Amiga Machine Code Course
markwrobel.dk
markwrobel.dk
Later, I moved on to doing realtime graphics in DOS, first with Turbo Pascal and inline assembly (reading Denthor/Asphyxia tutorials) and eventually C and although I have fond memories of that period too, the Amiga will always remain supremely vivid in my memory. Utterly unforgettable.
The meaning of life is to become a legend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok
It's one of the best Amiga demos ever made running on a machine with a 7MHz CPU and 1MB of RAM.
I am just starting to understand this feeling -- both with a real Amiga 500 and with UAE on my "Pimiga" -- and oh, man. There really is nothing like it, aside from maybe programming a Lisp Machine.
I was sadden to have gotten a 386SX instead of an Amiga, like everyone else on the group, in retrospective my parents were right in sponsoring a PC acquisition instead of the Amiga.
However our "demoscene" gang used to spend weekend, mostly saturdays, where the Amiga owners would bring their computers into someone's place.
Then we would have a mix of ProTracker or Assembly coding sessions, and some gaming to relax as well.
oh man I read those as well! Nostalgia overload right now.
I strongly respect Amiga, and believe that Amiga could have and should have been the company to dominate computers. It boggels my mind that Amiga has faded into relative obscurity all these years later. Folks don't know what they missed.
It's not the only factor in the Amiga story since Commodore's incompetence in the business and marketing domain is the stuff of legend, but it certainly resonates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwoyfH7TgEQ&t=3270s
Eon by TBL from Revision 2019.
Not the worst start I guess, they're still making popular games with its distant descendant Multimedia Fusion today.
Years later when we emptied that house, I found an assembly programming manual. Turned out it was there all along...
It doesn't really feel tempting to go back and learn it now, though.
Also like your story, later I realized that I could actually have had access to the software and information, since I was going every year to the Assembly demoscene event and could have surely found the tools and information there if I had just tried harder.
It's incredible how now you can just get any software and such wonderful tutorials for anything imaginable that you could want to learn. What a time to be alive.
Excerpt:
"Before we continue to letter 2 of the Amiga machine code course, I want to show the debugger in WinUAE.
It’s a real gem and it makes your life as a programmer a whole lot easier."
The things people are doing with this amazing machine today really remind me of the life and enthusiasm that was in the Amiga scene back in the day.
Perhaps with the success of the ZX Spectrum Next, we might see a new wave of machines, which build upon their 80's ancestral architecture and provide a way out of the walled gardens in which we are all trapped ...
There is continuous development in both software and hardware. The Amiga demoscene is also very active (it never really slowed down) with productions that would be considered unreal in the past, and constantly upending each other.
Besides the golden age in the 90s, it's never been a better time to have classic Amigas as your hobby.
I definitely agree that Amiga users have kept the machines alive. ZX Next is like that, for Speccie fans and other 8-bit aficionados.
Definitely check trapdoor expansion for RTC battery and remove if present. If you're lucky, there is still no damage.
There are several projects to restore Amiga systems like Checkmate 1500: https://www.checkmate1500plus.com/ It is an Amiga 1000 type case an Amiga 500 or ATX motherboard etc can be put into.
There is this Vampire chip that plugs into the 68K Socket to turbocharge the Amiga. A PowerPC adapter to run the latest Amiga One software on the 500, SDcards to emulate floppy and hard drives.
I agree it would be cool.
The Vampire standalone is not really "a new Amiga with superior specs". It has a lot of compatibility issues and it comes with AROS firmware by default which is not Amiga OS but an extremely buggy OS reimplementation by volunteers that's still far from being complete. The main issue with standalone Vampire is that it tries to do too much and is basically a closed-source incomplete (e.g. it still doesn't do AGA properly) FPGA reimplementation of classic Amiga hardware. The Mister FPGA does similar things but is opensource and is a much better proposition in my view.
The vampire cards that slot into existing Amiga machines are basically CPU accelerators with a lot of memory and a graphics card built-in. Again, I find them a lot better than the standalone vampire. It's too bad that the Apollo team (creators of Vampire) keep biting off more than they can chew by branching into side-projects all the time and not honoring promises they made in the past (e.g. Gold 3 core for Vampire 600).
http://www.amibay.com/forumdisplay.php?24-Amiga
Is where the 'real' Amiga collectors hang out, if you sold there first, it would be appreciated.
I wish someone would do an Atari 8bit course as well! I didn't get heavy enough into Atari asm as a kid.