

Ask HN: Was the c64 better than the Amiga for hobbyist programmers? - amichail

Programming the Amiga was much more complex and it didn&#x27;t help that its multitasking did not have process protection.<p>So the Amiga was a step backwards for hobbyist programmers?
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LarryMade2
It certainly added a whole lot more cost and complexity. 64 was pretty
inexpensive and very open and well known software and circuit wise. If you
just wanted to do single task work - the 64 was ready with a flip of the power
switch.

Then again it depended on what hobby things you were going into; hi-res
graphics, music, and especially video. that's where the Amiga had a definite
advantages.

I would say disk storage Amiga was at a disadvantage (at least until the 600),
hard to get basic HDD controllers, floppies sometimes were problematic (this
is back in the day where every system had their own proprietary disk format)

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zerohp
The Amiga was a huge leap forward once ARexx became popular. It was an easy to
use scripting language that allowed you to receive events and instruct the OS
and applications to run commands and functions. After the release of AmigaOS 2
it became a standard feature of applications to support ARexx. It allowed you
to extract a lot more functionality from your applications and was
approachable for hobbyists that weren't ready to become systems programmers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARexx)

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icedchai
The Amiga came with AmigaBasic, up until AmigaOS 2.x, , which was way more
advanced than the C64 basic. There were also other commercially available
basics (AMOS for example.)

The Amiga had commercial C compilers (Lattice/SAS and Aztec), as well as
freely available ones like DICE (not sure of license.) This was certainly
better for "advanced" programmers (I taught myself C on an Amiga when I was
14.)

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tired_man
It's been quite a time since I recall anyone discussing commodore vs. amiga.

As far as the C64 goes, it was left in the dust by the Atari ST. I used the 64
and the later 128 right up until I got my ST. The programming tools
(compilers, etc.) available for the ST were words better than the 64/128's
toolsets.

I used the Amiga for only a month. Housefire :-(

