sincere questions. what is it about the Amiga, in 2021, that still has such interest to warrant a project like this? Does it do something a modern Mac or PC can't? Does it have a unique ability that does something better?
Note this is in jest; as a vintage computing enthusiast I have nothing but respect for this and may be speaking from experience :)
I saw a new vid on YouTube recently with a guy showing how to use the Octamed tracker. By coincidence, the guy that bought my Amiga all those years ago bought it primarily for the tracker.
The Amiga is a surprisingly capable machine. I saw a demo where they booted up Debian on the Amiga. It was slow! It just goes to show how compact the AmigaOS is. The whole OS came on 3 single-sided (?) floppies, and one of them was for fonts. Amazing, a whole OS on less than 2 HD floppies.
It appears that AmigaOS is STILL being released commercially . The latest release was 6 months ago. Amazing, considering that Commodore died in 1994. There is AROS, a free version of AmigaOS, which is still actively development. Development seems to be slow, though.
AmigaOS is available for the MK68K and PowerPC. I saw a PowerPC version awhile ago. They're not cheap, though, which is a pity.
I really thought that an AmigaOS is combo with a Raspberry Pi would be an awesome hit. OS development on Pis has been a disappointment, actually. I was expecting more. Everyone just runs Linux.
Kids these days need 8G just to run Firefox, of course.
If you'd bought a typical Acorn in 1993, it would have come with either 1, 2 or 4 MiB RAM.
You can run the Acorn OS (RISC OS) on a Raspberry Pi.
Is this related to the Reality Distortion Field?
Joking aside, they were amazing machines that people, somehow, became emotionally involved with.
But there's a lot of quirks that still stand out.
Some of my favorites include datatypes - closed source Amiga programs released 30+ years ago can load things like webp images if they support datatypes, as long as you drop a datatype into your system.
And AREXX. The language is pretty awful, but the pervasiveness of AREXX ports in Amiga applications and how normal users took advantage of it is something I haven't seen since.
The openness (despite the os being closed source) of the platform is another one. Hardware schematics. A composable, modular well documented OS where everything could be patched and replaced. Where people kept experimenting with new file systems because you could just drop a file in and it'd be accessible. Or new device drivers, including virtual ones. Or plugged in new system wide file requesters, because they could.
A lot of it has more to do with the community around it than the machines themselves.
I later upgraded to an Amiga 3000. That was my favorite machine of the early 90's era. Eventually, Linux started taking off and around 1994 I moved on from the Amiga.
I play around with the Amiga occasionally on various emulators. I also got a MIST box some years ago (which is an FPGA-based emulator.) IMO the FPGA stuff isn't worth it given the speed of emulation you can obtain even on a Raspberry Pi.
Switching from my beloved Amiga 3000 to Windows 95 was like being thrown back into the dark ages for a few years (apart from the games of course, Doom FTW!), until the rest of the world finally caught up (but not completely) with WinXP and OSX.
Dbus actually took quite a bit of inspiration from Amiga REXX ports (via KDE DCOP), so we've actually gotten that back in recent years. But so many Amiga features are still lacking in modern OS's.
Dbus tends to be treated as something developers might use, while AREXX was something regular users used, and expected applications to support.
The technical capability is there, but something is lacking. And that is the case for a lot of things I miss from the Amiga - it's technically easy to replicate datatypes for example.
And the fact that today it is possible to do is a fun in itself.
Edit: I forgot that although the OS was fully multitasking, it lacked memory protection and management, so a rogue process could easily crash other processes or the entire system by writing parts of the memory that it shouldn't have touched. Also, there was no such thing as resource tracking, so if I malloc'ed say one kb, I had to remember to free it before exiting, or it would remain allocated until the next reboot. Those were limitations that I found immensely useful when learning to optimize things.
For some others, the demo scene, copy parties, gaming, BBSes, first coding, electronics projects, name it.
For me it was all of it, so yeah, powerful experiences that I don’t think I will ever see or live again because of the nature of where and how technology is heading. Last time I got excited with something with the same experience potential was when Oculus launched their kickstarter, received my DK1. Wow. New paradigm shift… but Facebook bought them and that was it for me after the CV1.
So we’re going back to our first love, nostalgic, stable environment and comforting :)
It doesn’t do stuff better than today’s machine, but the fact that its still usable in 2021 and that there’s still a lot of development being done to keep it fast and geeky shows you how powerful the experience was for all of us.
I’m happy I was alive and a kid at that specific timeframe, because being a kid today I would probably not have 80% of the tech skills I got now if it wasn’t for the Amiga, forcing me (as in fun) to understand everything low level and make me a better problem solver and expand from graphics, coding, electronics and creativity to cross-link disciplines.
Now the only last thing exciting I can see before dying is going to space, when prices are down by a notch. Kids today won’t live an Amiga experience, but will probably be able to go to Mars.
I’m glad I won’t be nostalgic over angry bird, an xbox or an iphone!
Now I feel the urge to play that video toaster vhs demo…again. lol.
* a stable - as in non-changing - platform from which to extract as much performance as possible by way of programming prowess instead of throwing a few more gigahertz/bytes at the problem
* a compact and rather elegant operating system which' state can be kept in the head of a single person, this makes it possible to reason your way through most problems
* the combination of the above created a thriving demo scene which, if they want to keep active, need access to compatible hardware so they can be sure their exploits can be demonstrated on "real" Amiga hardware
The same is true for e.g. the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX-Spectrum and a host of other popular systems. The Amiga was revolutionary at its time and as such attracted those who were looking for a machine to explore hence it gained a large following. While the absolute performance parameters fall in the dust compared to modern hardware [1] it still remains an impressive demonstration of what can be done with a relatively slow CPU combined with the custom circuitry and the OS which made the Amiga different from e.g. the Atari ST.
[1] pulling down from the top of the screen running some program to reveal the workbench (desktop) on an Amiga 500 (512K, 7MHz 68K CPU) preceded the Android notification shade (which Apple later copied into iOS) by a few decades, using hardware less powerful than what is integrated into the SIM card in that same device. On earlier versions of Android (1.x without hardware compositing, tested on a Qtek S200 which originally ran Windows Mobile) this was quite laggy...
Sure much of it is nostalgia and those who owned Amigas in the 80’ and 90’ now have the time and funds to tinker.
I still wonder about the custom chip. Could you just send a handfuld to China and have them reversed engineer? Sure an FPGA is easier and cheaper, but many want real hardware. The custom chips are almost the only thing you can’t get as a new part.
And while those custom chips are fine, they seemed almost targeted at sprite-based gaming and cost reduction. Again, I’m just looking at it through other peoples nostalgia, but it seems like it just wasn’t that remarkable of a machine for general purpose usage.
E.g you could draw higher quality art on an Amiga than machines with far fewer colours or no bitmap graphics at all. You could compose music on an Amiga that was not achievable on any other computer in it's price class without extra peripherals.
And so on.
It's simply false to suggest the primary function of the custom chips was cost cutting - there was nothing that provided what they did when they were introduced. Making it cheap enough was certainly also critical, but making it cheap enough is irrelevant without making it possible first.
I think the problem with looking back at this without a very clear timeline is that things did move very fast. In '85 it was astounding and revolutionary. By '87 it started seeing some competition, and without considering that most of the competition was too expensive it starts looking less impressive. Then prices for PC cards kept dropping. By '91 it was getting dated, and Commodore was desperate to survive and get AGA and AA chipsets completed. By '93 it was all over.
In '88 the custom chips would have looked like just cost cutting if introduced then, but when they were introduced they were expensive and extravagant compared to what was on the market.
I guess those ideas now live on macOS and Windows platforms, to some extent.
16 bit color made HAM irrelevant and was more exciting than pre-emptive multitasking and graphic acceleration.
BeOS was almost acquired by Apple to replace the Mac OS, but it wasn't, and it makes you wonder how history would have been different.
Ironically there was a group of engineers at Commodore that was big into trying to merge Amiga OS and UNIX.
"VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore"
The PC killed it off. Even before 3D accelerators came along, there'd been years of year-on-year performance improvements, each time at the same or lower prices thanks to competition between suppliers of commodity parts. You also had byte-per-pixel display memory, and much better ALU throughput than the Amiga, so the games would look more interesting even when they weren't the nice high production value stuff you'd now be able to get from US developers.
When you consider in the early 90s that the Amiga emulated the fastest Mac FASTER than the fastest Mac, you get an idea of the power. Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic today's technology landscape is.
Okay, I'm a fan of the Amiga, but this is just too far. Today's computers are "pathetic"? I remember playing with an A500 when I was really young and didn't really know anything other than a few games. I really got into Amiga with the A2000 solely based the Newtek's Video Toaster. Then, computers became all about video for me since. The things we can do now in real-time with video blows an Amiga out of the water. Toaster was all about SD video. We now do more things in real-time with 4K videos.
Your comments act like the rest of the computing world is at a stand still compared to the Amiga of yore.
I think that is going a little far. There are some incredible technologies out there right now. What GPUs can do these days is amazing. For another, the phenomenally fast SSDs in current gen consoles like the PS5 will trickle down to PCs. On the flip side of the coin, you have very capable microcontroller platforms based on chips like the ESP32 for a few dollars, not to mention the latest offerings from the Raspberry Pi foundation. Really low cost boards like these put the technology into the hands of anybody that might be interested in learning something with next to no investment required. Even the Amiga couldn't make that claim back then.
The slow, incremental improvements weren't enough to keep up with x86 and SVGA. Commodore really dropped the ball. If the 1200/4000 was released in 1990 instead of late '92 it might've been a different story. The 1200's performance was hobbled by lack of fast memory out of the box and a previous generation processor (68020, which as 5+ years old at the time.)
Early versions of the OS were also primitive and unstable. That didn't change until 2.0 which wasn't generally available until late 1990.
Example: Atari's STe line got a nice blitter and more advanced sound hardware than the original ST about 2 years after the original ST launch, but almost no games used it. It just wasn't practical for game authors to target it when so many people had the original generation. (And hence the next generation didn't sell well because no compelling reason and so on). And in fact the marketplace was small enough that even just targeting either Amiga or ST and programming specifically for one and getting the most out of them wasn't done that much. People just wrote what amounted to a generic 68k planar bitmap graphics game that could be ported easily to either the ST or the Amiga, not taking advantage of the better features of either.
PCs were ugly and not nearly as sexy and fun as those machines from that era, but what they brought to the table was standards and upgradable commodity hardware.
I remember when people would post this sort of thing on Usenet, for years after most people had given up on the platform.
By the time the A4000 came out (late 1992), there were Macs that also had 68040s and ran at higher clock speeds, so I don't think it was remotely possible to do what you say. How could a 25 MHz CPU emulate a 33MHz CPU faster than native under any circumstances?
These older computers are still auditable from a security standpoint. A pre-486 machine doesn’t have binary blobs or sketchy hypervisors that run in ring -1 that are under the control of a third party.
If manufacturers ever cease to provide general purpose machines, one way for the community to bootstrap itself would be from old hardware or FPGAs (if they can be trusted).
There's even an enthusiast's market for new games and software for retro computers. The target seems to be either people who remember them fondly from their youth, like me, or even people who were actually part of the scene back then! It's something like a club for old automobile collectors I guess.
As for uniqueness: everything about the Amiga was unique, especially when compared with PC and Macs (or the Apple II). The Amiga was built out of custom chipset purposefully designed for the vision its creators had; these were not off the shelf chips like with PCs.
For a pretty detailed history of the Amiga, complete with hope, betrayal and tragedy, I recommend you google the Ars Technica series titled "A History of the Amiga". It will provide a glimpse into what was so unique about the system.
The schematics are available for them & they're documented really well
People still make software & games for it for presumably the same reason, then there's people who are into it for the nostalgia and the games.
The Amiga era was the last good overlap of "you can know everything about the machine" and "the machine can do useful things".
It took dedication and many now use it for creating the ultimate retro computer.