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Comment by smartmic | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 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.

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".

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.

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 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.

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