Exploring the Amiga – Part 1 (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Exploring the Amiga – Part 1 (2018)

thedigitalcatonline.com

90 pointscodezero22 comments

I often wonder what a computer would need to be in order to become a phenomenon similar to the Amiga.

The Amiga blew people's minds by having impressive graphics for the time, excellent multimedia and a very responsive multitasking graphical environment when most Windows machines couldn't format a floppy and move the mouse at the same time.

The only solution space I can imagine for this is something so alien to our desktop computers (everything today is a multi-core processor coupled to a GPU and SSD storage) that it could cause the perception that it's not just an evolution, but revolutionary.

I keep returning to something that merges CPU and GPU like Intel's Larrabee, which became Xeon Phi, or Esperanto's RISC-V MIMD+SIMD monster. It could be something with cores of more than 2 sizes of core, but it'd need to be something different enough to enable the things we consider impossible today.

Which brings something else to the discussion - we no longer have science fiction to guide us here - apart from AGI, uploaded human personalities, and fully immersive brain-connected (or upload-friendly) virtual reality, there isn't much in sci-fi that our machines can't handle.

This comment has a fascinating structure. You laid out what made amiga a great product in human terms. But when describing what can be like that today, there were no human terms just technology. And that is the pitfall for which the last part of the comment gives the reason. We really do not have much to guide us any more. The things golden age of scifi put as guidance has been more or less achieved.

Home trainable AI hardware; something like Tesla's AI hardware, but completely usable & customizable by hobbyists?

But what would such machine be capable of? What would be the use that would make us all wow ourselves the way we did when we first saw an Amiga?

A revival of the Amiga spirit is not going to be achieved through hardware, no matter how powerful it is. The kind of quality improvement the Amiga offered over its contemporary 8-bit brethren simply cannot be achieved anymore, given that we already have near-photorealistic realtime raytracing in consumer hardware anyway.

That leaves the software side of things. What the Amiga brought to the table, and what still has value today, is its attitude towards how you use a computer: "Simple things should be easy; complex things should be possible."

Is such a thing still possible today? ...maybe, but it would require a very different software design ethic than we see today; one where the primary goal for any piece of software is existing within an ecosystem, and enabling cooperation between software packages instead of locking everything down as much as possible. And an OS that puts the user first, instead of itself.

I can see that the wow won't come from graphics or sound - it's already beyond what humans can perceive, but I'm not sure it'd come from software design philosophy either, or that the current hardware we have would be able to enable truly revolutionary software or even what that software would look like.

The Amiga really felt like a discontinuous jump. Most technological changes are only incremental. They're still good, but they don't knock your socks off. The first time I played "Shadow of the Beast" on an Amiga, it literally blew me away.

This appears to link to all 8 parts: https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/categories/amiga/

Dang, I should have posted that one! Thanks for sharing. I’ve been planning a small Amiga 68000 assembly project and this series inspired me.

Edit: last year around this time I was planning a Commodore 64 6502 assembly project, and I didn’t follow through, so, yeah, that.

I got into C64 6502 coding last year - had a pretty decent game prototype working (before had to relocate and life got in the way!). If anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole, I recommend the Twitch streamer "Shallan" (https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k). All his old videos are on YouTube too, and tonnes of great info to get started and motivated.

Thanks so much for sharing this, I’ll get to the project eventually, I bet. :)

I might as well plug my 6502 assembler MOS[1] again. It's written in Rust and comes with a full language server implementation that does things like full code formatting, refactoring support (go to symbol, renaming, etc) and if you're using the VICE emulator for the c64 it even integrates with the Visual Studio Code debugger.

[1] https://mos.datatra.sh

Thank you for sharing, guys. The next posts in the series have been in the works for a bit too long, this reminded me that I should keep writing =) Thanks!

Thank you, this was refreshingly deep and technical for a retro article. Straight to assembly in part 1 is nice! :)

As someone growing up coding MC68k assembly, I think I was still not aware of the existance of the "vasm" cross-assembler. That might push me to clean up and make buildable a really old game I wrote, that would give some nice closure. :) Thanks!

Just a heads up to the author. Your global Atom RSS feed seems to be broken. https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/atom.xml The one for retro is ok.

Ouch! Thanks for the heads up, I'll fix it asap!

I just fixed it. That was caused by ANSI escape codes in Celery's output that I copied in one of my posts :shrug: Thanks again!

If you're specifically interested in Amiga demo programming a scene insider has a nice Youtube series running:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3ltHgmiidpK-s0eP5hTKJnj...

It's quite enjoyable to watch at the beginning explaining basic assembler but also Amiga specific hardware programming like "copper lists". It gets pretty hardcore later on which was too much for me.

This is a fantastic cross-platform project for VSCode : https://github.com/prb28/vscode-amiga-assembly

There are also similar project(s) that target Windows only and give some nice extra features such as profiling.

I've been using the above on macOS to get back into demo coding after a 25+ year break and it's been great fun/nostalgic.

I learnt m68k on an Amiga 500+ in a week, it's a decent assembly language which a lot of CPU manufacturers could learn a lot from.

Did you learn on an amiga, or did you build on another platform? What tools did you use?

It was a very clean ISA at the time, which made it quite easy to learn. Though if you want to learn a modern ISA today you'd pick RISC-V which is almost as simple.

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