Hacker News Reader

Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

I reluctantly moved to Windows/PC very late (probably 1997 or 1998) long after Commodore was done for. The scene was clearly losing many people but there were still a few magazines in circulation and I was amazed every time I went in Germany to see much more life on the Amiga scene.

Nothing was ever the same after - the community of creators that had formed and thrived on the Amiga was unique, and while people moved on they did not find a proper alternative to reunite on.

It's always good to see such articles about the Amiga, but it's a bittersweet feeling.

View on HN

I had similar experience, and have similar bittersweet feelings. I don't think about it every day, but when I do, I miss what we had.

Granted, today's computer systems can be used toward creative ends much more advanced than anything I ever saw done with an Amiga. It's not as if today's computers are lacking technologically. It's really the mindset, the community, the sheer joy, that seems to be gone.

The scene hasn't died! There are still people doing awesome demos on the Amiga 25 years later. Elude's Amiga demo "Rise and Shine" from just last year is phenomenal!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7liUfI46Weg

When I first got a windows 3 machine at work (early 90's) it took about year to stop trying to drag down from the top of the screen to show the high res display.

And I also used to be unofficial UK third line amiga support for PRESTEL and telecom gold - if they had some weirdness the normal help desk couldn't replicate

I didn't get to try an Amiga growing up. What do you mean when saying "drag down from the top of the screen to show the high res display"?

Amiga could support multiple "desktops" with different resolutions at the same time. You could (partially or fully) expose a different desktop by dragging the titlebar at the top of the screen.

Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=534

Yeah, it's actually a hack that is well explained in the book "The Future was Here". It's not real desktops since it only works on the vertical axis. But even though, it was massively impressive compared to what other computers could do at the time.

It was a hack because it depended on the refresh cycle of old CRT displays. The electron gun scanned across each horizontal line from top to bottom. The video chip could use interrupts to switch resolution in the middle of the vertical refresh cycle. The same trick wouldn't work with a modern LCD display.

Only because of the inherent fixed resolution of the display - it would I think work if you had an Amiga with VGA out into an LCD display.

The native output resolution is the max vertical resolution of all currently displayed modes.

For instance, if you have an interlaced mode showing under a non-interlaced mode, then the entire screen displays at ~480i (to use modern terms) with the non-interlaced portion doubling its scanlines. But if the interlaced screen gets covered up, then it snaps to ~240p non-scandoubled.

The biggest modern problem with this is that displays turn themselves off to resync on mode changes, which always annoyed me greatly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com