Telecommuting with the Amiga [video] | Hacker News Reader

Telecommuting with the Amiga [video]

youtube.com

40 pointsdoener31 comments

This starts slow and I almost quit but it gets really interesting in the middle, if you are into this retro stuff.

I never would have believed that you could use Dropbox from a machine as old as this. And we are not talking about accessing the files only with a web browser but actually mounting Dropbox as a drive. All the stuff involving TLS, like browsing modern websites or IMAP access to GMail, I'd also written off, but apparently it works.

For TLS they have a port of OpenSSL (named AmiSSL). So, when that port gets updated, and software is updated to any changes resulting from the port, they get any features (if they were ported) from OpenSSL.

They import (their version of) the Mozilla trust store, so roughly the same CAs are trusted as in a copy of Firefox from the same date as your install of AmiSSL.

This is a neat video. It made my day. I'm currently in isolation at my family's place due to covid, enjoying my old computers, including my A1200 (which I use with an OSSC), so I found it particularly amusing.

As I have a 68030 and I've been messing with current netbsd on it (a decades old pcmcia bug finally got fixed on netbsd-9 stable branch, so now my ethernet card works on netbsd), I feel the video should have been called "with AmigaOS" rather than "The Amiga".

Of course, on netbsd, it is very possible to run ssh, ansible, aws-cli and all the other crap I use to work.

Wauw, I love this, you can make money doing virtually anything. Amiga seems to be way ahead of it's time.

Doesn't seem to cover Slack, I guess you'd do that by running one of the Slack to IRC gateways on a VPS and connecting to that using an IRC client.

Wow everything is so painful. Every time I get nostalgic for the “oldentimes,” I use old hardware / an emulator and quickly remember how far we’ve come. It’s easy to omit all the pain from your memory until you try to use this stuff for real.

Obviously if you keep using it though you get used to the pain. Perhaps you'll even start to enjoy it.

Why does the Amiga UI always look "stretched out", like someone forcing a 4:3 tv show into a wider aspect ratio?

Edit: thanks for the explanations!

IIRC it had very tall and narrow pixels to work with NTSC compatible displays. 1280x400 was the highest you could do with the super-high-res card.

Later cards got rid of the ~400 scanline limitation and would do things like 1024x800.

Good question. On classic Amiga, the UI was designed for the default un-interlazed resolution of 640×256 (PAL).

Anyone wanting higher resolutions on would go to the interlaced resolution that doubles the vertical resolution to 640x512 (PAL). The UI, however, does not adjust resulting in squeezing UI elements vertically.

If you had a plain old monitor of TV resolution, then going to so called "high res" (640x512) meant that there was a terrible flickering that made this unusable. You had to buy an expensive multiscan monitor that could handle that.

A trick I used to do was to jump up to the NTSC equivalent (640x400) which was flickering less in my standard monitor.

>"high res" (640x512)

In OCS Amiga, Low/High/SuperHigh are defined by the base (as in not using overscan) Horizontal resolution, 320/640/1280.

PAL and NTSC are 256 and 200 lines base vertical resolution respectively, and 50/60Hz vertical refresh rate respectively.

512 and 400 lines are Interlaced modes. The flickering has to do with the interlacing. The improvement perceived with the NTSC mode is due to the increased vertical refresh rate.

ECS Amiga (A500+/A600/A3000) introduces the so-called Productivity modes, which are just the 512/400 lines hires modes but in Progressive, thus doubling the horizontal refresh rate to ~31KHz, while also doubling the DMA bandwidth required.

At full DMA you can form a a palette of 2^2 colors instead of the usual hires 2^4, and unless you have FAST RAM you'll want to keep it at 2 color in order to let the CPU use the odd ram access cycles.

This palette can of course be changed during horizontal blanking, as then the display DMAs are off and the copper has room to access the palette registers, or several times midline if only using 2 colors.

In Productivity mode, as the chip that does actually encode the video receives the same bitrate as usual, the color depth is reduced to 2 bits per channel (from 4) for a choice of 64 colors.

These restrictions do not apply to AGA (A1200, A4000, CD32) Amiga, which are a different beast.

To display the picture from an Amiga today, I do use and recommend the OSSC (Open Source Scan Converter) and a modern monitor with HDMI input.

To expand on this, apps could also (ab)use "overscan" modes, which granted slightly larger resolution but image quality at the corner/borders was often somewhat unreliable.

Image quality on overscan is alright. This is very testable by throwing the video output through the OSSC.

There are restrictions on some aspects of overscan display, however. They vary between generations of Amiga chipset. e.g. It might not be possible to display sprites outside of a certain area, or display them at all if overscan is large enough.

Addendum to the first line: SuperHigh starts at ECS, so it's not available yet on OCS.

Save file dialogs should take ten seconds to open up like in Windows 10, or it's not ready for prime time yet.

100 upvotes

My old 1200 was able to boot from cold in 8 seconds so I think that’s a tall order. Amigas just can’t be slow.

My A1000 took a minute or so to boot. It spent about 10 seconds with the Kickstart diskette, then swap to whatever program I was running for another ~50 seconds or so.

Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there.

Then the warm reboots were instantaneous magic! (But a cold start took a bit longer as it had to copy the entire contents of the WB disk into memory. Worth it.)

>Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there.

RAM: is a fs like Linux's ramfs, and is implicitly mounted on early boot, you don't need to create it. It is also gone on reboot.

What you're referring to is ramdrive.device, typically mounted as "RAD:", which is implemented as a standard reboot-persistent module that offers a standard trackdisk block device, and can be configured as bootable. You'd format the drive with FastFileSystem or OFS after creating it.

In Workbench 1.3, the device was named "RAM:" (EDIT: I'm wrong). Not sure if that changed in later versions of the OS, but 1.3 was as far as I got with the 1000. And yeah, I guess I didn't "create" it so much as "use it as the boot disk".

It was gone on power-cycle, but it persisted through so-called warm reboots. (CTRL+𝔸+𝗔, I think?)

Definitely "RAD:", not "RAM:".

RAM is a filesystem and not reboot persistent.

RAD is a block device and reboot persistent.

Article on RAD usage: http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html

Annotated disassembly: http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt

It's fresh to me, because I still use my Amiga computers.

Thanks. Your first link dislodged some cobwebs. I'm definitely confused after all these years. Yeah, it must have been the RAD: device that I copied my WB1.3 disk to.

As an added note, ramdrive.device would use chip ram, which is not very clever as CHIP RAM is limited and precious, besides slow from a CPU perspective.

There's third party RAD implementations that use FAST RAM instead.

That's some bloated S:startup-sequence you had.

I like to keep it under 5 seconds, power to Workbench, which my A1200 setup does currently achieve.

Do note I do not autostart the TCP/IP stack, which helps considerably with that.

Maybe it was the 500 then... so you still use your amiga? I wish i still had mine, so snappy!

Yes I do!

I've got 500, 500+, 600 and 1200.

I use the 500+ the most lately, as I've been messing around with assembler and I have a nice NMI switch setup in it.

Until the Amiga has versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and the proprietary VPN the IT department decided on, it's unsuitable as a telecommuting machine.

I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, since Linux has none of these and is still used by a lot of people for remote work.

“A lot of people” = small percentage

Teams is available as a beta for linux now. Outlook- use the web app. Tons of VPNs are supported on linux.

It's not that hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com