The Amiga, Circa 2010 — Dead and Loving It 383
Orion Blastar writes "While many Amiga users have moved on to Linux, Mac OS X, and even, gasp shock, Microsoft Windows, some of us don't want to give up so easily. There are two open source projects that are keeping the Amiga legacy alive even if Amiga Inc. seems to be deader than a doornail and not really doing much but selling old Classic Amiga games for new platforms. Like WINE, there was a project to run AmigaOS 3.1 software for Linux and other platforms, but it evolved instead into an open source operating system named Amiga Research OS, or AROS. AROS is best run inside an emulator, and while it is not a modern OS like Linux, it can be downloaded and run inside of Linux (and the downloads section has more). While it is not ready for prime time yet, it is a promising OS that is being ported to many platforms and uses the user friendly Amiga GUI we Amiga users grew up with." Read on for more.
"OK — maybe AROS is not modern enough for you, and you like Linux instead. Then you might like Anubis OS, as it is a hybrid of AROS and Linux. Much like when Apple took NextStep (based on *BSD Unix and the MACH kernel) and the classic Mac OS to make Mac OS X, this project wants to take Linux and AROS and do the same thing.For those who want the classic Amiga, there is UAE, the Universal Amiga Emulator, which needs kickstart ROMs and boot disk images to work. You can buy them from Amiga Forever; the emulator comes with all the files you need plus other goodies.
For the classic Amiga 68K series, it is recreated via the Minimig, which uses SD cards instead of floppy disks; a must for retro computer hobbyists. AmigaOS 4.1 exists for PowerPC based SAM 440EP systems like the SAM 440Ep systems and parts sold here. (I am not associated with Amiga Kit or Amiga Inc. or any Amiga company. I am just an Amiga user since 1985 and very much into retro computing.)"
2010 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:2010 (Score:5, Interesting)
(not that Win95 was better in any way, but it managed to finally kill the Amiga commercially, most active Amigausers I know gave up around 95-96.)
Re:2010 (Score:4, Interesting)
not that Win95 was better in any way, but it managed to finally kill the Amiga commercially, most active Amigausers I know gave up around 95-96
Not entirely convinced that Windows 95 was to blame. The Amiga- which was *the* machine to have in Europe in the late '80s to early '90s- had already been losing ground to the PC on one side and the Mega Drive and SNES on the other for some time before that.
Commodore had sat on what was basically the same once-revolutionary core hardware and OS for 7 1/2 years with only minor improvements. The A1200 and A4000 offered some notable (but not revolutionary) improvements, but should have come out *at least* a year earlier- by the time they hit in late 1992, the ground had already shifted, and many people had already moved away.
I'd say that '95-'96 sounds about right, regardless of Windows 95. After Commodore went bankrupt in mid-'94, the Amiga was in limbo, stagnating for more than a year. Eventually, in late '95, the new owners announced that they were going to start selling the same, unimproved, three-year-old A1200... for £100 *more* than it cost before the bankruptcy!
They claimed that they had to do this to make their money back, but whether or not this was true (or just a cynical attempt to milk the diehard fans of a doomed format) it was clear- to me at least- that there was no way that this was going to be a success, and that the game was quite obviously up.
Windows 95's launch probably just emphasised that the market had moved on, and that the Amiga had already missed its final chance to catch up.
Re:2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
The Pentium was released in 1993, barely a year before Commodore went bust. The Video Toaster was released in 1990. So you're saying that Windows is so great, it can do what the Amiga was doing three years earlier.
Ever notice how the quality of CG in Babylon 5 dramatically increased after the first season? That's because they dumped their Amigas and Vidoe Toasters in favour of more powerful Pentium PCs.
Wait - *gasp* - you're telling me that as time passes, computer technology gets better? Wow, amazing! If they'd used faster Amigas, it would've got better too. The only reason they couldn't is because Commodore were then bust - so you're saying, Windows is so great, it can compete against platforms that are no longer produced? Amazing!
We had that on PC too, along with the 3D Studio, which is the product line that went on to be used for making films like Iron Man and Avatar.
Only years later. And last time I looked, those films were released recently - so you're saying Windows is so great, it can do better than a platform from 20 years ago? Brilliant!
The thing I love is DOS fanboys trying to use the success of the PC today to justify their purchase of a slow DOS based expensive 286 PC back in the 80s or early 90s. It's hiliarious. The irony is that the ways in which PCs are better today is only because they've added what we took for granted back then on the Amiga (e.g., GUIs, multitasking, coprocessors for graphics).
On top of that, the PCs and Windows of today have nothing in common with the machines of the 80s and early 90s (other than legacy crap that's an embarrassment to keep around). Just as "Macs" today have nothing in common with original Macs. And if Commodore were still around, you can bet that any "Amigas" would be running a different OS on different hardware too. So it's particularly nonsensical to try to use later hardware to justify a purchase 20 years ago, just based on a shared trademark.
Today, I use Windows because I consider it the best today. In the 1990s, I used the Amiga. Use the best tool for the job at the time - if you can only justify your purchasing decision based on what happens to the trademark 20 years down the line, you have a problem.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The "real" 68030 was used because, well, we wanted to use a 68030, the "Embedded Controller" version hadn't been made yet (these used "real" 68030 chips with MMUs that failed the test, at least initially), and, well, you don't put an EC chip in your high-end machine. Also, the A3000 ran UNIX.. the A3000/UX wasn't terribly successful (largely due to Commodore management somewhere pulling their typical stupid moves), but it was the first available System V release 4 outside of AT&T and Sun.
There was no te
Re:2010 (Score:4, Insightful)
Win95 didn't kill the Amiga, the new owners did, coupled with the first viable alternative that was available at the time...Linux.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I tend to agree here. The real die-hard Amiga users probably ended up going to Mac or Linux, and everyone else just went to PCs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The real die-hard Amiga users probably ended up going to Mac or Linux, and everyone else just went to PCs.
The real die-hard Amiga users went to PowerPC accelerators, and everyone else went to Linux or *BSD, mostly on x86 for price reasons. The Macintosh was never a valid substitute for the Amiga on any level, though with the right hardware, the opposite was certainly true.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Dead wrong. Your speculation is fueled by pure ignorance about Amiga users and biased toward Linux. My father and I were about as hardcore as you can get and neither of us had any interest in Linux or any other Unix clone. Five other Amiga users I know also didn't follow suit with Linux. Why? Several reasons. For one, software. At the time Linux didn't (and in many ways still doesn't) have a robust commercial software library. Most Amiga users longed for the day they could walk into any small to mid
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Speak for yourself (Score:3, Insightful)
Rather than simply mod your post flamebait, I think I'll respond to it point-by-point.
For one, software. At the time Linux didn't (and in many ways still doesn't) have a robust commercial software library.
Pure 100% distilled fanboy bullcrap. Posix. Go read up on it. Java might be a nice follow up read - Linux runs that just fine too. I'll leave it up to you to determine their industry impact.
Next, there is the Unix philosophy and culture, which for many of us seemed like yet another group of peo
Re: (Score:2)
...coupled with the first viable alternative that was available at the time...Linux.
You do know Amigans were fanatic gamers, right?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, the Amiga 3000 didn't have built-in graphics that matched the number of colors of the VGA or Macs of the day. On the other hand, none of the PCs or Macs had hard drive performance capable of real video... the Amiga 3000 did. So it's not exactly the situation as described. Most folks using Amiga 3000s were doing video, with Toasters or other video hardware, and the Amiga's lack of color wasn't a killer.
Yes, of course we wanted more. The original project for a next-generation chipset was started in 1988,
Re: (Score:2)
1985-1995 were the years of the Amiga Desktop.
(not that Win95 was better in any way, [...]
It's worth noting that many of the big features of Windows 95 such as:
- Preemptive multitasking
- 32-bit support
- Long filenames
- "Plug & Play" expansion cards
had already been present in the Amiga OS since 1985.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Windows 95 had nothing at all to do with the Amiga's death, commercially. It wasn't even out on the market during the commercial life of the Amiga.
There were two big factors in the Amiga's death. The smaller of the two, but still very substantial, was piracy. While Amigas had a number of very cool niches, the big engine of Amiga sales was home computers, largely driven by gaming. Most of that was in Europe, and at the peak of the Amiga years, piracy was so bad some releases that sold tens of thousands in th
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
..Year of the Amiga Desktop
It's Year of the Amiga Workbench, you fool!
Promising OS (Score:2)
Yeah, Amiga's a promising OS. It's just like my ex-girlfriend's promise to be loyal to me.
Amiga Pansys (Score:3, Insightful)
Atari TOS/GEM ( And later the open sourced MiNT ) was/is still better! So take that! Seriously tho, see where all that bickering got us? Compartmentalized and marginalized into oblivion as the world of mass produced, consumer oriented mediocrity won in the end.... But I suppose at least we are in the same boat now, going nowhere.. A shame really, as a 'PC' just has no soul.
Re:Atari TOS/GEM (Score:2)
Atari TOS wasn't really an operating system in the modern sense of the term. More like a nice version of DOS, complete with 8.3 filenames and no multi-tasking to speak of. GEM wasn't half bad, but it was woefully limited compared to the Amiga windowing system, unless a single running application with a small number of windows was all you needed.
I really liked the Atari monitors though - they were extraordinarily crisp. And the Atari ST hard drives were faster (and more common at first) than ones for the
Move on (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Move on (Score:4, Funny)
There's the joke that with Commodore's marketing "savvy", had they tried to do something like KFC they would have called it "Warm Dead Bird" ...
-uso.
Re:Move on (Score:5, Insightful)
I heard it as marketing sushi as "cold, dead fish."
Cheers from the (long-defunct) Amiga-centric Ack! Phffft! BBS! (circa 1992)
Re: (Score:2)
Hey man, I loved the Amiga as much as anybody. We had an A1000 in 1986 and got an A3000 thereafter. Fine computers, if they had had Apple's marketing acumen, they might have ruled the world. However, it really is time to let go now. Mac OS X is superior in just about every respect, and the hardware is lightyears beyond what CBM had. Emulators are great for nostalgia, we'll always have Nuclear War.
What are you talking about? When Amiga was still alive Macintoshes had Mac OS 6,7,8,9, not Mac OS X.
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
Re:Move on (Score:4, Insightful)
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
Yes. Structurally speaking, Mac OS Classic was about as much an operating system as DOS was (aside from a a very nice GUI programming environment). One application running at a time, and special tricks required to switch to anything else. Programs were statically compiled to access critical system state variables at fixed addresses in low memory, there was no locking, no scheduler, etc. There was no real multitasking because of that, not even cooperative multitasking.
By comparison Amiga OS was a modern multiprocess multitasking operating system in every way except originally there was no memory protection, and no virtual memory. More like a modern embedded system than a general purpose operating system, but *very* fast, and ridiculously easy to program for.
Re: (Score:2)
And Mac OS "classic" was not an OS, was a crash-prone, non-multitasking toy.
MacOS from System 6 had the multifinder (as an option in 6, or all the time in 7-9.) It did multitasking, albeit not very well. Amiga had great multitasking. Both crashed all the time, but the Amiga booted a lot faster.
Re: (Score:2)
That's beside the point. GP certainly meant: the Mac you can get now is better than the Amiga you can get now.
Re: (Score:2)
Hardware light years ahead is it? So can I have multiple resolutions present at the same time on my monitor? No? Amiga wins again! :p
Re:Move on (Score:4, Informative)
I'm afraid it doesn't allow more than a single resolution on my screen at once, it just offers a resizable window. Besides which, we're talking about hardware here.
From wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
Uses of the copper
* It can be used to change video hardware mid-frame. This allows the Amiga to change video configuration, including resolution, between scanlines. This allows the Amiga to display different horizontal resolutions, different colour depths, and entirely different frame buffers on the same screen. The AmigaOS graphical user interface allows two programs to operate at different resolutions in different buffers, while both are visible on the screen simultaneously.
So is the Amiga more powerful than both VirtualBox and the Mac? Again, Amiga wins! :P
Re: (Score:2)
Platform makes Mac look cheap.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
That is why it is much more practical to deal with the Amiga Research OS (AROS) or an Amiga emulator, which both run on x86 boxes. You would have to be quite a diehard or have a very special application to purchase a contemporary PPC Amiga.
It is worth mentioning that when they first came out, Amigas were much less expensive than (color) Macintoshes, and rather less expensive than any remotely comparable PC as well. Most of the games in the PC world ran in four (fixed, ugly) color CGA at the time. Apple II
Re: (Score:2)
Keep in mind that a PS3 has even lower numbers, at least if you want to run Linux,
Well, yeah. And as anyone who has used Linux on PS3 will tell you, its nothing great.
but still provides outstanding floating point performance and is still suitable for many tasks.
Yeah, the tasks of doing obscure math calculations which is what the Cell was made for, but for general purpose use it sucks. Games
Re:Platform makes Mac look cheap.... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but don't forget that AmigaOS doesn't fuck around.
Yeah, it doesn't do anything. It's a corpse.
Re: (Score:2)
Right, so it lurches after the living to consume our tasty, delicious brains, yeah?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Platform makes Mac look cheap.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Talking about MUI reminds me of when I started working with C# and WPF a year and half ago, namely that WPF is very similar to MUI. Both was declarative, has nested widgets, and are very extendable with custom widgets.
The Amiga, Circa 2010 — Dead and Loving It (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't listen to the disparaging remarks on slashdot. I would never have known even the little I know about Amiga, had it not been for the articles here on
Obviously reality matters (time and commitments etc) but if you guys can build a system in your own time that works keep doing it, it may even become a big deal to every one some day. enjoy [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
To be fair, the 1985 Amiga wasn't nearly as powerful, nor as capable, as the 1995 Windows PC.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
To be fair, the 1985 Amiga wasn't nearly as powerful, nor as capable, as the 1995 Windows PC.
A 1985 Amiga could multitask better than any 1995 Windows PC. That leaves out OS/2, which was much more capable than Windows circa 1995, but hardly anyone ran OS/2, either. OS/2 met the same fate as the Amiga - epic mismanagement. If the Amiga had survived and continued to evolve, adding protected mode and VM, it still would have been far ahead of anything in 1995. Too bad CBM cheaped-out on evolving the hardware to
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, the 1985 Amiga wasn't nearly as powerful, nor as capable, as the 1995 Windows PC.
My 1995 Windows PC needed an add on graphics card, plus a sound card to do anything but beep. It also needed to boot into DOS to run games -- except minesweeper and solitaire. It sure didn't have a speech synthesizer. It also didn't have a software installer as part of the OS -- ok, Amiga didn't get that till a little after '85. It didn't really multitask. No NTSC (or PAL) output. No stereo sound even with the sound card. In 1995, I was still booting my '89 Amiga for stuff my Win/DOS PC wouldn't do l
Re: (Score:2)
Did you ever use the two side by side?
The average '95 PC running Win95 took 10 times as long to boot, file manager took ages to open and display icons, programs took often a minute or more to load and it was hell to configure all the hardware
In the meantime, on Amiga 1200 (no PowerPC CPU) the GUI reactions were nearly instantaneous, programs took 1-2 seconds to load, and mostly all hardware just worked as you plugged it in.
Sure the PC had more RAM and MHz but its OS was more than capable of eating it all up
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
Um, what hardware monopolies are you talking about? Yeah, just about everything is x86 now, but I wouldn't call either AMD or Intel a monopoly in CPU terms. Same with graphics cards, its about 50% nVidia and 50% ATI though most everyone who isn't a gamer uses integrated graphics.
And if you want things to work really well on -your- hardware then try running Gentoo and compiling everything with high levels of optimization.
One of the main reasons why everything isn't hardware centric is because peopl
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Insightful)
one could talk about an x86 monopoly, which is a weird instruction set, based on a weird CPU architecture. Though the architecture has by now been mostly microcoded away, it makes me sick every time I see x86 assembly code. Even Intel thinks they can do better now, but their RISC and later VLIW efforts failed in the face of x86-entrenchedness (trying to match x86 assembly ugliness with that word !)
there's also a kind of directX graphics monopoly: though ATI and nVidia go about implementing it in different ways, basically all they do is target directX, which does simplify things for developpers but prevents really innovating designs. OpenGL is tacked on as an afterthought, but all openGL seems to do these days is play catch-up.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
but their RISC and later VLIW efforts failed in the face of x86-entrenchedness
No, they failed because Intel does not seem to employ a single person who can design a decent instruction set. The i860 and Itanium both managed to produce something even more hideous than x86. Both have some nice ideas, but producing a compiler that generates decent code for either is insanely difficult. Both had a huge theoretical throughput advantage over x86, but both failed to deliver. The i860 could perform twice as fast as an 486 with carefully optimised code on both, but was slower with code tha
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Better is a strong term. It's not quite as bad. You have a few more registers and, more importantly, most of the instructions can now use any register as a target instead of just eax, but it's still pretty nasty. Compare it to something like ARM and it's hideous. The other nice thing about x86-64 is that they got rid of segments. Having a segments is nice in theory, because it lets you do things like object or array bounds checking in hardware. It's terrible in practice on x86 because you can only hav
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
MacInTalk (or whatever they call it now) has been in Mac OS since day one in 1984. One of the famous demos involved the original Mac "introducing itself" using it.
Now, I think, every OS has that support. Not sure if Windows has a CLI command for it, but it wouldn't be tough to write a quick VBScript or something to provide one, if you really had a need.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:5, Insightful)
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Sorry, you can keep this feature. I, for one, like having things like disk caching that works.
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Fullscreen windows. Why slide them up and down when you can switch with Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab. Also check out Virtual desktops, you might like them.
Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
On the Mac at least you can do this:
ls | say
Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)
Filesystems have come a long way, check out something like btrfs [wikipedia.org]
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
How about tucking the slim and very flat keyboard on top of the foot of an iMac. Or, use a wireless keyboard where you can move it out of the way anywhere you like.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
I like to have modern abstractions, like a HAL, so my OS doesn't need to be written in hand-tuned assembly specifically for the hardware I'm running it on. Even in the relatively closed ecosystem that runs Mac OS X there's far more variety in hardware that the one OS image will run on than there was in Amiga land. What kinds of tasks could a 7MHz Amiga do that would cause your 2GHz PC to struggle? I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Even back in the mid 90's when Amiga fans were extolling the virtues of the custom hardware in the Amiga, on the PC side of things we were able to achieve much of the same by brute force. Copper Bars - done by palette switching very quickly in the horizontal retrace interval. Sprites - once again, done using brute force on the CPU, or with graphics card hardware. Even compiling the sprite to assembly to speed up it's operations. Using the blitter to move/copy memory quickly. Done using, once again, brute force or DMA access and done as quickly.
I'm all for nostalgia, but don't let it cloud your vision with just how far computers have done today.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:5, Interesting)
Fullscreen windows. Why slide them up and down when you can switch with Alt+Tab or Cmd+Tab. Also check out Virtual desktops, you might like them.
It's difficult to compare with modern operating systems, but the sliding windows were really clever. Each screen could be a completely different resolution with a different colour map and screen format. If you Alt-Tab between full-screen applications of different resolutions, you can still only see one at a time. With the Amiga, you could see all of them at once. For example, if you're playing a full-screen game today and alt-tab to the desktop, the game will typically switch back into a window and the screen will switch to the desktop resolution. The Amiga method would let you simply drag the full-screen game screen to reveal the higher-resolution desktop behind it, without forcing the game to swap back to a window. Even virtual desktops aren't as clever or flexible as that.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Interesting)
Okay, that makes no sense.
It sounds like you are talking about auto-stretch scaling. That the monitor is at 800x600, the game is 320x240 and is automatically up-scaled to 800x600 by the OS. It isn't possible for a monitor to display "multiple resolutions" at once by definition of what a 'resolution' is. Auto-scale also presents aliasing [wikipedia.org] problems without a decent anti-aliasing algorithm.
Yeah, unless you saw it in action, it's hard to imagine. It is exactly like the parent post describes, and you can have two (and only two) different resolutions displayed at once. You could be playing a game at 320x240 and drag your desktop down over half the screen, at a higher resolution. It was a horizontal division between the two (you couldn't have, say, one smaller window of one resolution on a desktop of a larger resolution) and (remember, we're using CRT based monitors here, and hardware that has an intimate knowledge of how the scanlines are driven in the limited range of CRT displays the Amiga supported) and the top half of the screen would be drawn at a different resolution to the bottom half of the screen, or wherever the division was dragged down to. It was pretty magical stuff...
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
You're both right. The scanning was the same for the whole screen. The copper just reconfigured the graphics chip at a certain raster position so that it would output pixels from a different memory location, in a different color mode and with different pixel sizes (durations really). It still all ended up looking the same to the monitor. Remember that the monitor was basically just a TV set without a tuner, so we're talking about the equivalent of a fixed-frequency monitor.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like you are talking about auto-stretch scaling. That the monitor is at 800x600, the game is 320x240 and is automatically up-scaled to 800x600 by the OS.
There were only two basic horizontal resolutions on a standard Amiga - 320 and 640. There was hardware to switch resolutions (and palettes and bit depths) on a scan line by scan line basis. There were no aliasing problems because there was no real scaling done, the graphic chip just output pixels at one of two different rates (albeit with different palettes and bit depths), potentially on a line by line basis.
So you could grab the menu bar at the top of the screen and pull it down (vertically) to reveal another screen behind it. Separate frame buffers - one program (games and paint programs especially) could write all over the frame buffer of a screen that was invisible or only partially visible on the screen. All this vertical screen motion didn't involve moving any bits around in memory, so it was instantaneous - no waiting for anything to redraw.
The Amiga allowed you to dedicate back buffers (so called "smart refresh") to ordinary windows as well, to avoid redraws when a part of a window was exposed or brought to the front. Screen level double buffering, hardware line drawing, pixel blitting, bitmap movement, vertical palette changes, hardware sprites, all par for the course.
With a hardware sprite, for example, you could have a mouse pointer that moved around without ever touching the underlying frame buffer. The application didn't care, didn't worry, the mouse pointer was just an operating system controlled sprite that was overlaid on the video output in hardware. None of this "hide the mouse pointer", then draw, then restore (or XOR) the mouse pointer stuff that was common in competing operating systems at the time.
Similar hardware, by the way, was used to implement many of the early Atari game machines, inexpensive consoles that often implemented very nice games with only 4K of RAM (albeit typically 16 or more kilobytes of game cartridge ROM on top of that). On Atari game consoles there was usually no bitmap at all, just a bunch of hardware tiles and sprites. Can't fit much of a bitmap in 4K of RAM (or less in some cases).
In any case, the Atari graphics hardware guy ended up at Amiga, and the remaining Atari folks designed an Amiga competitor (the Atari ST) with very conventional frame buffer support and none of the exotic graphics hardware goodness Atari had a considerable reputation for, let alone as implemented on steroids in the Amiga hardware design, at very low cost.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, you can keep this feature. I, for one, like having things like disk caching that works.
In order to safely flip the power switch to power off an early Amiga, you had to wait until all pending disk writes were complete. This was pretty easy to do if you didn't have any disk writing background tasks running. Just wait for the drive lights to go out and then wait another couple of seconds for the superblock write to happen (which causes the drive light to flash a second time), and then you were good.
Woe be to the person who didn't wait for the second flash, because he/she would generally have to repair the disk on reboot. That happened to me a couple of times before I learned my lesson.
The real performance advantage of the early Amigas over many modern PCs is *no virtual memory*. It is amazingly fast to do just about anything if half of your applications haven't paged out to disk, as Linux is wont to do for inactive processes even when there are gigabytes of free memory in the system.
The Amiga, of course, originally didn't have any memory protection, which made programmers very careful. If you want to develop something for a quasi-embedded system it is ten times easier to debug "kernel level" code on an Amiga than for practically any other system, because the debugger, editor, test tools, etc. are all running in the same address space as what is being tested.
If you develop kernel mode code your kernel will crash and burn anyway, especially painful if you are on the same system, so it is awfully convenient to take advantage of the simplicity it allows. Even with memory protection turned on, Amiga OS is a single address space operating system. It is ridiculously simple to develop multitasking systems for a single address space OS compared to the hoops you have to jump through to do the same things in user mode in a more traditional Unix style operating system. Much higher performance too, of course.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently one of the advancements in OSX snow leopard is that SL apps keep track of whether they have any pending writes. If they don't, the OS can kill -9 them on shutdown, so only third-party apps have to be sigterm'd, which greatly speeds shutdown. (I haven't upgraded yet so I've not experienced the difference this makes).
When Linux pages out but doesn't need the memory at the moment, it keeps the contents, but clears the dirty bit after writing the page out. It only needs to read the data back in if it
Re: (Score:2)
It only needs to read the data back in if it has given the space to another process
That is the way it *ought* to work. In reality, applications get completely paged to disk after any extended idle period, and sooner than that if there is any significant disk activity. Linux pages out process pages in favor of disk buffers all the time. So you come back a few hours later, hit a key and wait five or ten seconds while everything pages back in again. Compared to an Amiga, that is really annoying. It's even
Re: (Score:2)
> What kinds of tasks could a 7MHz Amiga do that would cause your 2GHz PC to struggle
Not have the OS lock up when a new volume is attached for one. (I'm pretty sure it is just in windows these days because people expect it though!)
Video Toaster + Awesomeness (Score:2)
That low-level access gave the Amiga several firsts:
Hardware accelerated 4-channel digital audio
4,096 colors (when the PC was limited to 16... Hercules offered hi-res monochrome)
Hollywood acceptance as an A/B video editor + SFX engine (commercials of the 1980's & Babylon 5 + others)
The exclusive screenshots to every PC title for a decade
Granted, computers have come far today. Consider their inspiration. The Amiga really did pave the way for advanced technology. It was a brief moment in PC technology tha
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:4, Insightful)
# To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Most drivers did a sync when you did a soft reboot, e.g. ctrl-amiga-amiga. This only applies if you had write-delayed caching, which was not the default for most early storage devices.
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Yes, that was very cool for its day. But now we have Expo.
# Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
You can pipe text to an executable on windows or Unix today.
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
They make stands that do this that don't necessitate a retarded case with little expansion room like the A1000.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S.
We added layers of abstraction to allow the hardware to do new things, and to permit the use of arbitrary third-party hardware instead of being locked in. You can get a PowerPC Amiga-ish board today, it's six hundred bucks. Or for that you could build the system I'm using now, a Phenom II 720 (3-core, 2.8GHz) with 4GB RAM, 250 GB 7200RPM/16MB cache disk, and more I/O than you can shake a stick at... And the gaming performance is not astoundingly worse than scripted demo performance, which is to say that I scarcely care if I get 90% or 98% of the capabilities of this hardware.
why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
Har de har de har. Even file management was pathetic comparing a 25MHz Amiga to this system running Ubuntu, which has a footprint bigger than the whole hard disk in my A2500. You're succumbing to the temptation to view the past through rose-colored glasses. It wasn't that rosy. The Amiga was an amazing platform for its day, and a $600 Amiga could beat the pants off a $2500 PC in most ways. But it's an enthusiast's platform today, and you can get much more out of a PC costing much less.
Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score:5, Interesting)
I had an Amiga and it was great, however the world has moved on since then. To answer your points:
No, you waited for the disk light to stop flashing and then turned it off, hoping that all applications had flushed out all of their data. The Amiga got away with it (mostly) by not really having a lot of long lived service-type applications.
I do miss this - having each application on its own screen (with its own screen mode) was very useful. Now that we are all running high-res desktops with 24 bit colour, the different screen modes aren't so important, and software like "Spaces" on MacOSX fills much the same need.
That was cool, but fairly niche. I am disappointed that computer generated speech as not come further, the MacOSX voices sound only marginally better than the old Amiga voice from 25 years ago.
This was very useful on unreliable floppies, but used precious space on the disk and made updating files slower. Now that removable storage is more reliable the trade-off doesn't seem worth it.
What you are basically wishing for is MacOSX, where one company controls both the hardware and the software, and it does (suck it, haters) produce better computers. However, even MacOSX has abstraction layers and drivers because Amiga-style direct hardware intergration turned out to be a terrible long-term plan. The clever hardware tricks that made the Amiga1000/500 so cheap and fast back in the early 80s ended up holding back Amiga development 5 years later.
To sum up, while the Amiga was (in a lot of ways) ahead of its time, modern computers (and I am including Windows in this as well) do more and operate in a different environment than in the 80s. Although the Amiga was fast and amazingly inexpensive for the time, for the equivalent money today you could buy a high-spec iMac that is better in every way. Those who pine after the lost Amiga are living in the past.
Re: (Score:2)
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
The Amiga didn't commit changes to disc synchronously, but it provided no sure-fire way to flush all pending write buffers.
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
That was a workaround for low resolution displays with small colour palettes. With 1920x1200, 24bpp displays being common place thes
Re: (Score:2)
If I could go back in time and make just one change to the Amiga, it would be to have ensured that the A1000, or at least the 500 & 2000 onward, had a 68010 instead of a 68000. Nothing, and I mean *nothing*, caused more software to crash and burn on Amigas with 68020+ microprocessors than the damn Move SR, instruction (privileged on everything from the 68010 onward, but nonprivileged on the 68000 -- and used by just about every Amiga copy protection scheme.) From what I remember, a 68010 cost a whopping
Re: (Score:2)
^^^ argh. I forgot Slashdot doesn't transparently handle less-than and greater-than characters, even in "Plain old Text" mode. The offending instruction should read "move SR, (ea)" (substituting greater-than and less-than for parentheses).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
1. To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Well, DOS did that too. But there’s a reason this is not used anymore: Cache. Especially disk cache. So if you disable all caching, you can turn your system off at any time. Of course be sure to first close any apps that might be killed in mid-air.
Or use hibernate or sleep mode. It allows you to do the same with cache enabled. Just that if you want your ram be powered off, it has to be saved on disk, which because of today’s HDD speed, takes a little while. (Or use non-volatile RAM.)
2. Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
That’s
Re: (Score:2)
# To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
And what did a person do about unparked heads?
# Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
This is a feature I do not understand, conceptually - unless you are referring to something like OSX's Expose or the Awesome window manager's tags. Screenshot?
# Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
Something like:
ls -m --color=never | festival --tts
Does the trick just fine. Or was Amiga really all that hot that it made TTS not sound like someone with a puckered asshole?
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
What? Is this even a valid complaint? I've got a drawer under my computer desk where my keyboard hides. It fits the qualified descrip
Re: (Score:2)
The nice part about Amiga sliding screens is that each sliding screen could be at a different resolution and bit depth.
Haven't seen anything like that since.
Thus when sliding a screen down, if the screen(s) underneath needed something "better" the monitor automatically adjusted.
This trick was also used by "playing fields"... really made for some nice graphical tricks.
I'll miss the Amiga. Ahead of it's time, and STILL ahead of the times (sadly).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It rather restricts your choice of motherboards, and takes some hackery; but coreboot can bring up a minimal linux build extremely quickly.
I would really like a simple Linux system that would just load the kernel and drivers, then load X, start enough of the system to give me a login, and then kick on all that other crap. It would be nice to finally do away with the bootsplash and/or text crap.
My First Computer (Score:2)
My first computer was an Amiga 500. It was 1991. I was 4. It was the most amazing machine on the planet. I could draw pictures on it. I could play Thomas the Tank Engine. I could even make it say things out loud.
We only got rid of it, when the video chip fried itself. It was better than the Mac in it's day. Too bad it's almost gone.
Re: (Score:2)
and if you want the A500 feel today, fire up AROS on this:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/12/gecko_surfboard_packs_in_everything.html [ubergizmo.com]
Re: (Score:2)
It was better than the Mac in it's day
Better than the original Mac, absolutely. Better than the Mac II, for many things, yes. Video production, games, most entry level applications, yes. The Mac II was *expensive* and often slow by comparison.
For graphic design and desktop publishing not so much. That is where the Mac II really shined. There was nothing comparable to Quark on the Amiga. Device independent or high bit depth raster graphics on the Amiga were the exception, not the rule. The sort of thing
Re: (Score:2)
Obligatory //gs whine (Score:2)
Sound is more important than graphics! Amigas can't run GS/OS! //gs+ is coming out any day now !!1!11!!
Apple
(If you don't understand this, please don't rate it.)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
The only time I have had 2 computers at the same time in my life was when I purchased an Amiga 500 as the IIgs days were waning.
The amiga was vastly superior, even aside from how more games game out in the first week I owned my amiga than the entire time I owned the IIgs.
And lets not forget the demo scene.
God, i miss when computers were fun.
Re: (Score:2)
"God, i miss when computers were fun."
This. +1
Re: (Score:2)
Relative to what it was trying to accomplish, the Apple IIgs was the slowest computer I have ever used. Imagine trying to backport a subset of Mac OS Classic to a 2.8 Mhz 16 bit CPU with an 8 bit data bus. The early Macs were slow enough (i.e. barely tolerable) even with a much better processor at two and a half times the clock rate.
By comparison, the Amiga (and the Atari ST in its own way) was just plain fast.
Amiga Forever (Score:2)
DVD set is a must (Ofcourse The various Kick's are needed but that is simple to get from the original disks or rom's.) Running all old code projects and to get at old content not available anymore because ooffice does not support Final writer and so on...
http://www.last.fm/music/16+Bit/INAXYCVGTGB [www.last.fm] :-)
From one generation to another (Score:5, Insightful)
The 1980's: "I had an Amiga!"
Re: (Score:2)
The 2000's: "I was on MySpace!"
Instead (Score:2)
The Amiga crowd might be placated by an X-Windows interface skinned to look and behave like Amiga. Then port everything to keep it alive on Linux.
Yes I didn't read the whole thing and the part I skimmed I didn't understand, but I have the moral right on /. to comment especially after not reading properly.
Re: X vs. Amiga (Score:3, Interesting)
[begin rant] X is precisely everything the Amiga was not, an innovation that set open systems graphics back by at least a decade. Aside from an SGI app here or there I never saw an X interface that looked good until 1998 or so. Functional yes, attractive compared to the alternatives, not in the slightest.
X was so poorly designed that network transparency, which should have been its greatest strength, was essentially unusable anywhere other than the local LAN, and still is to this day. RDP runs circles aro
Re: X vs. Amiga (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, the big problem with X with regards to network transparency is xlib, not the X11 protocol. The protocol is very well designed for remote use (although not as nice as NeWS or DPS), but xlib was designed to make X11 programming 'easy' and so wrapped an asynchronous protocol in a synchronous API. Run a typical xlib program over the network and you'll see that the network is not saturated and the CPU load on both machines is tiny. The reason for this is that the client is spending most of its time in blocking xlib calls. If you have a 100Mb/s network with 100ms latency, you can only make ten blocking xlib calls per second, which doesn't come close to using the network throughput.
XCB does a lot to improve on this. It's very close to the protocol and designed for asynchronous use. If you write good XCB code, your app will be very responsive over the network (or all apps using your toolkit, if you are using the XCB to write a toolkit).
Xlib is too low level to be nice for writing apps and too high level to be nice for writing toolkits.
what personal computing lost (Score:4, Interesting)
Here are a few things that personal computing lost when the Amiga died.
* Abstraction of data handlers from apps. Datatype handlers were stored in their own directory. You could drop new ones in, and more or less *every* app of that type (sound/video/images/text/etc) would suddenly be able to read the new format. No farting about with "this app only handles image formats X and Y, but not Z". Drop in a datatype for Z, and it now handles Z. Sound editor didn't support saving in mp3? Drop in a datatype. Now it (and every other sound app on your system) does. It wasn't perfect, and some apps didn't support it, but many did.
* Single metadata format for everything. We now have 92340860159 different file formats, many replicating the same functionality as other ones. The Amiga had IFF (Interchange File Format). Ok, eventually all the stupid PC formats (then typically without any metadata to speak of and far less well designed) were supported, but originally IFF was just about it once you got above ASCII. Apps could be built to handle just a subset of the data from a file- e.g, just the sound from a video multimedia file, for example. You could parse the container without having to understand all the data in it. Granted, there are many other formats now which do that, but in the 80's it was groundbreaking, and with ONE container format instead of a million, you stood a much bigger chance of any given app supporting the scheme. To boot, it was open: most apps published their storage formats, and were typically good about using established standards for images, movies, sound, etc.
* About 10 years of time loss while DOS and later Windows PCs caught up to what the Amiga started out with. Who knows where we'd be now if they hadn't been so far behind from the start.
What does one DO with it? (Score:2)
I don't mean to be a whippersnapper, but ... why would one install this? What does one do that constitutes "play"? Are there games you're nostalgic for, or is there something useful about it? I can understand running a VM of a current OS for development or sandboxing, but ... there's tasks there that can be made useful by that. What's one do with an Amiga VM?
Re: (Score:2)
What's one do with an Amiga VM?
Personally, I like Deluxe Paint better than anything I have seen since then. Other than a few applications like that (and modern ports thereof) it is probably mostly a hobby thing.
The Amiga is extremely easy to program for, so one of these days there might be a number of useful applications that people might run a VM for. Or it could escape the VM and be used as an operating system for embedded systems. Amiga programming is certainly a lot easier than Linux kernel mode prog
What was that Amiga tank game? (Score:2)
Back when I was in college one of my dorm mates had an Amiga.
It had a two-player tank game where you basically raided the other guy's base. You could drop mines, and shoot his tank or his base.
Does anyone know what this game was called? Is there an online or PC version?
MorphOS (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
people love old crap, not news (Score:2)
Misplaced sentiment. (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole Amiga OS story is utterly misplaced and foolish. Amiga, for those who were into PCs, really, was a story about hardware that was way ahead of its time for the price. You had a 32 bit processor in the 68k married up with 4 channel waveform audio and hardware accelerated bitmap graphics. It was amazing, it really was. But as someone who learned C on the Amiga, I never thought the Operating System was really all that great. Indeed, I had a really fun summer working on a game engine with a friend of mine and our biggest triumph was NOT to use the operating system to manage the Blitter because it was too damned slow. I mean, Intuition had its upsides, for sure, but overall, the whole Amiga story was about the hardware. People bought that Hardware Reference Manual because it was so well written, and, in those days, you had IBM PC's with CGA / EGA graphics and the best sound you got from them was a dopy Adlib or SoundBlaster with tinny crappy FM synthesis and Amiga had faux true-color displays with quadraphonic sound playing. It was a revolution.
For me, to get that same kind of hardware buzz, since then, has really been in workstations. I loved my Dual Pentium II with first a FireGL and then a Voodoo2 and then an nVidia GeForce board, that was Amiga to me. I loved my Dual Opteron, that was Amiga to me. And right now, I have my dual Nehalem Xeon with a GeForce GTS, that is Amiga to me. Amiga's not a software story, never has been. It's about hardware that makes you imagine entirely new kinds of applications with just the sheer power available, power that makes you drool, or at least, is really fun to screw around with.
Here's what I still miss from AmigaOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Intelligent Window Manager.
When you're running an application in AmigaOS, let's say it's so busy, it's not reading window messages (Windows would report this app as "not responding"). For most applications, you could still move the window around, shrink it, grow it back, etc. At worst, the contents of just that window don't refresh. You don't have the window "stuck" not responding, you don't have parts of other windows getting into each other, as you often see in other OSs. You can even resize the window (again, you MAY not see it refresh properly, or you may, depending on the nature of the window itself).
Datatypes
System level objects used everywhere. You don't care about the kind of graphic file or video you're opening, you just open an IMAGE or a VIDEO or a DOCUMENT or whatever in your program, and you can open any of these known to the system. BeOS implemented a similar idea, but I haven't seen it anywhere else. Sure, there are programs that do this for you, and different systems within the same OS to deal with SOME media types. But nothing as complete, not at least that I've seen.
AREXX
Every program of consequence had an AREXX port. Basically, any command the program could understand was available in AREXX (standard scripting language, originally invented at IBM). So you could build very interesting interactions between running programs. Linux users get a taste of this, between a million command lines and pipes, but this was so much more powerful. And very well supported, pretty much in every commercial application.
ASYNCHRONOUS I/O
Every I/O operation to every device driver could be done synchronously or asynchronously. So what becomes a pain in the butt in an OS like Linux was a couple of extra lines of code in AmigaOS. Of course, in those days, there was no point of asynchronous I/O for Windows or MacOS, since they didn't multitask and pretty much had to dedicate the CPU to loading or unloading your I/O, anyway. But it was a beautiful thing in AmigaOS, in the day.
Probably some other stuff, but I gotta go. It's not that I plan on firing up my A3000 when I get home, rather than that home-integrated Q9550 PC with nVidia 8800GT graphics, 8GB RAM, twin 1920x1200 monitors in 24-bit, and 11TB of total attached storage. My old Amiga was weak at electronics CAD, and I'd still be waiting for that first AVC render for Blu-Ray creation to finish... not to mention the lack of support for huge drives and all. But it's a shame when you have to leave behind better ideas just to move forward a bit.
And don't even get me started on word processing... all the power I had with Scribe at CMU in the 80s, to be stuck with things like Word or OpenOffice, it's crime. I do like the WYSIWYG editing, just wish they didn't have to remove 100 IQ points from the formatting engine to get that....
Re:News? (Score:5, Funny)
It beats someone trying to recreate them later using Frogger DNA.
Re: (Score:2)