What made the Amiga so great
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The Amiga 1200 was based on a Motorola 68020, had a hardware-based bit blitter and could display 320x240 in 256 colors, basically the holy grail of analog gaming graphics modes. It was the only widely distributed home computer capable of faithfully emulating the vast majority of 1980-90 dedicated arcade machines with few compromises. I have all the machines mentioned above in pristine working condition and still enjoy playing around with them.
It was a special era in computer history because every platform had its own unique hardware and operating system providing different capabilities and trade-offs. This gives each platform an unmistakable (and strongly-opinionated) 'personality'.
While the 68k ISA was a dead-end, that's mostly because Motorola was all-in on PowerPC; AFAIK there's no fundamental reason they couldn't have pulled an Intel and thrown transistors at it until it could keep up despite the decode complexity.
Near the end, after the initial bankruptcy, PowerPC boards, some with 060s and PPC chips both, hit the scene.
Entire SDKs were introduced, and many bits of software were ported. This was a good bridge, and as Apple made this sort of jump, eg, they didn't die when switching from 68k to ppc, I don't think a healthy Commodore would have either.
So I disagree. The Amiga could have transitioned too.
I have written some assembler for MIPS and Alpha AXP back in the day. The mips assembler was quite straight forward and reasonable but I found the alpha to be very hard.
Surely if "last and best" is your criterion, one can hardly discount the Atari Falcon. (And the earliest models in the Acorn Archimedes line were definitely "all-in-ones" integrating a keyboard although they might have lacked in-built TV out.)
Was just an Atari. Braindead architecture throughout.
It is remarkable how the 68030 still had to wait for its turn to access RAM. Like the ST, Falcon had no concept of FAST RAM.
Falcon had a cool DSP chip in it, but that's about it.
At the time it was launched, 1992, the ARM2 processor inside it was considerably more powerful than workstations that could be bought for ten times the price. It was insanely powerful, but hamstrung by not having any form of graphics acceleration. (The CPU was so fast it was just assumed you'd do everything in the CPU.)
It's a shame, really. RISC OS running on ARM deserved to be the British standard of computing, but Acorn's failure in the US market meant they could not compete with the sheer PR power of the large American competition.
Photos and details: http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A3010.h...
Maybe it was the OS that caused it, but working on acron was painfully slow.
(Developed a CAD software for it, moved to PC very quickly)
I keep looking at my mechnical keyboard and thinking it ought to be possible to squeeze a NUC like computer in there.
Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.
When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128.
The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time.
In all I’m happy I went the IBM compat route.
I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things.
It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit.
I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.
The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on.
Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match.
It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up.
Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation.
What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.
You put into words the feeling I've held onto for 25 years. When I finally gave up on my A1000 and moved to Windows on a 486, it felt like a loss to be grieved.
> What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
Seriously, you're capturing my memory of this platform perfectly. The Mac was the nearest thing to an Amiga, but it was still lacking in some hard-to-pin-down way that I think you just nailed.
... which cost you a fortune and yet was still worse than the oldest and cheapest Amiga, nevermind the A1200 which was made available around that time.
I finally "upgraded" to an Athlon with Linux in 2000. I do not feel like I missed anything in between; Through the years, I had lots of chances to extensively use 386/486 with DOS and Pentiums with Windows 9x elsewhere than home, and at no point I thought the user experience held a candle to my Amiga, which by the way was just an A500 with 1MB RAM and no hard drive.
PCs just sucked. Quake was cool, though.
The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga
https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i...
Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine.
For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS.
It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be.
I loved it!
This is literally the linked video in the article. (it's a good one though, watched it last night)
The Workbench 3.0 Utility disk included a copy of MicroEmacs. Decades later still my favourite editor and top 5 piece of software.
The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time.
From wikipedia:
"The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..."
There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'.
Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations."
Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.
That rough timeframe would see the Toaster arriving in the Amiga world, which would put the Apple offerings even further back in comparison.
Woz is / was a legend, but I'm certainly no Apple Inc apologist, so my reaction to a story about what made the Amiga so great is a bit different, I guess.
On the plus side, that makes that “256 out of 2^24” a bit less of a problem.
Matt Dillon has brought a ton of design from Amiga to his FreeBSD fork called DragonflyBSD.
And its extremely performant, which is impressive given how few work on DragonflyBSD vs Linux & other BSDs.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-f...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466
And a bit here too
https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.h...
I hope it's exaggerating the similarities of Hammer and FFS, because FFS was dated already a couple of decades ago. It was never a strength of AmigaOS.
they've spent basically 4 whole days with it with breaks for food and sleep. it was amazing. Lego has found a spectacular balance between physical play and screen time.
Also, the keyboard, it came out a good couple years after the DEC LK201, which is very similar to both the Amiga and the STs. The IBM enhanced came out at about the same time, but, IIRC, the 122 key layout dates back to the Model F family.
I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context.
Fun fact regarding bitplane: a friend of mine realized that he could use only 16 colors instead of 32, have all colors from, say, 0 to 15 be black, then clear the whole screen by zero'ing only the first bitplane (so effectively only blitting one-fifth of what would typically need to be blitted in case you wanted to clear the whole screen between two frames).
Problem is: running the Amiga in 16 colors mode (instead of 32) was faster than using that trick in 32 colors mode.
However... That trick worked on the Atari ST. It was a very fast way to clear the whole screen. But as the Atari ST only had 4 bitplanes to start with, then you'd end up with only 8 usable colors if you used that trick.
We're talking decades ago, but I'm pretty sure I remember this correctly (as in: we actually tried and timed all this on both the Amiga and the Atari ST back in the days).
> I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context.
Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today.
Yeah... Computers used to be more exciting. And don't forget the M1.
By the time chunky mode graphics and 3D rendering really started to have an advantage, computers were moving to seperate graphics cards anyway, so I don’t see it as a bad choice. Had Amiga continued I’m sure we would still be using Nvidia and AMD graphics cards in them now. In fact 3rd party graphics cards did start appearing for the Amiga.
The bad decisions for Amiga all came down to Commodore sucking it dry and not putting any money into the engineering division.
The main class of application that would have used single-pixel modifications would be paint-style programs, and the cpu was generally fast enough to keep up with user input.
There are advantages to planar graphics that can help applications too. Being able to dynamically change the number of bitplanes based on an application's color requirements both saves ram and increases cpu performance.
It wasn't really until about 1992 that the lack of chunky graphics really became a liability, with the rise of 3D games like Doom and various multimedia applications, like streaming video off CD-ROM and more advanced productivity apps. If Amiga had actually delivered the AAA chipset in 1993 with it's various chunky graphics modes, maybe the platform would have survived.
Any app that draws a pixel as a single operation does that. In order to make this faster, you'll need to keep a bitmap to hold the image and then, maybe, use the blitter to render it to the screen. Bitplanes allow some tricks with games, when you split the planes into more than one playfield, or could even use it for windowing, putting the active window on one group of bitplanes above the rest so that you wouldn't bother to redraw windows because oclusion isn't destructive.
Text rendering is not done per-pixel, it's done in character sized blocks. Most UI elements at the time were tiled-based. You can do a lot with just blocks of pixels. And with anything that's done in large block (especially blocks that are multiples of 8 pixels wide), the per-pixel cost is atomized and becomes much less of an overhead.
The original Amiga shipped in 1985 and at that time the bitplane approach offered a reasonable trade-off versus chunky pixels by enabling some uniquely powerful capabilities. When Commodore died of self-inflicted wounds in 1994, a much more powerful new chipset codenamed "Hombre" had been created and was working on prototype boards. Hombre had chunky pixels among other cool things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset. Too bad it never shipped
Well, I had an Amiga, and all I did was use it to play games; maybe those games were a little aesthetically better, but in the end, I didn't do much with it.
So even if you didn't have an Amiga, don't worry - you might never have done anything great with it anyway (like me).
I had an Amiga and learnt to code in Basic on it. But anything beyond that was so much harder than it is today.
Sure, there was a GNU C-Compiler for the Amiga, but in the 1980s people didn't know about those things because so few people had internet access.
Today if you're a bright kid and want to learn coding there are so many resources and free languages.
Of course the distractions are much better too really.
If C compatibility wasn't required, then Amiga-E was possibly the best option if one wanted a (very) fast compiler paired with a high lever powerful language.
The A500 helped me to study how digital gates and ICs work using a software that allowed their emulation plus the excellent Don Lancaster cookbooks. I managed to "build" a device that could grab a value on a port, store it into a memory, get it back and send it over a serial line to be reconstructed back on the other side. It was awfully slow, of course, but the experience turned out of great help to me. I also made some bucks by building and selling MIDI interfaces, ADC0804 based parallel port audio samplers and a very simple device which would activate a beeper whenever there was a disk write. Most viruses replicated by writing themselves on the bootblock as soon as a diskette was inserted so an unexpected beep could be a sign that something was going on.
With the A2000 plus the Dr.T's KCS sequencer I managed to compose and record my first over 20 minutes long prog rock song using a Roland R8 drum machine, a Yamaha TX81Z expander for bass and a TX802 for guitars and other intruments, then a Roland Juno 2 for solos and pads. It was amazing how the 8MHz Amiga 500 and 2000 (actually 7.16 MHz as the system clock was synced to the video clock which in my case was PAL) could record a very fast realtime double stroke roll without a hiccup (sw/hw limit was 1/384). I used this seemingly unique feature of the R8 by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad, and the Amiga didn't complain. (Any Neil Peart fans out there should understand what I was trying to accomplish:^)
On all machines I made my first experiences with 68K assembly and other languages, also developing along with a friend a chat system for the Dialog Pro BBS software.
The Amiga also taught me how fast an user interface can be if well developed, and how to make use of system resources without wasting them. I would probably never think that Android on a 2GHz phone today is slow if I didn't experience AmigaOS on a 25MHz computer back then. Also, AmigaOS had no memory management, so if I allocated say one byte and exited from my program, that byte would remain unavailable until next reboot (short of using dangerous low level tools to free it). This forced developers to be very careful when using resources: each allocation would need its corresponding free before exiting, and situations where one would need to allocate A, then B, then C, and one of them wasn't available had to be taken into account (usually by conditionally freeing in reverse order).
So did I do anything great with the Amiga? Probably not, but the knowledge and experience turned out useful in all my jobs, and still is today. To me, using the Amiga alone was the great accomplishment.
That alone made it pretty awesome.
Sliding the screens up and down, revealing what is behind, every screen having its own palette.
You are at a mercy of every program behaving though. But that is part of its charm.
I'm glad the Arduino, RPi and other small devices exist today, that don't evolve as fast as desktop OSes or mobile SDKs do, that give the chance for curious minds to learn before their knowledge gets obsoleted.
A simpler example, the support for showing multiple virtual desktops (Amiga called them screens) at once. The DMA registers in the Agnus and the video mode in Denise would be set to the next screen at a certain point @ raster, triggered by the copper.
They offer email subscription instead. I'll pass.
Once it shows up, I'll add to my aggregator.
Demoscene creators were putting out fantastically creative polyphonic rich music on Amigas for years while Doom-playing PCs were still blip-blopping.
Even when Sound Blaster type cards (with sampled instruments) became popular, MIDI was the standard of PC audio, which couldn’t hold a candle to MODs.
The MOD music format actually outlived the Amiga, being used in 1998 in Unreal and in 2000 in Deus Ex.
Sounds crazy, but that's how the mind works.
:trollface: ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vPpj_x4wo Quite a fascinating blast from the past.
The C128 and later the Amiga are the main reasons I became a developer.
My parents kept bugging me for wasting my time. Now, almost 40 years later, they understand ;)