After 14 years a new printed UK Amiga magazine
amiga-addict.com
amiga-addict.com
I tried purchasing a few magazines about music production this summer but they read mostly like advertisement brochures, all “reviews” read like ghost written blog posts and there was no soul, for the lack of a better word, to be found.
In short - get of my lawn you damn kids, things were better in my days.
It also bundles in O'Reilly Learning membership, and is cheaper than you would otherwise pay for the same...
But... do people join ACM? They seemed like a supreme institution back when I was in the University but rarely hear about them nowadays.
I honestly joined because of the O'Reilly Learning membership, but since joining I've found value in the magazine and community.
What you miss is quality, not printed magazines.
I'm sure there are good articles online, but it seems very hard for me to justify spending the time reading them when there is so much else. There is too much choice.
I remember a teacher at school telling me how once he bought all his favourite films on DVD he never watched them again. Once it becomes a conscious choice to spend your time on this rather than that it often ends up spent on nothing at all.
I've come to realise that choice (or freedom) is just not the greatest thing for humans. I firmly believe most people benefit from some kind of external structure and constraint. I think declining happiness, especially for women, is mostly due to this structure being removed. I also notice that the best art tends to be made under tight budgets and strict constraints. Artists tend to produce worse work when they are given freedom to do whatever they want.
https://fusionretrobooks.com/products/the-story-of-the-commo...
1: https://www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/collections/all/products/commo...
I am pretty sure there are far more magazines/podcasts/blogs which work with just supporting readers, but you have to find them.
Let's not forget the case of the beloved H-online.com which could not sustain themselves despite top-notch quality.
Race to the bottom indeed...
Something about having a physical magazine that's an unchangeable snapshot in time is so appealing to me lately. I have no nostalgia for the Amiga (never had one growing up), but I do have an Amiga 500+ now and love discovering this thing 30 years later. Community is incredible and the Amiga's ongoing development makes it a really fun system to own.
Edit: On a side note, I still subscribe to National Geographic Magazine. If you are interested in that type of content, Nat Geo magazine is just exquisite. Photography is stunning and the long form articles are usually months/years in the making and written beautifully. It's absolutely loaded with substance, even the ads are interesting. I can't recommend it highly enough and I think it's only $19/year. Paper quality is slightly lower than what I remember as a kid, but that's pretty minor.
Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.
Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.
So much choice and an amazing array of machines! It seemed like endless possibilities! It was fun and interesting.
It's perhaps similar to the early days of the web design when we had experimentation with Flash interfaces and all sorts of crazy browser experiences! Now it's all the same same on the web :-/
I love macOS - but it's so boring these days. It's kinda joyless. Feature rich, but just no fun any more. I've been a life long Apple users, and used to work there in the late 90s.
I tolerate and use Windows for gaming and to mix it up a bit.
But right now I've been using and enjoying Ubuntu on older Intel hardware with cobbled together updates. And it's more fun.
I like things to be fun :-)
That is part of the point of the Amiga and retro computing - it's actually fun!
FWIW we were an Atari ST household! :-D
AROS showed that it can be done. The OS is aimed at AmigaOS compatibility and it's really fast and small. Porting it to smaller ARM single board computers would give unprecedented performance on small hardware where a full fledged Linux could not run at proper speed.
Related links worth a look:
Most of the 8/16-bit interest is really just personal nostalgia. I don't know how many people really care passionately about recreating AmigaOS in 2020, but I would be surprised if it's more than four figures, most likely with a median age over 40.
The tight integration of everything via AREXX, for example (though AREXX is an awful language, the expectation of a tightly integrated AREXX port in applications was important). The device model that led to a plethora of device drivers and filesystem drivers doing interesting things (e.g. FrexxEd, an editor co-written by Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame, exposes a filesystem where you can find all open files, so anything that can read or write a file can manipulate the editor buffer directly). Datatypes. Widespread "standard" libraries for pluggable compression. A culture of tightly controlled APIs to the point that e.g. the default file requester etc. was easily replaced across huge swathes of applications just by dropping in new libraries.
It's especially notable that none of it is down to technical limitations of modern OS's, but cultural differences. You could do the above trivially in Linux (or any other OS) if you wanted to, for example, but it only matters if it gets wide traction. Amiga had a culture of quickly coalescing around standards that promoted reusability and modularity and sticking to them.
And that is also part of the reason why some of the hardcore fans stick to it: Their 30+ year old applications can open modern file types if someone writes a datatype for it (and they often do). Their 30+ year old apps can transparently compress and decompress new formats if someone writes a suitable library for it, and so on.
I'm not going back to AmigaOS, but I do still wish we'd see a resurrection of that culture, because in the ~25 years since I used AmigaOS as my primary OS, while we've surpassed it in a whole lot of areas, there are still areas where it was more pleasant to use an Amiga.
I think about this a lot. I really want to know what the "Amiga feeling" was made of so I can reproduce or encourage it today. It was one of the main things I enjoyed about computers in the first place.
I also think its important for Amiga people to pass these notions along somehow, in a similar way to people who've worked with Symbolics Lisp machines or other innovative technologies whose core ideas were not taken up by a mainstream that surpassed them for reasons unrelated to the actual value of those technologies.
I keep wanting to build some libraries and tools to experiment with this, but a lot of it is about culture, as I mentioned, which is often harder than the tech.
One simple example is the AmigaOS ReadArgs() call. It provides a standard mechanism for parsing command lines. An important consequence of it is that auto-complete for Amiga terminals that supports it can do typed auto-complete for any application that uses it without anyone having to write auto-complete script or specifications.
It's not a hard thing to do. The ReadArgs templates are really basic. Probably too basic. There are tons of good open-source command line parsers. All that's really needed is for people to settle on one with a suitable static spec format, and a mechanism for making it easy to extract that format from an executable.
But it serves very little purpose unless you convince a lot of people to do it.
There's a chicken and egg scenario there, in that it's a lot harder to find people prepared to spend time creating "standards" like that and pushing them than it is to find people to work on solving an issue with a more immediate payoff. Especially when you really need a critical mass of applications that supports these specs before the benefits starts becoming obvious.
The Amiga however was already from the next generation, with a "real" OS and really suitable for business, productivity, multimedia and other "serious" applications. Two of those 16-bit machines (or rather their evolved descendants) are still with us today - the PC and the Mac. So you can't blame people for phantasizing about what could have become of the Amiga platform if Commodore had managed it better. But today of course thinking that the platform could be revived and updated to become mainstream again is a pretty fringe view...
I think there's more to it than that. I want to push beyond the base A500 (in fact I don't even own one of those at present, even though that was the machine I had back in the day), preferring instead the A1200, but don't in any way see Amiga or AmigaOS as "the future".
This manifests as a (very slow) mission to build what would have been my ultimate Amiga circa 1992. So, yes, I'm adding a 68030 accelerator board with a 68882 FPU, and I'm taking advantage of modern conveniences like Flash storage, but fundamentally I'm not departing too much.
I may add an FPGA accelerator at some point but, with that, it feels like you can quickly stray into "Is it even an Amiga any more?" territory.
Therein lies the question; for me, the past is in the past.
https://www.howtogeek.com/190217/10-alternative-pc-operating...
Such a disappointment!
Looking at https://www.simulant.uk/shop/amiga-addict-magazine it says 341 more orders required, so 159 orders so far.
AmigaOS 3.x is still common by people running emulators, and legacy hardware, and the Vampire V4. AmigaOS 4.x is still under active development for legacy hardware with PPC accellerators and "modern" PPC Amigas.
Then there's the open-source AROS and the commercial MorphOS too.
It's a mess.
So there's new hardware (that's not branded Amiga for legal reasons, but can run AmigaOS), old hardware, and everything in between.
For those who "just" want the cheapest way of running Amiga software, and don't have any particular reason for wanting one of the PPC boxes, an x86 PC with UAE (Amiga emulator) or AROS + UAE is a far cheaper option.
For those who wants something closer to the "classic" hardware, there are a number of FPGA based options with various degrees of advances over the classic hardware.