I find it more fun to just screw around with than the other computers I've got. I wouldn't suggest anyone else get one unless they're just 'into computers' and like messing around with stuff.
The one thing it does that I really, really wish Windows or OSX would do is its focus paradigm. Click to focus, but click does not raise window. It gives you the advantages of both click to focus - the focus stays where you want it even if you bump the mouse - and the advantage of focus follows mouse, that you can have a background window be the active one. Double-clicking a window raises it to the top.
I'd certainly pay a few bucks for a program to add that to my PC or Mac.
I do use my Amiga quite a bit - it's a 2009 model, with 800 MHz PowerPC and a gig of RAM - because the browser is good enough, my IM and email clients work fine, and it has most of the software I want to use. But I also have other computers, because some stuff the Amiga just won't do, or it's a pain in the butt to do with it.
My 'New Amiga' wasn't cheap, but it was in line with other pricey hobbies. A bit more than a launch-day Playstation 3, all told, got me a machine with no moving parts other than the DVD drive. So at least it has 'completely silent' as an advantage.
That's not really a new/old problem; even 'back in the day' I had that issue with some cables. The local computer shack carried adapters to get around it, right in with the 25 pin to 9 pin serial adapters and the Centronics to 25 pin SCSI doohickeys.
UltraHLE and other 'high level' emulators run a certain subset of games really well, given the hardware they're on.
High level emulators don't emulate the hardware; they emulate the API calls and redirect them to compatible API calls on the host. (UltraHLE originally require Voodoo GLide, if you remember.)
But their compatibility isn't that good once you get outside the most popular games that the emulator developer specifically patched for.
If you get a game that bypassed the APIs and hit the hardware directly, high-level emulators fail completely.
If you can, play Ultima VI on a C-128 instead of a C-64; it uses the 128's extra memory for music, and supports the 1571's Burst Mode for waaaay faster loading.
The C-64's keyboard was about the same height as an electronic typewriter's - and far lower than most manual typewriters.
Commodore didn't really have an educational pricing program I'm aware of, but they were so much cheaper than Apple they didn't need one. They did have an ad campaign of 'Commodore puts more students on computers for less money', showing a long line of kids waiting to use a couple of Apples.
There's a subset of Diehard Amiga Purists who refuse to use anything past Workbench 3.1, on Commodore-produced hardware (a few might deign to use QuikPak-produced 4000 T/68060s, but not many.)
But pretty much anyone interested in AmigaOS as a hobby is going to want to run at least *some* old stuff.
AmigaOS 4.1 does a pretty good job of running old Amiga software. It has a 68k emulator built in much like the early PPC MacOS.
There are a bunch of old games that don't work, but there are a bunch that do, too. Basically, if it'll run on a 68K Amiga that had aftermarket graphics and sound cards, it'll work on a PowerPC running AOS 4.
There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!
Yes, I have one. It's a Sam440ep-flex board, currently running AmigaOS 4.1 update 3.
It's not very fast (I can watch a DVD on it, but that's about the most CPU-intense thing I can do) and as you can imagine, getting software for 'modern' computer tasks can be a pain. (There's a good web browser, but no Twitter clients, for instance.)
On the other hand, other than sheer number-crunching tasks it feels pretty fast when I'm using it. AmigaOS was always very responsive on slow hardware.
But mostly, I use it because it's fun to screw around with. Much more plain _fun_ than the Win7, Mac, or Linux boxes I have here. Each of those has a task that I use to do some sort of work; the Amiga is a hobby.
As for a new Amiga for sale, ACube has been selling AmigaOS capable motherboards for a couple of years. There's an AmigaOne 500 for sale built on one of those; I think vesalia.de stocks them.
They're expensive. I'm not going to claim a Windows PC isn't cheaper. After all, no matter how they were priced they're not going to sell many, so they need to make more dough on each unit. I think the new AmigaOne X1000 systems they're taking preorders for now are too expensive. Yeah, they're much faster than the one I've got, but the base price is $2600 and that doesn't include the OS.
On the other hand, people spend that kind of money on toy cars, so maybe they'll sell more than I think.
I can only imagine that computer books are kind of a pain in the butt for bookstores. They get obsolete really fast these days; I'd probably want to reduce my inventory of them, too.
(Disclaimer: I haven't set foot in a Barnes & Noble in five-plus years. There just aren't any at the malls I go to.)
If you can get 1.5 mbps dsl, you're not in need of a broadband subsidy.
I can't get any wired internet faster than dialup, there are no WISPs around here, and while I was able to get no-cap 3G, it ain't exactly what I'd call cheap. I pay for it, because I'd go bonkers on dialup.
Banking online doesn't work reliably on dialup any more. It takes so long for most banks' pages to load, the security timeout trips before you can do anything.
I'm on 3G, theoretically 1.2mbps, and I can't stream Netflix. Heck, I can barely manage YouTube. Games do work pretty well, though.
It's areas like this that need the government to kick an ISP's butt to run some wire up here. (And it's not even that far. There's Comcast service 2400 yards from the end of my street. But they say it's not worth running cable up here because all the houses have dishes.... we all have dishes because we can't get cable.)
It's not like I'm way out in the boonies either. I'm a couple miles outside a city of 200,000, half a mile from a school. And the people who live here aren't 'chosing a country life'. They live here because it's a lot cheaper than living closer to the city limits.
In theory I can get satellite. However, have you ever used satellite? The caps are insanely low, it's a daily cap so you can't even save it up and splurge on a big download at the end of the month, the latency is horrific, and even text chat is a chore. It works okay for email and web browsing, but that's about it. And at $60 a month (and usually a few hundred for installation) for 1 megabit service, it's considerably more money than most DSL.
Really, a broadband subsidy / mandated rollout now makes just as much sense as the mandated telephone rollout did in the 20th century.
Because there aren't all that many open source games, the ones there are don't look very good compared to commercial ones, they often have weird play mechanics, and the documentation is often poor.
It's not the salaries that kill support, it's the costs. Where I work (I do phone support) our typical call is three or four minutes. Divide up all the calls we take by all the costs of the building, power, computers, software, training, etc. and those calls run about $7 each for us to take.
A couple hundred bucks an hour per person on the phones is about average when you figure in all the costs.
As someone who has asthma, if they're spending 'a lot of money' and they're using Primatene Mist, they're spending that money foolishly. There are much, much better things out there for treating asthma.
Didn't the Amiga do something like this with ARexx? I distinctly remember someone showing me Lightwave rendering a frame then pushing it to an arbitrary image editor along with some commands to execute on it.
ARexx was primarily for commands and scripting. Maybe they copied the image to the clipboard and referred to it. But the general result was data being shared.
I want to know why Sprint won't sell me unlimited 3G. I had Sprint. It was unlimited for a couple years. Then a 5GB cap came in.
So I switched to Virgin Mobile, which is a Sprint brand. Used Sprint's network. Was unlimited. But the modem sucked (it overheated) and eventually they ditched the unlimited plan.
So I switched to Millenicom. It's unlimited. I'm using my original Sprint modem. Millenicom is a Sprint reseller. It's ten dollars more than Sprint was. Been on this for a while, no problems.
If a Sprint reseller can sell me an unlimited data plan, why can't Sprint?
Sprint's still getting money off my service, but presumably they're getting less than when I was paying them directly.
I usually use about ten gigs a month, sometimes up to 30 or so if there's a good sale on downloadable games somewhere.
You can cancel your phone service. Even an out of service telephone will dial 911. (This has been my experience everywhere I've been in the US; you'll want to check to make sure that's the law where you are, but it is most places.)
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I find it more fun to just screw around with than the other computers I've got. I wouldn't suggest anyone else get one unless they're just 'into computers' and like messing around with stuff.
The one thing it does that I really, really wish Windows or OSX would do is its focus paradigm. Click to focus, but click does not raise window. It gives you the advantages of both click to focus - the focus stays where you want it even if you bump the mouse - and the advantage of focus follows mouse, that you can have a background window be the active one. Double-clicking a window raises it to the top.
I'd certainly pay a few bucks for a program to add that to my PC or Mac.
I do use my Amiga quite a bit - it's a 2009 model, with 800 MHz PowerPC and a gig of RAM - because the browser is good enough, my IM and email clients work fine, and it has most of the software I want to use. But I also have other computers, because some stuff the Amiga just won't do, or it's a pain in the butt to do with it.
My 'New Amiga' wasn't cheap, but it was in line with other pricey hobbies. A bit more than a launch-day Playstation 3, all told, got me a machine with no moving parts other than the DVD drive. So at least it has 'completely silent' as an advantage.
That's not really a new/old problem; even 'back in the day' I had that issue with some cables. The local computer shack carried adapters to get around it, right in with the 25 pin to 9 pin serial adapters and the Centronics to 25 pin SCSI doohickeys.
I have a pair of CRTs that run at 2048 x 1536 over VGA. I'm not sure what VGA theoretically tops out at.
HDMI, however, tops out at 1920 x 1200, same as single-link DVI. For higher than that you need dual-link DVI or DisplayPort.
UltraHLE and other 'high level' emulators run a certain subset of games really well, given the hardware they're on.
High level emulators don't emulate the hardware; they emulate the API calls and redirect them to compatible API calls on the host. (UltraHLE originally require Voodoo GLide, if you remember.)
But their compatibility isn't that good once you get outside the most popular games that the emulator developer specifically patched for.
If you get a game that bypassed the APIs and hit the hardware directly, high-level emulators fail completely.
Apple's OSX uses file extension exclusively to determine what sort of file it is.
They used to use creator codes, but those have been removed and now it relies entirely on file extension.
If you can, play Ultima VI on a C-128 instead of a C-64; it uses the 128's extra memory for music, and supports the 1571's Burst Mode for waaaay faster loading.
The C-64's keyboard was about the same height as an electronic typewriter's - and far lower than most manual typewriters.
Commodore didn't really have an educational pricing program I'm aware of, but they were so much cheaper than Apple they didn't need one. They did have an ad campaign of 'Commodore puts more students on computers for less money', showing a long line of kids waiting to use a couple of Apples.
Lonesome Dove followed the book pretty closely. They cut some subplots for length, but not many.
And it was SIX HOURS long anyway.
I have no problem playing my old PC games.
I just pull out a 486.
(a Thinkpad 701cs, in my case.)
Amiga Forever isn't free; it's $9.95 for the cut-down 'value' edition or $29.95 for the regular edition.
That said, it really is a very good and easy to use emulator setup. But it's not free.
I got rid of the mouse lag by editing the .ini file and turning off mouse acceleration and vertical sync.
I'm not sure which fixed it, but the mouse lag is gone and my framerate is way up, at the expense of a little screen tearing.
The .ini is in your My Documents/Skyrim folder. .ini files, with some settings in each. It's worth searching for a tweak guide.
There are two
There's a subset of Diehard Amiga Purists who refuse to use anything past Workbench 3.1, on Commodore-produced hardware (a few might deign to use QuikPak-produced 4000 T/68060s, but not many.)
But pretty much anyone interested in AmigaOS as a hobby is going to want to run at least *some* old stuff.
AmigaOS 4.1 does a pretty good job of running old Amiga software. It has a 68k emulator built in much like the early PPC MacOS.
There are a bunch of old games that don't work, but there are a bunch that do, too. Basically, if it'll run on a 68K Amiga that had aftermarket graphics and sound cards, it'll work on a PowerPC running AOS 4.
There's actually a fairly high demand for classic Amiga app support; while the people who buy this sort of thing are certainly not Diehard Amiga Purists, we do want to run our old crap, too!
Yes, I have one. It's a Sam440ep-flex board, currently running AmigaOS 4.1 update 3.
It's not very fast (I can watch a DVD on it, but that's about the most CPU-intense thing I can do) and as you can imagine, getting software for 'modern' computer tasks can be a pain. (There's a good web browser, but no Twitter clients, for instance.)
On the other hand, other than sheer number-crunching tasks it feels pretty fast when I'm using it. AmigaOS was always very responsive on slow hardware.
But mostly, I use it because it's fun to screw around with. Much more plain _fun_ than the Win7, Mac, or Linux boxes I have here. Each of those has a task that I use to do some sort of work; the Amiga is a hobby.
As for a new Amiga for sale, ACube has been selling AmigaOS capable motherboards for a couple of years. There's an AmigaOne 500 for sale built on one of those; I think vesalia.de stocks them.
They're expensive. I'm not going to claim a Windows PC isn't cheaper. After all, no matter how they were priced they're not going to sell many, so they need to make more dough on each unit. I think the new AmigaOne X1000 systems they're taking preorders for now are too expensive. Yeah, they're much faster than the one I've got, but the base price is $2600 and that doesn't include the OS.
On the other hand, people spend that kind of money on toy cars, so maybe they'll sell more than I think.
Whippersnapper! Why, my 4K RAM expansion for the VIC-20 cost me... ... oh god, I'm old. I'm going to go hide in the corner. And get off my lawn.
He typed 4 * 4 GB there, not 4 + 4.
I can only imagine that computer books are kind of a pain in the butt for bookstores. They get obsolete really fast these days; I'd probably want to reduce my inventory of them, too.
(Disclaimer: I haven't set foot in a Barnes & Noble in five-plus years. There just aren't any at the malls I go to.)
If you can get 1.5 mbps dsl, you're not in need of a broadband subsidy.
I can't get any wired internet faster than dialup, there are no WISPs around here, and while I was able to get no-cap 3G, it ain't exactly what I'd call cheap. I pay for it, because I'd go bonkers on dialup.
Banking online doesn't work reliably on dialup any more. It takes so long for most banks' pages to load, the security timeout trips before you can do anything.
I'm on 3G, theoretically 1.2mbps, and I can't stream Netflix. Heck, I can barely manage YouTube. Games do work pretty well, though.
It's areas like this that need the government to kick an ISP's butt to run some wire up here. (And it's not even that far. There's Comcast service 2400 yards from the end of my street. But they say it's not worth running cable up here because all the houses have dishes. ... we all have dishes because we can't get cable.)
It's not like I'm way out in the boonies either. I'm a couple miles outside a city of 200,000, half a mile from a school. And the people who live here aren't 'chosing a country life'. They live here because it's a lot cheaper than living closer to the city limits.
In theory I can get satellite. However, have you ever used satellite? The caps are insanely low, it's a daily cap so you can't even save it up and splurge on a big download at the end of the month, the latency is horrific, and even text chat is a chore. It works okay for email and web browsing, but that's about it. And at $60 a month (and usually a few hundred for installation) for 1 megabit service, it's considerably more money than most DSL.
Really, a broadband subsidy / mandated rollout now makes just as much sense as the mandated telephone rollout did in the 20th century.
Because there aren't all that many open source games, the ones there are don't look very good compared to commercial ones, they often have weird play mechanics, and the documentation is often poor.
It's not the salaries that kill support, it's the costs. Where I work (I do phone support) our typical call is three or four minutes. Divide up all the calls we take by all the costs of the building, power, computers, software, training, etc. and those calls run about $7 each for us to take.
A couple hundred bucks an hour per person on the phones is about average when you figure in all the costs.
As someone who has asthma, if they're spending 'a lot of money' and they're using Primatene Mist, they're spending that money foolishly. There are much, much better things out there for treating asthma.
Didn't the Amiga do something like this with ARexx? I distinctly remember someone showing me Lightwave rendering a frame then pushing it to an arbitrary image editor along with some commands to execute on it.
ARexx was primarily for commands and scripting. Maybe they copied the image to the clipboard and referred to it. But the general result was data being shared.
I want to know why Sprint won't sell me unlimited 3G. I had Sprint. It was unlimited for a couple years. Then a 5GB cap came in.
So I switched to Virgin Mobile, which is a Sprint brand. Used Sprint's network. Was unlimited. But the modem sucked (it overheated) and eventually they ditched the unlimited plan.
So I switched to Millenicom. It's unlimited. I'm using my original Sprint modem. Millenicom is a Sprint reseller. It's ten dollars more than Sprint was. Been on this for a while, no problems.
If a Sprint reseller can sell me an unlimited data plan, why can't Sprint?
Sprint's still getting money off my service, but presumably they're getting less than when I was paying them directly.
I usually use about ten gigs a month, sometimes up to 30 or so if there's a good sale on downloadable games somewhere.
You can cancel your phone service. Even an out of service telephone will dial 911. (This has been my experience everywhere I've been in the US; you'll want to check to make sure that's the law where you are, but it is most places.)
Because unemployed or low-income adults without kids wouldn't have any use for the internet to look for a job or something, right?