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Comment by kzhahou | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga was undeniably magical for those lucky enough to experience it in the 80s. We've seen lots of magical platforms since (mobile, tablet, maybe VR soon). I often wonder what about the Amiga took hold so strongly. Was it just that it was so much more advanced experientially than its peers, or the fun personality down to the hardware naming, or some more technical aspect? Is that magic still alive for young people today when they first explore ipad+xcode development, or (maybe in the future) Rift devt?

If you were to design a system today to try to re-create that magic for young developers and users, what would it look like?

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I think that contemporary platforms can't have distinctive graphics / audio where you can look at a screen and say "that's a ZX spectrum game!" or hear a buzz and know "it's a C64 tune!". So the distinctiveness gets limited to the physical design of the device (for the looks) and maybe some default start-up and other sounds (for the sound).

You said VR - I suppose the first VR platform with full field of view could be rather memorable, but the first software won't be ported especially for it unlike just about any ZX Spectrum game...

I feel that the limiting factor is now software, not hardware. There are way more great PS4 games in our imagination than in reality, while, with the ZX Spectrum, most of our imagination easily outran the platform's ability. This made each platform advancement more exciting. I couldn't care less when the new Samsung Galaxy 7 comes out because there's no software I want that my Galaxy 3 can't run.

But that's just how I feel as someone born 6 years after the ZX Spectrum. So someone younger will have to comment to really answer your question.

I think somehow we're wired to get attached to a system architecture and how people create representation that will create sensations/emotions in you. A sense of using the bandwidth of a system to its limit. A holistic interaction that is not filled by high density / high resolution (I like the sound of FM radio more than clear CD-A, I enjoy using an old Nexus S for its low-res LCD even though my moto G is high DPI).

When I went to the computer store as a kid, there was the amiga 500:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yJNGwIcLtw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkKxJw-jB5Q

And then there was the PC:

http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/images/phantasietowncga.jpg

Amiga had one of the best planar GPUs ever build. This was great in the eighties and made it a cult classic. Hardware assisted 2D planar gpu could do miracles with weak CPU.

This was also Amiga downfall, as planar graphic modes became irrelevant in the nineties. As soon as you get into ~486DX2/66 territory you have enough pure CPU to render chunky(13h) mode in software.

I'd always wondered about this. Planar always just seemed a horrible way to try and think about a screen.

What made it faster? Is it just that the hardware could be simpler? Curious to know.

CPUs had poor support for addressing memory as 5 bit bytes, for one. 32-color paletted mode was really a sweet spot for pixel graphics and limited (512k) memory. It looked much better than 16-color which could sort of work with byte addressing.

You could compose out of, say, 3 bpp sprites or layers. Or you could make 1bpp "control" bitplanes that, when fed to the blitter, would fill your polygons scanline by scanline. (The blitter can also make these for you using the harware line drawing support) All the graphics hardware could be bit depth agnostic but still do 1bpp operations 5x as fast as 5bpp operations. And do it asynchronously with CPU doing other stuff concurrently. Saved memory bandwidth, memory space, and CPU time - all of which were very tight and CPU had no cache.

Related note, there also used to be bit-sliced CPUs that didn't have hardwired byte lengths.

On the PC, VGA had a "byte-planar" mode that combines some of the advantages of planar and chunky graphics that had further advantages in eg filled polygon rendering over "plain" chunky mode.

> what would it look like?

That's the raison d'etre of the raspberry pi, which appears to be really popular... with middle aged men who grew up with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 and Amiga!

It's pretty close, but until we have sufficient open or reverse-engineered information on the videocore it's not really the same. Much of the Amiga's fancyness came from creative use of the video chipset.

A modern comparison might be the "layerone" demoscene board, which is a PIC24 with a VGA connector: http://hackaday.com/2015/05/26/layerone-demoscene/

I think the Amiga was pretty revolutionary when it launched. Without any accessories, it had stereo sound output and pretty impressive color graphics. And it was affordable (esp. the 500). PCs didn't really get anywhere close in that department until the whole Multimedia PC thing happened in the early 90s.

And as you mention VR, the Amiga powered the first generation of Virtuality SU1000 & SD1000 arcade machines!

using Unity and Cardboard to build stuff for steam boxes and rifts / etc... I hope

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