences became a bit screwy when Amino bought the Amiga in 2000, but at least we're back on track. Maybe Microsoft will buy it next?

Their influence was sufficiently strong enough to result in a Help key being added to an otherwise sparse Amiga 1000 keyboard (see it there above the cursor keys). Oddly, it was the only key I never used on my Amiga keyboard so I wrote a program to pop up a full screen graphic that said, "Don't Panic!" when it was pressed. Completely useless but it gave me no end of amusement. Kind of like my first girlfriend...

Pshaw. We never sleep.

Speaking of Amiga, when the hell is Corel going to release the long-promised upgrade to Amiga WordPerfect? The last version released was version 4.1. (Not counting the phantom bundle deal Amiga Inc. had with Corel for Linux Wordperfect 8.)

Here's a better explanation. The latch was reset periodically. One would assume that the latch would allow notification as long as it was reset, which it would need to be after a disk was manually ejected. The Macintosh did not allow for manual ejection, so it had full control of resetting the latch when it wanted. Thus it did not need to reset the latch by moving the head as the Amiga does.

They were Amiga 3000s. An arcade here on the Isle of Palms had one. They were interesting, not so much for what they were, but what they portended for the future. Unfortunately, that future has not come to pass. Still cool stuff, though.

One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.

This is incorrect. Check out a comprehensive Amiga history and you'll see that the original corporate investor wanting to buy Amiga was in fact Atari, who produced the ST in competition to the Amiga after Commodore saved Amiga's IP butt by foiling a dirty funding deal by Atari.

IBM wasn't really involved at all. Would the computing landscape be different if Atari had bought Amiga? Maybe, maybe not. Atari had a great bit of mismangement as well, but it might've been a winning combination nonetheless. We'll never know. :(

Andy Warhol. He was all about the manipulation. Wonder where he would have been had he lived long enough to get past the Amiga technology.

He's also wrong in claiming they were the first 32 bit systems available. I hate articles like this because nobody ever mentions any computers from outside of the United States.

The Amiga 1200 was launched in December 1992 but before that a British company called Acorn Computers released the Archimedes range of computers, the next generation after their 8 bit systems (Atom, BBC A/B/B+, Master, Master Compact). Starting with the A305, A310, A410 & A440 in mid 1989 these machines had 32bit ARM2 processors (from which the Intel XScale/StrongARM chips out now originated), the Arthur (later RISCOS (Screenshot) operating system in ROM (instant bootup!), wonderful GUI, built in BBC Basic and easy ARM assembler access, 8 channel stereo sound, etc.

My first computer was a BBC B in 1982 (which should have been mentioned for it's incredible robustness and shedload of I/O ports.. you could link it to anything, oh and for being the machine the original version of Elite was written for) to an Acorn A3000 in 1990, before going PC 94'ish. Shortly after Linux appeared so all was ok again ;)

1-3 belong to commedore.(Amiga)

1. The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 and the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Apple I shipped in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.

2. The Amiga didn't ship until September 1985. The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 (remember the SuperBowl ad?).

3. The Amiga used the same Motorola 680x0 CISC chips the old Macs did. Only the new ones are PowerPC-based. Apple has been shipping PowerMacs since 1994.

1-3 belong to commedore.(Amiga)

1. The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 and the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Apple I shipped in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.

2. The Amiga didn't ship until September 1985. The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 (remember the SuperBowl ad?).

3. The Amiga used the same Motorola 680x0 CISC chips the old Macs did. Only the new ones are PowerPC-based. Apple has been shipping PowerMacs since 1994.

OMM is a close second to the greatest example of video game journalism there ever was, Amiga Power. Never before had the industry seen such ruthless, tactless critique on video games, the video game industry, and even its peers. never afraid to use the entire range of 0-100% for scoring games (as opposed to the 73% syndrome that the industry still seems to be stuck in, and maintaining journalistic integrity by refusing to review incomplete games and take bribes, Amiga Power shined above its competitors.

unfortunately like OMM it's just a memory for those who remember it, and unlike OMM many people this side of the pond never experienced it firsthand. Stuart Campbell's article archive and AP2 (sort of a post-hummus commentary of it all) serve as beacons of its greatness.

and no, i'm not an amiga fanatic, but i played one in my troubled youth.

My vacuum cleaner is now a screen capture utility! Can I get a Hoover with USB?

Yes. USB solutions are now available for the Amiga.

Matt - Love the project. Really, really love the project. I've been walking around with a ridiculous grin all day long that someone in the *NIX scene is finally going to try to Do the Right Thing. (Of course, as a FreeBSD user, I'm equally interested to see how KSE and the like perform when all is said and done -- but when it comes to doing something useful, like, say, deploying production systems, it's all about the solution with the right featureset and the fewest parts to break.)

That said, I've got point out to the rabble that no, Amiga, in any of the Classic, Extra Crispy, or
Third-Party-Possibly-Rebranding-to-Atari flavors, is certainly no deader than the good ol' Atari camp. It's just that, as you've said elsewhere, the Amiga scene has had GCC for quite a while -- and is now using it in the development of both competing OSes -- so we've less reason to bother you for legacy support than those poor ST users. ;)

We're rooting for you!

free clue

For someone who might currently subscribe to streaming radio (as opposed to people who are automatically dead set against a rental scheme), this would function as an upgrade to what's available now in the guise of services like Launch.com, Musicmatch MX, Live365, and Real Radio. Basically, you'd get to listen to any song you want, in any order you want for a flat free with no commercials. And if you want to "share" with a friend who has the same service, you just send them a pointer to the song on the server, no need to email them the file itself. And you'd get to put your current playlist on your portable too. For current streaming subscribers, this is a proposition with no downside.

Now, is this going to appeal to everybody? No, but it doesn't have to. But I think it would appeal to the type of people who don't see the point in buying DVD's instead of just renting them, or in buying books instead of going to the library. The sort of people who don't like to clutter their lives with excessive "ownership." And I think it's fair to say, judging by the success of libraries, and Netflix, and Blockbuster, and PPV, that there are plenty of people who fit into that category.

I should add that I'm not one of those people. I still have books from 30 years ago, old issues of .info magazine in the closet, and LP vinyl records I haven't touched in 20 years or more. I'm a packrat. But I've got friends who will read a novel and then throw it out immediately afterwords (gasp!), who reuse the same, crufty, dollar VHS tape over and over again for that one TV show they record every week, and who probably think their "collection" of 15 compact discs takes up too much space.

Eyetech have sold combined x86/Amiga systems to the Amiga market for years and Siamese Systems announced, though never sold, the 3-Pack and 8-pack Amiga/Alpha-based systems.

Eyetech have sold combined x86/Amiga systems to the Amiga market for years and Siamese Systems announced, though never sold, the 3-Pack and 8-pack Amiga/Alpha-based systems.

A good web site for Amiga history can be found here. Brownie points for computer collecting are awarded to anyone who possesses one of the various Amiga prototypes that have appeared over the years.

A good web site for Amiga history can be found here. Brownie points for computer collecting are awarded to anyone who possesses one of the various Amiga prototypes that have appeared over the years.

Said Dave Haynie, "The initial schedule of 18 months was for the Hombre game machine hardware. There's no real OS here, just a library of routines, including a 3D package, which would probably be licensed. The Amiga OS was not to have run on this system in any form."

A bit better. Done by "SimoAmi's".
Another AmigaOS4 Screenshot

Matt Chaput is working on their GUI.
Concept picture

Front page

"None of the new screenshots show the default AmigaOS 4.0 appearance, although some of them contain certain elements or concepts that will become part of it. However, it is of little importance what the default will be as most every aspect of the GUI can be customized."

More proof of concept than anything.

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/darius.jpg

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/gburzynski.pn g

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/renkert.jpg

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/kelvin.jpg

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/sami.jpg

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/radzikowski.p ng

http://www.gfxbase.com/wbshots/shots/stom.jpg

The above is YAM a mail app. in different user configurations.

Actually, Atari didn't sell Amiga off to Commodore..

Amiga Inc. had a money loan from Atari and a contract, but C= stepped in with a higher bid for their share and snatched the company right from Atari's hands.

More info on the matter.

Wish I had the karma to spend on the parent.

Here're some Secret Guru Decoder Rings, for the curious: amiga.emugaming.com's version, or the AmigaDOS Online Reference Manual's.

The latter site features a few more errors to chew on, like the colored POST codes and filesystem error numbers; do keep in mind that the 'News Flash' on the site is from 1999(?), and is now only a historical document itself. Check the comments of the recent MorphOS article here if you wonder what everyone's up to now.

>Who's the bigger idiot: The one who is placed in a position of making decisions for a corporation, or the one who has posted over 1600 slashdot comments?

I don't know, why don't you tell me?

This hardware licensing scheme was designed by Amiga Inc. with "consultation" from Eyetech, and it's hardly surprising that Eyetech is the only hardware distributor that has acquired such a license.

Anyway, a whole list of amusing AmgiaOS messages, including (From Workbench 1.2) "We made Amiga, They fucked it up",

it wasnt Amiga, it was Commedore Amiga: always was.

Wrong! Amiga, Inc was funded by 3 dentists as a company called Hi-Toro, in 1982. They later changed the name to Amiga... Comodore didn't buy them until 1984, when the designs and prototypes were already well under way.

Try reading a little history.

Perhaps you should take your own advice...