How great was the Amiga?

How great was the Amiga?

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youtube.com/watch?v=8S3B8a8N83k
amigareport.com/ar134/p1-12.html
frombedroomstobillions.com/
sabrina-online.com/thismonth.html
sabrina-online.com/strips/SabOnline815.JPG
github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain
assemblergames.com/l/threads/what-are-the-ultimate-capabilities-of-the-fc-nes-and-sfc-snes.41663/
youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E
youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok
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Ahead of its time, but also far too late for it to make any difference.

Amigas were great, but more of a video game machine.

their OS was true multitasking way before Windows. They were cheaper than Macs and IBM's and pretty powerful

their problem was no real software, basically video game consoles

>their problem was no real software
weren't they great picture and video editing machines? also tracker music
I think there's like 4-5 photo editing suits alone, don't think it lacked software

Amiga 500 was a great machine but then IBM-PC compatibles machines got cheaper and it was time to move as Commodore didn't offer any real alternative. They also lost the gamer market with the CDTV and CD32 fuckup.

yeah i should have said no real "muh business" software

although they were cheaper than IBM's, they were still expensive and most people who bought computers back then were buying them for work

my dad for instance would have never considered a Macintosh or Amiga because they didn't have Lotus 123 so he bought ugly ass IBM's

yet a mac would have been far better alternative for office software, not to mention you could run Lotus 123 on both of those machines if you wanted, but it's not worth it for a business

>Commodore didn't offer any real alternative
Amigas where fucking great until the mid 90's

someone posted an amiga desktop in a screenshot thread earlier, and I had to chime in

i was really fascinated by Amigas. I have never actually used one but I have emulated the OS (lots of great games)

Back in the early dial up days I stumbled upon the Amiga community, there were people who basically tried to keep the dream alive. They were updating the OS themselves, getting them on the WWW etc... i kinda hope that's still happening but it looks like things have stagnated unfortunately

oh well

The first true multitasking machine and was capable of more than anything at the time, but no development and little innovation made it fail

This one? I posted it, it was on a desktop thread a few weeks ago.

They're still bringing things out for it. Some of it's pretty insane.
youtube.com/watch?v=8S3B8a8N83k

The problem is not the hardware, it never was, it's what the modern requirements are. Often times far more than it should be. Libreoffice is at about the level of Office 98, but good luck running it on a '98 machine.

Same applies to the Amiga range. Even with upgrades like that the modern web (looking at you, JS) is too much for them. Which is sad, really.

yep, that's the one

no way, you could get a no name pc with much better specs for way cheaper at that time

Amiga users were all furries.

And proud of it

Great enough to have a very special place in my heart. Miggy 500 forever

a used amiga with a fast 060 costed same much as an used 486, while anything newer new costed several thousand

don't count me in, I had seen a few animations, but it was rare, I didn't really give a shit

Computers got faster, they had more resources to spear, developers got lazy, software got bloated. Nothing new.

amigareport.com/ar134/p1-12.html

Amigas were used a lot in movies and TV

Total Recall and Jurassic Park used them, those are both in my top 100 so thanks Amiga

Oh, I know the reason plain as day. I just don't think we should have stood for it.

My Amiga 1200 remains the best computer I've ever owned. It blew everything else of its time out the water.

I see there's a port of SDL 1.2 for Amiga. I'm not sure what versions it's compatible with though. Does anyone know more information about it? Can I compile my SDL game on my old Amiga computer?

That's not necessarily true. Software has to be very portable across many devices today. Also, programming has gotten better due to faster computers. Faster machines allow us to program more safely, and perform memory and data integrity checks in nearly every point of the program. Now, tell me, with 2 mb of RAM and and 25 MHz to work with, could programmers afford to program defensively? No.

>programming has gotten better due to faster computers

Nope!

If programming is so much better then once those features you highlighted came in we'd actually be getting more efficient hardware from that point forward and requirements would go down again as quality of code increased,

And very little software is portable, or not enough that this a valid argument when ALL software is affected.

That was pretty impressive. I wished the M68k had been developed as much as the x86. It liked that instruction set.

...

>by the mid '90s
Only if you had a big box, and even those were long in the teeth by then. The mainline consumer systems like the 500/600/1200 et al. were hot garbage under the hood for anything but games, even when they were new.

That guy has some good stuff for Amiga fans, and it's always good to find a tech channel that isn't hosted by a massive sperg.

i cant believe i watched this video whats wrong with me? i didn't even understand 90 percent of what he was saying but it seemed legit

>The mainline consumer systems like the 500/600/1200 et al.
budget systems*
Bigbox costed exactly the same as any other system of the time.
Also the budget systems where pretty powerful with expansions. A Amiga 1200 with a 50MHz 68060 in 1993 was pretty useful machine. Still cheaper then any bigbox 486 or Pentium 1 counterpart.

must see docu about the amiga...
From Bedrooms to Billions - The Amiga Years (2016)
frombedroomstobillions.com/

I just watched it a few months ago, awesome documentary!

Even for people not familiar or into Amiga.

"Budget" IS the mainline, the big boxes sold in far fewer numbers, home computers in general were a rarity back then after all.

>Also the budget systems where pretty powerful with expansions.
Sure, but so was a board-swapped PC or a Mac with an accelerator, it's fair to say that the Amiga had real strength in the excellent base of 3rd-party accelerators and other tweaks you could get your hands on for it to really extend it way past its useful life, but I think it gives the platform too much credit saying it was "ahead of everything else" because of it. (though yeah, that wasn't what you said in particular)

>Still cheaper then any bigbox 486 or Pentium 1 counterpart.
I want to call bullshit on this, since the '060 was a pretty performant chip and undoubtedly carried a price tag to match, but even at $700+ a pop for a good accelerator that point would probably still hold true considering the absolute shit $2,000 or less bought you back then in the PC or Mac space (some of the entry-level Quadras seemed pretty decent on a spec sheet basis though, if only they were A/UX capable)

I'd still like to see some old price lists though, I wonder if BYTE archives have anything interesting

>"Budget" IS the mainline
That's what you say, I know people who only ever owned bigboxes.

>but I think it gives the platform too much credit saying it was "ahead of everything else" because of it.

Never even said anything like that, you're just trying to find a way to shit on others.

>I want to call bullshit on this, since the '060 was a pretty performant chip and undoubtedly carried a price tag to match, but even at $700+ a pop for a good accelerator that point would probably still hold true considering the absolute shit $2,000 or less brought you back then in the PC or Mac space

The '060 accelerator I had in my 1200 around that time costed me £470 while the computer was £399, while a 66MHz 486 costed £4000.

How do I get in the "Amiga scene"? From the out looking in it looks cool.

>mfw winamp

>That's what you say, I know people who only ever owned bigboxes.
I know plenty of people who exclusively bought systems at close to that price point too, but it doesn't make them the majority. Volume sellers were always in the lower, inexpensive echelon, hell you yourself and everyone else in here saying they own/owned one do not have big boxes even today.

>Never even said anything like that, you're just trying to find a way to shit on others.
Did you neglect to read my acknowledgment of that after I said it? I was poking at that general mentality that seems to be displayed in discussions like this with that statement, not you in particular.

>The '060 accelerator I had in my 1200 around that time costed me £470 while the computer was £399, while a 66MHz 486 costed £4000.
Seems that the base system especially was a bit cheaper across the pond than here, and you could definitely find a DX2-66 for a far lower price point depending on what vendor you went with.

get UAE (Unix Amiga Emulator), many platforms
download OS and Software thru Archive.org (TOSEC Sets) or from many other amiga archives
Install and have fun. Do a few tutorials if you dont know the amiga that well.

All free.

or

There are commercial programs available like Amiga Forever (C64 Forever) and others.

Google the lot!

The a500 was more powerful and more capable than any home computer at the time, the graphics and sound rivaled or even beat arcades at the time

>Seems that the base system especially was a bit cheaper across the pond than here
No, the British pound was just more expensive, the costed the same much.

If they had originally sold it as a multimedia workstation instead of a video game machine maybe it would have made an impact

Nothing would have helped Commodore at the time, they where too stupid and just would have fucked up somewhere else.

Just get pirated Amiga Forever straight away.

>and you could definitely find a DX2-66 for a far lower price point depending on what vendor you went with.
Not really, it was a new machine for the time and new systems really did cost that much and there weren't used ones.

Also the budget machines really where exactly that, cheap, look what Macintosh or x86 machine you could get for the same money, actually you even couldn't get one, except maybe a used and then some 386.
But the budget machines still where great thanks to cheap expansions, still far cheaper than anything else with the same performance.

but how?

I got FS-UAE. What version of AmigaOS should I get? (Does it matter?) I was thinking of getting 4.1.

both price lists from december 1993, the accelerator card for the 1200 is 4000 francs with 1MB of ram, the 1200 with a 62MB hard disk is 3790 francs so it comes all together to 7790 francs, same price as the 486 dx 33 with 4MB ram, 4x bigger hard disk, a 14inch svga monitor and a sound card. then you look at the game lineup for both systems and you know why amiga crashed so hard.

4.x is not "real Amiga" and won't run on UAE emulators. 3.x is what you want.

>How great was the Amiga?

Fucking AWESOMELY GREAT, that's how fucking great.

1) It had a fucking GRAPHICAL COPROCESSOR. Nobody else had that shit. It could do blitting, manage something like four sprites, all on its own.

2) HAM mode. Motherfucking 4,096 colors on screen at once! It worked a bit like JPEG, such that a pixel's color was related to its neighbor, so you'd get streaking. But clever image processing could minimize it.

3) 32 colors initially, adding HalfBrite mode for 64 colors. 64 glorious colors when PCs had EGA's godawful 16 color palette. Two years before VGA (265 colors out of a palette of 262,144) even came out, much less gained any degree of popularity.

4) Pre-emptive multitasking years before Windows or Mac OS had it. This meant one task couldn't lock up the machine by failing to complete its routine.

5) SCSI. While PCs were fucking around with MFM and RLL drives, dicking around setting IDE master/slave jumpers, the Amiga could daisy-chain drives out the ass. Of course, they were expensive as fuck, but whatevs.

6) Expandability. The brilliantly-designed Zoro bus allowed for an internal expansion slot (Amiga 2000), or external slot (A1000, A500, A1200) that could literally take over the computer. Throw in a Great Valley Products 68030 accelerator card with a couple megs of RAM, then compute to your heart's content.

The Amiga was goddamned badass. Then it got sold off, some dickhead shiek's kid bought it (or something like that), moved the company meetings to the Bahamas, and drained the company dry.

Goddamn, the initial engineers at Amiga were truly fucking brilliant. It's sad that the Amiga never became the dominant force it could have been, at least in the US.

>the graphics and sound rivaled or even beat arcades at the time

There was a basketball game in the arcades that literally had an A500 inside.

7) How could I forget the sound? When the PC could go *bleep* *bloop* the Amiga had "four voice audio". Basically, four eight bit channels. I can't even remember the details, but I want to say you could effectively model something like two or three MIDI-style tones AND have a digitized voice playing. The best sound on the PC in the *late* 1980s involved MIDI output for music, and shitty 8-bit digitized output for voices and effects.

Oh, and to get your shitty sound card working on the PC, you had to dick around with IRQ assignments, and often the software you wanted to run would assume a particular IRQ, so you'd have to reshuffle them and reboot to run the next program. And you might have the utter piece of shit Adlib sound card, rather than the 1st gen SoundBlaster. The Adlib was supported by like three games, ever. Such a piece of shit.

Probably the most beautiful architecture of any personal computer ever made.

Its users were fucking annoying though, like Apple fanboys, but even more fanatical. There's still some around today, convinced the Amiga will come back one day.

holy shit, if the amiga had that in the mid 90s it would have stayed alive. Impressive

>Its users were fucking annoying though, like Apple fanboys, but even more fanatical.

You shut the fuck up, the Amiga will one day be THE machine. It is technologically superior! How can fucking IBM machines win?! Impossible! REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Seriously, though, I always hated Mac users. Such prissy faggots. Their screen options were like "Gray Scale", "16 Colors", "256 Colors" and "Millions of Colors" because they couldn't handle powers of two more than eight. And yes, I used to go to stores that sold computers and set all the Macs to grayscale to dissuade potential buyers.

>tfw Sabrina Online ended last month

>Sabrina Online

Looks like it's still going?

sabrina-online.com/thismonth.html

>'Sabrina Online' first appeared on the web on September 15, 1996. It seemed fitting to bring the strip to a close twenty years to the day later, ending with a bang (of sorts) rather than keeping the strip plodding along month to month indefinitely without any focus or goal. I want to thank all of Sabrina's readers and fans out there, whether you've been there from the start or discovered the strip more recently. You all are the power that helped me keep the comic rolling as long as it has. While all good things must end, Sabrina, R.C., Zig Zag, Amy, and everyone else are not gone. It's only the regular monthly strip that is completed, but new stories and works from the Sabrina-verse will pop up from time to time. Just drop by for news and info, whether on this site, Furaffinity, or elsewhere. Thanks again to everyone. I can only hope you enjoyed the two-decade ride anywhere near as much as I did. - Eric W. Schwartz

That's sad, I remember reading them in print in Amiga Format in the mid 90s.

Last comic here, she still has her Amiga:

sabrina-online.com/strips/SabOnline815.JPG

Thanks! I got Hello World working with this cross compiler:

github.com/cahirwpz/amigaos-cross-toolchain

...

That's some expensive Amiga shit, seriously, price listing of an 1200 in '93 is $600 here and a typical 486 system around $5000.
Also the 68060 accelerators that came in '94 where maybe double the price of the system and not more.

Thank you Mr.Amiga

>convinced the Amiga will come back one day.
Nobody is like that, they just keep a childhood memory alive, like retro threads.

You could do this for something like the SNES or Sega Genesis if you wanted to as well. It's basically the same concept as something like the Super FX chip but taking advantage of advancements in modern technology.

If you were to cram as much hardware in a SNES cart as possible with current tech you'd be looking at PS3 quality graphics (in 240p).

thread about the topic
assemblergames.com/l/threads/what-are-the-ultimate-capabilities-of-the-fc-nes-and-sfc-snes.41663/

>SNES

In principle you could do it to any system, you could also do the whole system on a FPGA.
Those consoles are too locked down to do it conveniently though. Amiga had way better support for such things, even though FPGA expansions are lame.

Seems like the cartridge way is quite limited actually, not a good way to expand the system.

4.x will run on newer versions of WinUAE/Amiga Forever, since they added PPC emulation support.

Put it like this. If I could travel back in time to 1983 and design the best computer I could think of with the resources available at the time but the knowledge I brought with me, I still think the absolute best I could have ever done would be a cross between the Commodore Amiga and the Acorn Archimedes. Maybe I'd have had voice coil-driven high-precision superfloppies like the LS-120 or zip drive earlier, and I'd have gone with some kind of RISC and a nice Blue Alps mechanical keyboard as standard because they were a thing then.

Bear in mind I had Atari STs and Falcons, and that's a big thing to admit given the long-standing platform rivalry, but looking back, it was incredibly ahead of its time.

Unfortunately neither Commodore nor Atari could into business. At all. They made some unreliably stupid decisions. Acorn tried, but it was a little too late for the expandability and relatively low cost of the common, shit office PC, but at least they learned how to pivot and licence their designs, and now Sophie's ARM chip legacy probably powers your toaster, or your pacemaker, or definitely your phone.

>Bear in mind I had Atari STs and Falcons, and that's a big thing to admit given the long-standing platform rivalry, but looking back, it was incredibly ahead of its time.
The Amiga and Atari weren't so different, Atari ST was build with the Amiga in mind.

oh man that art.

Amiga was a huge part of my childhood, I learned how to type my name on it before I could even write. Fast forward many years and I was going through dad's floppy disk collection, found one unlabeled. Whack it in, and lo and behold a whole bunch of erotic art.

Very exciting for an 11 year old just learning about dem tiddies.

youtube.com/watch?v=cETl8PhUy_E

youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok

prices are in french francs, at the time 1$ was around 6 francs. so the 486 dx33 is only 1315$. the 5000$ you quote were price for prebuilt brand name pc, no brand pc compatibles were already cheap.

As an Amiga autist they were fantastic.

>tfw no amiga 500 with modern day components

1200/4000 were seriously outdated when they came out.

1200 was gimped because no fast ram.

And AGA-chipset didn't support 24-bit colors.

1992 was too late for them. They should have come out two years before.

4000 was not outdated.

1200 was budget. It was seriously cheap alternative to other computers at the time, perfect for muh amiga gayming.
Most well known system probably, thanks to it's expandability it lived on quite a while.

Macintoshes of the time where even only 16-bit with the integrated graphics.

Yet the Amiga was half cheaper. Even with better specs.

What a great story, cherish those memories.

is it making fun of linux desktop threads?

>Mr.Amiga
Topkek, you know what amiga means?

so not are you guys only luddites, you're furfags too

youtube.com/watch?v=06di_a588b0

astronauts and black people use it

Well, I'm sold.

Nothing wrong with a little snout

welp

God, they spent so much money on that ridiculous ad, yet the ad almost entirely ignored WTF the Amiga actually *is* and *does*.

The company was flailing. Amiga and, later, Be are two of the saddest tales of technology that was ahead of its time.

No seriously
Sabrina is better than any other waifushit

Pretty great, but I was a kid back then so I mostly used it for the snoopy videogame

All waifushit is cancer.