
Telecommuting with the Amiga [video] - doener
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYgwpB-8nWY&feature=youtu.be
======
weinzierl
This starts slow and I almost quit but it gets really interesting in the
middle, if you are into this retro stuff.

I never would have believed that you could use Dropbox from a machine as old
as this. And we are not talking about accessing the files only with a web
browser but actually mounting Dropbox as a drive. All the stuff involving TLS,
like browsing modern websites or IMAP access to GMail, I'd also written off,
but apparently it works.

~~~
tialaramex
For TLS they have a port of OpenSSL (named AmiSSL). So, when that port gets
updated, and software is updated to any changes resulting from the port, they
get any features (if they were ported) from OpenSSL.

They import (their version of) the Mozilla trust store, so roughly the same
CAs are trusted as in a copy of Firefox from the same date as your install of
AmiSSL.

------
snvzz
This is a neat video. It made my day. I'm currently in isolation at my
family's place due to covid, enjoying my old computers, including my A1200
(which I use with an OSSC), so I found it particularly amusing.

As I have a 68030 and I've been messing with current netbsd on it (a decades
old pcmcia bug finally got fixed on netbsd-9 stable branch, so now my ethernet
card works on netbsd), I feel the video should have been called "with AmigaOS"
rather than "The Amiga".

Of course, on netbsd, it is very possible to run ssh, ansible, aws-cli and all
the other crap I use to work.

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RandomWorker
Wauw, I love this, you can make money doing virtually anything. Amiga seems to
be way ahead of it's time.

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donio
Doesn't seem to cover Slack, I guess you'd do that by running one of the Slack
to IRC gateways on a VPS and connecting to that using an IRC client.

------
azinman2
Wow everything is so painful. Every time I get nostalgic for the “oldentimes,”
I use old hardware / an emulator and quickly remember how far we’ve come. It’s
easy to omit all the pain from your memory until you try to use this stuff for
real.

~~~
Volt
Obviously if you keep using it though you get used to the pain. Perhaps you'll
even start to enjoy it.

------
floren
Why does the Amiga UI always look "stretched out", like someone forcing a 4:3
tv show into a wider aspect ratio?

Edit: thanks for the explanations!

~~~
kyberias
Good question. On classic Amiga, the UI was designed for the default un-
interlazed resolution of 640×256 (PAL).

Anyone wanting higher resolutions on would go to the interlaced resolution
that doubles the vertical resolution to 640x512 (PAL). The UI, however, does
not adjust resulting in squeezing UI elements vertically.

~~~
avel
If you had a plain old monitor of TV resolution, then going to so called "high
res" (640x512) meant that there was a terrible flickering that made this
unusable. You had to buy an expensive multiscan monitor that could handle
that.

A trick I used to do was to jump up to the NTSC equivalent (640x400) which was
flickering less in my standard monitor.

~~~
snvzz
>"high res" (640x512)

In OCS Amiga, Low/High/SuperHigh are defined by the base (as in not using
overscan) Horizontal resolution, 320/640/1280.

PAL and NTSC are 256 and 200 lines base vertical resolution respectively, and
50/60Hz vertical refresh rate respectively.

512 and 400 lines are Interlaced modes. The flickering has to do with the
interlacing. The improvement perceived with the NTSC mode is due to the
increased vertical refresh rate.

ECS Amiga (A500+/A600/A3000) introduces the so-called Productivity modes,
which are just the 512/400 lines hires modes but in Progressive, thus doubling
the horizontal refresh rate to ~31KHz, while also doubling the DMA bandwidth
required.

At full DMA you can form a a palette of 2^2 colors instead of the usual hires
2^4, and unless you have FAST RAM you'll want to keep it at 2 color in order
to let the CPU use the odd ram access cycles.

This palette can of course be changed during horizontal blanking, as then the
display DMAs are off and the copper has room to access the palette registers,
or several times midline if only using 2 colors.

In Productivity mode, as the chip that does actually encode the video receives
the same bitrate as usual, the color depth is reduced to 2 bits per channel
(from 4) for a choice of 64 colors.

These restrictions do not apply to AGA (A1200, A4000, CD32) Amiga, which are a
different beast.

To display the picture from an Amiga today, I do use and recommend the OSSC
(Open Source Scan Converter) and a modern monitor with HDMI input.

~~~
aruggirello
To expand on this, apps could also (ab)use "overscan" modes, which granted
slightly larger resolution but image quality at the corner/borders was often
somewhat unreliable.

~~~
snvzz
Image quality on overscan is alright. This is very testable by throwing the
video output through the OSSC.

There are restrictions on some aspects of overscan display, however. They vary
between generations of Amiga chipset. e.g. It might not be possible to display
sprites outside of a certain area, or display them at all if overscan is large
enough.

------
jacobush
Save file dialogs should take ten seconds to open up like in Windows 10, or
it's not ready for prime time yet.

~~~
Grustaf
My old 1200 was able to boot from cold in 8 seconds so I think that’s a tall
order. Amigas just can’t be slow.

~~~
function_seven
My A1000 took a minute or so to boot. It spent about 10 seconds with the
Kickstart diskette, then swap to whatever program I was running for another
~50 seconds or so.

Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and
use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there.

Then the warm reboots were instantaneous magic! (But a cold start took a bit
longer as it had to copy the entire contents of the WB disk into memory. Worth
it.)

~~~
snvzz
>Until one day I read in a magazine how I could create a ramdisk ("RAM:") and
use my startup-sequence file to load Workbench in there.

RAM: is a fs like Linux's ramfs, and is implicitly mounted on early boot, you
don't need to create it. It is also gone on reboot.

What you're referring to is ramdrive.device, typically mounted as "RAD:",
which is implemented as a standard reboot-persistent module that offers a
standard trackdisk block device, and can be configured as bootable. You'd
format the drive with FastFileSystem or OFS after creating it.

~~~
function_seven
In Workbench 1.3, the device was named "RAM:" (EDIT: I'm wrong). Not sure if
that changed in later versions of the OS, but 1.3 was as far as I got with the
1000. And yeah, I guess I didn't "create" it so much as "use it as the boot
disk".

It was gone on power-cycle, but it persisted through so-called warm reboots.
(CTRL+𝔸+𝗔, I think?)

~~~
snvzz
Definitely "RAD:", not "RAM:".

RAM is a filesystem and not reboot persistent.

RAD is a block device and reboot persistent.

Article on RAD usage:
[http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html](http://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html)

Annotated disassembly:
[http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt](http://wandel.ca/homepage/execdis/ramdrive_disassembly.txt)

It's fresh to me, because I still use my Amiga computers.

~~~
function_seven
Thanks. Your first link dislodged some cobwebs. I'm definitely confused after
all these years. Yeah, it must have been the RAD: device that I copied my
WB1.3 disk to.

~~~
snvzz
As an added note, ramdrive.device would use chip ram, which is not very clever
as CHIP RAM is limited and precious, besides slow from a CPU perspective.

There's third party RAD implementations that use FAST RAM instead.

------
bitwize
Until the Amiga has versions of Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and the
proprietary VPN the IT department decided on, it's unsuitable as a
telecommuting machine.

~~~
smallstepforman
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, since Linux has none of these and is
still used by a lot of people for remote work.

~~~
azinman2
“A lot of people” = small percentage

