The Amiga Turns 25

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Posted by ryuzaki0 on Saturday July 24, 2010 @06:22PM from the follow-the-bouncing-ball dept.

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."

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I'll freely admit to it by NiceGeek · 2010-07-24 18:34 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:I'll freely admit to it by dotgain · 2010-07-24 18:55 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  They were good machines, but my A1200 was revolutionary (for me at least). Smaller than the A500, packing 2MB RAM standard and an internal hard drive. Since I could use the Power supply + monitor at my clients office, it was almost like a laptop for me. I used it to write the accounting system for a small business using HiSoft Basic, rendered my first 3D stuff on it, and even got on the net with SLIP, later PPP, and had my first experience with the web.
  I thought at the time the web was unbearably slow with the speeds of the day being 14.4kbps, and Mosaic performing quite badly in only 2MB. These days I have 4GB RAM and 4Mbps downstream, and pages still seem to take forever to load.
2. Re:I'll freely admit to it by sznupi · 2010-07-24 19:27 · Score: 1
  
  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)
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
3. Re:I'll freely admit to it by NiceGeek · 2010-07-24 19:37 · Score: 1
  
  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.
4. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Joce640k · 2010-07-24 19:47 · Score: 1
  
  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'.
  
  --
  No sig today...
5. Re:I'll freely admit to it by SeanMcGPA · 2010-07-24 19:54 · Score: 1
  
  I sold my Amiga 1000 in the early 90's, and I am sooo sorry I did. Best computer ever.
6. Re:I'll freely admit to it by hitmark · 2010-07-24 19:58 · Score: 1
  
  500 for home, 2000 for office ;)
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
7. Re:I'll freely admit to it by jazzmans · 2010-07-24 20:58 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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
  
  --
  Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans. No-one sees motorcycles
8. Re:I'll freely admit to it by flatlinr · 2010-07-24 21:04 · 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!
9. Re:I'll freely admit to it by dltaylor · 2010-07-24 21:33 · Score: 1
  
  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.
10. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Monolith1 · 2010-07-24 22:20 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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.
11. Re:I'll freely admit to it by dotgain · 2010-07-24 23:01 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Good points. Thanks for your reply, no matter how much you've ruined my Sunday evening you ghastly blashphemer :)
12. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 04:43 · Score: 0
  
  I ditched everything but an A-500
  had 2 500s both with harddisks, 1 a2000 1 a4000 all maxed out, graphics cards on the a2000 and a4000
  those were the days when computers didnt suck
13. Re:I'll freely admit to it by multipartmixed · 2010-07-25 05:53 · Score: 1
  
  If a Sun CD-ROM works, then you might need to change a jumper on a commodity drive, to select 512 byte sectors. (You did with 1990s Sun hardware like the SS20).
  
  --
  
  Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
14. Re:I'll freely admit to it by catmistake · 2010-07-25 06:33 · Score: 1
  
  Light-years? idk about that... certainly up for debate over which os had which better qualities. 2 things stick out in my mind... there were Amiga video toasters still in use in 2000, and in 1989 when first released, though few were aware, the Mac SE/30 could take 128MB RAM and run A/UX. Just imagine blowing 20 grand (or so) on RAM to max out your already expensive (but not overpriced for the time) Mac. OK... toaster more impressive depending on what side of entertainment you might fall.
  
  --
  The Admin and the Engineer
15. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 07:06 · Score: 0
  
  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!
  Architecturally (OS an HW) Amiga may be better but lacking in features now common in PCs not really.
  Now PC has better expansion capabilities but there's still hefty load of stuff due to history that's weighing it down. PC has more "brute force" capabilities and only fairly recently gained support for multi CPU and GPU systems: despite current status PC could do with major architectural overhaul.
  Amiga OS implemented light-weight multitasking very early, see BeOS and QNX for similar efficiency and compare that to Windows which is fairly heavy and restricted in comparison.
16. Re:I'll freely admit to it by toejam13 · 2010-07-25 09:34 · Score: 1
  
  The Playstation would have devastated sales of the CD32 had Commodore still been in business in late 1994. One major reason was because Sony sold their hardware at a loss, subsidized by licensing fees collected against software sales. The MSRP of the PS1 was $299.
  
  IIRC, Commodore made their profit from the CD32 up-front. They were eying a MSRP of $399 for its US launch. We can only speculate how much cheaper it would have been a year later.
  
  I'm not sure if Commodore adopted it, but IMHO, it would have been suicidal for Commodore to try to use the subsidized hardware model with the CD32 since so many users would have bought it with the sole intention of turning it into an A1200 clone. Cheap users would then buy or pirate desktop versions of games, robbing Commodore of their ability to profit from the console.
17. Re:I'll freely admit to it by dave420 · 2010-07-25 13:22 · Score: 1
  
  ... which doesn't matter at all, as Amigas are shit when compared to modern PCs. I think that's the point a lot of fanboys don't seem to get - it doesn't matter.
18. Re:I'll freely admit to it by AmigaMMC · 2010-07-25 14:51 · Score: 1
  
  Happy Birthday to me and my Amiga, we're both still very much alive thank you very much
19. Re:I'll freely admit to it by AmigaMMC · 2010-07-25 15:00 · Score: 1
  
  Interestingly enough the A500 was what made the Amiga famous but at the same time what killed it in the eye of the professional public because it was perceived as a toy. I remember an argument I had with my dad who knew nothing about computer and still doesn't know how to turn one on, whereas my mom is all internet savvy (I bet she's spying me on /. ); he claimed that PC were serious computer and Amiga just a toy. One of the many times when he had no clue of what he was talking about.
20. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Finite9 · 2010-07-25 21:53 · Score: 1
  
  I sold an Amiga 1200 with a 4MB upgrade unit (total 6MB) and an 80MB internal hard drive, plus a great 14" monitor, thousands of pirated games and 20-30 originals, plus lots of other things I can't remember, to some old guy for literally a fifth of what it was actually worth on the second hand market at the time. The guy was so overjoyed, I could quite honestly see the greed in his eyes! My dog tried to bite him, which has never happened either before or since that incident. Could probably smell the bad intentions :) The reason for the sale? Because I became interested in girls in a big way, and a geeky computer setup was not part of that image. Ahh, the follies of adolescence. My brother in law still has his C64 w/ tape drive working! But I really really wish I still had my Amiga 1200 so my boy could experience it (he's currently playing on one of those C64 emulators in-built in a joystick, but it's a crap joystick and the games aren't exactly the best picks from the C64).
  
  --
  "Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
21. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 21:54 · Score: 0
  
  you can get most of the parts to build an A1200 at amigakit.us
22. Re:I'll freely admit to it by mdwh2 · 2010-07-26 00:37 · Score: 1
  
  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!
  This isn't a fair comment - and I wondered how long it would be before this straw man appeared.
  I have hung out on amiga.org in recent years - yes, you occasionally get one random deluded guy claiming that an A1000 is better than a 2010 computer, but the point is, not only is he hardly representative of the users there, he's also shouted down and mocked by the other Amiga users there. You get fanatics everywhere (just look at Apple - people who think that Iphones sell the most, or it was the first phone with Internet).
  Yeah, of course I thought the A1200 was the shit at the time, but that's cause I was a blinded Amiga fanboy.
  I don't think that was deluded at the time. Obviously an A1200 is crap compared with a 2010 PC (what an unfair comparison to make); and yes, it certainly wasn't as revolutionary as the A1000, and it's a shame that Commodore fouled up and didn't get things like the AAA chipset ready time. But, compared to PCs at the time, what could you get for £400? Yes, the Amiga had nothing to compete with a £1500 PC, but the problem there was at the high end with the A4000, not with the A1200.
  The A1200 wasn't as great as it could have been, but it wasn't delusional to still prefer it over the alternatives at the time; it was a perfectly reasonable decision.
  The Playstation came out another two years later, and wasn't a computer anyway.
23. Re:I'll freely admit to it by mdwh2 · 2010-07-26 00:49 · Score: 1
  
  Indeed - but it's also frustrating (and amusing) to see how things turn around.
  PC owners looked down on Amigas as games machines, thinking that they were superior with their DOS based 286s. Yet it's now games that are big business for PCs, and drive much of the PC hardware development.
  Mac owners looked down on Amigas as "toys", yet now Apple try to advertise Macs by branding PCs as being boring business machines, and Iphone fans go on about how they can run trivial games on their phones (whilst dismissing Blackberry, on the grounds that it's only "used for business").
  Of course I suspect that many of the Amiga users in the 80s/90s went on to use PCs, and thankfully PCs have adopted many of the things the Amiga did well, such as a decent GUI on the OS, decent graphics and sound as standard, doing away with add-on cards for the most part, being more user-friendly. Thus the guys bragging about how good DOS-based PCs are are thankfully as much of a relic of the past as an A500 is, if not more so.
  The change is also probably due to the fact that these days (since about the mid-90s), games are seen as acceptable for adults, where as before they were just for kids.
  Ironically, when Commodore had gone bust, I'd say what actually accelerated the move from Amigas to PCs was the fact that PCs were becoming games machines (e.g., Doom).
24. Re:I'll freely admit to it by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-26 01:02 · Score: 0
  
  You seem to forget the A2000 that was released in the same year as the A500. The A500 was aimed at the home market user and was a low end model, while the A2000 was more of a high end.
  I doubt the tv stations and movie producers who used the A2000 with video toaster and lightwave agree that it was non serious computer. ;P
25. Re:I'll freely admit to it by commodore64_love · 2010-07-26 09:44 · Score: 1
  
  It's hard to understand how advanced the Amiga was unless you see it in action. Remember this demo was made using 1985 hardware using the following specs. I challenge you to recreate this demo using a PC or Mac on equal limitations:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-JFJ8Hjo_g
  - 0.007 gigahertz single-core processor
  -
  - 0.0005 gigabytes of memory
  -
  - 8 bit sound and 64 color video
  -
  - In other words very, very, very primitive. And yet powerful.
  
  --
  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by blind+biker · 2010-07-24 18:42 · 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.

--
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
1. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by piggydoggy · 2010-07-24 18:53 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The first IBM PC was released several years before Amiga, in 1981. By 1985 the PC world had ATs with 80286 processors and EGA. No doubt Amiga was still massively superior at multimedia at the time, but in the end, open architecture and expandability won.
2. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 19:08 · Score: 0
  
  Really? but in china IBM is the nearly the best apart from apple.:)
  Welcome to my site: http://iibetter.com
3. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Daniel+Dvorkin · 2010-07-24 19:10 · Score: 4, 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.
  
  --
  The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
4. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by blind+biker · 2010-07-24 19:11 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  The Amiga was every bit as expandable as the IBM PC 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.
  
  --
  "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
5. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-24 19:22 · Score: 0
  
  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'.
  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)
  
  --
  No sig today...
6. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 19:37 · Score: 0
  
  The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.
  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".
7. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by blind+biker · 2010-07-24 19:43 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
8. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by sznupi · 2010-07-24 19:46 · Score: 1
  
  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 prove out of reach still for almost a decade; gave us real media editing. Even where Blender started. And if it was good for Babylon 5 or NASA...
  (and apparently for Scotty, too - supposedly the crew of Star Trek IV wanted an Amiga; but Commodore wouldn't provide it just like that, on notice; what could have been...)
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
9. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 19:50 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  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.
  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...
10. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by sznupi · 2010-07-24 19:53 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
11. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by sznupi · 2010-07-24 19:57 · Score: 3, 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...
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
12. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by NotInTheBox · 2010-07-24 20:00 · 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.
  
  --
  What I cannot create, I do not understand
13. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by hitmark · 2010-07-24 20:02 · Score: 1
  
  especially given how many buy from the fruit because of the "experience".
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
14. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Darinbob · 2010-07-24 20:06 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Um, missing something here. Later Amigas had 68040s, a far better chip and chip design than the 386 (to Intel's credit, they're stuck with a horrendous backwards compatibility legacy they can't escape). Even later it migrated to PowerPc (though the popularity had seriously waned by then). That later Amiga had 256 indexed colors out of a 24-bit palette, and in 256K colors in HAM mode. Earlier Amigas were 32 or 16 color, but those colors were out of a large palette.
  
  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.
15. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by hitmark · 2010-07-24 20:07 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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 to anyone with compatible hardware. End result was a massive drop in hardware price, and a massive rise in customers for microsoft.
  problem is, linux cant go the same way, as it may well be that dell and the rest are earning money on using windows, thanks to all kinds of trial bundles (enough of those, and it may offset whatever rebated price microsoft sells them windows for). And this also follows on to the brick and mortar stores where a clueless sales drone can push boxed media based on generic descriptions of "problems".
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
16. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 20:08 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.
  My last amiga was the 1200. @mb of Ram was todays equivalent to 32gb. It was an endless expanse you could not understand how to use. The PC I bought was 4mb, and -75%- was taken up by a simple desktop (Win3.11, no net). By contrast, the amiga os, consumed a few percent at most of system resources. Maybe 250k tops, thought I think I had mine below 100kb. The 20gb hard disk was easier to consume, even with my external 20 from my last machine, however the OS took up, what 1-2% of the disk? By contrast the 200gb pc was half consumed by the default install. Sound was was -better- than the pc I bought afterwards. The PC I bought at 256 colours, the A1200 had 256,000 colours.
  I downgraded from the a1200 to an PC. IT was a 486dx, 4mb of ram, 200gb hard disk sound blaster with a CDRom card hanging off the sound card (non ide). It took a few mins to get to a usable desktop, my amiga took all of 5 seconds (optimised startup script, it was only loadwb from memory).
  The Amiga was a pleasure to use and I feel that only recently with the iMac have wee seen a truly 'better' machine (I'm an old MCSE from the 3.5 days, not much of an apple fanboy). The only reason I sold was that I hear on the news about the US parent company going in to receivership and had already being exposed to a dead end funvision system in the past. I sold it -above- retail in Sydney's trading post magazine on a sorrowful day. I miss it, mostly because it costed half the price of the dog I bought next.
17. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by sznupi · 2010-07-24 20:11 · Score: 1, Offtopic
  
  ...having ASCII graphics apps...
  Hey, such could be the necessity to get roguelikes really going. And without them, where would we be?
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
18. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by mcvos · 2010-07-24 20:14 · Score: 1
  
  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, they like having the same machine at home. Except for the small group that's aware of the superior computer.
19. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by scottgfx · 2010-07-24 20:15 · Score: 1
  
  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"
  
  --
  It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
20. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Man+On+Pink+Corner · 2010-07-24 20:18 · Score: 1
  
  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 altogether. IBM's text display was infinitely sharper, crisper, and generally more attractive than anyone else's, including the early Macintosh's.
  Back then, most computer users who weren't playing games spent their days staring at a screen full of text. People who say the PC won because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" or because "Bill Gates cheated" never actually tried using an Amiga for anything but gaming/multimedia work.
21. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Gary+Perkins · 2010-07-24 20:19 · Score: 1
  
  It wouldn't have been hard at all to clone an Amiga -- most of the hardware, as I understand it, is well documented. This is why the Commodore and Amiga series had such great games, software developers had direct access to the chipsets and could control the hardware however they liked. Most games were, in effect, their own OS's. The only non-open part was the kickstart, but I'm sure if someone had the bug up their ass to do it, could have developed a replacement. A small part of it was BIOS-like, but a good bit of the OS elements was in it was well... so, it probably wouldn't have been hard to reverse engineer a new kickstart containing a reverse engineered BIOS and alternate OS elements to boot into an alternate OS. The only reason you never saw cloned Amiga hardware was because there wasn't any demand for the Amiga compared to IBM compatible machines. Had the Amiga been made more IBM compatible (especially the floppy) from the start, CBM would probably still be in business today.
22. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by keeboo · 2010-07-24 20:32 · Score: 1
  
  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.
23. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by sznupi · 2010-07-24 20:37 · Score: 1
  
  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
  
  --
  One that hath name thou can not otter
24. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by u.hertlein · 2010-07-24 20:40 · Score: 1
  
  It wouldn't have been hard at all to clone an Amiga -- most of the hardware, as I understand it, is well documented.
  Yes, the hardware interfaces was well documented. But since the Amiga was using custom chips (for sound and graphics, if not more) I doubt it would've been easy or cost effective to re-create those chips for a clone.
  
  --
  Geek by Nature - Linux by Choice.
25. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by (Score.5,+Interestin · 2010-07-24 20:49 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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...
  
  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).
26. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by VinylPusher · 2010-07-24 20:50 · Score: 1
  
  You're talking about differences between monitors and TV's. I bought a monitor for my Amiga and it made a huge difference. I may not still have my Amiga, but I have the Amiga->VGA monitor adapter still in my cable collection.
27. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by DigitAl56K · 2010-07-24 20:50 · Score: 1
  
  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
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_Half-Brite
  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 gaming to desktop applications. Amiga games would have smooth parallax scrolling, multiple hardware sprites, 4 channels of sampled sound mixed in hardware, and they'd be fast and responsive. PC gaming by comparison was using a terrible mode system where you basically traded color palette against resolution and at higher resolutions most adapters performed so poorly that you'd see games that scrolled redrawing. The Workbench environment had full graphical file system browsing, a nice shell, a really smart preferences system, preemptive multitasking and all this ran along with your applications in 1MB or 0.5MB of memory depending on your system. Heck, even trying to compare Windows 3.1 on a 486 to Amiga OS was a joke. Windows in these days regularly blew up if you ran two apps at once and it's "folders" consisted of virtual entries in .ini files - not even a real file system.
  I think only on the very old system ROMs you needed a bootstrap to boot from HD, though sadly back in the day I couldn't afford a HD :)
  Personally I would not say that it was clear who was going to win when it came to PC vs Amiga. Amiga was very badly mismanaged towards the end. As it eventually became clear that Commodore was falling apart I was dismayed by what I faced in the PC world by comparison at the time.
28. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 20:52 · Score: 0
  
  The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.
  What, you mean the " PC"? It's still there and the PC is doing great.
29. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by VinylPusher · 2010-07-24 20:55 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  The Amiga died just around the time I developed an almost complete knowledge of its hardware and became fluent in 680x0 assembly. A state of coding Nirvana I have never been able to achieve on the PC, much to my dismay.
30. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by keeboo · 2010-07-24 20:55 · Score: 1
  
  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 to set up the IRQs correctly, otherwise the PC would lock up while playing sounds.
  I remember that each single PC game came with its own "sound setup" you had to configure. That was nightmarish, but PC users were used to that and found that "normal".
31. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Patch86 · 2010-07-24 21:01 · Score: 3, 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.
32. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by nogginthenog · 2010-07-24 21:03 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  "Even if you managed to attach a hard disk to the stupid edge connector it still needed a floppy disk to bootstrap it."
  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.
33. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by somersault · 2010-07-24 21:06 · Score: 1
  
  Something tells me you mean MB, not GB, for all those hard drive sizes..
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
34. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by smallfries · 2010-07-24 21:07 · 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.
  
  --
  Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
35. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by DigitAl56K · 2010-07-24 21:10 · 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.
36. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by snuf23 · 2010-07-24 21:35 · 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.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
37. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by dimethylxanthine · 2010-07-24 22:05 · Score: 0
  
  Brother, I bought gold and all sorts of accessories for my amiga and the bitch still left. Carajo!
38. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by drinkypoo · 2010-07-24 22:14 · Score: 1
  
  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 reimplemented on the video card or in the driver and then patched around in the OS. Before long, buying a video card for the Amiga cost more than buying an entire PC as PC prices fell and Amiga hardware prices remained fairly constant. I know because I was one of the Amigans lusting after upgraded graphics. Eventually the PC got so much CPU as to make the Amiga irrelevant. The moral here is that custom hardware doesn't work for commodity PCs, and that the Amiga's design was cool for game consoles but didn't scale well enough to keep them in the PC market. Of course, Amiga was trying to bring out new hardware, and Haynie had allegedly actually prototyped the whole next system, but C= had CEOFAIL and AFAIK that's the real reason they're gone.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
39. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by zyzko · 2010-07-24 22:36 · Score: 1
  
  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 ill-behaving processes on machines without MMU.
40. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by EdZ · 2010-07-24 23:16 · Score: 0
  
  Doom killed the Amiga. Comanche killed the Amiga.
  Both Doom and Comanche ran perfectly well on the Amiga.
41. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by snuf23 · 2010-07-24 23:27 · Score: 1
  
  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 architecture but they were nothing like the concept of a hardware abstraction layer. You still need base custom chips either real ones or via emulation to run a lot of Amiga software.
  The architecture and the code that ran on it was tied to those beautiful custom chips. The thing that gave Amiga it's early advantage became it's Achilles' heel as the platform aged.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
42. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by gilesjuk · 2010-07-24 23:36 · Score: 1
  
  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) and the X86 CPU with its 64-Bit mods.
43. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by gilesjuk · 2010-07-24 23:39 · Score: 1
  
  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.
44. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by snuf23 · 2010-07-24 23:46 · Score: 3, 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.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
45. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Sun · 2010-07-24 23:47 · Score: 1
  
  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 500 ran at 7.2Mhz, with a memory bus cycle of 4 (four!) CPU cycles. I remember going over the copper registers list one day, and finding a "CPU danger bit". Enabling it meant that the mechanism that was designed to force the CPU to get one memory bus cycle if it has been trying to get to the memory for three times in a row and denied is disabled.
  So I wouldn't call it exactly "running your game/app code", though definitely better than the PC of the time.
  Shachar
46. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 23:51 · Score: 0
  
  By the mid-90s Commodore had been bust for 3 years, the last lot of Amiga's 1200/4000 had many improvements, but even that had been effected by poor management cutting budget to the technical departments.
47. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by snuf23 · 2010-07-24 23:51 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
48. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-24 23:53 · Score: 1
  
  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 was the hard disks. The ST had a built-in SCSI connector and the hard disks just worked. Getting an Amiga to work with a hard disk was much more of a black art.
  
  --
  No sig today...
49. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by smallfries · 2010-07-24 23:55 · Score: 1
  
  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 after rendering, or accept a huge penality in the number of live values in the renderer as you try and do pixels in batches of eight. This causes more spills and thus you get memory bandwidth and latency problems.
  
  Both Doom and Comanche ran perfectly well on the Amiga.
  Never saw either of them. Sure later on Doom got ported to every platform under the sun, but I never saw it released on the Amiga.
  Commanche : Maximum Overkill was the game of the year. It was a huge revolution in PC gaming, you couldn't move without seeing it running demos in computer shops. Never saw the Amiga version. I've just had a look for it now, and while I can find hundreds of videos of the PC version / screenshots / nostalgic review etc I can't find anything about an Amiga version. What did it look like? Which models did it run on?
  
  --
  Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
50. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by BasilBrush · 2010-07-24 23:59 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  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 launching MSX products. But it didn't take over the market.
  Outside of the field of computers, take razors. Safety razor blades are commodity. And the early Gillette twin blade cartridge design is out of patent, and manufactured by other companies as a commodity. Yet various newer proprietary and patented razor cartridge systems dominate the market, even though they are far more expensive.
51. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 00:08 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  No sig today...
52. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 00:11 · Score: 0
  
  iirc there were doom clones for the amiga later on - but they needed a cpu add on board with a 68040, the 68000 itself was just not powerful enough for the 3d texturing, esp in full screen (half sized screen was doable though) - the big problem was the graphic memory management, as for the vga version each pixel was one byte and those very easy to calculate the texture values to display, compared to the amiga where they had to be split up and combined with several pixels on several bitplanes as there was no 1 pixel 1byte graphic mode for the amiga at that time (without extra graphic cards)
  and i do not remember if there even was a version of comanche for the amiga? definitely not at the same time as the pc release, maybe a year later or so and probably having the same restrictions needing a more powerful cpu as in a stock amiga 500?
  if you meant the precessor gunship though - that one even had a c64 version which could be played well
  there was the possibility though to use an extension with 80386 or higher cpus to make the amiga ibm pc compatible and through that you could play those games on an amiga of course too....
53. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by BasilBrush · 2010-07-25 00:20 · Score: 1
  
  I don't think he is talking about the difference from TVs. Circa 1990, at work we had an Amiga, with an Amiga monitor, and a bunch of clone PCs with EGA and VGA monitors. The display of the PCs was far crisper, and easier on the eye for reading text.
  In every other way the Amiga graphics were better though. Including the fact that they could be genlocked - we were using the Amiga for video titling and effects.
54. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by BasilBrush · 2010-07-25 00:28 · Score: 1
  
  Even the oldest Amiga, the A1000, was able to display 4096 colors simultaneously.
  It was, but it was of limited use. HAM was good for displaying still photos, but absolutely horrible for pretty much anything that required anything to move.
55. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 00:46 · Score: 0, Troll
  
  You're innovating in the use of the apostrophe. It's means IT IS. How come people can memorize trivial junk for defunct computers but the apostrophe completely baffles them?
56. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 01:01 · Score: 0
  
  Jobs pushed the company to use standards such as USB and eventually transitioned Mac to commodity processors and busses (Intel and PCI/PCI express).
  But in true Apple tradition, they buggered that up. Try buying a decent video card for a mac pro and wonder why Apple made sure it won't work, thanks to that EFI crap.
57. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 01:07 · Score: 0
  
  You're talking crap. Amiga died when Akers took over, a stooge who didn't like "home" computing. He wanted the Commodore to be an IBM PC clone outfit and actively killed Amiga development. Guess what company he used to work for? IBM! Job done. Just as PCs eventually got upgradable components, Amiga has those option for years, even for the basic machines. Pop a chip, install a tiny board.
58. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 01:21 · Score: 0
  
  There were 3rd party developers for Amiga as well. They were just not as competitive due to a smaller market size for the upgradeable models.
59. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by heson · 2010-07-25 01:23 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, on an Amiga that costed ten times more than the PC.
60. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by strikethree · 2010-07-25 01:23 · Score: 1
  
  "Problem was...anything over four bitplanes on the Amiga started stealing RAM access cycles from the CPU."
  Only true if the computer only had chip ram in it. If the Amiga had fast ram installed, the CPU would happily continue working on data in fast ram. The hardware was truly amazing.
  
  --
  "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
61. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 01:24 · Score: 1
  
  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's CPU was very slow compared to the PC's. We're talking 7.2MHz 68000 vs. 16 or 20MHz 286. In real terms the sound mixing wasn't a factor.
  The problem with specialized chips is, well, they're specialized. The Amiga was only really good at certain video effects (ie. screen scrolling and 2D sprites). All the fancy hardware was no help at all if you weren't doing that...and unfortunately for the Amiga it the world wasn't doing that. The real world was going 3D (eg. Wolfenstein 3D) and the puny Amiga CPU combined with its awkward video memory layout meant it simply couldn't compete in that world.
  
  --
  No sig today...
62. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by flatlinr · 2010-07-25 01:30 · Score: 1
  
  I think you might misremember a little bit.
  The 68k CPU was a CISC design using microcode, which meant that one instruction took multiple clock-cycles to execute (minimum of 4 cycles). Basically, it spent one clock cycle accessing memory and one clock cycle for internal processing.
  The designer's exploited this by having DMA during the memory on odd cycles when the bus was free. Audio DMA had four statically allocated DMA slots per raster line, which did not interfere with the CPU, meaning that even if you turned off all audio DMA, the CPU wouldn't run any faster, because it didn't use those slots anyway (of course, the copper or blitter could make use of them if needed though!)
  Where it got interesting was with bitplane DMA, because there wasn't enough bandwidth to sustain both display and CPU at full speed if more than four bitplanes were enabled (lores), and then cycle stealing started. Turn on high res and four bitplanes and the bitplane DMA consumed all memory slots except during v-sync and h-sync!!
  On top of that, the copper and the blitter also competed for the same cycles as the CPU. The "CPU danger bit" that you remember was actually the "blitter nasty" flag, which gave the blitter ultimate priority over the 68k.
  The copper always had priority over both the blitter and the 68000 and would steal as many cycles as it needed, potentially every one.
63. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by NotInTheBox · 2010-07-25 01:32 · Score: 1
  
  BIOS is crap and should be removed from the PC, replaced by EFI most likely.
  What I don't know or understand is why Apple choose EFI over OpenFirmware?
  
  --
  What I cannot create, I do not understand
64. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by VGPowerlord · 2010-07-25 01:39 · Score: 1
  
  Later Amigas had 68040s, a far better chip and chip design than the 386 (to Intel's credit, they're stuck with a horrendous backwards compatibility legacy they can't escape).
  According to Wikipedia, the 68040 wasn't released until after the 486 came out, so comparing it to the 386 is rather disingenuous.
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
65. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by flatlinr · 2010-07-25 01:39 · Score: 1
  
  Well, the Amiga was doing 3D in hardware since 1985. Flat-shaded, texture-less polygons only, but still...
66. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by dfghjk · 2010-07-25 01:49 · Score: 1
  
  ...and stability.
67. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Sun · 2010-07-25 01:49 · Score: 1
  
  I might misremember. It was a long time ago, and I was young. I don't think so, however.
  According to my memory, The "one memory cycle is four CPU cycle" came from the generic 68000 handbook, not the Amiga specific documentation. Furthermore, if you wanted to know how much an instruction would take, you took the number of memory accesses it required, multiplied by 4, and 95% of the time, you got the right number.
  Now it is possible that the limitation had something to do with the internal 68000 constraints, and not the memory controller speed, in which case it is entirely possible that what you said above is 100% accurate, except for one minor detail - I did not misremember, I never knew that :-) Please remember that it was 20 years ago, I was 18, and did not know what "CISC" meant at the time.
  Shachar
68. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by dfghjk · 2010-07-25 01:52 · Score: 1
  
  Today it would be Apple, not Microsoft. It's curious how few seem to understand this is what fueled the success of the iPod and the iPhone. Both were weak on features when introduced and both did well anyway because of the power of the company behind them, just like IBM with the PC.
  Regardless, the openness of the PC platform is what led to its success.
69. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by flatlinr · 2010-07-25 02:13 · Score: 1
  
  Well, a 1/4 vs a 1/2 ratio would of course mean that even more DMA time would be available, but what I wrote was pretty much straight out of the "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual". Yeah, I had to dig it out because I didn't remember whether the CPU used odd or even cycles :) Anyway, here's the quote:
  "The 68000 uses only the even-numbered memory access cycles. The 68000 spends about half of a complete processor instruction time doing internal operations and the other half accessing memory. Therefore, the allocation of alternate memory cycles to the 68000 makes it appear to the 68000 that it has the memory all of the time, and it will run at full speed."
70. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by tepples · 2010-07-25 02:24 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  A single company can't compete with unique hardware vs commodity hardware
  Yet all video game consoles of this generation use unique hardware.
71. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Fross · 2010-07-25 03:18 · Score: 1
  
  The older amigas (512kb 500/1000/2000 and up, the very first 256k amiga 1000s had some other issues as well with their early kickstart iirc) could do more than 32 colour. They also had a 64 colour "half-brite" mode, and up to all 4096 colours onscreen at once in HAM mode.
  The comments elsewhere about the Amiga stagnating are spot-on, however. The upgradeable machines were WAY too expensive, and the later versions came too late. They were well ahead of the curve in the mid-late 80s, and in the early-mid 90s got surpassed. Windows 95 was the final nail in the coffin for the mainstream.
  However, if you consider the Amiga part of the Vic-20/C64/C128/Amiga home computer sequence, it makes sense for it to stagnate over time, as they all did. Other manufacturers' machines such as the ZX81 or Spectrum had similarly limited expandability. The Amiga went so much further it could compete with the PC in its areas as well, just the PC improved and scaled, while the Amiga didn't have the support to do so.
  Still have my A500. Plan to gut it and make a MAME/WinUAE box out of it.
72. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Rockoon · 2010-07-25 03:43 · Score: 1
  
  it is exactly right that the text was crisper, but only when the dispay was in text mode of course.
  
  There was *competition* in the video card market, so video card makers did many tricks to enhance text mode output. The 'effective' resolution was often a lot higher than the 720x200 the ega/vga specs defined.
  
  720 is derived from 9 pixels wide characters * 80 characters. The text characters were actually 8x8, but a 9th pixel was assumed between each char ('cept with certain high ascii characters, where the 8th pixel was copied to the 9th)
  
  The thing is that these video cards were basically doing card-coded finely-tuned sub-pixel anti-aliasing on these 8x8 characters. Abrash even wrote about leveraging one particular makers sub-pixel capabilities in text mode.. but by then SVGA, particularly 1024x768, and with VESA standardization, nobody wanted to mess with proprietary stuff.
  
  --
  "His name was James Damore."
73. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 03:55 · Score: 0
  
  So? The Acorn Archimedes was better than the Amiga in almost every single aspect ... except
  Shit operating system (oh yes! I used to have to code for it). Overpriced. Dreadful file system. Zealots even more obnoxious than the Amiga... and yes.. even worse than Linux ones. Wildly overstated performance figures for the CPU (I once saw someone comparing a mandelbrot generator written in hand optimised ARM integer only code) with a C floating point implementation on a PC - and loudly claiming that since the Archimedes one could generate the first iteration in 1 second, whereas the C/PC implementation took 5... that meant the Archimedes was 5 times faster than the PC.
74. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 04:00 · Score: 0
  
  No, a good PC in 1987 had 8514 graphics doing 1024x768 with 256 colors; a decent machine had VGA for 640x480.
75. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 04:19 · Score: 0
  
  The Amiga came with a set of full schematics and the full kernel programming manuals. The typical PC comes with binary only drivers and a leaflet showing where the power button is. Open architecture was set back 20 years by the PC and we are only just starting to recover.
76. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Jeremy+Erwin · 2010-07-25 04:24 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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
77. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by mmontour · 2010-07-25 04:26 · Score: 1
  
  The Amiga was tied to the custom chip set. Even ROM revisions broke software.
  ROM revisions only "broke" software that was already broken, relying on some undocumented quirk or accessing hardware directly instead of following the proper APIs.
78. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Bing+Tsher+E · 2010-07-25 04:47 · Score: 1
  
  The Amiga was every bit as expandable as the IBM PC and way more open.
  You're kidding, right?
  The ASM source listing of the PC Bios is in the technical reference manual. The ASM source listing for the BIOS extension on the Hard Disk controller is in the technical reference manual.
  There were no custom chips whatsoever in the IBM-PC.
  Meanwhile the Amiga was a big cluster of custom ASIC chips.
79. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by tendrousbeastie · 2010-07-25 04:48 · Score: 1
  
  How is your 200GB modern PC half consumed by a default install. What are you running? A Matrix simulator?
  A clean Win7 install for me, including updates and office (2007) will easily fit on a 20GB VM.
80. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Bing+Tsher+E · 2010-07-25 04:50 · Score: 1
  
  The custom chips were the undoing of the Amiga.
  It just wasn't feasible for the platform to grow incrementally, because it was all custom silicon.
81. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Belial6 · 2010-07-25 04:52 · Score: 1
  
  For me it was SCSI was a big factor in killing the Amiga. As games got bigger, Commodores choice of SCSI for Amiga hard drives meant that to put a hard drive on my 500, I would have to spend as much as the price of a whole IBM with a hard drive. Stagnation didn't help, but the cost of a hard drive was the final straw. By the time the 600 came out with IDE, and it's huge compatibility problems, it was just too late for the Amiga in my house.
  
  I do still have a couple of Amigas, as well as Amiga Forever and a MiniMig though.
82. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by tendrousbeastie · 2010-07-25 04:56 · Score: 1
  
  It is true, HAM was a special case, the A1000 was limited to very few colours. Plus HAM would tend to lead to fairly obvious artefacts on screen.
  Prior to the 1200/4000 (AGA) the Amiga was limit to either 16 or 32 colours per bitmap (sorry, I can't remember exactly which it was, but some fairly low 5 or 6 bit register). By this , only 16 (or 32, etc.) could be shown on screen at a time (the Amiga had some weird display hardware).
  The AGA chipset raised it to 256 colours on screen at once (from a 24 bit palette).
83. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 05:12 · Score: 0
  
  Getting an Amiga to work with a hard disk was much more of a black art.
  Was it? You put the 2.5" IDE drive into your A1200 or A600, installed Workbench to it and that was that. The A2000 came in an A2000HD version, or you could buy an A2091 or GVP SCSI card. The A3000 & A4000T came with SCSI on board and the A4000 had an IDE interface. What was so difficult?
84. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Dwonis · 2010-07-25 05:52 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  That sounds like how Linux too off, too.
85. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by catmistake · 2010-07-25 06:42 · Score: 1
  
  well, you are sort of mixed up on the facts, and the feel for what Jobs really did. This isn't stricktly true, but, what it seems like is Steve recognized early that the hardware would soon be secondary to software, and that there were no modern operating systems that could do what he wanted. So he left (yeah, he was fired, but it seems like) to develop Apple's next gen OS. It took him 10 years of frankensteining other OS's (freebsd & mach) and coaxing developers to redecorate (fantastic APIs and dev tools, webkit, other great software tech), and when he had a mature, modern OS, he returned, slapped on a new paint job and an emulation layer, and with the OS as a giant tow line, pulled the company out of the technology bog and speculatively bubbled 90's. If he intended it from the beginning, he's a smart guy. If not, he's a lucky bastard.
  
  --
  The Admin and the Engineer
86. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by colinrichardday · 2010-07-25 06:45 · Score: 1
  
  Doom killed the Amiga.
  OK, who forgot to include the defense_against_rocket_launcher() function in the Amiga kernel code?
87. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by colinrichardday · 2010-07-25 06:48 · Score: 1
  
  as it may well be that dell and the rest are earning money on using windows, thanks to all kinds of trial bundles (enough of those, and it may offset whatever rebated price microsoft sells them windows for).
  Didn't Dell get in trouble with the SEC for taking secret money from Intel to exclude AMD on Dells?
88. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 07:25 · Score: 0
  
  "eventually" ? The very first PC had eight ISA expansion slots.
  One of the many things you could put in an ISA expansion slot, if you could afford it, was a 256 color graphics board. Yes, before the Amiga.
  The "success" of Amiga was kids or husbands who wanted a games machines and parents or wives who would only buy a "useful" computer that could do homework/ manage the accounts/ etc. An A500 could be bought as a "home office" machine and then spend all its time hooked up playing video games.
  Reproducing this unintentional hit proved impossible. The A600 in particular is a joke.
89. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 07:27 · Score: 0
  
  Sorry not the first PC (although that was technically expandable) ISA arrives with the XT, still two years before the Amiga.
90. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by toejam13 · 2010-07-25 07:42 · Score: 1
  
  I think it was less about open architecture and more about forward momentum.
  
  IMHO, I believe that the IBM PC won and the Apple Macintosh survived is because they were constantly improving. You can see a clear line of succession from the original PC to the AT. The line is a bit more murky with the Macintosh, but it is almost spastic with the Amiga.
  
  Imagine if Commodore had released a new Amiga chipset every two years with incremental upgrades to every part of the system, all tied to a slightly faster processor. Do you think they would have remained more competitive? Would you have been excited if Commodore had released the Amiga 2200 in 1988 with a 14MHz 68000, an Enhanced Denise with support for 320×200×8bpp CLUT and HAM screen modes and an Enhanced Paula with 6-chan 8-bit 32KHz audio and native IDE support? I know I would have.
  
  Based off of some of David Haynie's comments, it just sounds as if some of the chipset designs, including Hombre and AAA, were just too advanced and too aggressive for the fabs at the time. Meanwhile, management's obsession with the word "cheap" kept the platform from evolving properly.
91. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 08:01 · Score: 0
  
  Uhhh... NuBus was developed at MIT and later taken under Texas Instruments' wings.
92. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 08:19 · Score: 1
  
  Why is that amazing? Even the Sinclair Spectrum had that 'feature'...
  
  --
  No sig today...
93. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 08:28 · Score: 1
  
  '3D in hardware' is a bit of a stretch.
  I remember my Amiga polygon function used the blitter to draw individual horizontal lines for the polygons but it wasn't really much faster than the 'software' Atari ST version. The blitter was only faster when pixels needed to be shifted left/right.
  
  --
  No sig today...
94. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 08:38 · Score: 1
  
  Real men didn't use operating systems back then...we wrote boot sectors for floppies and took over the entire machine.
  
  --
  No sig today...
95. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 09:44 · Score: 0
  
  Remember that VGA didn't arrive on the scene for another 3 or 4 years, though.
96. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by lennier · 2010-07-25 10:59 · Score: 1
  
  To many who want conserve what they have, and not enough who want to move progressively forward.
  
  Conserving what we have isn't a bad thing at all - in fact, it's a fundamental prerequisite for any genuine progress. At the moment, what we have in our industrial age (most highly visible in computing due to its insanely rapid timeframe) is a sort of contradictory destructive progress, where "advance" comes at the expense of breaking old stuff.
  That's fine for a while - Moore's Law rocks! - but then you realise that if you're losing old stuff at the same rate as you're making new stuff, are you actually advancing? Or just running in place? And especially if the stuff you're losing is history and memory, perhaps we're risking doing ourselves a serious psychic injury.
  I'm in my 30s and feel old. I still remember the freshness of the 1980s. The computer magazines and websites of the 2010s often seem to run on a three-year time horizon: if it happened before then, it's like it never was.
  "Cloud computing"? They called it "thin clients" in the 1990s and "time sharing" in the 1970s.
  Virtual machines? 1972, IBM.
  And of course Microsoft were famously late to the GUI party, as the Mac and Amiga demonstrated. Even then, the first demonstration of a mouse was 1968.
  It's nice that the PC world has finally grown up into the mainframe world, but please can we stop pretending that we're actually innovating and not just rediscovering a previous generation's inventions? And to actually stop for a bit and make sure that we keep stuff compatible (or rather, design stuff so that it can be kept compatible without being utterly broken): that would be golden. Thanks.
  
  --
  You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
97. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 11:00 · Score: 0
  
  And video game consoles are not PCs. Maybe some hardware is similar, but the two are nowhere close in purpose or design.
98. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Threni · 2010-07-25 11:43 · Score: 1
  
  > ROM revisions only "broke" software that was already broken, relying on some undocumented quirk or accessing hardware directly instead of following the proper APIs.
  Practically *ALL* games for the Amiga accessed the hardware directly, rather than via the APIs. There were no APIS for some of the hardware. You were cranking code for the 7mhz cpu and related hardware on the one device (a500, a1200 etc). I don't remember rom revisions breaking stuff, because it changed between platforms, not on a given box. Stuff that did break was easily fixable too. Publishers weren't banking on more than a few months return on a game, so if something broke 2 years later no-one gave a shit.
99. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by shadowfaxcrx · 2010-07-25 11:50 · Score: 1
  
  I had Doom on a graphing calculator. Doom running on an Amiga isn't that astonishing. Remember, it wasn't real 3d.
  
  --
  "I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
100. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 12:26 · Score: 0
  
  Seriously erroneous details. The truth is actually detailed well in the history books. CBM lacked the ability to deliver on the product and instead hired political pundits that wanted to see MS and the clone succeed. Proof that politics is bigger than tech.
101. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by tmp31416 · 2010-07-25 16:17 · Score: 1
  
  bzzt! wrong!
  to say that apple "used only internally developed hardware" is very inaccurate.
  the ignorance still displayed about anything apple astounds me (like saying the ipod does not support mp3).
  apple did use externally designed hardware (nubus, scsi, etc.), though they did tweak it (scsi) to, er, "make it fit" (wedging scsi into a smaller db-25 connector). you better check your facts first, ok?
102. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by mdwh2 · 2010-07-26 00:54 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not disagreeing, but it's interesting that now Toys-R-Us sell PCs, and no one cares about it. And a product being seen as "for business use" is, if anything, now a bad point when trying to sell for consumer use (look at Apple trying to falsely brand PCs as boring business machines, and Microsoft's response is to show the exciting things people do with PCs, without pushing the business angle). Similarly, I've seen Iphone users criticising Blackberries for their perceived associations as a business phone...
103. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by plumby · 2010-07-26 01:10 · Score: 1
  
  IBM's text display was infinitely sharper, crisper, and generally more attractive than anyone else's
  I'd take a late-80s ST with monochrome monitor over a late-80s PC any day of the week.
104. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-26 05:13 · Score: 0
  
  Consoles don't compete directly with PCs, they also don't need to worry about raw performance.
105. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by tepples · 2010-07-26 07:50 · Score: 1
  
  AC wrote:
  
  Consoles don't compete directly with PCs
  Tell that to any of the fanboys posting emotion-laced comments to the periodic "PC gaming is/isn't dying" stories on Slashdot. Consoles don't compete directly with PCs, but they compete a lot closer with a PC that has non-Intel graphics.
106. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-26 11:06 · Score: 0
  
  We can see the same thing with Apple, a 1995 Mac was nearly identical to that of 1985.
  What planet are you from? What color are the skies there?
  The original Mac was a small all-in-one box with an 9" 512x342 mono display, an 8 MHz 68000 CPU, 128K RAM, and a single 400k single-sided floppy drive for the OS, applications, and data.
  Only an insane man would claim that anything Apple was selling in 1995 was "nearly identical" to that. In 1995, Apple was in the middle of transitioning their entire product line to PowerPC processors... that alone shows how inane your statement is.
107. Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas by VinylPusher · 2010-07-30 03:11 · Score: 1
  
  VGA was introduced in 1987, the same year Commodore released the A500. By the time the A1200 was released in 1992, VGA as a video interface was well established.
Sigh... by bennomatic · 2010-07-24 18:49 · Score: 1

I miss my old A500. Can't believe I gave it away.

--
The CB App. What's your 20?
1. Re:Sigh... by Phrogman · 2010-07-24 18:51 · Score: 1
  
  I sold mine and bought an IBM 286, the difference was staggering. The only good side of the IBM PC was that it had a HD.
  
  --
  "The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
2. Re:Sigh... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 19:46 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:Sigh... by somersault · 2010-07-24 21:15 · Score: 1
  
  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 Windows.. bleh.
  
  --
  which is totally what she said
4. Re:Sigh... by Trolan · 2010-07-24 23:51 · Score: 1
  
  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.
5. Re:Sigh... by antdude · 2010-07-24 23:53 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Its worth mentioning AROS.... by 3seas · 2010-07-24 18:54 · Score: 4, 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 and News page of the open source project AROS
1. Re:Its worth mentioning AROS.... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 14:06 · Score: 0
  
  Let me take a moment to point out Icaros, the most prominent AROS distro around.
  There is also a custom-built machine designed specifically to work with AROS.. It's called the Imica. Check out the demo video on the site -- bet you wouldn't expect to see an Atom processor do so much so smoothly.
Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry by ChipMonk · 2010-07-24 18:54 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's on YouTube here. The raw history of the occasion makes up for the downbeat aspect.

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...
1. Re:Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 21:19 · Score: 1, Informative
  
  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...
  Check the battery on the motherboard: it was not so uncommon that with time passing it leaked acid and eroded the circuits below. At least, that was a tipical problem on A3000.
2. Re:Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry by frontofhouse · 2010-07-25 10:09 · Score: 1
  
  Removing the A3000's battery from the circuit board is a good idea if the 3000 is going into storage. There are ways to install a socket so more modern batteries can be substituted.
  
  --
  support your local songwriter
Interesting by jkeelsnc · 2010-07-24 18:54 · Score: 2, Informative

Actually the Amiga was quite an advanced machine at the time. It is too bad that Commodore did not market it aggressively enough over time. Someone mentioned how poor PC programs looked compared to the Amiga. This is true. But I don't think the "three magic letters" are what made PC's so popular but rather the fact that PC's at the time already had all of the popular and "killer" business applications of the day. It also had M$'s monopolostic marketing and sales strategies which are exactly the strategies that Commodore should have used and actually were used when Tramiel was at the helm. Well, nothing is perfect in this world. Commodore made some of the most innovative computer products of the 80's and early 90's. It is a shame they have faded into relative computing obscurity. The Amiga OS itself was amazing for the time.
1. Re:Interesting by Joce640k · 2010-07-24 19:42 · Score: 0
  
  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).
  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.
  
  --
  No sig today...
2. Re:Interesting by Darinbob · 2010-07-24 20:09 · Score: 1
  
  It booted very well from hard disk! Stop thinking the Amiga 1000 was the only one ever made.
3. Re:Interesting by Skuld-Chan · 2010-07-24 20:25 · 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).
4. Re:Interesting by scottgfx · 2010-07-24 20:30 · Score: 1
  
  Wow, look at you with the misinformation. It's like I'm back on the FidoNet Amiga Echo.
  
  --
  It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
5. Re:Interesting by scottgfx · 2010-07-24 20:32 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
6. Re:Interesting by keeboo · 2010-07-24 21:04 · Score: 1
  
  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.
7. Re:Interesting by jo42 · 2010-07-24 23:39 · Score: 1
  
  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
8. Re:Interesting by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 01:33 · Score: 1
  
  The Amiga 1000/500 were the only ones that really counted, the rest of the world had already moved on when the 68040 Amigas appeared. Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
  
  --
  No sig today...
9. Re:Interesting by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 01:40 · Score: 1
  
  It was a serious computer developed by some really smart and talented software and hardware engineers, but people didn't see it that way.
  So were many other machines of that era (e.g. NeXT, Acorn Archimedes). They all died for the same reason: Lack of software.
  
  --
  No sig today...
10. Re:Interesting by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 08:32 · Score: 1
  
  The Atari ST had built-in hard disk support in 1985.
  The A1200 wasn't launched until 1992 - much too late to make any difference.
  
  --
  No sig today...
11. Re:Interesting by keeboo · 2010-07-25 10:11 · Score: 1
  
  Amiga programming was my job at the time and I think I only ever saw one of the 68040 Amigas in the real world. We certainly didn't buy any in our company.
  Considering the constant "damn-Amiga yay-Atari ST" trolling of yours here, I wonder how bad you were as a programmer.
12. Re:Interesting by keeboo · 2010-07-25 10:14 · Score: 1
  
  The Atari ST had built-in hard disk support in 1985.
  The A1200 wasn't launched until 1992 - much too late to make any difference.
  Funny, I mentioned a A500 being expanded in GP post.
  You obviously have serious issues understanding what people write.
13. Re:Interesting by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 12:18 · Score: 0
  
  Amazing it was. But the guru spent more time meditating than marketing. And now history is as it is.
14. Re:Interesting by Skuld-Chan · 2010-07-25 14:04 · Score: 1
  
  Amiga certianly didn't lack for software. Most of those killer titles: Cinema 4D, and Lightwave - still exist today on Windows/Mac.
15. Re:Interesting by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 19:02 · Score: 1
  
  1980s calling ... we want our ST vs. Amiga flamewar back!
  
  --
  No sig today...
The Amiga was a blast to program by dougsha · 2010-07-24 18:58 · Score: 5, Interesting

Here's a playthrough of my bestselling Amiga game The King of Chicago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xQQ-PMPBs It sold 50k copies for Cinemaware - not bad for 1987. Some reviews: http://channelzilch.com/doug/kocblurbs.htm I'm still proud of it.

--
Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
1. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by Mattpw · 2010-07-24 19:27 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for the good times mate ;) I hope amiga.com would open again, I bought a bunch of their Cimemaware pc converted amiga games 6 months ago off the site but I see its down or gone now. Lots of good memories.
2. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by EvilIdler · 2010-07-24 23:16 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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 :)
3. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by snuf23 · 2010-07-25 00:03 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
4. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 01:18 · Score: 0
  
  So you must be Doug Sharp. Thx for that revolutionary masterpiece! Imo a true classic.
  The first cinematic adaptive-storyline strategy game I played. What was it again when starting the car for the restaurant bombing, 'Hit it, Peepers!'.
  I can't help but demand you make some epic sequel (not remake) for some current platform, preferably PC or Android!
  And while I am at it, if you know the Cinemaware-crew, I ask the same for the other Cinemaware gems.
5. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 02:19 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  So you must be Doug Sharp! Respect! And thx for creating a great game, truly revolutionary at the time. Imo one of the great classics and in my book you are up there with the likes of Sid Meier and others.
  Absolutely enjoyed 'King of Chicago', with it's adaptive storyline, cinematic graphics and the gameplay-combination of strategy with action. How did the restaurantbombing start again, 'Hit it, Peepers!' ? Ah, the nostalgia...
  I can't help myself but demand a sequel on some current platform, preferably PC of Android. Hell, even on Amiga, but that probably wouldn't be a commercial move. And while I am at it, if you know the Cinemaware crew in person, ask them the same for all the other great games they made.
  (second post, first one seems to have been lost, so excusez-moi if a double post appears)
6. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by teknopurge · 2010-07-25 06:06 · Score: 1
  
  Rocket Ranger, Defender of the Crown and a ton more. Cinemaware titles were AWESOME!
  
  --
  Website Hosting
7. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by dougsha · 2010-07-26 17:46 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks, Evilldler! Makes me feel all warm inside.
  
  --
  Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
8. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by dougsha · 2010-07-26 17:47 · Score: 1
  
  It was a fun time to be in the game industry. Once developer could still design and code the bulk of an A title.
  
  --
  Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
9. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by dougsha · 2010-07-26 17:49 · Score: 1
  
  Both of those classic games are Kellyn Beeck designs. Kellyn designed both the gameplay and the graphic design. I am trying to lure Kellyn Beeck back into game design.
  
  --
  Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
10. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by dougsha · 2010-07-26 17:50 · Score: 1
  
  Glad you enjoyed my little game, Mattpw.
  
  --
  Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!
11. Re:The Amiga was a blast to program by teknopurge · 2010-07-28 14:59 · Score: 1
  
  Keep me posted - I'll comp you guys hosting. IMO, games are shit now. All FPS and pretty much cookie-cutters. Lemmings was another great game on the amiga...
  
  --
  Website Hosting
Software patents and the death of the Amiga by mccalli · 2010-07-24 19:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

Digg are currently running this story, and there's a post on there leading to this:
Software Patent ended CD32 and Commodore Amiga

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", 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
1. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by kriston · 2010-07-24 19:30 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not so sure since my local Amiga retailer had CD32 machines for sale among the A3000, A4000, and A1200 machines.
  
  --
  Kriston
2. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 20:49 · Score: 1, Interesting
  
  The CD32 was the wrong move by Commodore (did they still own the Amiga by then?). The Amiga had long since lost its way by the time of the CD32. Commodore should have bundled hard drives as standard with the machines long before (e.g. by end of the '80s). Perhaps if the Amiga had got a foothold into business, companies like Microsoft would have developed their apps for it? I used to a have a hard drive for a 1200 but the computer would crash frequently with it.
  PCs had moved onto Windows 3.1, and killer apps such as Word 2. The Amiga had missed its chance and become stuck in a rut.
  The Amiga was undoubtedly far superior to PCs, but their reliability was suspect. I went through quite a few A500s due to disk drive faults (probably not helped by anti-copy loading techniques). The shop owner I purchased it from was sick of the sight of me.
3. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by keeboo · 2010-07-24 21:07 · Score: 1
  
  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?
4. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by lmnfrs · 2010-07-24 21:35 · Score: 1
  
  If you can't find the book but still want some Amiga history, Ars had a good series a few years ago.
5. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 22:01 · Score: 0
  
  XOR? They patented XOR? PRIOR ART! I suppose the guy who was running Commodore at the time was a dim wit (apparently he had managed a clothes manufacturing plant) and didn't have the slightest fig of an idea about software. XOR is used (heavily) in cryptography and basically every cryptographic algorithm out there (every last one) uses XOR to decrypt. You still need the pass keys and the algorithm (and the math), but xor un-fuddles what was originally fuddled. With algorithms going back to well before world war 2, any one of them could be used as prior art. Something so stupid bringing something so advanced down, and yet because of the bucket-heads running Commodore at the time (of the 10,000 things they did after the launch of the Amiga, was there at least 1 that made a positive impact on sales? Surely there must have been 1!), this simple, stupid thing brought them down, and if they had only one person in charge with a clue...
6. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by drinkypoo · 2010-07-24 22:08 · Score: 1
  
  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.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
7. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by mccalli · 2010-07-24 22:22 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  "That post seems to be nonsense, because you could buy a NTSC CD32 in various shops in the USA."
  
  Reading the Wikipedia entry, 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 as a strategy.
  
  Cheers,
  Ian
8. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by drinkypoo · 2010-07-24 22:27 · Score: 1
  
  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 couldn't afford one.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
9. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 23:23 · Score: 0
  
  3D gaming killed it too. The A1200/CD32 were supreme 2D systems, but came out just when Doom was hitting its stride. Even with a CPU accelerator, the AGA chipset was a hinderance to displaying texture mapped polygons. The CD32 had some custom hardware which could translate between chunky and planar bitmap data on the fly, but it didn't have the market to custom code for the CD32 over just releasing an A1200 compatible game.
10. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Pharmboy · 2010-07-25 01:36 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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.
  
  --
  Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
11. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 10:19 · Score: 0
  
  It describes how Commodore lost a software patent fight over, believe it or not, blinking a cursor using XOR.
  The same patent bit AutoCAD
12. Re:Software patents and the death of the Amiga by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-31 16:46 · Score: 0
  
  Fascinating. I'll have to go check the CD-32 in my basement, but I could have sworn the manual and case reference US copyright and patents.
"Other platforms"... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 19:10 · Score: 0

Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings most notably OS/2 and Linux
Most who remember an Amiga as their favorite computer think of the OS and Hardware as one beast. It's more like C64 and original Macintosh fans.
Disclaimer: I'm guilty as hell. The Amiga 1000 with Workbench 1.3 is still my sentimental favorite by far. I started in '78 with the Commodore PET, so there's been a lot of boxes to compare with. CP/M, Apple, and x86, and none of it remembered so fondly as the Amiga days. (Dang... now I want to fire up Silent Service and Fighter Duel Pro.)
For the afflicted, check out this incredibly clean A1000 a chap picked up last year, with the box. Amazing Flickr set.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blakespot/sets/72157621596272210/
One megabyte of Chip Memory by kriston · 2010-07-24 19:23 · Score: 1

One megabyte of "Chip" Memory made me fall in love. Custom chips and the Blitter were decades ahead of everyone else.

--
Kriston
Re:Oh yeah! by acedotcom · 2010-07-24 19:24 · Score: 2, Interesting

what does the gansta specta of da beat have to do with this?

--
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
Why Amiga? by should_be_linear · 2010-07-24 19:33 · Score: 2, Insightful

On Amiga, it was possible to create what we call today "flash games" and "flash animations" which used some 0.1% performance of todays desktop PC (because that was available). Yet, today with similar animation/games computers are easily eating whole CPU and even sometimes newest CPU cannot keep pace with animation. Today, you get close to "feeling" of Amiga programming only if you make shader programs.

--
839*929
1. Re:Why Amiga? by VinylPusher · 2010-07-24 21:35 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  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 actual pixels around that fast.
  Now try doing Warzone Tower Defense, or *any* of the physics-based games where graphic objects undergo rotation. The Amiga had no built-in support for rotating graphics. It could be kludged but it was usually limited to demoscene stuff. Brian The Lion was the only commercial game to implement full-speed rotating graphics. Well, Turrican 3 I think might have (on small objects), but I may be mis-remembering.
  The game Rotox was based entirely on a top-down rotating vector playfield, but framerate was fairly poor.
  The only area the PC falls down when dealing with 2D gaming is that there is absolutely no hardware support for detecting per-pixel collisions between objects. You either iterate through the objects pixel-by-pixel using the CPU, or you do bounding-box, bounding-circle or ever more complex bounding-polygon stuff.
2. Re:Why Amiga? by strikethree · 2010-07-25 00:32 · Score: 4, 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)
  
  --
  "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
3. Re:Why Amiga? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 01:09 · Score: 0
  
  This was a game in a completely 3D environment.
  Yes, but 3-D on a 68000 was not unheard of and certainly not unique to the Amiga at all. The Amiga excelled at moving 2D graphics, but it offered nothing new in the way of 3D that the 68000 wasn't already capable of producing. Low-res, flat shaded polygons with a very small draw distance at a frame rate below 15-10 FPS. It isn't as awesome as you remember, but that's how it is.
4. Re:Why Amiga? by strikethree · 2010-07-25 01:43 · Score: 1
  
  Hm. There was no way for me to measure the framerate. You could be right that it was that poor, but it does not seem like it was quite that low. You are definitely correct about low-res flat shaded polygons, but the draw distance on Armour-Geddon did not seem very small. It is as awesome as I remember because I still play it from time to time on an emulator. That is why I want to recreate it. There were very few games that were quite as open ended in how you handle getting to the goal.
  BTW, thank you for replying. Even though it seems as if you were not impressed by Armour-Geddon, you at least considered what I had said.
  
  --
  "Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
5. Re:Why Amiga? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 07:55 · Score: 0
  
  Sure it did. Since the chipset was off doing its thing with screen handling, sound, and collision detection there was little getting in the way of CPU rendering 3d such that it fit into cache and/or prevent context changes and was smooth enough to actually play instead of the lurching behaviour of other systems short of an Evans and Sutherland or an SGI.
6. Re:Why Amiga? by Uber+Banker · 2010-07-25 14:57 · Score: 1
  
  I remember that game! I played it for hours too, on a 386DX 20MHz with 4MB of RAM and a 512k ISA video card. I don't know if it would have played on a lower spec'd PC, that's just what I had. As I had no sound card, there was no sound.
video production..... by ushere · 2010-07-24 19:42 · Score: 1, Interesting

there was nothing (other than extremely expensive, dedicated equipment) that could integrate so well into a 'low budget' on line edit suite in the 80's and early 90's.
with bt2 (broadcast titler 2) i could knock out graphics that made some of the broadcasted titles of the day look like they came from some fisher-price toy.
by the early 90's (?) i was producing corporate and tv material first on highband, then betacam, then betacamsp, and mastering to 1". all my graphics were sync'd through the amiga (i do remember using some card or other (?)), and using it was a joy.
unfortunately my business grew to the point where the amiga just couldn't keep up (not it's fault, more the pressure of work), and it gave way to pc's running matrox illuminator cards.
i had my amigas in storage till just a few years ago, and fired them up before giving them to the local youth centre (where i believe their still in use with the younger kids for games).
Still cruisin' after all of these years by LoadWB · 2010-07-24 19:44 · Score: 2, 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...)
1. Re:Still cruisin' after all of these years by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 21:49 · Score: 0
  
  There is no modern Amiga hardware. We're going to have to agree to disagree about the word "modern"
Best emulation for Mac? by SeanMcGPA · 2010-07-24 20:10 · Score: 1

I'd love to run some of my old Amiga 1000 stuff on my Mac - any decent Mac emulator available?
1. Re:Best emulation for Mac? by mccalli · 2010-07-24 21:15 · Score: 1
  
  I use E-UAE, in combination with the licensed Kickstart/Workbench and key files from Amiga Forever and Hi Toro as a GUI (can't seem to link to Hi-Toro directly - just click the tab after following that link). Great for those days when it just has to be a game of Paradroid 90...
  
  Cheers,
  Ian
Good ol miggy ... by MxMatrix · 2010-07-24 20:26 · Score: 1

Yeah they were the best you could get for just anything. Not only games but DTP, music and of course video. Allthough i still own a beefed up A2000 (Cvb64-3d/BlzrdA2040/Ariadne) it is in my storage room, boxed en waiting for ..... I don't know. Is there still m68k linux around ?

--
Bach says it all.
1. Re:Good ol miggy ... by Rockoon · 2010-07-25 04:12 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  They were not the best for music.
  
  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 licensed and customized Ensoniq ES5506 mixer chip, while the IIgs used the previous version, the ES5503.
  
  Apple IIgs: 1986
  Gravis UltraSound: 1992
  
  Amiga never really competed for high end audio. The IIgs kicked its ass very badly. Those 16 channels were PANNABLE as well, not locked to a side like the Amiga.
  
  --
  "His name was James Damore."
2. Re:Good ol miggy ... by Rockoon · 2010-07-25 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  Here is an example of the IIgs's music capabilities.
  
  Here is another one.
  
  Amiga fans eat your hearts out. Thats not MIDI with an external synth. Thats wavetable synthesis (just like the Amiga) but only.. you know.. way better.
  
  --
  "His name was James Damore."
3. Re:Good ol miggy ... by mister_playboy · 2010-07-25 08:39 · Score: 1
  
  Cool videos! Thanks for sharing. :)
  
  --
  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law ::: Love is the law, love under will
4. Re:Good ol miggy ... by Rockoon · 2010-07-25 10:42 · Score: 1
  
  Here is a direct comparison of a game on both IIgs and Amiga:
  
  Apple IIgs version"
  Amiga version
  
  --
  "His name was James Damore."
5. Re:Good ol miggy ... by MemoryDragon · 2010-07-25 18:52 · Score: 1
  
  True the Amiga never really was the choice for artits and musicians the ST with its midi capabilities was. The Amiga however made major inroads in the video editing and cutting industry and even early 3d rendering industry. The reason was its programmable custom chips which until the early to mid 90s gave a speed advantage in those areas.
  The Amigas problem never was Commodore its main problem was the custom stuff, which initially gave a huge speed advantage but as the PC platform matured and overtook the Amiga in 2d graphics slowly but surely the hardware was to costly to scale up Commodore simply did not have the financial background to scale the hardware up, and they were too afarid to perform a full system change so the Amiga slowly but surely moved out of the marketplace being overtaken by more powerful generic hardware pcs.
  I think the turning point was the introduction of VGA which was good enough to slowly overtake the low end Amiga in graphics and the final nail was Windows 95 which finally removed gaming from Dos and with it the restrictions on resolution and color depth. In between was the emergence of cheap affordable soundcards which also like VGA were first good enough but relatively swiftly surpassed the capabilities of the Amiga.
  The end then was the emergence of hardware accelerated 3d gaming, that was when the Amiga as a home machine was dead. The video cutting and editing secort followed a few years laster.
  You can see that transitional period with Babylon 5 where the first 1-2 seasons were rendered on an Amiga and things moved over then to dedicated 3d rendering hardware (or pcs I cannot remember) with significant gains in quality.
6. Re:Good ol miggy ... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-26 01:14 · Score: 0
  
  But it still had mono sound as default..
7. Re:Good ol miggy ... by MxMatrix · 2010-07-26 06:13 · Score: 1
  
  Surely in 1986 ... but not in 1985 when the A1000 was introduced.
  
  --
  Bach says it all.
What it could have been... by Zubinix · 2010-07-24 20:34 · Score: 1

I still remember the look on a PC clone owning friend when I showed him my Amiga 3000 running 3 operating systems at the same time. Namely, MSDOS via PC-Task running Turbo C, Mac OS via shapeshifter running MATLAB and browsing the Internet on the Amiga side with the iBrowse browser. Oh and those huge virtual screens and screen dragging so I could see all OSes at once. That was 1992. Imagine what it would be like today if had continued development?
1. Re:What it could have been... by VinylPusher · 2010-07-24 21:50 · Score: 1
  
  What-if futures are the dreams of many ex-Amiga owners. Personally, I consider the issue entirely moot. We have Cray supercomputer performance from mobile phones, these days. Any amount of progress, whether it stemmed from our timeline of IBM-PC clones winning out as the dominating force, or the alternate timeline of Amiga OS based computing being the leader, we would still be in a mostly similar position today.
  The only real difference is the GUI. Hardware would have been the same, though maybe Power CPU's instead of Intel may dominate. Graphics cards would be the same, hard drives, RAM, motherboards... the whole top-to-bottom of the PC tech industry would be doing very similar things, no matter what. Convergent evolution.
  We would still have our Java's, our Flash, our legacy features still present in our CPU's and BIOS. Malware would still exploit the same weaknesses and the internet would still use the same protocols and run at the same speeds.
  The question you should really ask is: What would things be like today if Amiga coding ethic was now the main driving focus of software development?
ebay by voss · 2010-07-24 20:54 · Score: 1

They do sell Amiga 1200's on ebay. They sell even now for a couple hundred dollars.
1. Re:ebay by Joce640k · 2010-07-24 23:25 · Score: 1
  
  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...)
  
  --
  No sig today...
Only on Slashdot... by mangu · 2010-07-24 20:55 · Score: 1

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 cards, both from IBM and from third party vendors, that I could plug into an IBM-PC ISA expansion slot.
It's interesting that IBM thought they had made a mistake in creating such an open architecture and tried to backtrack in the PS/2 version, where the ISA slots had been substituted by MCA slots. The result was that the PS/2 had even less market share than the Amiga. So much for the "magical three letters that sold anything" theory.
1. Re:Only on Slashdot... by hitmark · 2010-07-24 22:09 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  try the A2000, launched at the same time.
  https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga_2000
  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.
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
2. Re:Only on Slashdot... by agw · 2010-07-24 22:25 · Score: 1
  
  try the A2000, launched at the same time.
  https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Amiga_2000
  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.
  Forgetting the powerful video slot and the even more powerful CPU slot there?
  Can't remember those in the IBM XT. You remember the 68030 CPU/mem expansion card from C=? Even the expansion card was expandable! (Years later with 100 times the memory of the original computer).
3. Re:Only on Slashdot... by hitmark · 2010-07-24 22:39 · Score: 1
  
  sadly i never really got beyond the A500 (still have it stashed in some basement, wanted a HDD and a 3xdisk addon tho).
  
  --
  comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
4. Re:Only on Slashdot... by snuf23 · 2010-07-24 23:38 · Score: 1
  
  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 hardware rallied around standard like CGA, EGA and most importantly VGA. Later on Windows created the DirectX layer which gave a target for third party products. These things didn't happen to the Amiga.
  What was initially superior in the Amiga became surpassed in the PC world.
  When the A1200 came out I had a A2000 with a superior processor (68030 vs 68020 in the A1200) but there was no path for A2000, A500, A600, A1000 or A3000 owners to upgrade to the newer AGA graphics. You had to either suck up the loss in CPU power to get a lower performing A1200 with AGA or pay through the nose for a A4000. This was happening concurrently with prices dropping on PC clones featuring VGA graphics.
  The consume value proposition that Amiga once held was overturned. It was cheaper to get a PC clone with a VGA card than invest in Amiga and there was more software for the PC.
  
  --
  Sometimes my arms bend back.
5. Re:Only on Slashdot... by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 00:19 · Score: 0
  
  I think he ment to link the Amiga 2000, which indeed was easily as expandable as any pc, perhaps more. (I miss my Amiga 2000, 14mhz adspeed, 2090a SCSI, 1meg chip ram, 8 meg fast ram, multiface 3 board(aka 3 serial ports, 2 parallel) , amas digitizer)
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_2000
6. Re:Only on Slashdot... by bpsbr_ernie · 2010-07-25 02:53 · Score: 1
  
  My A500 had 4 expansion ports via this card... http://amiga.resource.cx/photos/busconverter,1
7. Re:Only on Slashdot... by Bing+Tsher+E · 2010-07-25 04:53 · Score: 1
  
  Forgetting the powerful video slot and the even more powerful CPU slot there?
  Expandability means that there have to be strong third-party vendors of stuff to plug in those slots. A few midget vendors in a niche market doesn't really count.
  I can wire-wrap up a machine here at home with more 'expandability' than an Amiga OR an IBM PC-XT. Doesn't mean I'll ever get around to wire wrapping up the expansion cards for it.
8. Re:Only on Slashdot... by agw · 2010-07-25 05:06 · Score: 1
  
  There were plenty of choices even "at the end" for those slots.
  C= always provided the basic cards and GVP and others provided the more featureful cards.
  That was more than the whole PC sector at the time managed to produce. All PC CPU upgrades were pathetic ("Intel overdrive", to name one from the strongest vendor in the industry).
Wow, I had no idea... by (Score.5,+Interestin · 2010-07-24 20:55 · Score: 0, Troll

... there was still such an active Amigahole community still around. Takes me right back to 1980s flamewars on bulletin boards.
(Moderation suggestions: Troll, Flamebait, etc).
Re:Wrong by keeboo · 2010-07-24 21:19 · Score: 1

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.
My old A1000 by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 21:23 · Score: 0

I still have my old A1000 somewhere around here (if it didn't get thrown out, I haven't even touched it in years). I still have a genlock and video toaster. The graphics were matched by PCs and Macs about 10 years later. Sound and video were matched by PC's about 15 years later. I reminisced about Amigas quite a few years ago, after reading about the death of Jay Miner. It brought back memories and melancholy. I read the article at least 10 years ago, and it was at least 4 or 5 years old then... Still, it was a great machine. I liked it. It was a Unixy machine. Too bad it didn't have memory protection. It never caught on, which is too bad. The computing landscape is still richer because of it. The first proto version of what became Blender was written on the Amiga. In many ways, the work at Xerox PARC flowed more directly to Amigas than it did to Apples or PCs. It was just more advanced than most people wanted at the time. Pity.
1. Re:My old A1000 by VinylPusher · 2010-07-30 03:52 · Score: 1
  
  The lack of memory protection never really was a big problem during the heights of the Amiga's reign. The Amiga was successful despite never coming as standard with a CPU equipped with an MMU, a feature which is an absolute necessity, these days.
  *Developing* software on an MMU-equipped Amiga was a bonus. You were able to run 'enforcer' in the background to catch calls to uninitialised pointers. You could also see other people's programs misbehaving (e.g. MaxsBBS, anyone remember that?).
  The greatest thing the Amiga had was a really elegant set of API's coupled with extensive documentation. Can you imagine how different the computing scene would be today if Nvidia and ATI routinely pushed out comprehensive hardware docs?
  Imagine as well how much speed we would be able to eke out of software if we were able to dump (most of) the OS and hit the hardware, or at least drop into a single-tasking mode?
  Since none of this is ever likely to happen, we will just have to live with OS overhead, unpredictable CPU-cache states and a reliance on closed-source hardware drivers.
Whatever happened to Bill McEwen? by FranTaylor · 2010-07-24 21:32 · Score: 1

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.
I hadamigas for 16 years by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 21:40 · Score: 0

And only gave them up when I emigrated.
Heres to the amiga and the people who made it great, like Jay Miner and Carl sassenrath.
Special metions to Fred Fish and Urban Mueller for making the freely distributable software easily accessible
Proud Amiga user since 1993. by drHirudo · 2010-07-24 21:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

The Amiga turned 25 and I am extensively using Amigas since 1993. That's seventeen years. Things changed a lot since the early 1990-ies. First it was the BBSes, where an Amiga with modem more than fine. Then the Internet era came, where I was connecting to the Internet and downloading games and scene demo off Aminet and enjoying them. Then the 68000 line of processors was getting old and slow, but hopefully the PowerPC accelerators came to give the old machines an enormous speed boost. Then new machines appeared based on faster, more powerful and newer processors. And now in 2010 we have more new Amiga machines coming - the Sam 460 and the Amiga X1000. My Amiga history and experience is excellent, so I have no reasons to move to other platforms. Cheers
Re:Wrong by (Score.5,+Interestin · 2010-07-24 21:54 · Score: 1
Nah, let's be fair: fanatics of Amiga and OS/2 were really terrible.

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.

Linux fanatics are manageable. I find Apple and BSD fanatics way more annoying.

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 following categorization:
- Amiga fanatic: Will quote footnotes in the appendix of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual at you in support of their platform.
- Linux fanboy: Stallmanesque rants about why OSS is better, and everything should be free, and the world owes them a living.
- Apple fanatics: They just *know* their platform is better, and there's no need to back that up with a supporting argument. Why would anyone question that?
So for Apple fans you can either ignore them or use some technical facts which will instantly baffle them, the fanboys are mostly just ranting, it's the Amigaholes who are the problem because they're often prepared to continue arguing technical trivia (interspersed with personal abuse) until the sun goes out. At least the Apple crowd are polite. Smugly polite, perhaps, but polite.
Useful? by FranTaylor · 2010-07-24 22:10 · Score: 1

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.
1. Re:Useful? by drinkypoo · 2010-07-24 23:01 · Score: 1
  
  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 hardware was so. fucking. slow. Everything in the box held back the CPU.
  
  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.
  There are STILL community television stations using Amigas with toasters to process SD video in realtime. It's close enough to what we normally call "broadcast-quality" as makes no difference. The toaster does lumakey (did they finally get chromakey in the last one?) and has a four-input switcher, and it came with 3d software (Lightwave) as well as video titling software (built into the toaster app I think.) Lightwave 3D was and still is used for professional 3D graphics, for example Babylon 5 was done with it at a staggeringly low cost. Rendering was done on a farm at least from season 2 but at least some artists still worked on Amiga computers.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
2. Re:Useful? by VinylPusher · 2010-07-30 03:57 · Score: 1
  
  They're exceptionally rugged machines. You can pull An Amiga 1200 apart whilst it's running and it won't crash unless you do something daft like unplug the accelerator board.
  I'd worry, using a PC (or Mac, or Linux box) in any live-show environment. They're so damn fragile and sensitive to their environment. An Amiga 1200 will happily run in environments a Panasonic Toughbook would balk at.
Amiga nuts? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-24 22:27 · Score: 0

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."
Well, I think the comments here have conclusively proven this part of the summary.
More than just fill by kegon · 2010-07-24 22:43 · Score: 1

The exercise didn't prove much of anything other than that Warhol was able to use the paint program's fill command
Although the demo was mostly Warhol using fill on a digitized image, you can clearly see him using some screenmode with >32 colours, which would have been a struggle for the average PC of the time as they usually had motherboard graphics only. Also Windows 2 was nowhere near as slick as Workbench 1. The Amiga had hardware sprites giving smooth pointers (or is that "cursors" ?) since day 1.
At that time PCs were only used for boring spreadsheets and business applications. The turning point was Doom, after which people got interested in graphics and sound hardware; and the PC became a lot more general purpose as a media machine.
Amiga started the revolution. If they hadn't shown what was possible, we would all be much more split between applications based computing and gaming consoles.
1. Re:More than just fill by VGPowerlord · 2010-07-25 01:57 · Score: 1
  
  which would have been a struggle for the average PC of the time as they usually had motherboard graphics only.
  There were no "motherboard graphics" for PCs until sometime during the Pentium era. Every video output, including the old 4-color CGA graphics, were a separate card. Even disk I/O was a separate card! Sound wasn't, but considering that the PC speaker was... well... terrible, I wouldn't count that as a plus.
  
  --
  GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
2. Re:More than just fill by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 20:45 · Score: 0
  
  Bullshit. Intel's Internal Computer Sales department SCS had a pizza box out in '91 or '92 with onboard VGA graphics and either 1 or 2 megs of VRAM for under 1500 bucks.
  I still have that systems sitting here, and if I hadn't mishandled the hard disk and faceplate storing it all these years I'd have it running right now (Still POSTs, but it's got bios issues from plugging a damaged hard disk into the ide controller, hampering the ability to boot without a floppy.)
  The slick part about it was the onboard video card was 500kb/s or so faster than the fasted ISA card I had available and almost as fast as the VLB graphics cards for my later 486 build. It was capable of running 1024x768 with 256 colors interlaced or progressive, and ran Wolf3d and X-wing pretty much at 'full speed'. As I remember it the PWA Doom Alpha ran bearably on it, although the released shareware demo with sound absolutely killed it. That was about when we replaced it with a Pentium 90 for like sub 500 bucks in parts at a Computer Swap meet.
AGA was stop gap by gilesjuk · 2010-07-24 23:31 · Score: 3, 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.
1. Re:AGA was stop gap by flatlinr · 2010-07-24 23:46 · Score: 1
  
  AAA was never released because it was too expensive and already getting old. AGA was maybe a stripped down version of AAA graphics system.
  Anyway, the so-called "Hombre" architecture would have been interesting, had not just been a pipe-dream. Then I would certainly admit revolutionary again: 100MHz 64-bit RISC processor and 3D hardware!
2. Re:AGA was stop gap by CarpetShark · 2010-07-25 00:32 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not even sure Hombre would have cut it, by the time they'd got it out the door. It sounds a lot like the very basic 3D cards that were around for the PC at the same time, except that it still had a lot of crazy legacy stuff, like HAM modes.
3. Re:AGA was stop gap by AmigaMMC · 2010-07-25 14:56 · Score: 1
  
  Ah... I remember that morning at a show in London when the new mysterious graphic chip for the next generation Amiga was announced, the successor of the AAA, made by a Taiwanese company but unfortunately it never saw the light. Speculations went on and on for months. That morning I came up with the acronym MMC: Mystery Monster Chip... since no one knew what that was or what it did, just that it was fabulous and it was going to retake the home computer market completely. Soon after the entire community used that name, it stuck. After all the years consulting communications for Amiga Inc. I still have a hole in my heart.
Oh boy by zdebel · 2010-07-25 00:14 · Score: 1

I'm getting my amiga500 next week, gonna SLIP it through my linux box, IRC the hell out of it and smash some pixels in cannon fodder, oh boy :D

--
\,,/ Rock and Roll ain't noise pollution, Rock and roll ain't gonna die! \,,/
Re:PCs compared poorly with Amigas as did Macs by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 00:16 · Score: 1, Interesting

Babylon 5 effects were first done on Amigas.
Amigas could also put their output out on NTSC.
Small scale, no funds by CarpetShark · 2010-07-25 00:29 · Score: 1

Commodore was a famously parsimonious outfit,
I hadn't heard of this fame, but I'm glad it's not just me who thought they should have been spending a lot more (even if they had to borrow money to do it). They really should have saturated the PC/Mac business marketplace with A100/2000/A3000 advertising, especially in the UK where Amiga wasn't understood as a grown-up's machine at all.
That said, from what I've read of the last days of Commodore-Amiga, they really didn't have a huge operation. I think it was Dave Haynie who talked about that. From the description and pics, it seemed to be a fairly small scale, low-tech (read: humans soldering, not robots) operation.
1. Re:Small scale, no funds by Tablizer · 2010-07-25 06:57 · Score: 1
  
  The Amiga started out as a private firm funded by a bunch of orthodontists, of all things. The key breakthrough happened when a way was found to present an almost continuous span of colors using relatively cheap hardware using a kind of random-but-fast-changing dithering (as I understand it). The graphics hardware didn't have to be able to display all colors if it could quickly wiggle in-between the close matches of a limited palette such that the human eye wouldn't really notice.
  Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, had recently been ousted from Commodore because the newer management wanted to break into middle-end consumer computing, something Jack was against.
  The new management saw the Amiga prototypes at a tech show and decided to buy the company. But marketing was something that Commodore never did well, both before and after Jack, and Amiga's superior hardware wasn't quite good enough to make it a big-market success.
  Being the Low-price leader had always been Jack's strategy: if you were the cheapest you didn't need much marketing because the price did the talking. But since Amiga actually created a new category: low-end color multi-media, it did need better marketing. However, it was such a new market, that nobody knew quite how to market it.
  The ads showed pretty screen pictures, but not much in practical uses. It was too ahead of it's time and color desktop publishing software wasn't quite ready yet. Eventually the Color Mac came out, and stole that niche, despite being more expensive. Commodore failed to sufficiently court the desktop publishing industry, otherwise it could have eaten Apple.
  
  --
  Table-ized A.I.
2. Re:Small scale, no funds by CarpetShark · 2010-07-25 21:47 · Score: 1
  
  Dithering is an interesting way to look at it, but technically I think HAM is really just a lossy compression format. Amigas had a hardware-based decoder, and could handle the low bandwidth of the compressed version, so were able to display it. Result: lots of pretty colours.
  Cool for its day, but only really useful for static images, and way overhyped. If they'd included a hardware encoder that allowed games to treat HAM as a simple bitmap, THAT would have been something more amazing. We might have actually had many 4096-colour games or apps back in the mid 80's :)
The Business Machine by westlake · 2010-07-25 01:20 · Score: 1

The big, not-often-told truth is that IBM PCs sucked donkey ass, compared to the Amigas... The only thing the IBM PC had going for it were the three magic letters.
The IBM was a business machine with the best keyboard in the western world.
It was - as it was intended to be - the obvious choice if you were upgrading from CP/M or introducing the PC into your office for the very first time.
Developers followed the same path.
Guru meditation by Haxx · 2010-07-25 01:38 · Score: 1

Alright, who remembers the story behind the guru meditation error.
1. Re:Guru meditation by remadeus · 2010-07-25 13:29 · Score: 1
  
  Alright, who remembers the story behind the guru meditation error.
  Enligten us...
  
  --
  Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface :)
2. Re:Guru meditation by Bambi+Dee · 2010-07-26 12:45 · Score: 1
  
  They had developed a meditation game for their "Joyboard" game controller (for skiing games & the like, I think) - the goal was simply to sit still. Legend has it they'd play that game when the Amiga OS crashed during development, to calm down.
  Wikipedia references this: http://www.bogost.com/games/guru_meditation.shtml
3. Re:Guru meditation by remadeus · 2010-07-27 07:49 · Score: 1
  
  Thanks for the explanation. I've been an avid amiga user for about 15 years, but didn't know this. My handle is also referencing to RAD: the persistant amiga Ram disk, is 'encoded' in it {RemADeus}
  
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  Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface :)
Should have gone with an A4000 by Bambi+Dee · 2010-07-25 01:41 · Score: 1

It was great that there were affordable Amigas like the 500, 500+, 600, and 1200, but I suspect they also held the platform back because they weren't as easy to upgrade and most kids didn't have that kind of money anyway. I should've gone with a tower A 4000 for revisiting my Amiga days. Instead I got an A 1200 HD bundled with Photogenics, Personal Paint & other niceties and the Blizzard 030/50 Mhz board with 16 MB additional Fast RAM, now hooked up to that bizarre 1024*1024 px monochrome monitor because my PC VGA monitors don't do the default PAL screenmodes. Yes, a monochrome Amiga =D. It does make for a rather fast-booting text editor. I also got a PCMCIA ethernet card, an external CD-ROM drive, a genlock and other goodies... but haven't got any of that to work so far. Meh.

I never was that big a fan of Intuition/Workbench, to be honest. While WB 3.x finally had proportional fonts and could view icon-less files... you still couldn't push windows off the screen, and I always spent a lot of time digging through a stack of windows to find the right "bring to foreground" widget. (Presumably the "click to front" commodity should've done the trick, and I remember it working on my first (3.0, not 3.1) A 1200... but it doesn't seem to work here.)

Sadly, I never did anything half-way professional with my little Amigas. Made pixel art, composed frankly awful Protracker MODs, some BASIC and Pascal... I enjoyed the demo scene above all. Here're a few videos of The Black Lotus showing off the 68060-expanded Amiga quite artistically.
Rain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi5ijtRlKGI&feature=related
Ocean Machine: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns5u3Ac4deM&feature=related
Starstruck: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDrICN4UJoA&feature=related
Why where rom updates needed? apple did t software by Joe+The+Dragon · 2010-07-25 01:55 · Score: 1

Why where rom updates needed? apple them in software so there was no need to get new roms to go to a newer mac os.
the old cable Prevue guide that was runing on amig by Joe+The+Dragon · 2010-07-25 02:02 · Score: 1

The old cable Prevue guide that was running on amiga hardware as well many Public Access channels.
just to translate this into modern terms by yyxx · 2010-07-25 02:22 · Score: 1

The Amiga effectively had a microkernel, multitasking, and hardware accelerated graphics. Kind of like Apple got 20 years later. Programming it also was fun and made a lot more sense than Apple's mess of toolboxes.
Unfortunately, the Amiga's fonts were ugly as sin, the marketing was horrendous, the people selling it had no charisma, and Amiga made one business mistake after another.
With Intel came EFI by itomato · 2010-07-25 02:27 · Score: 1

Open Firmware - while it could be adapted to the newer platform, requires Apple in-house people dedicated to the task, with the cooperation of IBM and Sun.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
CHRP is dead, and with it, Open Firmware.
My Amiga Memories by Stele · 2010-07-25 02:44 · Score: 4, 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.
1. Re:My Amiga Memories by teknopurge · 2010-07-25 06:10 · Score: 1
  
  I grew up(basically) at the Slipped Disk in southfield and loved the auctions at the madison heights location. c64 and A1000(original with the signatures under the case lid) is where I cut my teeth. 313 BBS list for the win.
  
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  Website Hosting
2. Re:My Amiga Memories by Gregg+Alan · 2010-07-25 14:46 · Score: 1
  
  Do you / have you ever run your code in an emulator? Might not be practical but would probably be fun.
  Great story anyway. Thanks!
  
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  Here before all but 8486 of you.
3. Re:My Amiga Memories by bleair · 2010-08-07 13:23 · Score: 1
  
  Ah the good memories. The Rom Kernel Manuals and Carl Sassenrath's book Guru Guide to the Amiga still stand out in my mind as good documentation.
  
  http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwsassenrath_en.php
  I was just cleaning my close and ran across my collection of Transactor and Amiga World Tech magazines. This next move they aren't coming along as I have enough nostalgia items. Sigh, I also gave up the last of my old SGI kit.
  The software architecture of the amiga still stands out in my mind as being ahead of its time.
  I think of lot of people (at least in the VFX world) grew up on the amiga.
  If anybody wants an amiga toaster 4000 setup, let me know. :)
Doom was ported but I doubt Comanche was by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 02:56 · Score: 0

Doom was ported after the code was open sourced by id. It ran fine on my A1200 with an accelerator and more memory (only at 320x200) but I suspect performance would be poor on a stock A1200.
I don't ever remember Comanche being released for the platform nor can I see it in Hall of Light
Multitasking was incredible by zelik · 2010-07-25 04:12 · Score: 1

The Amiga had awesome multitasking, esp. for its time. I had an Amiga 2000 upgraded with a 68030 25mhz cpu card (along with a FPU!!!) and I ran a 2 line BBS with two USRobotics Carrier HST 14.4 modems. My BBS had 99% usage (as in had someone connected uploading/downloading) and I was still able to print out my homework report in Scribble (haha yes, Scribble) and run The Curse of Monkey Island all at the same time. It was.......brilliant! Of course, I had to spend money on those upgrades (including a ridiculous flicker-fixer card for VGA monitor use) but it made my machine a monster. Compared to the 486-33 I had running Win 3.1 it was heaven.

It's sad to think what a great computer it was and how it just got passed over and left to die at the hands of such a poorly ran company. HAM graphics (for .. pr0n or other things) and MOD music made my adlib PC sound ilke a joke and the tsenglabs ET4000 video card with VGA looked like a joke next to 4096 colors! woohoo!

I think I need to go take a cold shower now. I think my iphone has more processing power than my Amiga did. haaha.
loved my amigas, not a fanboy, $ where mouth was by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 04:26 · Score: 0

i started mowing lawns for my vic20 and cassette player. i dint get a apple or PC from my rich parents and then just ignore it. my dad had 4 boys and we learned the importance of value. he bought a c=64 and we we allowed 1hr a night to play on it. i could make it do lots of cool things (with the help of magazines like run and basic). so i wanted more time. i was 13 and couldn't afford much but after working a few summer months i bought my vic20 so i could program all weekend after my chores were done. when the amiga 1000 came out it was the best value for the money and had the most advanced features of any home computer. by this time i was playing with vax machines on arpanet at fermilab in the fortran club and dialing up chatbox bbs at 300bps. with school cars and girls i was stuck using hand me down computers. my dad bought a 500 for my brothers so i could buy the 1000 and the bought a 8086 for him because thats what he used at work. the 8086 SUCKED in comparison to the Amiga, no color, no sound, no multitasking, no gui. so i got a scsi 8 meg hard drive for the 1000 and a color dotmatrix. sold it all to a computer guy in the disney computer club that started Babylon 5 rendering in lightwave and bought a !200. i had been running a bbs for sometime on fidonet and just got uucp and my pc on the internet 4 or 5 years before the pc got winsock. several years later i got a used 3500 because it had unix and x winndows on it. finally windows 3.11wfw came out with winsock and i could get a pc modem on the internet. i never saw the value in a pc until the pentium 75 came out and i had a matrox soundblaster and quake. finally the pc had something the amiga didnt do better. by this time amiga was dead because of the 80's corporate raiding and i was working in the pc field full time so i could run a quake server on works t1. now that i have a family i post this on my android phone and use my pc is on my 52 tv in the living room. my kids have touch screen pc the play pbs kids on (1 hour a day). using the computer is a family thing like the rest of our life. i feel life has almost come full circle from my family sitting around the brand new computer when i was a child to my family sitting around the computer surfing the net.
the biggest difference between now and then...back then we spent hours trying to get the computer to do something at all...now when spend hours to get it to do the something we want right...we used to be happy with just programming a sprite of a balloon to go up the screen. now we just have a hard time getting a post to publish on slashdot (I actually couldn't post this on my phone and had to email myself a copy and publish on a computer...at least I can cut and paste on my android!). The best thing about the amiga? it just worked, no stupid drivers, himem, doskey, smartdisk bullshit...it just worked, and it didn;t need SWAP! Tell me something today that just works to the point where you can create? Not osx its a bigger pile than netbsd (which I love), not win7 bloataholic, not android, not linux...I wouldn't give anything for a computer that just worked...but I would use it. .So no i am not a fanboy but i loved my amigas and i put my money where my mouth was. BTW if the lack of capitalization and punctuation is on purpose, if you have half a brain and are half interested then you will read it despite the obstacles, that is the how things have gotten to the place they are now in the computer world. People don't do things the right way or the best way they just get them done however they can....Thats why the PC won.
Re:Why where rom updates needed? apple did t softw by RedMage · 2010-07-25 04:30 · Score: 1

Not completely true - the old 68000 series of Macs had lots of different ROM revisions. Some worked with different versions of MacOS, but others didn't. The problem wasn't the ROMs however - it was memory. Remember back in '84-'87 128K-512K was fairly standard, so if you needed to use up a big chunk of that with OS code then you reduce the memory for user applications and graphics. Later versions of the AmigaOS could do tricks and map out various ROM routines into RAM, and even map out the entire ROM to faster RAM using the MMU, giving the machine a good speed boost in the process.

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}#q NO CARRIER
Re:Why where rom updates needed? apple did t softw by flatlinr · 2010-07-25 04:41 · Score: 1

The original Amiga 1000 didn't have ROM. Kickstart had to be loaded into RAM from floppy disk when the system first booted. Right there is the reason why it moved to ROM: loading was slow. When the early frequent updates were no longer prevalent, the OS moved to ROM for fast permanent storage.
Re:Why where rom updates needed? apple did t softw by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 04:43 · Score: 0

thats like saying why is a new bios needed. I guess we can always outmode our hardware but it would be nice if hardware and software worked sufficiently together to allow it to run on old hardware as well as new... PNP=fail
One of these things is not like the other by UnknowingFool · 2010-07-25 05:22 · Score: 1

Other platforms and tech products would inspire similarly fanatical followings -- most notably OS/2 and Linux.
To be fair, Linux is used extensively today but it isn't used as envisioned early on by the proponents. Desktop user Linux hasn't gotten massive appeal, but enterprise server Linux is common these days. Of the top 500 servers, over 90% is using Linux.

--
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Re:What was so difficult? by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 08:18 · Score: 1

The A600 and A1200 weren't released until 1992 ... by then the Amiga was already dead to everybody except the fanatics.

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No sig today...
this means just 5 more years by ifeelswine · 2010-07-25 08:23 · Score: 1

until the guru returns to punish the disbelievers and all amiga users vanish and enter a paradise consisting of nekkid kiki stockhammers and endless mod tunes and party demos.
Re: by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 09:37 · Score: 0

Which one is the toy computer? A motherboard should be a board with bus connectors only. When you put processor, memory, sound, graphics, mouse, modem and suchlike on a "motherboard" then you have a compromised design. Sticking it in a metal chassis doesn't make it a real computer.
And is either an open architecture? EISA and AGP connectors are patented. MMX is patented. Firmware has patents.
Both the Amiga and the PC are proprietary toy computers. The difference is that the Amiga was quite upfront about the matter and the PC made very large pretense about being otherwise.
Re: by Anonymous Coward · 2010-07-25 09:58 · Score: 0

That's quite revisionist. The USB patent pool is based on patents for ADB [Apple Desktop Bus]. So, its actually PCs that have "leveraged" Apple's "internally developed hardware".
Amiga Heroes & Villain (Some Not So Famous One by frontofhouse · 2010-07-25 10:43 · Score: 1

Heroes:
The original Sunrize/Studio 16 developers
Ben Fuller (RIP) developed the timeline display for the later releases of Studio 16 (among many other things) - died under what his family described as mysterious circumstances while developing a video app for another platform
The composer for the game "Mindwalker" (developed by the late Bill Williams)
Nicola Samoria, the initial developer of "NewIcons" - Some people preferred more extravagant icons, but a Workbench screen using NewIcons still remains one of the more elegant-looking interfaces in computerdom
Villain:
Mehdi Ali, the killer of the A3000

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support your local songwriter
I'm an Amiga. And I'm a PC. by tepples · 2010-07-25 12:11 · Score: 1

And video game consoles are not PCs.
Amiga computers aren't PCs either.
1. Re:I'm an Amiga. And I'm a PC. by CarpetShark · 2010-07-25 21:49 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, they are. They're not IBM-compatible PCs, but they ARE PCs.
Re: by dave420 · 2010-07-25 13:26 · Score: 1

It's a shame no one made a module to take sand out of vaginas. It sounds like you need one.
Benefit of hindsight by jedwidz · 2010-07-25 14:31 · Score: 1
I coincidentally watched some of 'The Deathbed Vigil' in the weekend, Dave Haynie's home vid about the company's demise, leading me to ponder what could've been done differently in order for the Amiga to have emerged as (IMO rightfully) a dominant computing platform.
Suggestions for the 1980's:
- Include a ROM catridge port on all models. Actually, make that several ports, with two reserved for kickstart and workbench, and at least two more for apps and games (hot-swappable). This would've gone a long way to curbing piracy, as well as slashing boot and program load times, reducing disk swaps, and reducing pressure on chip mem (both space and bandwidth). Don't just think games - in the era of floppies, cartridges would've been great for apps as well.
- Release something akin to the A1200 before the end of the decade
Suggestions for the 1990's:
- Release an 'Amiga on a card' for the PC, which acts as an sound and graphics card for the PC, as well as providing Amiga compatibility. Not sure how technically feasible this would've been, but it could've been an easy sell to families who already owned PCs (at the right price point of course). Even if the Amiga platform died, they could've stayed in the graphics card market for years.
- If you really must do a console in 1993, plan ahead to competing with the Sony Playstation, not the Sega Genesis.
Still, I don't regret getting the A1200, or the A500 before that. Once we had the A1200 upgraded to a multisync monitor, 68060, 1GB harddrive and 24MB RAM, it was quite a nice machine ;-)
Oh, I get it....! by Joce640k · 2010-07-25 18:50 · Score: 1

I said the ST was better at something than the Amiga!!!
Does that still get you worked up into a lather even after all these years? Lucky for me it was only the hard disk...I could have mentioned graphics!

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No sig today...
Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest by Hognoxious · 2010-07-25 23:53 · Score: 1

sold an Amiga 1200 with a 4MB upgrade unit (total 6MB) and an 80MB internal hard drive, plus a great 14" monitor, thousands of pirated games and 20-30 originals, plus lots of other things I can't remember, to some old guy for literally a fifth of what it was actually worth on the second hand market at the time.
If there was another buyer willing to pay five times as much, why did you sell for less?
If there wasn't another buyer, then its market value is what the old git was willing to pay.

--
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
1. Re:Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest by Finite9 · 2010-07-26 00:57 · Score: 1
  
  hehe, I recount a tale from my teen years and you question my motives/thought processes from that time??? Well, I wanted a quick sale, and sold it really cheap with the intention of getting rid of it as fast as possible. He was the first guy to contact me.
  
  --
  "Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
I'm an Xbox. And I'm a PC. by tepples · 2010-07-26 00:25 · Score: 1

What is the key point that makes a video game console not a PC? Amiga had standardized custom hardware, like a console; the commodity PC platform is anything with an x86 CPU and a boot process that can load Windows or Linux. Is the defining characteristic of a console the cryptographic lockout? That was the only key difference between an original Xbox and a PC with a Celeron CPU and a GeForce 3 GPU.
1. Re:I'm an Xbox. And I'm a PC. by CarpetShark · 2010-07-26 09:03 · Score: 1
  
  What is the key point that makes a video game console not a PC?
  Well, PC stands for Personal Computer. Consoles don't let you do anything personal -- just what was proscribed by the vendor. They don't compute much as far as a user can see; just play games and run other entertainment/apps, more like an arcade machine or household appliance. Finally, there are rarely input devices for complex data, like keyboards.
2. Re:I'm an Xbox. And I'm a PC. by CarpetShark · 2010-07-26 09:05 · Score: 1
  
  Prescribed, even :)
Oh look, a straw man by mdwh2 · 2010-07-26 00:39 · Score: 1

And the original Mac is rubbish when compared to modern PCs. Is that what people said when we got the anniversary article for the Mac?
If that's the worst criticism you can make of a platform, it must have been revolutionary to only be outdone by PCs 25 years later...
I'm a DS. And I'm a PDA. by tepples · 2010-07-26 11:26 · Score: 1

They don't compute much as far as a user can see; just play games and run other entertainment/apps
But the only thing that keeps consoles locked to games is the cryptographic lockout. When homebrewers break that, they inevitably create stuff like DSOrganize (text editor, paint program, voice recorder, day planner, audio player, and basic web browser) and MoonShell (media player).

Finally, there are rarely input devices for complex data, like keyboards.
All three consoles of this generation support entering text on a keyboard. Look at Internet Channel, Opera's web browser for Wii.
1. Re:I'm a DS. And I'm a PDA. by CarpetShark · 2010-08-01 06:34 · Score: 1
  
  But the only thing that keeps consoles locked to games is the cryptographic lockout.
  I disagree. I think the main thing keeping them restricted to games is the lack of parent/child education that results in kids thinking consoles that are bought to play games are just as good as a computer that can let you research stars, talk around the world, create music, etc.