The Amiga Workbench Simulator | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga Workbench Simulator

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99 pointsLutzb36 comments

As a kid, I have spent years of my life in front of the C64 and later the Amiga.

When I look at a C64 emulator, it brings up tons of memories. Commands like "POKE 53281,0", games like "Uridium", software like "Giga-CAD".

But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?".

Strange.

Some of the software I wrote on the Amiga can still be found online. With screenshots and everything. I look at those and I can't even remember which language I wrote it in or which editor I used to write the code.

I find it painful to emulate the Amiga to just play games. It feels like using a mac does today - as much as I might develop on it, I develop in the linux portions and the OS itself feels like a place to get away from as soon as possible.

My memory is that games-wise, one vary rarely touched Workbench for playing games. Most of them booted straight from disk, using the kickstart ROM.

Could you post the links to those tools?

I did writing in AsmOne's embedded editor, but since I was just a child, I haven't produced anything meaningful. I still remember some m68k's opcodes though!

It was Cygnus Editor, of course! :)

Your experience is interesting, and oddly I have almost the opposite experience. My guess is that it's somewhat tied to the respective phases of life we might have been in at the time. I was 5 when I started out on the C64, and while I got fairly deep into it, a lot of those memories essentially got wiped a few years later. The Amiga years, mostly from when I was 10 to 15, on the other hand, are crystal clear for me. And then there's he late 90s PC era, which is blurry again.

It was, but later years (at least for me) it was FrexxEd [1,2] which was written by another pair of Swedish dudes, one of which then went on to do some (I guess) hair-related piece of software ... whatitsname ... shampoo? no ... wig? naah ... ah, yeah, curl! :)

[1]: http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FrexxEd

[2]: https://github.com/vidarh/FrexxEd

CED was great, however I later discovered and registered to GoldEd which remained my editor of choice until I sold all my Amigas. It later became a full fledged IDE apparently. https://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/...

Wow, you just triggered a memory cascade for me. I used Cygnus all the time and had totally forgotten that name.

Re: phase of life: I was a teen when I got my first computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer. I can still remember 6809 opcodes and specific memory addresses for that computer.

>But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?".

Do you mean the initial menu where you select different versions of Workbench? If so, that makes sense...you would have just been putting a floppy in that was 1.2, 1.3, etc.

The "Workbench" itself is the desktop environment and graphical file manager, so if you used an Amiga, you likely saw it.

Does this not look familiar? https://imgur.com/a/zcEl5nd

Same reaction, generally, despite absolutely loving my Amigas and doing more on them than the C64s/etc.

I do remember loving "developing against the OS", the ROM Kernel Manuals, SAS/C and whatever assembler I was using, CygnusEd, and some of the demo scene stuff. And these trigger responses, but just seeing Workbench leaves me numb, unlike the C64 "welcome screen".

I, on the other hand, remember it vividly. I even remember what kind of wallpaper I had set in the background (tiling 8-color marble-like thing). I remember playing with loading image files, via the built-in Amiga Datatype plugins (was that the name for this mechanism?). I remember 1024x768 JPEGs took around 30 seconds to load, while similar GIFs loaded under 15 seconds. Both results were from hard-drive (not a floppy), so mostly CPU-bound.

  LDA #00
  STA $D020
  STA $D021

In asm, colors the background and border black.

I run https://c64g.com/

The Amiga, being British, never made it into the cultural nostalgia undercurrent that gets reinforced by US-centric culture. It's made it easier to vanish into a smaller footprint of memory.

(I never had one, but I remember being impressed by friends that did)

What? While the Amiga may have been more popular for games in Britain, it was an American creation. Jay Miner was born in Prescott, AZ.

Yes, and Commodore is absolutely an American company.

I wish the Amiga had been British! :)

Maybe OP is thinking of the Acorn Archimedes, which was also a fantastic computer and was very British.

Or AmigaDOS being closely related to TRIPOS, developed at Cambridge?

I wish I'd appreciated the Archimedes at the time. I didn't. It was a nerdy computer in the IT department at school.

A stupid shame for me to realise how wrong I was, so belatedly, given my first computer was an Acorn Electron (then a Spectrum before Amigas). I should have paid more attention to Just How Cool Zarch was, versus the Also Cool Virus on the Amiga.

I still plan on buying an Archimedes if I ever get around to having a proper house and making myself a nerd room... .

I remember doing AmigaBASIC but I have no idea how I did it to this day. Sadly my Amiga 500's wound up in the trash back in 2010 when I decided I finally didn't need them anymore. Along with a broken 1084s. Wished I had kept them for some strange reason...

I don't know...

Starting from workbench 3.1, Amiga had a far more advanced desktop than PC/Mac would see for a long time.

Even today on win11, when you switch from desktop to a game in a different resolution there is a small lag. On Amiga you could have different screens with different resolutions displayed _simultaneously_.

This is awesome! It really takes me back to when computers seemed amazing. (Yeah they do a million times more things now, but we are used to that.)

When Amiga was new, it offered so many incredible things that most people had never seen. PCs were horse drawn carts compared to the Amiga sportscar...

4096 colors! The SID audio which could play multiple tracks and speak far better than anything before.

For programming, just a few lines of code could demonstrated pre-emptive multitasking by "racing" two graphic progress bars.

Games were mindblowing. Silkworm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syk0yecayBo) with two human players on the same computer, multi-parallax background, incredible sampled explosions and music soundrack, etc. etc.

Edit - I forgot Lemmings! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgDS-16UFA&t=4372s

I got an Amiga A1200 as a kid at Christmas. The first one was a dud, so slightly disappointed. But my dad came home with a replacement from Dixons a couple days later. I didn't have high hopes of it doing anything, but we put a disk in and powered it up. I distinctly remember that moment the a strange synth pitch bending sound started playing, causing mild alarm, followed by this parallel scrolling scene [1]. There were a few of us there, our collective jaws dropped.

I spent many years after that dabbling with electronic painting on Deluxe Paint IV, which had a terrific balance between being fun for someone who had no clue, but also opened up so many advanced features if you dug a bit (animation, morphing, colour cycling, brushes, gradient fills), and I've struggled to find something similarly joyous for my kids. I learnt to make music on Octamed. And I have so many fond memories of all the games I played; the little worlds we created in our heads where computer characters existed.

Partly as a result, I have enjoyed playing computer games with my kids. I join in with them playing Zelda BOTW, and minecraft. I know that they will look back fondly on these imaginary worlds. However, I do wish I could get them more interested in the creative side of digital art. Maybe that will come later.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkhNi3RwUY

I think silkworm was the game that used DMA to load graphics tiles on the fly from the floppy disk, was pretty impressive for the time.

SID was the C64/128 sound chip. Amiga used the bespoke Paula chip to drive audio output.

I got a Guru Meditation for having javascript disabled - that's a nice touch

Also used for the Amega Event 37 page: https://amigaevent.de/WB.html

My Amiga 4000 booted right into VideoToaster. So it took me a couple of months before I really started messing with stuff in Workbench. Turns out, the used machine we bought to run our post production studio, had Directory Opus, Deluxe Paint, a coax NIC, multiple HDs. Our HD failed at one point and we found ourselves trying to reload the Toaster software from our box of floppy disks. One of the last disks was hosed so we had to drive hours to another city where a guy agreed to reload the software from another set of disks... if we gave him our NIC. We never got any of the other software back since we didn't have the original boxes.

Ahhh, a multitasking single user personal computer; the pinnacle of personal computing. AFAIK, Amiga, it’s variants and Haiku are the only OS’s left that fall in this category.

This brings back fond memories of my A1000 with Workbench 1.3.

It's still amazing what this machine was capable of given it's very limited resources back in the day.

Anybody remember Fred Fish shareware/public domain? I hung out at a local computer store and copied dozens of floppies in the heydays of the Amiga.

That's very cool

Hah, and visiting the page with Javascript disabled gives you an "Enable Javascript to continue" message styled like a Guru Meditation error. Nice touch.

this is amazing such smooth design, does anybody know if the source code is available somewhere?

It gives me warm fuzzy feeling

It is not really the same as the real deal, but it looks quite nice.

In development since 2001! Impressively familiar to me

Memories.

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