Classic Amiga titles, free to download | Hacker News Reader

Classic Amiga titles, free to download

amigafreeware.downer.tech

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Wow this is really cool!

Epic to see that it has "No Man's Land" [0] and really really weird feeling to read the readme. No idea why it's listed as a "17 Bit" title though, perhaps they distributed it at some point but they certainly were not involved in creating it. Source: I wrote it. Fun times.

Edit: formatting.

[0]: https://amigafreeware.downer.tech/17bit/17bit/1423

17-bit distributed a lot of redistributable stuff - in this case it's listed as disk 1423 in their collection

Fish disks were an incredible contribution to the Amiga community. The impact of a dedicated and contentious curator cannot be understated.

I think a lot of platforms today could be transformed if they had someone doing a similar contribution to Fred Fish.

I wouldn't be capable of such an effort, I think few people are, and I'm not sure if it can be done in any monetized way. The motivation has to be purely for the quality of the job.

Debians apt repositories come to mind.

> Fish disks

I still gotta play the quirky text adventure game called Fish..

Some background information: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1uzs4g9/amiga_freewa...

When I first got my Amiga I spent all day one weekend copying PD game disks at the local computer store, Think it was like 25 cents to copy one plus price of a floppy. Good times.

FYI, many of these collections are sourced from CD-ROM compilations, and thus they're also in the archive.org collection of CD-ROMs, e.g.: https://discmaster.textfiles.com/cd-rom?search=17+bit

The Amiga, and this era of computing, were before my time. But it is surprisingly fun to browse through some of this stuff, and get insights into the very early days of software development.

My favorite so far is the "Iff Specs Disk", with technical documentation on an ancient container and data format called IFF (Interchange File Format).

Like in the file ea.iff.85 [0], and this section explaining why common data file formats are useful the first place:

"The problem with expedient file formats - typically memory dumps - is that they're too provincial.

By designing data for one particular use (e.g. a screen snapshot), they preclude future expansion (would you like a full page picture? a multi-page document?).

In neglecting the possibility that other programs might read their data, they fail to save contextual information (how many bit planes? what resolution?). Ignoring that other programs might create such files, they're intolerant of extra data (texture palette for a picture editor), missing data (no color map), or minor variations (smaller image).

In practice, a filed representation should rarely mirror an in-memory representation. The former should be designed for longevity; the latter to optimize the manipulations of a particular program. The same filed data will be read into different memory formats by different programs."

Imagine having to explain to a professional developer today why having something like JSON is valuable. Most of us find it obvious.

But there was a time when this kind of thing was not obvious at all; the need for it had to be discovered the hard way, and then solutions invented from first principles.

We really are standing on the shoulders of those who came before us, in more ways than we realize.

[0] https://amigafreeware.downer.tech/17bit/17bit/61/contents/if...

Always fun to go and look up the very first software I sold in this archive.

Don’t keep us in suspense :-)

Oh sorry - it’s actually quite boring it was called Radbench! I had this idea you could load workbench from a TSR RAM disk rather than endlessly swapping floppy disks whenever you wanted to run a command.

which was it?

Does anyone know of a source of the pre-release eagle demo?

From webpage I read: " Search or browse games, applications, demos, graphics, music and tools from the golden age of 32-bit home computing."

But Amiga has a 16 bit CPU... or not?

It's a bit complicated and it depends on what exactly you're measuring. The 68000 CPU has 32-bit registers internally, the address bus is 24-bit, and the data bus is 16.

This is so for A500, but the definitive Amiga is A1200 with 68EC020, AGA and only limited by 24 bit address bus (=16 MB ram). From that on people just installed 030 with MMU and later PPCs if they wanted.

Interesting that you see the definitive Amiga as being the A1200 - the definitive one for me was definitely the A500/A500+ - it was definitely way more popular!

BTW, I don't think the software in this repository is compatible with PPC-based Amigas, is it? (Unless they have the add-on board that runs a 68000-series processor in parallel?)

There were things like BLIZZARD 603e+ that you could just plug into an A1200.

And it would still run 68K code on "companion" 040/060

http://www.phase-5-digital-products.com/TheLegacy/amiga/b603...

I think most Amiga’s had 32-bit registers, but a 16-bit bus.

(So to everything around the CPU they were 16-bit even though internally they could do 32-bit computations)

All Amigas have 32-bit registers, some of them have a 16-bit data bus.

"From a developer's point of view, the 68000 provides a full suite of 32-bit operations but has a 16-bit external data bus and is implemented using a 16-bit arithmetic logic unit, so 32-bit computations are transparently handled as multiple 16-bit values at a performance cost. Also, while addresses are 32-bit, the chip is limited to 16 MB of physical memory using the lower 24 of the address bits.[35][36] The later Amiga 2500, Amiga 3000, Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 models use fully 32-bit, 68000-compatible processors from Motorola with improved performance and larger addressing capability."

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

To me the entire 68K family were always 32-bit CPUs because of the 32-bit data registers. You work with it and write assembly for it in a transparent "32-bit way" like any other 32-bit CPU, with no additional care or work necessary for the programmer in regards to the 68000's external data bus being only 16 bits wide and behind the scenes doing 32-bit transfers in two steps.

Also worth nothing that it's just the early 68Ks that came with a narrow external data bus. The 68020 and onward, which were also used in the Amigas, have a 32 bits wide data bus.

First 2 games I tried it didn't have Lotus turbo Buggy boy

Not obscure games

Appears to be Public Domain games, sort of thing you'd get on magazine disks

A magazine disk was the first time a game containing Sonic the Hedgehog was released. He was thrown into a game as an enemy character in a platformer game (Adventures Of Quik & Silva) without any regard for copyright law. This happened before the actual Genesis/Mega Drive game released.

(and no, that game is not on this site)

Quik & Silva was a banger, noticed a bootleg sonic was in it as a kid but had no idea about that fact. Amazing soundtrack too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXtT3L0zEqs

Something special about growing up with an Amiga instead of just a mainstream console because a lot of the games were opinionated creations from individuals that went viral through physical disk copies rather than everything just coming from a corporation.

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