Why use Amiga in 2011? (AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS, AmigaOS 3.9) | Hacker News Reader

Why use Amiga in 2011? (AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS, AmigaOS 3.9)

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67 pointsdarkduck22 comments

£750 for a compatible motherboard at AROS?

Don’t get me wrong, Amiga OS was great, but its greatness was in part due to the bang for the buck Commodore delivered, e.g. you could almost purchase an entire Amiga 500 for the price of a 16 color ISA card…and have more than four times the pixels with overscan and ten more bits of color depth in HAM mode.

Let's not forget the apps, either. It was a long time before anything comparable to Caligari or NewTek's Video Toaster (required an outboard interface, but the Amiga's NTSC-compatible video made that cheaper than it would have been otherwise) were running on the Mac or PC. If we had the ease of multimedia distribution then that we have today, desktop video rather than desktop publishing might have been the driver, and the personal computer landscape might look a lot different today.

I run WinUAE and a copy of ClassicWB ADV in the background while at work. Often I'm listening to mods downloaded from Aminet. The Amiga had a great music scene. I keep an AmigaShell open and edit C code in Vim and compile it using SAS/C. I plan to do some 68000 assembly. Like Attic Greek, Amiga 3.X is a dead and a stable platform to develop for. The "Amiga Hardware Reference Manual" and the "Amiga Guru Book" have very detailed information for would-be Amiga programmers.

Having never grown up with an Amiga, this hobby can not be attributed to nostalgia. The Amiga has a damn fine UI and a nice DOS environment. Netsurf has recently been ported to it, so it now has a decent browser, though it is only practical in emulation or until Natami comes out.

I never got into AmigaOS 4.X or MorphOS. It would be great if the source for 3.X were opened

Answer: nostalgia. I'd also like an Atari ST running on reasonably (~10 yr old) hardware. I mean, I occasionally bid on old SGI workstations on eBay that I have no earthly reason to own, except that I really wanted one, back in the day.

I know what you mean. But the STEEM emulator is excellent. (It even does TT high res - 1280x960 mono.)

http://steem.atari.st/

You guys are crazy. What a waste. Heavy machines, power hungry machines. How much carbon is spent to deliver and run these? What an environmental waste!

Donate to a charity instead.

You're not wrong. It is not by some rational calculus that these desires are expressed. I should note that I don't ever actually buy any Power Challenge XLs or anything, just that I bid on them (to lose). Working on The Big Iron at HEP back in the day was really fun, and the fact that an 11" MBA is considerably faster than the 12 processor R8000 SGI box used for simulation work in 1995, while amazing, is sort of sad to me. Fast computers should be BIG COMPUTERS.

But I'm a greybeard; this is well-established.

You might be surprised: my Amiga 4000T with a 68060 processor, and full complement of cards (graphics, network, sound) has no fans other than the case fan - all running off a very modest (by current standards) power supply: because there's very little heat generated.

And while I'm missing many of my favorite modern apps, for many tasks the productivity is still unequalled: near-instant bootup, hugely responsive, and a beautiful elegant operating system.

It was more about the parent's post SGI nostalgia.

It's all nice, but my machine's power adapter is 60W. That's its maximal theoretical output. (okay, with 90% efficiency that's 67W). It typically uses 20W to 40W depending on the load.

Plus, it auto-sleeps. Then it consumes just about 1W. Talk about efficiency.

Slippery slope. That would make it an even worse offense to buy a new computer or even technological gadget. I'd wager a guess that every developer who's doing scripting development doesn't really need a multi-core machine at home (not counting the final server). So the reasons for not just using an old AMD 1.4 Ghz Athlon computer from 10 years ago are quite fishy.

Transport costs for an Octane aren't that high, and considering the time you're running it and the increased power hunger of contemporary machines means that your average yearly carbon footprint is the equivalent of one tween doing a single WoW raid (or heck, waiting for said event).

Nice, although you would have to be of a certain age to appreciate this. There are people out there running even older 8 bit microcomputers for single dedicated applications.

I sold my Amigas a few years ago, and soon after bought a Commodore 64, which I still have and still tinker with occasionally.

FPGA emulation of Amiga and other platforms:

http://www.fpgaarcade.com/

It's full of wires:

http://www.fpgaarcade.com/atari_amiga.htm

Now that he has found someone competent to assemble them without a crippling NRE, I believe Mike has just got his hands on the first run of boards.

(No connection other than that I used to be on the software side of his day job)

My dear Pegasos2 is sitting near my desktop, it's light is still on, enlightening my steps at night.

It's nice to turn it on to feel amiga once more.

Was it just nostalgia, or did you have a use for it?

Hmmm but I didn't hear any explanation of why use it, just a demo of how it works...

Hmm, MorphOS on PowerPC sounds quite neat. I've got a few old Macs and applications that run on 10.5 are getting fewer (or you're forced to stick with ancient versions). An interesting OS to play around with would be quite appreciated. An alternative to sticking with 10.4/10.5 or using Linux/BSD…

"nostalgia"

Yeah. I have an old TRS 80 I fire up now and then. Just for nostalgia sake.

I've tried to throw it out. Just can't do it.

2 Commodore PET's do it for me... a 2001 and a SuperPet. Some of the old cassette tapes still read though most of the floppies don't anymore.

We just moved into a new office and found an abandoned TRS-80 in the attic. Unfortunately, it doesn't power-up. Any guidance on how to learn to fix one of those things?

I have an 8088 that hasn't been plugged in in years. I still wish I had a good place to set it up.

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