How the Commodore Amiga Powered the Prevue Channel | Hacker News Reader

How the Commodore Amiga Powered the Prevue Channel

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85 pointsdoener35 comments

This is the machine were I learned about programming, graphics, sound, 3D design, animation, video editing, Vjing, games development, operating systems, multi-tasking, you name it, and all in the early 90's.

One of my first jobs before university was doing realtime cgi on an Amiga 3000 with a GenLock attached to an editing suite full of Betacam machines and editing desks.

Fun times!

But I try to avoid reading the latest posts on the Amiga because I tend to feel nostalgic and sad when I do.

It was painful when Commodore went bankrupt. I almost considered not going into computer science.

I still to this day feel like I never got the full system slow downs that our current OSs get on my Amiga. It may have had no memory protection and thus crashes took down the whole system, but it sure was a joy to use. It's a great story of how a fantastic system was doomed by the company that owned it.

I cringe at the thought that the Amiga is partially responsible for what we perceive today as Muzak. As sourced from the article: https://www.youtube.com/user/PrevueChannelMusic

I hope you'll be happy to hear that Muzak is being kept alive even nowadays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84iTur1-yww

Surprisingly awesome.

Muzak predates Amiga by at least a decade I'd say ..

Muzak dates back to the 1930s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak_(brand)

Oh the Video Toaster. Kiki Stockhammer. Newtek was doing amazing things for less money than anything else in its time. we had a Video Toaster in my HS TV Productions class. Between that and OctaMED, I spent a lot of my extra time in that class.

I definitely remember the Guru Meditation Errors on our local public TV station...

Now you get billboards and news channels showing Win BSODs.

Did you know that you could plug in a serial terminal hit right mouse and drop into a debug session (ROMWack) from a non-recoverable guru? Guru got a lot of stick, but they were really useful for developing.

Origins[0], for those not steeped in Amiga lore. I love it when this sort of humour or inside joke works it way into production...

I also recall the schematics for the chips/PCBs having song lyrics[1] (I assume this is a Tom Petty reference) on them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation#Origins

[1] http://www.amigawiki.org/dnl/schematics/A2000_R6.pdf (page 9, bottom right)

Edit: Now I see that it looks like _all_ the pages have pertinent lyrical hints... the Tom Petty lyric happened to be what stuck in my mind

I still want one.

https://medium.com/people-gadgets/the-gadget-we-miss-the-vid...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/49562/video-toaster-4000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1OVWfmynPw

I just want someone to implement how Intuition did screens into any other platform, ideally OSX or Linux. It often gets mentioned, yet no one ever has. It can't be that difficult. I can live without the copper trickery.

Enlightenment provides draggable workspaces, or at least did (I haven't used Enlightenment since about 1999) provide that. I used to use that. The usefulness is substantially less today without having different video modes and the copper trickery

(EDIT: For those who haven't used the Amiga, apart from providing multiple workspaces, which was in itself a big deal for home computers at the time, it was exceedingly useful because there was no "best" video mode those days - you could have high resolution and few colours, or low resolution and "many" colours - this made draggable screens very useful as you could e.g. have a high resolution screen visible on part of the display, and a low resolution screen on the rest if you wanted. E.g. some paint programs made use of that to show their toolbars etc. in a fixed resolution, with the image itself on a different screen)

Today there's always AROS, which can run hosted on Linux and runs a bunch of Amiga apps, though there are still painful missing parts to AROS and it's not an option to let you run Linux apps on Amiga-style screens.

Forgotten about Enlightenment - haven't seen that since mid 90s!

There's a few scenarios where they're still useful, and I'm reminded. I know we generally have 40x the resolution, but even so...

Running two or more monitors, you decide to run a game that for fps won't run at standard res. Now your second monitor is shifted, and so is windows desktop. Watching the movie as you play is now a pain in the arse unless you also change Win resolutions with each game. If you change win res, have messed up desk icons.

Achieving two monitor workflow when you've only got the laptop with you. Often missed that in virtual desktops which are an all or nothing approach to more space. Or you play a game and if it's the one you run at lower res, now windows messes up all your desktop icons, and can even do this for full res games if they change res for the intro vid (to display their sodding LOGO).

In 1995 Civilization ran on its own, different res, screen. Desktop not impacted even a bit.

So not everyday, but still regularly useful to have.

Different resolutions in different windows? That's pretty cool. I looked into the Amiga's and was most impressed by MorphOS. Had key features, was beautiful, and supposedly faster than Linux.

Different resolutions in different "screens". Each screen is pretty much a separate workspace that takes up the full width and will hold one or more windows, but can be dragged up and down so you can have multiple visible.

Here's an example [1]. DigiPaint used one screen for the toolbars, so it was independent of the image you were working on (unlike e.g. DeluxePaint). Here's a video showing screen dragging in AROS (which reimplements the Amiga API like MorphOS, but also runs on everything from original Amigas - with some limitatons - to Raspberry Pi or x86 PCs, both native and hosted under Linux) [2]. On non-Amiga platforms the different screens can't have different resolutions, though.

[1] http://don64738.deviantart.com/art/DigiPaint-Fashion-3371985...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKCHZFYj9Kk

Wow, that was an impressive demo. I was imagining how I'd react if someome did it on Win3.1 or something. It would've been badass.

Now, other commenter gave excellent use case with low res text and high res graphics. What other practical uses does something like in the demo have? Virtual workspaces like in Linux cover most I can think of. What about draggable screens?

See the second level comment I made for a couple of modern use cases where I'd get benefit in current Windows.

Now consider virtual workspaces that you can move around and assign a z order to. You can expose a small part of a screen at top, or bottom for copy pasting to. Or work in a full size terminal session that you can only see 2 lines of.

Status windows/web pages can live on background screens and only get dragged into visibility. It's really just a nice to have thing now we decent virtual workspace setups, and huge resolutions, along with 3rd party stuff like Ultramon, but I still would like the option. I get too messy with wndow management.

OSX would benefit most as multi workspace and screen handling was very kludgy, though I know they are meant to have improved that a lot in the last couple of releases. Not had a mac since mavericks, so can't say for definite.

There were a couple of graphic adventures that changed res 2/3 down the screen.

Top part, lower res, highest colour depth for the graphics, lower part highest res, 8 colour for the text adventure and typing.

That's a good idea.

> It can't be that difficult.

I remember a Commodore developer(?) once saying "Intuition is the only one word oxymoron he knows".

The context isn't clear but perhaps it was difficult to implement.

The draggable screen part is not particularly hard. It's basically multiple workspaces coupled with data about screen mode and offset from the top of the screen. Whenever they're dragged, intuition need to rebuild a copper list - basically a set of instructions for a simple co-processor.

The copper list will contain a bunch of simple instructions to wait for a certain scan-line, and then write new values into various registers to change screen mode (if necessary), update the palette, and change the source of bitmap data to the location of the next screen.

Yeah on the c64, the vic2 video chip could gen an interrupt at a configurable vertical line. So many people used different graphics modes for each band of the screen, Amiga went further and facilitated it.

It was fun mixing interlaced (and therefore shaky on a bad monitor) modes with stable modes.

Wow, don't agree with that. I always thought Intuition the nicest GUI I ever programmed. It was beautifully designed. ADos was a mess obviosuly. And rather limited compared to what we're used to now.

I remember at the end of the Amiga days buying a PC, Petzold, Visual Studio and MASM. Worked through Peztold, by the end and after porting one of my simpler amiga apps, there was so much swearing and disbelief at how Windows did dozens of things, and my app was now 40x larger with all the shite you needed, just to accept a resize message or somesuch that I sold VC, MASM and the book to some random guy at work and never touched Windows programming wise ever again. Pc had been reinstalled with FreeBSD within weeks too.

That was the moment I became a server side developer. :) Played with X a little, but wasn't a huge fan of that either, but it didn't produce the same level of swearing Windows had. Never did any real dev on OSX with the GUI, so don't know.

I cam just to say how BIG Video Toaster was in video. My church was about to drop a HUGE amount of money for a similar product in the 1980s. As a teenager I got heard and they bought the thing. It was working all the way till 2001.

I remember watching that channel at my grandmother's house. Every summer I used to stay there for a month or so. I'd always hit the "channel scan" option on the TV menu to see if they had any new channels that they didn't have from the last time I was there. I remember this channel popping up on like channel 97 on Time Warner or something.

Also helped to make Babylon 5

And early bits of Star Trek Voyager.

I am and always will be an Amiga fan; Got an Amiga 1200 with modern '040 CPU board, and a DVI video out. Best home computer, ever.

I didn't know they had DVI cards yet, much less one with a flicker fixer built in.

My 1200HD has a sketchy VGA adapter that came with it when I found it in a Value Village; when I try to play games every LCD I have in the house refuses to go to a low enough scanrate. A flicker fixer seems like just what I need.

You've probably already found it, but this is the DVI kit I have fitted:

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php...

Works really well - you can get up 1280x1024 on it with a modified 'monitor' file. I run mine at 1024x768, on a standard 15" LCD, and it pixel matches the panel 100% with no borders. Demo discs and games that run PAL/NTSC get auto scaled to your preferred native SVGA/XGA resolution as well, which is an added bonus.

And Todd Rundgren videos[0][1]...

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mH8PaWbi1E

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Wind

Funny thing is the cable UI for preview is pretty much identical to this today.

It's far worse for me -- the scroll is about two lines high, and there's a constant barrage of really bad advertising.

So many viruses.....

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