Commodore Amiga could get a mini/classic version next year
vintageisthenewold.com
vintageisthenewold.com
For extra points, it's not hard at all to setup the MiSTer board in a used Amiga 500 case with the original keyboard.
And of course, one can always buy a classic Amiga 500 system from AmiBay, there are lot of them out there and prices are still reasonable. Moreover, there's a galaxy of modern expansion boards and hardware accessories that can be used to bring them into the 21st century.
Not similar at all, as miSTer is all about the openness, and the minimig-aga core is of course Open Hardware.
Vampire, while being fully proprietary and closed, implements CPU and Amiga chipset extensions that are not found in any original Amiga hardware. If these are utilized, the possibility of vendor lock-in arises, as there's no alternative implementations.
That said, I'm a MiSTer user.
I do think what Apollo is doing with Vampire is doing is amazing as well. Lots of respect for them for what they've done, even if it's closed source. I fully understand people wanting to make a living off their hard work.
Or an ULX3S[0], which works with the open FPGA yosys/nextpnr workflow.
HOWEVER...
I'm perplexed how I keep seeing all these projects over the years to revive the platform. AmigaOS was good for its time but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now. For how cutting edge it was, it was an unstable POS too.
GAH!
This is why of any old OS I’d like to see revived, it’s BeOS[0]. To this day I’ve never used a desktop OS so fluid, so responsive and stutter-free.
[0] Yup, there’s Haiku. I guess I just want that to be successful!
For a school project (fractals!) I needed floating point support, which the free version of Dice C didn't have. I wrote a letter to Matt Dillion and he very kindly sent me the 3 disks of the full Dice C by return post (about 4 weeks). I still remember what a pain it was to arrange an international money order to actually pay him.
That must have been 1991. My program very slowly drew a 320x256 Mandelbrot set in 32 colors - as I recall it took about 90 seconds on a A500.
By coincidence I was mucking around with Cuda the other day and wrote a short un-optimized program to draw a 2048x2048 Mandelbrot in 256 colors - over 80 times more data - in about 2 seconds. This 2 year old laptop is about 3680 times as fast as my old A500.
Why not buy a real vintage home computer then? Well, in the case of the C64, vintage ones are unreliable, hard to get to work with modern screens and hard to get stuff in/out of them. You end up needing expensive extra hardware for all these things and for what? -- the retro remakes are pretty convenient out of the box, and give you the convenience of an emulator with the look & feel you remember from your childhood.
However, if you didn't own one of these as a kid, then you'll find them pointless.
Butterfly bad. Gib upboat.
My programming was mostly rewriting code from magazines and I didn't have any IDE so arrows were out of the question either way (AFAIR).
Of course, it's mostly a nostalgia trip. Just like I fondly remember green phosphor CRTs.
I bought TheC64 because I wanted the keyboard. Why else use a C64 lookalike instead of an emulator on a regular computer?
Productivity isn't in my mind when thinking about retro/vintage computers, in any case.
AmigaOS 1.0 release sure was. From 1.2 onward, it's trivial to get higher uptimes than windows 9x.
I consider 2.0+ (~1991) pretty modern. I haven't seen a crash in a very long time, and I always have some Amiga running.
On the Amiga it didn't have this problem. There was AmigaOS and that was it. The base hardware was for the most part tightly coupled to the OS and the architecture was designed to provide standardised mechanisms for accessing hardware that were fairly stable. The Amiga had different stability issues of course, but my A4000 manages fine without memory protection despite having a full MMU on-board.
Specialty groups are rather time agnostic. The Technics SL-1200 turntable for instance (look it up, you've seen it) hasn't changed much in 50 years and Technics brought it out of retirement because the demand for used ones was so high
So a 68020 is perfectly fine for these types of things. It's not a general purpose tool, it's a specific thing just like the Technics are for hobbyist and professional "turntablists" and not meant to substitute say Spotify
What is the amigs used for??
This album for instance, was produced on an Amiga and even has it in the album title https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=35Lv8J1VMog
Might not be your thing, sure, fine. That's not the point. There's a significant scene that uses amigas for this.
Vintage Commodores have a fanbase all on their own in the electronic music world and get featured prominently in some videos such as (1:50) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-UdW-lmHSNY
There's after market hardware, such as an Amiga 500 SCSI -> SD bridge because at one time old 50 pin SCSI drives were going for hundreds of dollars and people in this community started making modern retrofits so they didn't have to pay high prices for failing hardware.
Amen style has fallen out of fad but it's not dead by a longshot. (ex, 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRkfrpgLpeQ and 2020: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D4y0X2zzzXM - compare to 1995: https://youtube.com/watch?v=GhopRCAFQ2k). I'd be shocked, literally shocked if these weren't done in a protracker-style piece of software.
It was also the hardcore tool of choice for classic rave (ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PcHOHfwdOs) ... you can almost visualize the vertical scroll.
Did you ever go past your A1000? Did you use AmigaOS2.1 and up?
...like...scripting all your productivity applications with the same scripting language and have them interchange data, this way, orchestrating workflows I still dream about on other systems?
...like... mounting RAM: or SOUND: or HTTP: or IMAP: or FTP: or ARC(hives): or (raw) MEM(ory): ? All without any Virtual File System? Just real device level mounts?
#> mount HTTP:
#> COPY HTTP:hostname.tld/~user/index.html TO folder/
And so much more...
Yes, you can do all these things, the one way or other, on today's systems (except the mounting example,afaik). But with the Amiga these things were built-in. Which means, that, instead of system administration and time wasted on setup and tooling, you would just use the things and enjoy more productivity.
- Compatibility with international character sets (UTF-8) for data exchange
- Support for modern peripherals like LCD monitors, printers, wi-fi cards, etc.
- Access to external filesystems (Ext4, NTFS, remote storage, etc.)
- Other
I have never used Amigas, so maybe these points are all addressable with a recent version of AmigaOS, but I understand the OP's concerns.
This is all supported with the current version of the OS (AmigaOS 4), however, due to no market share, only select devices are supported (the situation is like Linux (was), but much more extreme: printers (non-postscript) and WiFi cards, especially).
It is other things, where the system did not age well: no memory protection and no multi user support.
However, I do not want to place the Amiga as a viable solution for today's use. I just wanted to address the comment, I replied to, which was a bit too 'absolute' in tone for my taste. I did not find the criticism to be justified. Currently there is a hardware scene, that builds FPGA systems, that are fully compatible and meant to be run as stand alone, or as add-in systems and which can cope with most modern tasks, albeit CPU and GPU power is a limit, of course.
Mounting "HTTP" counts as a virtual file system unless you have a real physical HTTP object plugged into your Amiga, surely?
> scripting all your productivity applications with the same scripting language and have them interchange data
Theoretically possible with both AppleScript and the much-hated VBA, but never quite as easy. Probably never will be as easy, as you can only have this kind of tight integration when there are no security boundaries between applications.
Maybe you are perplexed because you misunderstand the intent of the project, and judge it on a basis that is unrelated to its intent. Considering the various other "mini" computers and consoles, including Retro Games' previous such project, THEC64, the idea here probably isn't to revive the platform as a competitor to a modern OS, or even what AmigaOS offers at all, but to create a toy for retro computer/retro gaming enthusiasts.
Having different sized icons.
I miss my giant Battletech icon :(
Its current incarnation uses the tg68k open m68k CPU, and supports the original chipset as well as AGA.
It runs well on miSTer[0] boards and the open FPGA stack friendly ULX3S[1].
I'd personally rather it be an A1200 clone rather than an A500, but maybe that's just me :)
But once it was there, you could play the high RAM version of sim city instead of the low ram version, so life was good. Things were simpler back then.
Interestingly, modern 512k upgrades for the A500 are tiny now, just the edge connector and a single ram chip.
Yes, I'm an Amiga[1] nerd... :D
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A500+ came with 1MB chipram onboard, you could get 1MB more via trapdoor, reaching the ECS Agnus 2MB maximum.
Then typically you'd get fastram (exclusive to the cpu, thus cpu can't be stalled by chipset, thus fast) via the left expansion slot.
I would love a similar thing for the Commodore - I think the Commander X-16 is a close proxy.
Tasteful enhancements that may create a scene without losing the overall spirit make a lot of sense. I wish I could spare the cycles to participate! Looks fun!
It's been in dev hell for YEARS but actually looks like it might be coming out next year so fingers crossed.
Its so good that some old school pixel masters STILL swear by it despite the main platform it was released on being dead for a quarter decade. That's a program for the ages.
One thing that makes emulating an Amiga easier than, say, a Spectrum or C64, is that most software of the time was clock-agnostic, so you don't need to emulate the timings as precisely as you'd need to do with an older machine.