The Amiga Turns 25

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.

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"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.

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.
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.

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The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.

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"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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...

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One that hath name thou can not otter
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.

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What I cannot create, I do not understand
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.
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".

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comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
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).
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.
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.
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.

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Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
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.
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.

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Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.

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Sometimes my arms bend back.
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.
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

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

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

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Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!

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 :)
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.

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Sometimes my arms bend back.

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

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
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.

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Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!

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?

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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.

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839*929

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.
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)

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"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen

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...)

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.

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

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!

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: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.

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comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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."

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