
Amigaville – A New Amiga Magazine - doener
http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/amigaville-a-new-amiga-magazine/
======
gavanwoolery
From the feature article: "Lets however get one thing straight right off the
bat. Nobody can forsee that the Amiga will rise from the ashes to be a
mainstream competitor."

Its funny, because I have given serious thought for the past 10 years about
acquiring the IP and rebooting the brand (and doing a REAL reboot, not just
sticking a PC in a Commodore skin (or keyboard, as one IP holder did)). If you
look at Apple, the company was in a rather dire situation before Jobs stepped
back in. Likewise, I think dust is collecting on one of the most valuable
"unclaimed" brands out there.

~~~
doener
I really think that a device that captured the spirit of Amiga could be a
success. Not only amongst ex Amiga users, but amongst other users as well.

What was the "magic" of the Amiga in the 80s and early 90s and what could be
something similar today?

In the 80s and 90s:

\- Really good graphics and sound (when most PC users got EGA graphics and PC
speaker sound, if anything besides ASCII at all)

\- Easy to use (you could do everything with your mouse)

\- A device for games, fun AND serious stuff

\- Relatively affordable

What could this be today? Maybe an affordable "ready to use" device that
drives forward Virtual Reality for games and other use cases? A smartphone
that is also your PC and you can easily combine it with monitor, keyboard and
mouse?

Any ideas?

~~~
reitoei
Much of the attraction of the Amiga (and the Atari ST) from that time, as far
as I remember, was the 'step-up' in terms of the quality of the graphics and
the games, when most people were rocking 8bit micros like the C64 or Amstrad.

In terms of what you could do software-wise, I think we can forget about the
mainstream games industry. Same with the mainstream graphics industry (for the
reason we have no Adobe Creative Studio for Linux).

What would interest me would be a killer OS with an active ecosystem
supporting more indie-style products like Firefox, Sketch
([https://designcode.io/sketch](https://designcode.io/sketch)), Sublime Text,
Atom etc, as well as indie games like Hotline Miami.

Start 'small' and see where it goes kind of thing.

I, for one, would be very interested in something like this.

~~~
Derpdiherp
So.. Linux then? Happily playing Hotline Miami and using all the programs you
mentioned.

Unless that's what you meant, in that case "whoosh over my head"

~~~
reitoei
Yeah, but optimized for a very specific set of hardware. Like an Amiga-
flavored Rasbian I suppose?

------
pgarcia
It seems the author's dropbox account couldn't handle the traffic, so I added
my own links. Hopefully now people will be able to download both issues:

Issue #1: [http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/amigaville-a-new-amiga-
mag...](http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/amigaville-a-new-amiga-magazine/)

Issue #2: [http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/amiga-magazine-
amigaville-...](http://www.vintageisthenewold.com/amiga-magazine-amigaville-
issue-2-is-available-now/)

If it doesn't work, comment on the article, please.

Hope that helps

Paulo

------
puredlx
Alternative link:
[https://ftp.fau.de/aminet/docs/mags/Amigaville1.pdf](https://ftp.fau.de/aminet/docs/mags/Amigaville1.pdf)

~~~
jsight
Thank you... it is funny how often people mistakenly try to use Dropbox for
public file distribution.

------
danielbarla
PDF?! Blasphemy, where's my AmigaGuide format?

------
paublyrne
Great. It's 20 years since I opened an Amiga magazine. Hopefully there's a new
version of AMOS.

~~~
aphrax
"Hopefully there's a new version of AMOS." \- nice! Blitz Basic perhaps?

~~~
ZenoArrow
FYI, there's an actively developed successor to Blitz Basic called BlitzMax:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC#BlitzMax](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC#BlitzMax)

------
pantalaimon
It doesn't come with a floppy :(

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mrbill
I miss .info magazine. Still annoyed that it caved when I was still owed six
issues on my subscription.

------
baldfat
Amgia best illustrates that best technology doesn't always win. 2nd Be O/S.

I think Open Source has changed this now. The best usually always wins out
now.

------
yason
"What is the future of Amiga" asks the cover for issue #1.

There hasn't been a future for Amiga for a couple of decades. Amiga was dead
in 1995 already, not to mention 2015.

Don't get me wrong. I think I used mine till early 00's (for serious stuff,
such as email and work). I loved Amiga and I think no other platform except
BeOS has ever captured the same feeling that you get from having hugely
advanced technology in your hands. If I could jump back to the 80's/90's which
is the time I got my serious with my Amiga, I would. No doubt about it.

But Amiga as we know it is dead and has been dead for so long I barely
remember. I would welcome another Amiga that would again be such a state of
the art platform that it would compare to nothing else――although I wouldn't
know what that could it be. Maybe you could say iOS is the new Amiga, but it
doesn't convey the same feeling.

What I do remember from Amiga was how snappy it was.

AmigaOS had a modern design with no bloat. My i486 running my first Linux
installation in the mid-90's beat it hands down, technically, but it never
felt the same. Things were crazy fast (in comparison to MC68030) but they
never _felt fast_. And feeling counts for 99% for a human being, even if my
mind is telling me my phone is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than my Amiga.

In contrast to how my Linux@i486 behaved my Amiga did just what it had to do.
Linux (and Windows and Mac) always seemed to do a lot of things until they
bothered to do what I asked. I've only experienced something similar in BeOS.
It's weird that there are no other mainstream operating systems where user
interface would be prioritized over anything else. I still experience lag in
my 10's machines when running Ubuntu whereas I'm longing for the experience
where no button or window ever hesitated to behave when I asked it to. It
would be very much possible to implement (run UI in a single process that is
never paged to disk and runs on SCHED_RT priority and never depends on the
application itself to ultimately react to user interface events) but nobody
has done it. Yet that's what I still do miss from Amiga. The feeling is almost
tactile, and it needs to feel it comes from 20 years in the future.

I don't know how I feel about any Amiga magazine or any of the Amiga rebirth
projects there are. AROS is nice but none of them is the same. Even if we did
00's things in 80's architecture running on 10's hardware, it's not the same.
I don't give a dime about keeping the old Amiga on life support. Every few
years I fire up UAE and conclude that, all right, it still has that _X_ but is
lacking _A-W_ and _Y-Z_. I understand that I'm a human being and my emotions
attach to points in time, and that's how it's going to be. It's worth
remembering but not holding on to. At best, we can take what was extraordinary
back then and if it's still extraordinary, reimplement it on a modern
platform.

~~~
mikejmoffitt
I am glad to see somebody write this because it still astonishes me that I'm
faster than the computer. I don't want to wait before I'm ready to input
things, I know it can work faster!

There are two sides to it - poor choices leading to performance issues,
forcing the computer to wait, and also animations that completely halt UX
until they are complete. Not much is more annoying than the seldom-overridden
300ms javascript click delay on touch devices, or the iOS animations that
waste a lot of time.

