
The Amiga Consciousness - erickhill
http://countingvirtualsheep.com/the-amiga-consciousness/
======
vardump
After all these years I still remember Amiga original chipset register
0xdff180 is the first palette entry. Or that exec library pointer is at 0x4.
And hundreds of other details.

It was amazing to set a copper list that completely defines the display,
microsecond by microsecond, scanline by scanline. To setup blitter to decode a
raw disk sector on the background. To learn blitter 4-channel minterm [0]
logic combinators.

Having fun with Deluxe Paint color cycling. Trying to make some kind of music
in Protracker and Octamed and listening all those amazing music modules made
by other people. Writing text documents CygnusEd. Having fun with AsmOne
assembler IDE.

Playing Shadow of the Beast, Marble Madness, Xenon 2 Megablast, Turrican 2,
Civilization, Settlers, Lemmings, Another World, Stunt Car Racer, North and
South and all those other amazing games. That inspired to imitate and to learn
more.

Watching amazing demos like Phenomena Enigma, Kefrens Desert Dream, Sanity
Arte, Spaceballs 9 fingers. Wondering how seemingly impossible effects were
achieved.

It was a great machine and taught me a lot. I'd be a different person without
Amiga.

[0]:
[http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms](http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/Graphics_Minterms)

~~~
gilbetron
I saved up my summer job money and got an Amiga 500 (with an actual monitor!)
- ordered in November, so it was on our doorstep when I got home from my
afterschool (probably senior year of high school) job. My dad warned that I
should probably let it warm up overnight, to avoid shorts from condensation.
It was torture! I woke up like 2 hours before school to set it up :)

It was glorious! It was shocking to be able to "pull down" the main display
and see the OS GUI behind it - like magic!

I was devastated when my parents moved to a new place when I was around 30 and
I discovered they had just tossed out my TRS-80 coco, C-64 (and about 3
shoeboxes of disks), and my Amiga :( So sad.

~~~
Someone
_”to "pull down" the main display and see the OS GUI behind it“_

I haven’t ever used an Amiga, but thought its “main display” was its GUI, or
that its GUI at least was on par with the command prompt. Am I wrong, or am I
reading too much in this statement?

~~~
pkroll
In this context "main display" means "whatever display is in the foreground"
as you could have, say, a Deluxe Paint screen. It'd take up, literally the
whole screen, and you could drag it down by the top bar and see the OS desktop
screen behind it, possibly in a different resolution and number of colors.

~~~
jacobush
And now fullscreen apps are all the rage, again. In my mind, desktop computing
in general has always converged, sometimes in roundabout ways, towards the
Amiga experience.

~~~
gilbetron
I really wish they'd dispatch with the standard "minimize/maximize/close" trio
of controls and change them to something more interesting. Close is fine, but
I'd rather it be a bit harder to use. I don't need to suddenly close
something, and it far more often happens that I accidentally close something.
Seeing the Amiga video, a foreground/background button could be cool. Or maybe
"make transparent while I hold the mouse button down". Or any number of other
things. These days I just maximize my windows, then alt-tab (or equivalent for
Mac) through my windows. Only rarely do I do things side-by-side, and would
rather have some tiling capabilities rather than having to do it manually.

------
Keyframe
Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its
time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near
multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or
bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound,
all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations
behind it.

What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it
dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can
still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday
work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I
wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are
beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the
abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and
interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were
exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything
looks the same feeling).

~~~
flukus
I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC
(early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound
were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use
had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of
it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required
more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them
was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the
new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were
impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM
which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd
imagined.

~~~
Keyframe
Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based
games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?).
Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate
over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example).

Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and
4000).

~~~
wowtip
I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's
coffin.

Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with
the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of
games.

~~~
Annatar
Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural
blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping
because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane
and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed
to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However,
doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that!

Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler
code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola
processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC
bucket.

~~~
yason
_They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola
processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC
bucket._

Never.

You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of
256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000.

All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or
both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial
success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg)

Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D
graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the
graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a
lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a
good game.

------
subatomic
I highly recommend the documentary "From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga
Years"
[http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga](http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga)

The significance of the architecture and Jay Miners brilliance in system
design cannot be underestimated.

~~~
ianai
Can you outline the draw for people?

~~~
danielbarla
The draw, as in the attraction to Amiga? TL;DR: it was a technologically
superior product for a while, but never became mainstream. This allowed it to
garner a decent, very faithful following. Kind of like if the iPhone had
failed, but you still had people swearing it's greatest thing since sliced
bread.

I can't comment too much regarding the development side of things, as I was
quite young at the time. While I dabbled in coding and have heard many
comments about various ahead of its time ideas even on the dev side of things,
I suspect what set it aside was in large part the hardware.

For its price, it came surprisingly well equipped. For context, we're talking
1985, so most PCs you ran into would have had CGA (EGA only having come out in
'84). On the Amiga, the lower / standard resolutions you could have 32 or 64
colours at a time, picked from a 12-bit (4096) palette. For static images,
there was a special hack which allowed all 4096 colours on screen at the same
time, which made for breathtaking visuals. There were a set of co-processors
(Copper and Blitter), which allowed for specialised, primarily graphical
programming. Kind of alike a 2D GPU, but in 1985.

The OS itself had a fairly well implemented true pre-emptive multitasking,
which allowed for a number of apps to be run simultaneously. Again, this is 2
years before Windows 2.0, and probably 10 years before Windows had anything
better than switch-tasking. Apps could run as a window, or get their own
fullscreen mode, but surprisingly the fullscreen mode was stable (sometimes
games still crash on Windows when you drop do desktop), and you could even
drag the full screen window down, and see half the desktop, half the game,
etc. Along with the various co-processors offloading work from the CPU, this
meant that the entire experience was very fluid. I still remember playing
various simple games by setting them to high priority on the CPU, while a 3D
render was merrily taking 100% of the CPU in the background. There was
literally no noticeable lag in the game. For various architectural reasons,
this just doesn't seem to work on modern machines.

Couple that with very decent audio (again, I suspect it would be many years
before PCs routinely outperformed the Amiga), and you have a very decent
product. It's very difficult to explain the degree to which this technical
lead existed, the market is much more competitive now, and everything is much
closer together. But, as an example, it's as if someone came out with a
console with full VR capabilities at a 500$ price point. It simply shouldn't
be feasible.

Since it was quite different, a lot of in-house technologies sprung up. An
example is the AmigaGuide format, which was a kind of hyperlinked text
document (kind of like man pages?). I suspect a bunch of these esoteric and
quirky aspects gave the Amiga a lot of its flavour and soul.

For various reasons, possible mismanagement by Commodore, possibly the PC's
open platform simply being economically superior, the Amiga never became
mainstream. But therein lies it's draw - the people who knew it and loved it
simply couldn't believe this, and became rather fanatical followers.

~~~
ianai
That’s what I was not grasping. We were too poor to have a computer until I
was 16 (in the 90s) so I missed that era. Thank you!

~~~
danielbarla
You're welcome! One of the appeals of Amiga was that it offered all this at a
very competitive price (when compared to IBM compatible PCs). Still, I recall
a Commodore 64 costing my parents about 4 months of salary, and that was
without even a tape drive. This was Eastern Europe, so perhaps we were poorer
than most on HN. Commodores, Ataris and other alt machines were pretty popular
around those parts, due to their price point.

------
mmjaa
Old computers never die - their users do!

We should definitely not be throwing away old computers. They're just as
useful as they were when they were assembled, and can be tasked to do all
sorts of things we haven't even thought about yet.

I'm a huge fan of retro computing (Oric-1 Atmos, FTW!) and there is nothing
more satisfying than to sit down and download a fresh new app, built this
year, to run on a system built 30 years ago. I think this is a feeling that
must persist, somehow, so I encourage everyone and anyone who has an old
computer in their attic to dig it out, boot it up, and keep it running. Even
if you can't find a use for it, there are a million other people out there who
could. Give it to the kids and let them learn computing in the most
distraction-free environment you can give them... my kids learned computing at
the 8-bit level and its already put them way ahead of the iPhone-addicted
peers. Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at
least my kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few
characters, an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal ..

~~~
noxToken
> Sure, the Oric may not have the latest and greatest titles, but at least my
> kids know how to put a picture together with nothing but a few characters,
> an editor, and an understanding of hexadecimal

Some kids don't want nor will ever care to put their time to use by
programming on an 8-bit architecture. Some won't even care to do it on current
gen architecture, and that should be alright.

I could be misreading your tone (hope I am), but some people value experience
rather than creation. Creators are not superior to consumers. Putting down
others, especially children, because they'd rather play some shovelware mobile
release than create something is distasteful. We may be technically inclined,
but we aren't gods.

~~~
9889095r3jh
Na, creators are superior.

There's nothing wrong with kids playing dumb mobile games. But they gotta
spend some time making something. I don't care if it's a video game, a short
film, or a bird house. When you're making things, you're learning. And when
you're passively consuming, you may not be.

With games like Minecraft, kids today have no excuse. They can be making
things and playing a game at the same time.

------
zmix
AmigaOS was, overall, the best OS I have _ever_ used. As little technical as
possible, but as much as needed. It was an OS, that would gently make you a
power-user. I am not going to rant, but my God, was that a good OS! 10 years
ahead of its time!

~~~
kiksy
It felt like it was so "feature complete" even around 1990. Add a web browser
(and networking )and run it on a modern spec machine and I'm sure it would be
perfectly usable.

~~~
harel
People actually do that. You even have multiple browsers to choose from:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_Amig...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_AmigaOS)

------
stevoski
A story: I completed a PDP11 assembly coding assignment in university, on an
Amiga. Actually it was an Amiga running a Mac emulator, which in turn was
running a PDP11 emulator.

Macs at that time used a variable speed floppy drive, while the Amiga floppy
drive was fixed speed. So I was also using a Mac-compatible external floppy
disk drive.

The point of the story is that you could use an Amiga as a Mac if you really
wanted to.

~~~
fractallyte
Fusion - a commercial Mac emulator for the Amiga - actually ran _faster_ than
a real Mac at the time (mid- to late-nineties).

I sneaked out a couple of ROM images from the Macs at work, set up Fusion, and
had CompuServe running on my Amiga back in 1997. Nothing else though - System
7 and 8 were complex, lackluster, slow, and crash-prone; AmigaOS really blew
away the Mac, right up until OSX.

~~~
einr
RetroManCave on YouTube had an interesting video recently that investigated
the performance and capabilities of running a Mac emulator on an Amiga vs. a
real 68k Mac, and which actually was faster:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jph0gxzL3UI)

Very impressive stuff. Being able to run Mac software would mean access to
Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXpress, Framemaker, Microsoft Word and Excel and
other business/DTP software that unfortunately wasn't really available
natively on Amiga.

I suspect lots of people used Mac emulators to make their Amiga a viable
school/work machine, in addition to all the creative fun and games the native
platform afforded.

------
hoodoof
One day in maybe 1987 I was working at a computer company that had a mainframe
and was full of greenscreen microcomputers like the Apricot and Sirius 1.

One day, I walked into my work area and this new machine was set up and on the
screen was this:
[http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png](http://amiga.lychesis.net/amiga/AvrilHarrison/AH_KingTut.png)
I was a pivotal moment.

My mind was blown and although I could not afford it I immediately ordered
one.

In hindsight a more successful strategy for Amiga might have been to build it
as a games console as its primary market position.

~~~
basementcat
The Amiga was originally designed to be a game console but the company was
forced to pivot after the video game crash of 1983.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_develo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Concept_and_early_development)

~~~
flukus
Uncoincidentally, it's most successful market (or one of at least) was the UK
where the video game crash never happened.

------
egypturnash
_The Amiga, Born a Champion._

 _We made Amiga, Commodore fucked it up._

\- hidden message in version 1.2 of the OS

Computers nowadays feel so boring compared to the raw, crackling _future_
contained in the early Amigas. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking. I'm not
entirely sure the boringness is a bad thing; my Mac is a tool for getting work
done, rather than a cool thing that nobody really knows how to use right yet.

------
jshaqaw
If you weren’t around at the time it’s hard to understand just how much beyond
every other home computer platform the Amiga was. Yet another data point that
“best” doesn’t always win.

~~~
AndrewStephens
The Amiga was "winning" for a few years but, in hindsight, it is easy to see
why it was eventually eclipsed. PCs in the mid-80s were slow, boring, and
expensive but the ruthless PC-clone market had lowered costs and increased
specifications so quickly that around the early 90s games actually started
looking better on PCs.

Although the base Amiga500s were cheap, adding things like hard drives and
more memory were always expensive. The bigger and more capable models were
just as expensive as their PC counterparts and Commodore were slow to react to
competition. In the end it was one struggling company against many PC Clone
makers and they just couldn't compete on price or features.

The final nail in the coffin was when Windows95 came out and Microsoft started
focusing on the home/school market.

------
jflatow
I used an Amiga as a kid, and loved it. I am sure it had a profound impact on
me. I never identified with a broader Amiga using community, until now. This
is so cool, I'm excited to realize that the spirit lives on.

~~~
digi_owl
My parents got me one, hoping I could use it for school or something. I guess
I was too young to really appreciate it beyond the fancy games I could play.
Still have it tucked away in the basement though, but the floppies are likely
dead by now.

~~~
wowtip
Those 3,5" floppies seems to be almost immortal.

Packed up my Amiga 500+ after 20 years in different cellars and attics, most
disks seems fine, and my kids are fascinated by the late 80s / early 90s games
:)

~~~
Moru
Some 3.5" floppies didn't even survive the walk between the computer and the
library for printout. It all depends on what quality discs you could afford.
The expensive ones was a lot better than the cheaper ones.

------
AndrewStephens
The Amiga hit the home computer market like a bomb. For a few years there was
nothing quite like it on the market at a price that people could actually
afford. It was never that big in the USA but overseas it had a huge impact,
bridging the gap between games machines and real computers.

I saved up several years of teenage-dollars to buy one when I was 15 and never
looked back. Of particular interest to me was the excellent-for-the-time audio
chip. I spent many hours making MODs and games for my friends to play. Later,
I taught myself C and never looked back.

A sample of the sorts of things a teenager could do in 1991 :
[https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.htm...](https://sheep.horse/2011/11/stuff_from_my_old_hard_drive.html)

------
ggm
I had to do (crude) forensics on an Amiga belonging to a suicide victim at
university (I was in the computer center, the uni and police asked us to look
for a suicide note)

The mod/demo programs were amazing. I was totally outside the mod scene, but I
could see why people were attracted to it.

~~~
Something1234
That is such a sad event for you to have to perform forensics on. Did you find
anything of note about the demo programs?

I really want to ask for more details about the suicide but I feel that would
be crude.

~~~
ggm
I don't think the owner had written any/many. They seemed to be shared amongst
the digerati for c00lz. Mostly very trippy colormap warping, some of them had
sprites doing things over the underlying image, a lot of XOR
constructive/destructive interference fringe ideas.

They had two dimensions: 1) be as trippy-cool as possible 2) be written as
tersely as humanly possible

The suicide: I can't say. He left no note. I was led to believe he'd found a
way to consume a huge amount of time-charged online credit, realized he had
accrued a multi-thousand dollar debt, was failing university and was severely
depressed. This was back in the 1990s. Computer Crime was new, and the
consequences for him was probably jail time.

A lot of other stuff on the amiga was about conspiracy theory, hacking, the
usual ascii copy of 'the anarchists cookbook' which almost anyone can stumble
upon and hoarde. For somebody in formative years, maybe this was more exciting
than in hindsight it reads. (I mean both for me, finding it, and for him,
finding/owning it in the raw. I wouldn't have been significantly older than
him really, perhaps 10 years at most)

I don't think I helped the family come to any sense of closure, or informed
things to help the police or coroner. I did learn that this is a very
emotionally stressful job to perform and I am not well suited to either the
detail side of logging "what was found" or delivery of the right kind of
empathetic response to people in emotional stress. The uni was pretty good
about this. They gave me counselling afterward as I recall. I wouldn't be
surprised to be told anyone doing this kind of digital forensics nowadays has
a pretty solid support structure. Between this, and kiddyporn I think you'd
need it.

I think you can learn both skills, but it takes time

------
IronWolve
AmiTCP is what got me into being a sysadmin. I was a teenager using slurp and
amitcp to get my amiga online the Internet. Learning about TCP and
configuration files got me into setting up servers. I started working at an
ISP setting up BSD servers for web/ftp/mail/ppp/radius. I've been online on my
c64/128D with 300/1200 then finally a 2400 baud modem, then went Amiga 500 and
got that Amiga on my local ISP.

But after I started working at an ISP, it was AMD 486/DX100 and was PC since
then . with tons of Amiga Emulators and linux boxes

I still sit in an Amiga IRC channel till this day, and still idle on efnet.

Amusing story, an old buddy and co-worker I met on IRC, I got him a job at my
work, known him for years, he moved to Finland years ago so he could go to all
the demo scenes, and now he is a judge on many of them. Shout out to Sir
Garbage Truck and Accession!

------
kiksy
Just incase anyone hasn't seen it, Ars Technica have been running an excellent
series on the history of the Amiga. [https://arstechnica.com/series/history-
of-the-amiga/](https://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

------
harel
Everything about the Amiga was Magic. Even a system crash was a spiritual
experience, with a meditating Guru.

------
tadruj
I miss `filenote <filename> <note>` on the filesystem level - AFFS :) I'm all
emotional now

------
EB-Barrington
Reading text, scrolling by using the down-arrow on the Amiga in 1988, was
smoother than than the Windows 10 laptop I'm using to view this page, here in
2018.

I can't imagine what personal computing would be like in 2018 if the Amiga
system had gained market dominance.

------
EB-Barrington
My first full time job was at a store that sold Amiga's (and PC's). We had a
very large range of software - including every game, constantly getting new
stock. Once we convinced the boss to purchase a shrink-wrap machine to keep
everything looking neat, we started taking games home, copying them, and
sharing them with the local community. The next morning, we'd shrink-wrap the
games back to their original state, and put them back on the shelf for sale.

~~~
Moru
I'm not sure you realise this but that might have been the main reason Amiga
got successful in the first place. When my friends bought computers they
selected the one where they had easy access to free games. I bought an Atari
while they still bought c-64 because copying tapes and discs from other users
was easy. I learned programming since there was nothing else to do :-)

~~~
EB-Barrington
Oh yeah, I realise! (I bought an Amiga when I was studying Comp Sci at
University, rather than the recommended PC - as the games were much better on
the Amiga. Fortunately there was one unit with 68k assembly programming,
ideally suited to having an Amiga (and I got really good at Speedball II).

------
Nr7
Here is an excellent video about the history of Amiga:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP1nLzT_t0o)

There are several other related videos on the channel that are very much worth
to watch.

------
ekianjo
To fully understand why the Amiga was great for his time, a good introduction
is the book "the future was here".

------
_mrmnmly
so I've got a (maybe silly, but still) question: why Amiga wasn't successful
to this day as a solid competitor to PCs and Macs?

~~~
ubermonkey
Bad marketing is a big part of it. Amiga fans will also cite poor management
choices in general, though I don't know anything about that.

By the time they were introduced, though, the PC and Mac were already in the
market.

The PC was being adopted into offices by then, so it's also possible that the
ironclad rep (at the time!) of IBM meant that the PC was already locked into a
path to dominance, but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't
manage to survive in homes or education.

~~~
amiga-workbench
>but that leaves open the question of why the Amiga didn't manage to survive
in homes or education.

Compatibility mainly, being able to take your work home and continue doing it.

There were a few software 8086 emulators for the Amiga that could run DOS and
a few productivity applications, and there was a sidecar for the A1000 which
had a full blown PC & 5.25" floppy drive in it for compatibility.

~~~
_mrmnmly
thank You all for Your responses - it turned out an interesting question for
me which I plan to dive deeper into during following weekend :)

