The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks | Hacker News Reader

The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks

datagubbe.se

240 pointsarexxbifs62 comments

The X-COPY user interface[1] was very powerful, watching the little squares slowly fill with color while hearing the floppy drive painfully squeaking and grinding was an experience in itself.

Operating system standardization have killed this kind of creative interface, it's probably for the best, but I'm pretty sure something bold and colorful can still happen and make a difference to users.

[1] https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/a5003-crop-2302041155-01....

> Operating system standardization have killed this kind of creative interface

It's coming back with Electron and other frameworks for apps in the browser. Of course these must also be responsive to multiple window sizes and input styles, whereas on home computers you could always rely on a fixed-size screen and standard mouse/keyboard/gamepad as inputs.

One scene where this may still happen is the pico-8 community, they all work on a single 'device' with fixed dimensions, resolution and capabilities. The demoscene for that one is also pretty impressive.

There's a few similar "fantasy consoles" with different amounts of restraints. Oh, and there's the Playdate console, which also seems to have a pretty vibrant community - they're limited to greyscale graphics though.

I like how all these things emphasize how they're professional tools while having user interfaces would not look out of place in a video game.

Besides video games of course, it looks like the only field where people still get creative with their interfaces is in music production software.

Spent a lot of my youth staring at this screen. Still remember the bong sounds it used to make

Operating system standardization have killed this kind of creative interface

Clearly there is a yearning among users — even technical users — for more creative, colorful, and interesting interfaces.

That's why we have multiple variations on sixels, dozens of libraries for drawing charts in the command line, hundreds of colors were added to terminals, and thousands of tutorials for customizing command prompts.

I loved the old menu screens. I remember one on the C64 that had a little spaceship in the left screen border. It could be moved up and down with the cursor keys, the space bar made it shoot at the menu entries. If you hit one, you had it selected successfully, if you missed, the projectile was reflected from the right screen border. If you were not quick enough to move the ship out of the way you'd shoot yourself down. A tiny and very upset space creature emerged from the damaged vehicle and dragged it off the screen.

I still believe being able to portray an upset alien in like seven or eight pixels is true art.

> Size saving CLI commands

For those unfamiliar with the Amiga culture, it's worth pointing out that this frequently includes shaving bytes off tools. I remember more than once disassembling some CLI utility to strip out a few bytes here and there (seeing the poor, wasteful quality output of early C compilers delayed my switch from asm to higher level languages by at least a couple of years...).

Not just for the sake of saving disk space, but because you'd either make them resident in memory or copy them to a RAM: disk so you could more easily swap floppies and still have your tools available, and when you had 512KB or 1MB of RAM, every little bit made a difference.

Using something as monstrously bloated and needlessly wasteful as C would never have crossed my mind in those days.

It's fun checking in on the Amiga discussion forums now and again and seeing people still posting hand-optimised versions of standard AmigaOS libraries with additional clock cycles shaved off...

Some of the early code was actually BCPL.

True, hence the horrible BPTR/BSTR types (requiring shifting the pointer two bits). Most of the rest of the OS was written in C, but I think the point was that for a whole lot of us mere users of AmigaOS, writing in C felt horribly inefficient. E.g. the C compilers didn't know about the OS guarantees of which registers would not get clobbered by calls into system libraries, and so would unnecessarily reload the library base address all the time, for example, before considering the lack of all kinds of optimisations in the C compilers most of us had access to.

AmigaOS is beautiful.

dos.library is a pus-filled abscess that simply does not belong anywhere near it.

It is unfortunate they were in a hurry and just tucked tripOS in there.

The ABI also makes you pass said pointers in data registers, unlike other libraries in AmigaOS, instead of address registers, because of course there'd be little point passing them in address registers when they need to be transformed for use. Horrible.

There's additional uglyness elsewhere. Like processes vs tasks, or the IPC ports. It ends up adding overhead, a layer of bad grease on top of exec.library.

That X-Copy Screenshot was a blast from the past. A friend and I used to combine our pocket money, goto a local independent sport shop that had a tiny Amiga game corner and buy a game then X-Copy it. None of us remember how we learned about that. Was probably the guy in the sport shop itself. Amazing days.

Hah yes X-Copy, dreading a red? square on a bad copy, and wasnt there some kind of grinding noise trying to copy non spec disks?

You'd get numbers in red instead of a green zero, for any track where there was some issue.

Oh yes, a trip down memory lane... some notes:

> Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two).

These memory expansion cards went into the "expansion trapdoor" at the bottom of the A500 and most of them included an RTC - without that, you had to enter the date and time at every startup (of course only if you cared for your files having correct timestamps and other such stuff). I had one of those before I got a "Power PC Board" (https://mingos-commodorepage.com/sammlung/erweiterungen_deta...) because I needed something MS-DOS-compatible. The good thing was: when the "PC" wasn't in use, it not only doubled as a 512 KB expansion + RTC, but you also had a whopping 512 KB RAM Disk where you could copy some often-used programs to reduce floppy disk swapping.

> Fred Fish's AmigaLibDisks

Of course everyone (except maybe Fred Fish himself) called them "Fish Disks"...

>and most of them included an RTC

If you have one of these around, please remove the expansion and cut the battery off before it damages the expansion and possibly the Amiga too.

It's a common misconception that the A501 expansion included an RTC - it was actually a time bomb.

Indeed, I had that very setup, but with a little twist... I still have my very weird oddity which is an external, non-official, 5"1/4 (not 3"1/2, like most people had) floppy drive. Among our group of friends we'd all do that because, at that time and in the EU at least, 5"1/4 floppies were so much cheaper than the 3"1/2 ones that for the price of about 3 boxes of 3"1/2 floppies we could buy 3 boxes of 5"1/4 floppies and the external 5"1/4 floppy disk drive reader (which I take it were assembled by amateur/hobbyist: they didn't look anything like official drives and were very raw, bought through friends-of-friends-of-friends).

Now that Amiga Internet forums are flourishing people have accepted that this was a thing (there are even rare pictures of the thing) but in the past I've had Amiga users explain me that this didn't exist and that I was seeing things (!).

To make the matter even more confusing Commodore did sell official 5"1/4 drives for the Amiga too, but these were different.

The "bootleg" 5"1/4 were, for all matter and purpose, identical to the 3"1/2 ones and we'd install a switch on the Amiga to decide if we were booting from the 3"1/2 or 5"1/4 and the OS had zero way to tell the difference.

So these disks had the exact same capacity? or could fit more data?

In practice, it was the exact same identical capacity. The OS couldn't see any difference. We'd use them as exact replacement of the 3"1/2 disks.

So we'd use them as double-sided 880 KB floppies.

The track format is what is different.

Note that in a PC, the controller abstracts the tracks from the operating system. You read and write sectors, floppy controller does everything.

In an Amiga, the controller reads and writes raw data, full tracks. CPU does handle the format of the track.

The track format is described in chapter 2 of the ADF FAQ[0]. The main reason it is more efficient is that there's no gaps between sectors; only one gap after the end of the track. This is because the Amiga way is to read or write a full track, starting at any sector in the track.

One reason the PC's controller does not do this is the cost of RAM when the PC was introduced. A full raw track takes a significant amount of memory.

0. http://lclevy.free.fr/adflib/adf_info.html#p2

If you like this, you'll probably like some of the books published by Bitmap Books [1].

Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium, for example [2]

[1] https://www.bitmapbooks.com/ [2] https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/by-system/products/c...

I was responsible for creating a piece of shareware called 'RADBench' that part-eliminated the need for the second external disk drive, instead copying the essential utilities onto a re-usable RAM disk that survived reboot. It was a bit like having a hard drive, but without actually having to buy one!

Back in the day I wrote a simple script for setting a bootable RAD up, which I never shared because I thought it'd be pointless.

It wasn't too hard. Just mount a ramdrive.device volume of enough size, mark it as bootable, copy the minimal files for it to be usable, or just icon.library, loadwb, a few commands and a startup-sequence.

This reminded me of Turbo Imploder, an Amiga file compression utility with a synth soundtrack and scopes: https://youtu.be/vFbrYsXDM4w?t=189

The Save File dialog had a second soundtrack (played briefly at 3:45).

Turbo Imploder 4.0, with its new-style UI and a new Save File soundtrack: https://youtu.be/okJHO-176fg?t=245

The composer is Paul Van Der Valk, also known for Hybris.

He did a few good tunes on the Amiga, and also wrote his own tracker/replayer software called Medley. May he rest in peace.

I miss those type of graphics. They added an element of fantasy that you just don't get nowadays.

We keep chasing realism for the graphical frontend and its depressing.

I use WindowMaker with GNUstep daily, and GNUstep theme for GTK2/3 and QT5.

I don't like these new modern flat themes, they look like a medical prospect from a medicine.

What's most depressing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

Any company still rocking that style, including Apple's recent advertising looks woefully out of touch in 2023.

It's depressing, but here's the cure.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/e57bGfHEHy4/hqdefault.jpg

Perhaps someday we can have a realtime filter from corporate crap style to 80s hacker style, perhaps using stable diffusion.

I used to love this kind of stuff on the Amiga. My Dad would take me to computer fairs where there'd be random floppy disks being sold, sometimes with programs or games or even cheats and cracks on them.

I once had an Amiga utilities disk from a friend in the UK, it was called something like The Carpet Monster's Utilities and it was awesome. I wish I still had a copy, so on the offchance that anyone seeing this comment now or in the future, has it, please let me know!

I loved my Amiga 500. All my friends at the time also had one.

And then later on my Amiga 1200 with an actual hard drive. With the then excellent Amiga Workbench.

Whilst I tinkered with Basic on C64 and the 500 it was with EasyAmos on the 1200 I properly started my programming interest.

Back when machines could be fully understood, happy memories for me too, getting the first hard drive (some kind of side caddy thing from a computer show in London) and the speed of it! especially loading DevPac up for some 68000 possibly 68020 by then? I think my 2 player pacman with level editor is still sat on that disk, whatever happened to that I wonder...

Ah, the joy when I managed to cram both the compiler and the linker on a single diskette, so I didn't have to switch diskettes every time I compiled!

I think it was Matt Dillon's DICE C compiler. A true legend, Matt.

I had the same experience with DICE C. I am not sure I ever managed to get the compiler, linker, the system headers, and my source to live on a single disk.

Once I got a second disk drive some creative tinkering with a small RAM disk allowed me to compile without switching disks. Then I could sit back and watch my custom Mandlebrot generator slowly work its magic.

And this is the same Matt Dillon behind Dragonfly BSD.

That's a lovely collection of screenshots, I'm suprised the LSD Legal Tools series[0] wasn't included, but it does seem to be because the author is selecting for the aesthetic of the menu screen, calling the purely-ASCII ones "uninspired" :(

For a further hit of nostalgia, check out the 1994 Impact DK demo In A World of ASCII [1] which features a lot of demo effects that pretend to look like they were done in the Amiga CLI window

[0] https://www.amiga-stuff.com/pd/lsd-legaltools.html

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sPUVm4WH5U

It was really a shame the Amiga failed as a general purpose machine. In the end, even the ST, which was much better positioned to be one - cheaper to build, could read/write PC floppies, had a standard hard-disk port - failed to make a sizeable dent...

The Amigas can read/write 720KB DD PC floppies but indeed not HD floppies. Starting with the A600 they had an internal IDE port. The "ACSI" port of the ST is a custom/proprietary port which needs an active adapter to interface with standard SCSI.

All Amiga can read/write arbitrary DD and HD floppy formats, as the "controller" is actually pretty dumb, reading and writing whole tracks in magnetic flux format.

The CPU (with help from Agnus's blitter in some versions of trackdisk.device) would encode/decode blocks into sectors into tracks, including MFM encoding.

But the floppy drive they bundled was DD, and to get HD you needed an HD floppy drive capable of spinning at half speed. There's few models with that feature. A4000 bundled one such drive.

The relevant chip (PAULA, which also was the interrupt controller and handled audio and serial port besides floppy) was sadly never upgraded throughout the history of the Amiga.

Unfortunately, the 600 was too expensive and too slow by the time it was released.

They cost a fair share, and Commodore didn't really keep the required momentum after the A1000/500/2000, but most advanced computers of their time cost a bit of money. It's hard to say they didn't make a sizable dent, when both Commodore and Atari held almost the entire European 16/32-bit home computer market of the second half of the 80s and the early 90s. Additionally, both had tons of productivity software next to their massive game libraries.

My family had an Amiga 1200 when I was growing up although I was too young to do anything fancy on it other than play games.

I do fondly remember watching my brother copy disks using X-Copy though and being mesmerized by the UI.

Notice the "Schwarzkopf" killer in the 4th screenshot, a useful tool against the notorious "Saddam" virus (which could be activated simply by inserting a disk into your Amiga).

It's very different from PC's shareware disks which were not as charming(if it can be compared...).

That was a trip down memory lane. I loved the Amiga, I owned 3 of them at one stage, but ended up moving on after the collapse of Commodore. Still has a place in my nostalgic heart though

There is PiMiga distribution which is Amiga workbench + emulation on RaspberryPi. The torrent is 22GB (6oGB unpacked) of Amiga software. If anyone wants to play with retro computing.

goes real well and appropriate with Rpi 400!

Ah, the legendary Norris compression technique. A classic.

Im quite sure this is supposed to be Udo Lindenberg

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=udo+lindenberg+80er+jahre&t=midori...

Note the UDO on the menu ...

While you may be correct, I'd caution it could be dangerous to attempt re-identifying any portrait of The Chuck.

For me, it's safety first... whoever it was, it's now Chuck Norris.

Those graphics are so amazing. Leather jacket, liquor, cigarette, mullet, and finished off with sunglasses.

Chuck Norris is so strong he can decrunch himself. Twice.

Crafting Amiga utility disks was a bit of a subculture in the Amiga community.

I recall hacking my favorite utilities onto such a disk, and getting some 'copper' bars bouncing in the background. Think I used some non blue disks at the time too, or maybe they came later.

The demo scene was maybe a bigger group, and still going I think.

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