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Comment by Daviey | Hacker News Reader

As someone that thanks Amiga for introducing me to my passion for technology (specifically the 500), I am really impressed that active development is happening on a 35 year old platform.. But somewhat surprised.

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It's a lot of fun, still! I touched on it in my "Amiga Systems Programming in 2023" post[1] which had some discussion here[2]. In the few years since then there's been lots of development still across the whole scene. OS4 is largely stagnating (although I still fire up my X5000 whenever I have a chance) but the classic 68k scene is positively thriving.

Lots of great software & homebrew games, and the hardware options now are just amazing. There's FPGA, emulation, PiStorm accelerators, Vampire, re-amiga... and only this month, Hyperion released an updated OS3.2[3].

It was (and is) such a versatile, forward-thinking platform and I still very much enjoy seeing how far the community can take it.

[1]=https://www.markround.com/blog/2023/08/30/amiga-systems-prog...

[2]=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37389376

[3]=https://www.hyperion-entertainment.com

Just about every old platform seems to have a bunch of people building hardware stuff like this and writing new software. For 1980s stuff it's just all a lot simpler than it was back then, and what was cutting edge at the time is hobbyist tier today.

For software, you have modern computer power to bring to bear on the problem. Assembly/compilation/precomputation/prototyping is far quicker, and the debugging possibilities with an emulator are way ahead of anything you'd ever have had at the time. For hardware items there are freely available design tools, many cost-effective options for small production run manufacture, and for stuff like the Amiga (where nothing happens at more than about 16 MHz) logic analyzers are cheap.

And the Internet makes discussing things a lot easier too!

It’s just fun to program close to the hardware. On modern systems there are 10 layers between your program and the silicon.

Same. The Amiga got me started with C programming, eventually leading me to Linux, etc.

In hindsight, do you think you would have benefited more using Turbo Pascal on a PC?

Having had both available, Amiga definitely benefited me more.

Nah, late 90's I switched to PC but didn't feel at "home" until I discovered Linux (slackware, then Debian and friends)

Did you ever try Turbo Pascal? In the mid 80s, it had no equal.

Not the OP, but I started programming on Apple II, then PC, and eventually the Amiga. The Amiga had stuff like multitasking and IPC that "real" operating systems (like Unix) had. Turbo Pascal on DOS was fun, but it was all very simplistic. Windows was a thing but the barrier to entry was too high.

40 year old platform. That’s when Amiga 1000 was released.

I said 35 years, because the description on github includes these models:

  1. Amiga 3000 (1990)
  2. Amiga 3000T (1991) - Tower version of the 3000
  3. Amiga 4000 (1992)
  4. Amiga 1200 (1992) - Released shortly after the 4000
  5. Amiga 4000T (1994) - Tower version of the 4000
  6. Amiga 4000CR (1996) - Cost Reduced version
  7. Amiga 4000TX - No idea and not heard of it before

So they designed five board layouts of the ROM replacement for various revisions of hardware. That's some real dedication.

To be fair it's mainly just a case of changing the pin spacing

>Amiga 4000TX

Me neither, but this seems to be a video about this build:

https://youtu.be/i7wW5COUTGU

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