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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga has a small but really enthusiastic fanbase that doesn't want to admit that it's dead. That's it, as far as I can tell. All of the modern Amiga hardware seems to suffer from similar issues to the ones mentioned here - it's expensive, slow by modern standards, has strange and annoying hardware and driver issues, and there's just not much software for PPC Amiga. It can't even run modern web browsers. (Unless I'm mistaken, the second core and a lot of the motherboard peripherals are entirely unused because AmigaOS doesn't support them.)

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You've hit the nail, hard. I grew up on Amigas and SGIs and owe those platforms everything I am today professionally, but what is going on with Amiga post 90's is catering that nostalgia feel and that's about it. It's dead, Jim - but let's sell flowers to people worshiping the grave.

I had a maxed out Amiga 500 (with sidecar expansion) back in the day and it was awesome (for games and 2D graphics) in 1988, amazing in 1990, and then Commodore ate it owing to monumental incompetence.

Even at the height of its technical superiority, it was crippled for serious work. Its pixels weren't square in any graphics mode, and in the highest resolution mode you needed to endure flicker unless you had a special monitor.

I remember when our 512k mac's power supply died and we tried to use our (maxed out) Amiga for word processing we discovered the top-rated word processors became unresponsive with documents over 4-5 pages (WriteNow on the Mac was cheerfully handling hundred page documents with graphics). And its print quality was atrocious even setting aside the whole non square pixel problem.

I don't know why you were downvoted because you're describing a major problem the Amiga had in the creative industries of the '80s and '90s.

Back then almost everyone was still designing for print, and the Amiga just wasn't cut out for that. It was a multimedia machine before there was any way to distribute multimedia to anyone else than other Amiga users.

Video production was a niche that was compatible with the Amiga's design, but working with analog video wasn't going to be mainstream ever... and for digital video, the Amiga was fundamentally underpowered.

Designers were a tiny minority of computer users back in the heyday of Amigas, and they're still a tiny minority of computer users now. Designing for print on computers back then was as much a nice activity as using computers for video post production. So if the Amiga sucked at printing, that was not what held it back from succeeding, as desktop publishing was just in its cradle back then. In fact, as an avid Amiga user back in the day, I never ever heard anyone complaining about the Amiga's printing chops.

These are the kinds of arguments against the Amiga that I actually heard: "Who would ever need 4096 colors?" "I don't need to use all those sounds" (coming from IBM PC owners whose computers could only display 16 colors and only produce bleeps and blops for sound).

The Amiga's real forte was games, pure and simple. It was a monster of a gaming rig, for the day, and a ton of gaming innovation happened on the platform. Gaming was a pretty mainstream activity for computer users even then, and Commodore completely flopped by not marketing the Amiga as primarily a gaming machine.

Word processing was a huge market even if design was not.

I definitely think that, when it was released, Amiga was ahead of its time, at least compared to the equivalently priced Mac and DOS/early-windows systems. I just feel that the system hasn't really kept up since commodore left the picture.

As a child, I remember walking into a "World Computers" retail store and seeing a Commodore Amiga running some graphics demo. I was utterly blown away. It was far beyond what I had ever seen with a home computer, which at that point, was limited to a Macintosh SE and an 80286 PC running DOS 6.

Bouncing Ball?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A

My first store demo of an A500 was an educational title that taught German with full audio samples using a point and click interface. My dad bought the thing with practically zero convincing from his excited kids.

Rationally you are 100% on the money, but people are not always rational and I actually love it that they did this simply because they could. Bringing a machine to life at this level is an adventure all by itself and given the rather boring nature of the compute landscape I'm all for people taking the long way home and enjoying the scenery rather than just being driven by price and practicalities.

As a nostalgic Amiga user I agree on principle, sadly this platform has little to do with original Amigas; I applaude their effort but wouldn't spend even 100 euros to buy one. The Amiga success was a result of genius, money and time constraints, being in the right place at the right moment and a huge users niche still untouched by IBM/Apple/Atari; it's impossible to repeat, period. However I we wondered what if the surviving original developers banded together again and designed something new to be produced by some Chinese fab in Shenzhen, like small companies like Friendly Elec or the guys behind the Orange Pi can do today like twice a month. That could be an interesting move to give new life to a concept.

I totally understanding the beauty of the system; what I don't understand why they don't move to something like AROS, which is open source and runs on (substantially) cheaper hardware.

To the point!

What I don't get: Why don't they use at least a customized case which doesn't look like a typical PC case (such as Apple does with the Mac Pro)?

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