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Comment by tibbydudeza | Hacker News Reader

How many 68K Amiga's still working exist today ???. I don't get it.

I have my old Spectrum and Atari ST and from time to time I run them. My friends had Amigas and Apples(or their parents had them) that were super expensive at the time. I bought one Amiga from a friend when it got old. I also got old consoles cartridges and emulate them using FPGA devices as the original consoles died and I have not analog TVs anymore, so I need to use converters.

What I get from using those machines is feeling rich. I can look at my phone or a raspberry pi and say: Wow!!, that has millions of times more memory!

You also get the essence. With such a limited power they made programs that were useful and games that were funny. Now you have Unity or Unreal Engines powering games that are not fun or electron apps consuming gigabytes of memory that are not useful because the basics are wrong.

I use old Autocad for DOS with Autolisp support and you realize after all this time, the thing is useful.

My job is creating software so reminding what the basics are is always important.

We have FPGA implementations of the Amiga nowadays; these are basically identical to the original hardware.

It's quite amazing, I can highly recommend checking them out: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki

I didn't see on the github page whether there's an Agnus, Denise, and Paula?

Only in FPGA. No original chips.

Try here: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Minimig-AGA_MiSTer/tree/MiST...

Quite a few. The retro computing scene is extremely popular at the moment with Amigas being much in demand. Amiga use in the US was pretty low except for certain sectors such as TV production. I know more people with Amigas now then I did when they were originally sold.

Add my anecdata to yours, I also see a lot more interest (including from myself) now than when it was sold in regular shops. And not just from demosceners.

It gets even weirder when you realise that apparently it's some ones job to maintain an 35 year old operating system... for a platform that's no longer manufactured.

How do you even hire for that position? What tools do the AmigaOS team use?

I love that this is still worked on, and I'd love to know more about what that job is like.

I booted up my A1200 in 2008 to see if it still worked after ten years of disuse - it did.

Then a month ago in 2021 I booted it up again to see if it still worked after a further 13 years of disuse - and it did again.

Played Zool both times!

I do the same with my PowerPC iBook clamshell from time to time. Amazed the tiny PCMCIA sized 5GB spinny disk hard drive is still original!

If you want to make sure it boots up next time though, consider having it recapped : on A600/A1200/CD32 it's a matter of when, not if, low quality capacitors will leak and damage the board.

Hey, we even added an M68k backend to LLVM recently with Rust support already on the way \o/.

It's a pretty special machine. It can display a lot of colors and has PCM (sampled) sound, but is still simple enough that you can understand everything that's going on. The SNES is comparable but hard to program. The DOS PC is comparable but less standardized.

(I am not an Amiga user, but I'd love to get one in the future when I have more space, time, and money.)

Dude, nothing beats the Amiga.

Most that exist are still working.

They were well-built, and the most sold models (A500, A600, A1200) do not have the barrel batteries that leak and destroy PCBs.

A500+, A2000/3000/4000 have these batteries, but they weren't anywhere as popular as the other models.

If you own any of these, ensure you've removed the barrel battery (cutting it out with pliers is good enough, and the Amiga will still work).

I personally have 2xA500, 1xA500+, 1xA600, 1xA1200, all working.

I tend to have one running at all times. It's the A1200 right now.

Most ended up with ram expansions including RTC with battery, not to mention leaked capacitor juice dissolved chip pins and pcb vias.

They were build just a tad better than contemporary Atari ST from the point of signal integrity, but Commodore manufacturing plant was a shit show. Multiple models shipped with capacitors mounted in reverse polarity (1200, 4000, CD32).

And for the A600/A1200/CD32, make sure you have them recapped sooner rather than later. Old leaking capacitors can and do damage PCBs.

Managed to get my 6mb A1200 on the internet just the other day.

Caps and batteries on Amiga motherboards go bad and need replacement and cleaning up. There are replacement Amiga motherboard projects to keep Amigas alive just transplant chips from a dead Amiga motherboard to the replacement motherboard. Also replacement Amiga case designs.

Not to mention the emulators out there. It seems everyone wants at least Amiga via emulation, just won't emulate PowerPC Amigas.

I am perpetually surprised at this. I remember 24 years ago a colleague of mine had the butchered remains of an A1200 with all sorts of daughter boards literally taped inside a PC case. Just before covid hit i by chance bumped into him and yep he was still using it apparently.

I have test equipment that’s 50 years old in active service so I suppose the mantra of “if it works and makes you happy, use it” is still valid.

Still have my Amiga 1200 (expanded with 68040+MMU, RAM, VGA adaptor card which I can use to plug into one of my LCD monitors, plus some stuff I've probably forgotten) and I'm sure if I powered it up again it'd still work.

Powered it up a few years ago and it worked fine.

There were about 10k hard-core users left a few years ago, and many have multiple Amigas. There's probably at least as many (probably many more) enthusiasts with working hardware, and a ton of people running UAE and the like.

I fire up UAE every now and then for the fun of it.

Edit: I just realized that what I really want is an easy way to launch a single Amiga app in a window on my Mac. Double-click an icon and have The Bard's Tale up and running? Yes please.

What you are looking for is this: https://www.amigaforever.com/

Given that kstrauser specified "an easy way to launch a single Amiga app in a window on my Mac," an Amiga emulator that only runs on Windows -- however good it may otherwise be -- is probably not in fact what they're looking for. :)

(Edit: I see that Cloanto does have a somewhat cryptic page for macOS, but the way I read it, Macs can only run the open source UAE that I gather Amiga Forever is built on top of. So https://fs-uae.net might be a better place to investigate.)

That’s exactly the one I use, with the ROMs and ADFs from Amiga Forever. Still wish I could double-click a Defender of the Crown icon and be playing it a moment later.

My apologies. I simply glossed over the Mac bit. :( Just having a hard time.

That’s more for a whole desktop (which is also awesome), but it’d be fun to be able to launch and quit an Amiga app as easily as a Mac app.

I still have a working Amiga 500 at my parents' house in Germany.

Your parents might be alright, but I've heard a lot of horror stories where parents sell, give away or trash people's old computers.

i.e. If you care about it, better keep it close to you.

I had an Amiga 1000 in a staircase closet in my parent's basement. It just needed a new floppy drive and keyboard. My brothers cleaned up and found it broken and threw it away.

Are you kidding me? The Amiga scene is the most dedicated retro scene there is. Plenty of people with real hardware -- like myself -- are gonna be real excited over this.

Most Amiga users prefer either WB 3.1 or WB 3.9 with Boing Bags up to 3-4.

There is a huge market. Like myself, I'm definitely buying this for my Amigas. Also for supporting the team.

I have one. The music trackers on them are amazing.

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