40 Years of the Amiga | Hacker News Reader

40 Years of the Amiga

goto10retro.com

84 pointsrbanffy37 comments

In my opinion, an important detail is missing here. The Amiga 2000 was my first computer, and what made it special was that it had a PC bridgeboard with an 8088 CPU[0]. I remember it never worked properly, but being able to access MS-DOS and program in GW-BASIC was amazing to me. At least I could convice my parents at the time that I would use the computer not only for gaming but for also for school homework ( we had a class for learning programming/informatics )

[0]: https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-bridgeboard-the-pc-compatibil...

On the A1000 there was a 'sidecar' you could buy. It was an XT equiv, and also the only way to get a hard drive at that time.

You'd add the sidecar, add an MFM controller, MFM drive, and you could use it from the Amiga.

You had to boot off floppy for kickstart, and another to get access to the sidecar, but just awesome it was.

I remember being very excited to get the bridgeboard for my A2000... and not that long afterward, getting fed up with it and getting a white box PC clone to sit next to my Amiga instead.

Did you ever try doing your programming exercises in AmigaBASIC instead? It was also made by Microsoft, so it should have been quite compatible with GW-BASIC.

AmigaBASIC was both great and awful at the same time. On one hand it integrated quite well - you could write an interface definition that'd let it call system libraries relatively easily, and so could do a lot with it - but it was also buggy, and fell by the wayside pretty quickly on the Amiga in favour of AREXX (which was awful as a language, but the ability to script all your applications was fantastic)

Buggy? Aside from the abuse of the upper 8 bits of 32 bit pointers that prevented its use on newer CPUs, I don't recall hitting a lot of bugs in AmigaBASIC. Perhaps my memory is just old and faded.

That was the main/biggest one. I don't recall specifics on anything else - it wasn't much worse than most other software of the era.

Amiga BASIC was Microsoft's first BASIC with a GUI and first BASIC without line numbers. It's not very good.

A friend of mine had some emulator stuff for the A500, that at least was good enough to run MS-DOS and the Turbo Pascal 3 high school assignments, that beautiful yellow inspired "IDE".

I don't recal the name.

I started Amiga emulation with Transformer to run a COBOL IDE from 1983. Then switched to various A500 hardware emulation such as KCS PowerPC board and AMAX. Such a brilliant time.

I've mentioned this on various threads before, but my Amiga 2000 with a bridge board and SCSI controller was a wonderful example of 1980's convoluted heterogenous multi-processing:

- The 68k, of course + an 68020 accelerator

- The 8088 + a 286 accelerator

- A Z80 on the SCSI card

- A 6502 compatible SOC on the keyboard...

As an Amiga user it obviously pleased me immensely that the 68k controlled the lot.

Like you, I hardly used the bridgeboard, though. It's main role was to show off the ability to run a "PC in a window".

For those that missed the opportunity to go to VCF West this year, I should say they put on quite the dog and pony show for the Amiga. The platform was given such huge fanfare for its 40th anniversary, with many of the original Amiga staff from the 80s present. Some videos will start to trickle up on YouTube over the coming weeks.

Thanks for the heads up, I had lots of fun with previous recordings, where they had staff telling their UNIX backgrounds, the ideas for a graphical workstation, and how actually the ideas ended up becoming Amiga due to various changes along the way.

I was there. Absolutely amazing show. The high-fidelity walk-through recreation of the 'secret back room' in Amiga Corp's 1984 CES booth with the original wire wrap board stacks running original Amiga demos like the legendary red & white bouncing Boing ball was incredible. They used photos to match every detail down to the color of the walls, decoration and position of the gear on the tables.

The Boing ball was demo was completed the night before the show by two programmers who worked all night in the booth and left it running as they fell asleep on the booth floor. The normal booth staff arrived in the morning and got to be the first people to ever see it running. Amazing story and incredible that engineer Dale Luck saved so much of that original gear and has gotten it working again.

For anyone interested in this I can recommend the book, The Future Was Here. It really explains the Amiga hardware and how it was used. It even goes into how the bouncing ball demo works, and once you know all the tricks it could use on the Amiga, you can see why other computers of the time had to work so hard to recreate it.

Seconded.

I also like the Brian Bagnall books (beware: There are two multi-volume editions, the second edition is far larger which is good/bad depending on how interested you are) but they are much more for those already interested in Commodore, though "Commodore: The Amiga Years" on its own is worthwhile for people interested specifically in the Amiga.

Maher's The Future Was Here is much more accessible to people who has want a lighter read and/or don't have a personal relationship to the Amiga and Commodore, though.

Also, David Pleasance's book about Commodore UK as Britain was the largest market for Amigas in the late 80s and early 90s. Gives real perspective.

Yes, absolutely. It's a lot more personal than the other two as well. The inside perspective was very interesting.

(I remember 64738...)

I would say followed by Germany, Portugal and Spain, among other European countries.

I was not pleased to be the only guy on our highschool computing group with a PC, but at least there was plenty of home demoscene like parties across the group's places, that I knew enough Amiga stuff as if I also owned one.

I think the big deal with the UK was that Commodore UK went their own way and really doubled down on the game bundle market, which was a big part of how they survived the Commodore International bankruptcy (for a bit) and even attempted to arrange a buyout of their parent company.

Commodore did great in terms of sales in quite a few European countries, but their subsidiaries in those other countries didn't do as well as Commodore UK.

The other exception was Commodore B.V. in the Netherlands that also survived the bankruptcy and stayed afloat selling old stock until early 1995 (Commodore UK stayed afloat until August '95, so it's not like they survived very much longer).

As always, I can't recommend enough a very thourough dig into the system and its history that was posted in multiple parts on ars technica. Really well put together.

https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/

It was great for its time, having been there I think the recreations hardly make the point of what meant being able to use an Amiga during the 1980's hardware landscape of home computers.

Hence why I find funny the discussion about the US point of view, educated playing games in consoles, about the raise of PC gaming.

In Europe, gaming and indie development (back then bedroom coders), was all about 8 and 16 bit home computers, our consoles were arcade machines, and wanting to code at home games that in our dreams would get close enough to them.

Amiga was one of the best options at that.

Only the winners write history which is why Commodore, Amiga, and Atari seldom get mentioned unless brought up. The intent is to paint computing as an entirely PC or Apple based domain. Those who lived it know that wasn't the case, especially in Britain.

Still so excited when I see stories about the Amiga computer. As a kid I spent nights doing stuff with my Amiga 2000, trying to develop animations in Aztec C compiler, writing my own (super inefficient) matrix library, hacking assembler, playing games, it was just unbelievably cool. There were Atari guys and Amiga guys in my hood. And we‘d have endless discussions about which was better. Defining moments. An Apple computer was not affordable in Germany. And my Amiga 2000 must have cost 2000 Deutsch Marks back then.

256 kilobyte of the RAM used as ROM, did not drive cost significantly IMHO.

Such a large ROM would also have been expensive. It was entirely a practical matter - the OS was pretty buggy and Commodore knew it. It was smarter to distribute the firmware/OS on magnetic media vs burning it in forever.

The hard drive story may have been weird, but it was very flexible.

You could in theory design completely new storage hardware today and hook it up to an old Amiga, and the operating system would be just fine because the drivers can be loaded from the device itself.

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

It wasn't really "forever" in the newer Amigas either, though - you could buy replacement ROMs to upgrade.

Worth mentioning the brand has recently been acquired:

https://www.guru3d.com/story/perifractic-completes-commodore...

The Commodore brand is not the Amiga brand. The two have had their own separate histories post-Commodore. Interestingly, Commodore also had a line of x86-compatible PC's, though the prices were out of whack for the average home computer owner. (This only really changes starting in the mid-1990s with the "Multimedia PC" era, and Commodore is already out of the picture by then.)

not again! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20693785 (replies too)

at least his ideas seems less far fetched than a stadium in seattle and a brand new Amiga architecture but it's funny the same thing keeps happening

On this subject: Perifractic (new Commodore owner) and his team did not rule out that they will also take over Amiga.

If that were to happen, that would be amazing!

Don't get your hopes up, Amiga IP is scattered with unclear ownership.

I don’t recall the Mandrill image ever being used in conjunction with Amiga. Jim Sachs creations like this one were more common https://www.reddit.com/r/VintagePixelArt/comments/m1fxm1/sac...

It was, but note it's a scan, and so the point was to show off that it could reproduce photos. E.g. from Compute! September 1985[1].

Sachs was of course also immensely popular, and did enough work that I have no doubt more Amiga users saw his pictures.

Here's a page with a lot more of his pictures[2], including the color cycling effect. (There's also a fantastic comparison far down that page of a sharp version vs. a VHS recording that shows just how much color bleed we had to deal with, and how it affected the art.

[1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issue64/amiga.php

[2] https://amiga.lychesis.net/artists/JimSachs.html

The Mandrill was part of the launch event of Amiga in 1985 at the Lincoln Center. The event also included other famous demos, such as the bouncing ball. https://youtu.be/_QST1ZAJ29o?t=196

There's also the ownership/legal aspect, which is covered in detail in the Amiga Documents[0].

0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

Malotru !

AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com