Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vardump | Hacker News Reader

After all these years I still remember Amiga original chipset register 0xdff180 is the first palette entry. Or that exec library pointer is at 0x4. And hundreds of other details.

It was amazing to set a copper list that completely defines the display, microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline. To setup blitter to decode a raw disk sector on the background. To learn blitter 4-channel minterm [0] logic combinators.

Having fun with Deluxe Paint color cycling. Trying to make some kind of music in Protracker and Octamed and listening all those amazing music modules made by other people. Writing text documents CygnusEd. Having fun with AsmOne assembler IDE.

Playing Shadow of the Beast, Marble Madness, Xenon 2 Megablast, Turrican 2, Civilization, Settlers, Lemmings, Another World, Stunt Car Racer, North and South and all those other amazing games. That inspired to imitate and to learn more.

Watching amazing demos like Phenomena Enigma, Kefrens Desert Dream, Sanity Arte, Spaceballs 9 fingers. Wondering how seemingly impossible effects were achieved.

It was a great machine and taught me a lot. I'd be a different person without Amiga.

[0]: http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms

I saved up my summer job money and got an Amiga 500 (with an actual monitor!) - ordered in November, so it was on our doorstep when I got home from my afterschool (probably senior year of high school) job. My dad warned that I should probably let it warm up overnight, to avoid shorts from condensation. It was torture! I woke up like 2 hours before school to set it up :)

It was glorious! It was shocking to be able to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it - like magic!

I was devastated when my parents moved to a new place when I was around 30 and I discovered they had just tossed out my TRS-80 coco, C-64 (and about 3 shoeboxes of disks), and my Amiga :( So sad.

”to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it“

I haven’t ever used an Amiga, but thought its “main display” was its GUI, or that its GUI at least was on par with the command prompt. Am I wrong, or am I reading too much in this statement?

In this context "main display" means "whatever display is in the foreground" as you could have, say, a Deluxe Paint screen. It'd take up, literally the whole screen, and you could drag it down by the top bar and see the OS desktop screen behind it, possibly in a different resolution and number of colors.

And now fullscreen apps are all the rage, again. In my mind, desktop computing in general has always converged, sometimes in roundabout ways, towards the Amiga experience.

I really wish they'd dispatch with the standard "minimize/maximize/close" trio of controls and change them to something more interesting. Close is fine, but I'd rather it be a bit harder to use. I don't need to suddenly close something, and it far more often happens that I accidentally close something. Seeing the Amiga video, a foreground/background button could be cool. Or maybe "make transparent while I hold the mouse button down". Or any number of other things. These days I just maximize my windows, then alt-tab (or equivalent for Mac) through my windows. Only rarely do I do things side-by-side, and would rather have some tiling capabilities rather than having to do it manually.

I remember have several things running simultaneously, all at different resolutions and bit depth. Talking on a BBS on one layer, playing Tracker files on another, writing a paper on a third, and the Workbench behind them all.

It was glorious and very productive. Not that it would be super useful but I don't really think we can replicate the same "layer" thing on todays displays.

This is hard to describe, but easier to show. If you load up: http://www.chiptune.com/ the Workbench emulator, click and drag down the white bar at the top ("where it says Chipbench release) you'll see what is meant.

Here's a video clip showing the feature - too bad there isn't another application running behind the Workbench screen.

https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=8m54s

I grew up with this feature. At the age of 5, that was 1986, I used my father's just bought Amiga. I took all of this for granted... So for a long time I never used a PC seriously. Around the time Commodore blew it, I looked into PCs and linux, 1993 IIRC. PC have looked primitive to me for a long time.

The Amiga’s Intuition library, the core engine of the GUI, can draw graphics primitives on “screens”. Because of the Copper co-processor which displays the screen raster line by raster line, these screens can have different resolutions with different numbers of colors - all of them displayed simultaneously on the monitor.

The Amiga's way of getting relative pointers to libraries was amazing (and quite ahead of its time). Like you said, the only absolute address that always worked was 4, exec.library, and after that, you used that pointer to open other libraries, guaranteeing that they could be relocated any time.

I loved the Amiga, sadly I could only make use of it on those demopartys/gaming sessions where we all got together.

At the time my parents thought getting a 386 SX/DR-DOS/Win was a more future proof investment.

Sadly, thanks to Commodore mismanagement, they were right.

The Amiga experience made me always try to search on other platforms for the same experience, and focus part of my career designing UI/UX, also when doing backed end stuff as well.

For a while BeOS seemed it might be it.

GNU/Linux desktop experience (the whole stack) never felt right, nowadays only macOS and Windows kind of come close to those ideas.

Ahh, Protracker.

But let us not forget Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedball_2:_Brutal_Deluxe)

And forget the Blue Screen of Death... Amiga gave you Guru Meditation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation

Good times. I was once known as the guy who owns the AmigaDOS manual - the Amiga books were so expensive that we had a group of guys where each of us bought one book and we made photocopies.

All the cool stuff was of course in HRM and RKM so having the original DOS manual was kinda like ending up with the short end of the stick. :)

A lot of features were so far ahead it was astounding.

Many applications were scriptable with AREXX (the Amiga Rexx language implementation), and we could process data in one app, send it to another, process it again, save it, etc. Unix philosophy made available for any gui app. I remember the awesomeness of adding arexx support to my program and being able to script it.

I learned basic, 68k asm, C as a teenager thanks to the Amiga, I also had Latex and a printer for high school and college papers. Then added a modem and had access to the fidonet network.

Also, remember the Fred Fish's disks ? I still call my debug functions "dbug" everywhere I can as a tribute to his work (he also was the author of the C dbug library).

I can't emphasize enough how this computer and its great hackers community changed me.

Nice comment. Those Amiga 500 days were indeed magical times. Marble Madness was particularly memorable.

Indeed, Marble Madness was the first game I got for my Amiga 500! I think Shadow of the Beast was the most memorable, however. The parallax scrolling effect was amazing for the time...

Some stores had a combo when you bought an Amiga they'd throw in a game or two. We got Artic Fox and Speedball I think. Used our Atari 2600 joysticks so we didn't have to buy more. I got the Amiga 1000 with the PC Transformer software and 5.25 inch 1020 drive to boot MS-DOS in monochrome mode for college that only had IBM P cs and software.

In the UK I think the big seller was the Bat Pack [1]. Batman was a pretty amazing action game which had the bonus of being completable and at the same time as the film was a massive hit. New Zealand story was arcade perfect Mario style game. F18 interceptor was just brilliant. Hours of trying to fly inverted under the golden gate bridge. Deluxe paint - just brilliant! Coming from the spectrum this was a big upgrade.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/a500batman.html

> a copper list that completely defines the display, microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline

Sometimes even less. IIRC, some of the attempts to get around the chunky/planar problem for rendering Doom-likes took the approach of just drawing the whole screen in one colour and changing the palette definition of that colour on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

If you only used to copper to change that one color, you can't get smaller than 8 low-res pixels width of the virtual pixels.

You can, however, use more bitplanes and then use both the copper and cpu at the same time to get more colors, but you'd be tight of bus cycles pretty fast and I doubt you could get more than 80 colors per scanline using this technique.

Ha, I remember the Atari ST palette at $ff8240. Good memories, very similar to mine. I miss my Atari and Amiga.

What Atari ST palette at $ff8240? That address seems to be in the A500 KickStart 1.2 or 1.3 address space... My interest is piqued.

Atari is another computer altogether.

An excerpt from the original post I replied to:

“Ha, I remember the Atari ST palette at $ff8240.”

To which you replied:

“Atari is another computer altogether.”

I know, I own an ATARI Falcon 030 in addition to two Amigas!

A HackerNews in 2018 is explaining to me that an ATARI ST is a different computer... only on “Hacker News”! I was there and then, I worked on both an Amiga and an ATARI ST!

Sorry. I thought you didn't know about Ataris. $ff8240 seems to actually be an Atari address: http://atari-forum.com/viewtopic.php?t=8327 not an Amiga address.

68000 reset vector is at address 0x4.

In case you were thinking reset vector is somewhere at end of addressable memory.

Location of the reset vector is pretty weird, since at least Amiga got chip RAM over that region.

I guess there must be some special hardware that makes 68k read a different value from address 0x4 only momentarily after the system has been powered on.

$4 is the address of the exec.library, the entry point into the kernel (“exec” in Amiga terms), not the reset vector.

No, it really is the reset vector for 68000 chip itself. In addition to being exec library vector after being powered up!

Quick googling found this for example: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1158/why-...

"When a 68000 CPU powers up, it reads a few words at memory location zero to get the initial stack pointer and program counter. That suggests to me that a computer system designer would put the system ROM at memory location zero, where the 68000 would read the initial SP and PC when coming out of reset.

However the Amiga puts RAM at location zero, and the ROM at the very far end of the address space. It has a hardware switch which causes the system address decoding to place a second copy of the ROM at location zero, hiding the RAM. At reset, this hardware switch is "on", so the 68000 reads the initial SP and PC from this mirrored copy of the ROM and starts executing. Then the ROM firmware switches the hardware switch "off" to remove the mirrored ROM and reveal the RAM again."

well spoken and so recognizable. Without the Amiga I would have been a different person, too.

I remember the names of the chips (I think...) Paula, Gary, Agnes (I believe I had to get an FAT Agnes to use my cassette loaded CD-ROM add on). Lordy that loaded Wokbench FAST. And FMV!

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