ARMiga – home made prototype of the next Amiga | Hacker News Reader

ARMiga – home made prototype of the next Amiga

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71 pointsCorrado35 comments

Anyone trying to replicate the Amiga in 2014 doesn't understand what make it so special 20 years ago.

It was a home system with a powerful GUI, real multitasking, had a CLI if needed, special purpose audio and graphics chipsets blowing out anything else that was available on the home market. No the Atari ST wasn't on the same level. :)

Additional the whole demoscene culture and squeezing the most out of it in 68000 Assembly.

The symbiotic relationship of hardware and software is what made it special.

In the world of multicore and GPGPUs there isn't a space for the old Amiga, except due to nostalgia.

Nostaligia is what this is for, and that's a legitimate reason.

You're right, the Atari ST wasn't on the same level, it was $500 cheaper and had a faster processor.

And still it was slower for almost everything, and had an OS befitting an 8-bit...

EDIT: Now lets get on USENET and start another Amiga vs Atari ST flamewar on comp.sys.aiga.advocacy.

A ZX Spectrum +3 was better that an Amiga and Atari ST in all universes. xD

Don't forget the MIDI though.

Thanks for bringing some memories back, I had a 520 ST after my Amstrad CPC664.

That sounds like me. After that, I went OS/2. These days I fear for any platform I choose.

Ah, good memories of flamewars in pre-Internet age. The Atari ST was a good piece of hardware, but the Amiga was superior in almost everything it did.

The Amiga was more powerful, thanks to its multiple chips offloading the CPU for many tasks, but the ST was a simpler, more elegant, design. In the end, the evolution of the ST family was easier, as the machine was less tied to NTSC timings and other design compromises that betrayed the gaming console origins of the Amiga. TOS/GEM was a very limited stack, but we shouldn't judge the hardware by its default software.

> Anyone trying to replicate the Amiga in 2014 doesn't understand what make it so special 20 years ago.

I think those who try yo replicate the Amiga in 2014 and has any rate of success understand that to a greater extent than most of us. I am glad that I have my A1200, but emulation is getting really good, and is more or less the most comprehensive and accessible documentation of the hardware we have.

> In the world of multicore and GPGPUs there isn't a space for the old Amiga, except due to nostalgia.

As someone who didn't really grow up with computers like the C64, VIC-20 and MSX line, I have certainly had a lot of fun developing for these platforms unencumbered by any innate sense of nostalgia. I suggest reading this fun post by Viznut (of PwP fame): http://www.pelulamu.net/viznut/blog/2008-08-21/

> In the world of multicore and GPGPUs there isn't a space for the old Amiga, except due to nostalgia.

For the old Amiga, no, other than nostalgia which is clearly what these guys are aiming for.

But there's still lots to learn from it. I still yearn for a system that consistently remains as responsive to user input as it did, for example (which it did by a meticulous eye to process priorities and decoupling "everything" into separate tasks; e.g. due to potential slow IO, the clipboard was read/written by a separate task; the console/terminal involved about half a dozen tasks etc.). I also still wish a datatypes like system would take hold, so every app could read/write every image format, including ones not year written, for example (25+ years on, and Amiga apps still gets support for new image formats - even the apps we don't have source for).

And on the Amiga, "everyone" used libraries like XPK that made transparent support for whatever compression algorithm someone preferred in any application that used it, for example (and even if they didn't, you could easily add transparent XPK compression support to your filesystem).

And the pervasiveness of AREXX ports. Even though I detest the language, the presence of AREXX ports "everywhere" was a big deal. Even more so because it was a well know features. "Everyone" knew about AREXX, whereas I've yet to see anyone I know who use OS X actually use AppleScript.

And I still "emulate" Amiga screens in the way I use workspaces on my laptop, with most apps maximized (thankfully, on Ubuntu with Unity I finally have a global menu bar again for most apps).

I have an apple script that syncs the itunes library with another computer on the network.

That being said, I think it's usefulness is as limited as you seem to think it is.

I have hope for the raspberry pi to fill a similar niche. The only thing that's held it back so far was the lack of documentation for the GPU.

Ever since I studied how the *BSD and Linux kernels worked I felt it was not very elegant, it used to be like a web of spinlocks(analogy taken from a mail by Terry Lambert, FreeBSD developer). I think FreeBSD and Linux today use kernel-side threads and mailboxes a bit more, but it's not the foundation of how they work.

I'm hoping for an operating system where the kernel works like the AmigaOS exec.library with Tasks, MsgPorts and Signals, but offer a barrier where the outside could be a traditional ABI like the one Linux offer.

I've not looked, but I think Matt Dillon's DragonflyBSD is heading towards something like that.

Have you looked at Minix yet?

I have the book and have read some of it years ago. I can't remember if the OS-tasks were an isolated process or just a thread in shared memory.

My first comment would be for a kernel built up using threads in shared memory communicating with signals and mailboxes.

They are separate processes. In fact it is possible to restart or replace then on a running system.

Since 3.0, Minix changed the architecture. Now they are full micro-kernel, use NetBSD userspace tools, have EU funding and some commercial clients.

If you wish I can provide more info.

That box was genius. I am to this day grateful that it, not any other platform, was my entry to programming.

And why wouldn't this work today? Imagine getting an awesome piece of kit like your PS3/4 and being able to code on it, run anyone's code on it. Hack it to your heart's content. I reckon that would (a) rock. (b) foster an amazing community. The things that made the Amiga rock could make any specialist piece of hardware rock, what's prevents it is that companies like Sony and Microsoft are anal control freaks.

I'll just keep my real 500 + 4000 for now... Emulation is not very well done still. A lot of games and demos have quirks in the emulators and there are still enough random crashes for me to not to enjoy emulation too much even though I would want to.

Edit: is the disclaimer crap on top mandatory at IndieGogo? I would not imagine anyone from Spain caring about that; I don't anyway; you cannot do much in the EU with that kind of nonsense. It's an honest question though as I don't really like disclaimers and am wondering if this is something Indiegogo makes you do.

I'll sponsor the project anyway as it's a new ARM gadget, it looks nice and it's made in my favorite country :) If not for emulating Amiga, then for other hacking purposes.

Edit: does anyone know why emulation is still not perfect though on modern, very fast machines? I know it's hard to do the timing, but random crashes and some stuff still not working should be ironed out by now? (Example; I haven't found an emulator which can do SOTB 1 fully ; it always just crashes somewhere in the game; it definitely doesn't do that on real hardware).

Regarding the disclaimer, keep in mind that there are companies out there that are actively licensing and defending these trademarks. It's a sore topic in the Amiga community, as the Commodore and Amiga related trademarks are owned by companies that have no ties to the community, and/or are actively hated (Amiga). Amiga Forever is owned by Cloanto, a company that's reasonably popular. Kickstart I'm not sure about, but I believe Cloanto have the license rights to distribute the kickstart files, so they might have rights to the trademark as well - not sure.

In any case, it pays to be careful here - there's a history of multi-year lawsuits. And yes, for someone in Spain too; Cloanto is Italian, and Hyperion (the company publishing the current versions of AmigaOS) is Belgian, and the two current manufacturers of AmigaOne hardware for AmigaOS are respectively Italian (ACube) and British (A-Eon), and while the most litigious party (Amiga Inc.) is US, they've shown in the past they're perfectly happy to sue parties in the EU (multi-year fight with Hyperion), but recently C= Holdings B.V. - a Dutch company that claims to hold worldwide licensing rights for the Commodore trademarks - have also been involved in international lawsuits (suing another company claiming to hold the Commodore trademarks - Asiarim - in New York)

Thanks for clearing that up; that's insightful! I've been in a few of these suits before in the EU (not about Amiga stuff by the way) and I always got away with no more than a slap on the wrist while the stakes on the table were high. I know friends with companies who had similar cases; in the US we would've paid dearly. So I mistakingly then assumed it is normal not to get screwed in the EU by stuff which isn't relevant in most ways today. Sorry for that uniformed remark and thanks for clearing that up!

It's not really that it's normally a big deal in the EU, as long as you're not intentionally and knowingly trying to profit of creating trademark confusion.

But if the other party is intent on making it as painful as possible it can get just as nasty in the EU as in the US simply by tying you up in court for years. And in this case some of the potential litigants seems to be rather delusional.

Any bigger examples of that? Now i'm curious.

Edit: I see you already named lawsuits. Checking out those online now.

True. When Commodore went bankrupt, there were tons of companies who went in court to pick up the assets or confirmed what they owned of the technology. The Amiga Basic was for example made by Microsoft.

Regardless of the legal situation, the wording in the disclaimer is painfully confused.

"[..]trademarks named in this campaign are copyrighted[..]"

Trademarks and copyrights are two very different things, usually with separate laws governing each. Trademarks are usually not copyrighted because they are not eligible for copyright protection due the lack of "creative authorship".

So this is a boxed RPi with an Amiga Emulator?

There are a number of projects out there emulating an Amiga in a FPGA. That makes much more sense.

NO it's not. You misread the article. Check the indiegogo page:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/armiga-project

Interesting, if you use the Zynq the system is already designed, get a zedboard [1] (dual core ARM-A9 + FPGA + HDMI). But perhaps what would be a much better project would be the spirit of Amiga on an ARM system with a blitter and a copper chip. (Although jamming copper changes in during the frame for color rotation was fun, and benchmarking with the green pixel line, the chip itself seemed to have limited use)

Mostly I see it as a call for a "PC" for the current generation which doesn't have one.

[1] www.zedboard.org

It's sad that they're tying open source & hardware to 1M in funding.

They should also sell a version with no drive. Let's be honest - you don't really need the drive. All the disks have already been dumped for you. If for some reason you still have a disk you want to dump there are other ways to do it.

If all you want is to run ADF images, a Minimig is a good alternative. There's a bunch of other FPGA based alternatives too. Or you can pick up refurbished A1200's + WHDLoad (which patches a large number of games to make them installable on harddisk and behave in a system friendly manner)

The drive is the differentiating factor here. If you don't need the drive then you can just load an emulator on any computer, either one of the many ARM boards available or just your PC.

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