Amiga at NASA (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Amiga at NASA (1999)

obligement.free.fr

63 pointsLeoPanthera31 comments

> Gary Jones: "If its not a PC, NASA gives us a lot of grief when we try to buy anything to go with the Amigas. They want us to buy PCs and run Windows 95 and NT. We keep trying to tell them its not fast enough so they tell us to buy DEC Alphas. We tell them its too expensive. They don't like the Amiga; it doesn't cost enough."

So even NASA has these problems!

The article makes me more interested in learning about the Amiga platform vis-a-vis the PC. Any tips?

You can get a fairly extensive coverage for the launch from BYTE magazine from archive.org. The Amiga 1000 is described extensively. A similar in-depth analysis was done for the 2000 and the PC bridgeboard.

There were also lots of Amiga-specific magazines, but they lack the perspective of general magazines, which is useful when first approaching a new platform.

Old but gold:

http://www.upv.es/amiga/

EDIT: just in Spanish and French, but Deepl may be able to translate this right.

Maybe they moved to the Amiga 2000?

Not only does the Amiga 2000 include five Zorro II card slots, the motherboard also has four PC ISA slots, two of which are inline with Zorro II slots for use with the A2088 bridgeboard, which adds IBM PC XT compatibility to the A2000.

    > For more than a dozen years, Amiga computers have been
    > hard at work at Cape Canaveral's Hanger AE supporting the
    > launches of every American spacecraft including the space
    > shuttle.

12 years from 1999 would mean that they adopted the Amiga back in 1986 or 87. That time frame makes a little more sense. The Macintosh wouldn't have been a good choice if you need to interface with custom hardware (the Mac II arrived in 1987 with NuBus expansion slots, but that was brand new).

It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.

I guess it depends a lot on personal preference. That would be a very fun job, especially when you get to choose which platform to work with.

> It's not entirely clear why, say, an IBM AT 286 with multiple ISA slots is less suitable than an Amiga 1000 with 68000 and a single expansion slot.

The hardware might work OK but back then that AT would be running PC-DOS or MS-DOS, i.e. it would effectively not be running an operating system. The Amiga did have a functional operating system which was flexible enough to get out of the way when needed. Given that the Amiga seemed to do the job and they were comfortable using it there was no valid [1] reason to look elsewhere.

[1] bureaucratic reasons are not valid reasons, at least not to engineers. The right tool for the job, not the right tool for the acquisition department.

The IBM AT didn't come with an operating system with a lightweight premptive multitasking kernel capable of being used for real time applications.

I learned quite a bit about operating systems by disassembling the Amiga exec and other libraries with a debugger. The code was elegant and efficient, modular and well thought out. Putting the core of the operating system in ROM was a good idea for the time as it freed up most of the RAM in the system for application use - an important design choice when machines were only shipping with 512KB to 1MB of RAM.

Amiga had great graphics, with chips that made it feasible to animate at 50/60fps, and a genlock expansion that gave it ability to overlay graphics on top of a TV signal.

Afaik the Amiga had fairly open hardware esp the Zorro bus which made time sensitive expansion cards like the Video Toaster possible.

It also made home music production affordable for the average person, thanks to Paula[1] which had 4-channel audio playback. It's not a case that all music trackers for Amiga, such as ProTracker[2], had 4 tracks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Chip_Set#Paula

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eclMFa0mD1c

Oktalyzer had a maximum of 8. If I recall correctly it downscaled sounds on the fly to 7 bits to gain a maximum of four more tracks. Its samples were noticeably worse in quality and less loud, but back in the day I still had a lot of fun using it.

https://www.robotplanet.dk/amiga/oktalyzer/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXTuWQDCylE

Nice, I didn't know about Oktalyzer.

> Its samples were noticeably worse in quality and less loud

I think I get the idea - I remember those trackers for Atari ST that also used some similar tricks to play multitrack audio even though the ST didn't have native multitrack PCM playback[1]. I remember that the sound was worse than ProTracker but still "serviceable" if you get what I mean.

But at the end of the day many ST owners would just use it as a sequencer of external gear (thanks to built-in midi ports and SW like Cubase) - those were actually rich people, they didn't need trackers LOL - my uncle had a Roland sound module and an Akai sampler hooked to the ST! I was just a kid and didn't have money for external gear but I was proud of what my Amiga could do for a fraction of the price.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST#Music_and_sound

StarTrekker also had 8 channels: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13415

Ahah I love the comments tread in the pouet page, with Exolon replying! Thanks for posting the link.

Mirror if necessary. https://web.archive.org/web/20210712080928/http://obligement...

Here is some of the video they cite with Gary and Hal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw

An Amiga 4000 was not powerful enough to even play Doom in.... 1999 when HL and Unreal existed. But, yet, with a 68040, they were able to play MP3s and some low res videos!!!

And today you can even install modern TLS libraries and some modern (JS less) browser.

So you coudn't play Doom but you could comment into HN just fine...

That was mostly due to the planar based video layout rather than a byte per pixel display.

Planar graphics allowed some interesting effects, but Doom’s shortcuts for perspective calculation weren’t compatible.

When VGA came out, it became difficult to see a future for the Amiga - the hardware was just too tied to TV frequencies to match PCs in graphics, just because they didn’t have to be compatible with anything else.

Doom actually runs OK on 040 Amigas: https://youtu.be/fl-gYdkIXCk

But of course very few Amigas had an 040, only the highest end ones.

Ah, sorry. Then a bare 4000 with a 68030, ok.

Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...

> Yet, a Pentium MMX with 32MB of RAM in 1999 would stomp the Amiga...

On pure computing power, yes of course. But - at which price compared to A1200 ? (of course in the case of the PC you have to include a reasonable sound card + reasonable graphic card. I could buy my Amiga as a teenager in 1993 for less than 500 € while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...) - The OS was fantastic, very responsive despite the limitations of the hardware. Only when I left Amiga to switch to a supposedly much more powerful PC I experienced what meant "lagging" and "bloat"... (original Amigas didn't have an MMU and therefore both OS and apps were written carefully since there was no swap)

>while any entry-level Pentimum MMX PC in 1999 would still be > 1000 €...

It may looked so, but by 1999 you could get a Pentium MMX PC for 600-700 EUR in Spain (100-120,000 pesetas), cheap soundcarp and iGPU included. Cheap, but you could run Quake for sure. And MMX did wonders on multimedia decoding and emulation.

The last real Amiga, the Amiga 4000, was launched in 1992. Comparing it to a PC from 1999 is just a wee bit unfair.

4000 had 68030 or 68040, but 68040 was only clocked at 25MHz, wheres in the video it's running on 68040 at 50 MHz.

It's reasonable to assume that Commodore would have migrated the Amiga platform to (probably) PowerPC if they hadn't self-destructed.

Probably. Though at that point, I wonder what would have remained unique about the Amiga?

Defender of the Crown looked awesome :).

Makes me wonder if any of the NASA staff played SDI on the amigas when no one was watching.. :)

In its heyday, the Amiga easily beat Windows PCs for graphics and sound capabilities. But 1999 wasn’t a great time for the Amiga.

Not by 1996...

And by 1997-1998 everyone got a "Multimedia PC".

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