
A history of the Amiga, part 1: Genesis - ot
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1/
======
kingmanaz
I've posted this here before, but a 25-year old Amiga 2000 still provides
background music at home (when the wife is away). A couple hundred megs of Mod
files provide hours of nostalgia. Some people meditate with incense, Amigans
ruminate to the sounds of 80s tracker beats.

Here's a sample of a great mod:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZWgXiVJbpI)
\- albeit from a lame demo. There are thousands more available at aminet.net.

I've tried replacing the machine with emulation, but there is something
comforting in seeing the old girl in the corner singing as well as she ever
did. Perhaps devices living beyond their natural lifespans comforts man's
worries over his own perishable nature.

~~~
vidarh
For the slightly less "adventurous" in terms of music, here are two great
alternatives that provide modern remixes of Amiga and C64 music. I often find
that the remixes are better at evoking the feeling I remember in cases where
the originals often feel underwhelming when hearing them again. I think the
originals are in general easier to listen to for those of us who grew up with
the sound (I do listen to quite a bit of the originals too, as well as other
chiptune / retro music)

[http://remix.kwed.org/](http://remix.kwed.org/)

Quality is varying; sort by rating, and check out some of the IK+, Delta and
Commando mixes as "easy" introductions where the original tracks have kept
well)

[http://www.amigaremix.com/](http://www.amigaremix.com/) is also great, but
the irony is that because the Amiga sound is/was so much more sample driven, I
find that there are fewer remixes I like; often because the originals are good
enough that bad remixes are much more obvious.

daXX is a consistently quite good arranger to look for (also for C64 remixes).
There are many other good ones, but daXX is good for consistency across the
board.

Reyn Ouwehand is also highly notable, especially for being a guy that composed
original music for the C64 and Amiga (such as for Last Ninja 3), that then
went on to a career in the music industry, and has continued to do remixes of
C64 and Amiga tracks as a hobby.

------
Keyframe
The endless debates we had Amiga vs Atari vs PC (Mac wasn't even considered).
I remember vividly once we debated these three and Atari quickly fell out from
the debate (numerous reasons why it was subpar to amiga). Eventually it boiled
down to a friend debating PC (his) was better than Amiga and we all went over
how 486 (up and coming at the time) was indeed better and with SVGA and stuff
like that, but we were all team amiga. Said friend in the end convinced us PC
is better (his). Somehow we thought his PC was, indeed, 486 with SVGA... it
turned out it was a 286 with Hercules :) Amiga was so far beyond multimedia
capabilities (especially AGA ones like 1200 and 4000) in anything in its price
range that it surprises me to this day how it could've failed.

~~~
hansjorg
It was way beyond in multimedia capabilities at a point, but that edge was
quickly eaten away by the raw power provided by the 486, and later the
Pentium, combined with the modular PC architecture.

The Motorola 68k-family were beautiful processors to program, but
unfortunately they didn't manage to scale compared to the x86. Commodore never
made the jump to PowerPC.

The 1200 was a nice machine, but it was just a bit underpowered in every
department. It had a 68020 rather than a 68030 (which meant no MMU), 8-bit
sound rather than 16, no fast-mem (memory reserved for use by the CPU alone),
and no chunky graphics mode (which had been rumored before its release).

The last point was a bit of a death knell for any kind of serious graphics
performance. The planar bitmap model had worked ok on the older models with a
maximum of 32 colors (5 bitplanes), but with 256 colors you had to do 8 writes
to set a pixel. The bitplane model worked great for sidescrollers and similar
games, and also for rudimentary 3D games with the help of the blitter co-
processor, but when PC games started to do texture mapped 3D in VGA, the Amiga
1200 was left in the dust.

~~~
Keyframe
I couldn't get genlocked PAL signal out of PC until late 90's with Targa
boards which cost as much as four A1200s in their prime. I can't even remember
we used anything video related on PC until at least Pentium Pro became
available (and WinNT). Amiga and SGIs were used in video production for an
extremely long period of time (well extremely for technology time scale).
That's why I was wondering.

Commodore did some serious business mistakes.

~~~
chipsy
For similar reasons (built-in MIDI interfacing) the Atari STs had a huge
uptake in music production that has lasted well beyond their lifespan as
general-purpose computers, and even into recent years. Music arrangements
haven't gotten more complicated over time, so for many artists, there's just
no need to replace setups using 30+ year old gear.

------
vidarh
The Amiga community is still alive:

[http://www.amiga.org/](http://www.amiga.org/)

[http://www.amigaworld.net/](http://www.amigaworld.net/)

And many others, but those are the two "main" English language forums.

(EDIT: There's also a few print magazines still kept alive by enthusiasts. The
largest one is "Amiga Future", printed 6 times a year in separate German and
English Editions: [http://www.amigafuture.de/](http://www.amigafuture.de/) )

There's also a number of new machines you can buy that can run either classic
AmigaOS (FPGA reimplementations - look for Minimig, Chameleon, ReplayArcade)
or AmigaOS4 (PPC based) - AmigaOne X1000, and AmigaOne SAM460.

As well as two "clones" of the OS: MorphOS, and AROS. The former run on old
PPC Mac's of various types mainly. The latter is open source runs on
"anything" from Raspberry Pi's to modern PCs (either directly on the hardware,
or hosted under Linux). Here's a couple of AROS distributions:

[http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/](http://vmwaros.blogspot.co.uk/)

[http://www.aeros-os.org/](http://www.aeros-os.org/)

[https://sites.google.com/site/arosaspireone/aros-aspire-
dist...](https://sites.google.com/site/arosaspireone/aros-aspire-distro)

~~~
draegtun
Two other OSes that were influenced by the AmigaOS were AtheOS and then a
later fork of this called Syllable.

refs:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtheOS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AtheOS) |
[http://atheos.syllable.org/index.html](http://atheos.syllable.org/index.html)
|
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_(operating_system)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_\(operating_system\))
| [http://syllable.org](http://syllable.org)

~~~
wcummings
There's an "AmigaOS" release from '06 [1] (you can buy expensive PowerPC
boards that run it) [2]

[1] [http://www.amigaos.net](http://www.amigaos.net) [2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#Compatible_hardware](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS_4#Compatible_hardware)

------
zackmorris
I first saw an Amiga on Computer Chronicles in the late 80s or early 90s and
remember being blown away that they could edit cartoons and show 3D graphics.
I had a (gulp) Mac Plus at the time and remember that was the first time that
I was really disappointed in my computer! Macs wouldn't have similar abilities
until the 60 MHz PowerPC came out.

Tragically Apple's weakest link was always unimaginative hardware, which made
most Macs unable to play even the simplest 386-era PC games. My first
experience with crippled Apple hardware was trying to blit a 256 color screen
on a Mac LC II with BlockMove() and if I recall, it only ran at 20 or 30 fps
because the ram bus was only 16 bits wide instead of 32. A quick back of the
napkin calculation showed that 640x480@256 should have gotten around 100 fps
on a 16 bit, 16 MHz bus, but something about how the VRAM worked cut that by
2-4x. I wasted a lot of years on things like interlaced lines and 2x
enlargement blitters that never could quite make up for the lack of a 320x240
video resolution. The system also didn't allow direct access to the palette
entries, so palette animation blocked for 1/60 of a second so games couldn't
use it. As an aside, the other system libraries for sound, input and
networking all had various failings so I found myself reinventing the wheel at
every turn. To me, those shortsighted decisions were a big part of why Apple
almost went out of business before the second coming of Steve Jobs and the
iMac (which had a decent enough video card to at least do 2D in thousands or
millions at 60 fps).

Of course, Amiga realized all of this early on and went completely around the
problem by providing decent video hardware. Whenever I hear people talking
about various limitations with 3D graphics, physics or AI today, I mourn the
lack of outside-the-box thinking that Amiga exemplified. Our hands are tied by
the CPU/GPU/OS oligarchies for the foreseeable future.

I did a quick search for Amiga and found these videos, not sure if there are
more:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hJ_3MvH7Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hJ_3MvH7Q)

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0)

~~~
lawtguy
Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS:
[http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html](http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html).
Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe
emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun
hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS.

It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-
forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't
think any of that was important to selling computers.

~~~
vidarh
The Apple IIGS is/was _nothing_ like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities.

The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac
sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as
well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a
primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US

(while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had
a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore
US didn't think any of _that_ was important to selling computers).

~~~
nevster
This is true in terms of graphics but in terms of sound, the IIGS was better.

Also, the OS had some neat stuff like File System Translators - it could read
and write all sorts of disk formats.

~~~
vidarh
> but in terms of sound

That may be so, but that's also pretty much it. Then again, for that price you
could buy an Amiga 500 _and_ a synth :D

(amusingly, Ensoniq was founded by ex Commodore/MOS engineers, including Bob
Yannes, who created the SID chip found in the C64)

> File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.

Just like the Amiga. There's dozens of filesystem implementations for the
Amiga - you just drop a device file in the right directory, and add a very
simple configuration.

E.g. here's a small selection from Aminet:
[http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem](http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem)

There's even at least one editor (FrexxEd) that exposed it's currently open
buffers as files in a filesystem (so you can e.g. run your compiler directly
on the editors buffer without going via a temp file, and have the compiler
output go directly to another buffer, without any explicit support in the
editor)

------
crb
Author Brian Bagnall wrote a book about Commodore, from MOS Technology and the
6502 through the departure of Jack Tramiel and the Amiga years: "On the Edge:
The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore"
([http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412006.On_the_Edge](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/412006.On_the_Edge)).
This was published in 2006.

The book was then later split into two halves. The first half, very heavily
expanded, was published in 2011 as "Commodore: A Company on the Edge".

As of 2013, the faithful are still waiting for the second half, "Commodore:
The Amiga Years". Bagnall missed his deadline for the update and has now moved
onto another project.
([https://twitter.com/BrianBagnall1/status/390845357979992064](https://twitter.com/BrianBagnall1/status/390845357979992064))

I re-read the first half recently while waiting for the second, and I
thoroughly recommend it. As of yet I've resisted the temptation to get the
2006 book to see how it ends.

~~~
vidarh
I ended up picking up the 2006 book used because of the cancelled second half.
It's ok, but of course nothing like the full book treatment I'd hoped for.

I was a Commodore user from the Vic-20 days, through a C-64 and then several
Amiga's, so the first part was also highly interesting to me, though. Just
hope Bagnall gets back to it eventually.

------
wslh
Please don't make me cry... I remember in the 90s not understanding all the PC
thing that only came with DOS, Hercules/CGA/VGA, a speaker, etc.

Few years later, Windows 3.1 was a quasi-DOS frontend.

~~~
pjmlp
My first PC was a 386 SX.

After I got hold of Windows 3.1 and had some Windows only software, I trimmed
my autoexec.bat and config.sys to load just the essential MS-DOS stuff, and
jump strait into Windows.

------
protomyth
I dearly miss Jay Miner. He doesn't get enough credit for the chips he put
into the Atari 8-bit and Amiga computers.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Miner)

------
hanula
Link to whole serie: [http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-
amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

------
ot
This is a truly fascinating read. It was linked in the other story about OS/2,
and I couldn't stop reading. Apparently it will turn into a book, looking
forward to buy it!

    
    
        Author’s note: The Demo Scene is the latest piece in a
        long-running Ars series on the history of the Amiga. The last
        installment in the series ran in 2008, but professional
        obligations for the author caused a delay. More chapters are on
        the way—emphasis on chapters. The ultimate aim is to compile all
        the parts of this series into a book. Stay tuned!

------
icedchai
The Amiga was so much fun. I had a 500 in the late 80's, then upgraded to a
3000. Some games, like Shadow of the Beast, were so amazing for the time. The
OS was pretty advanced, too (real, pre-emptive multitasking in 512K of RAM,
IPC using very lightweight message passing, etc.)

Around '94 or so I moved on to Linux.

I still miss the Amiga though.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Ahh, nostalgia.. getting a second disk drive for my A500, using PowerPacker to
pack the executables of often needed tools, use a menu editor to add them to
the Workbench menu = my first taste of the external harddrive I got later.
Which was quite the brick and had a proud capacity of 52 MB. The 4 megabyte
RAM expansion, also _huge_... combined with the Action Replay module and the
kickstart 2.0 ROM switcher, it all took up quite some space. Oh how I miss my
Amiga 500; it died when I got carried away while soldering (after having
sucessfully made a pause toggle by putting a switch between a pin from the
expansion slot to mass). Ripping modules! I miss that, too. Later on, the
A4000, playing Ultima VI with a speed increase of 35x (which had to make up
for the games that refused to work on it)... configuring the crap out of
MagicMenu, MUI, Directory Opus, and whatever I found on the Public Domain
disks I ordered... discovering the Aminet CD series... all that music, the
demos, oh. And yes, the games, obviously, all the pixel art and all those
amazing composers.

Sorry for rambling, and regards to grafx2, Renoise, DeliPlayer, WinUAE, and
whatever else keeps some of that spirit alive still ^^

~~~
icedchai
Yep, my Amiga 500 was the first machine I had with a hard drive: a whopping 30
megs! I had to beg my parents to buy it for me for Christmas, being only 13
years old at the time. It also came with a 2 meg memory expansion, giving the
Amiga a total of 3 megs of RAM, which was pretty decent for 1989 or so.

A year or so later, with some birthday money, I bought a copy of Lattice C and
managed to teach myself C! That was basically the beginning of my interest in
programming.

~~~
vidarh
I got a used 20MB hard drive. After about 6 months it refused to spin up. My
solution was to open it up(!), and manually help the motor spin up the platter
- after that it'd keep running until I powered the machine down. So I'd keep
it running most of the day. It lasted probably about another year after that,
with me spinning up the drive by hand first time I booted every day...

------
vinkelhake
I got my first PC in 97, that's how long I held out with my Amiga. At the time
my Amiga 1200 had 42MB ram and a 68030 accelerator. I had carved a slit on its
left side so that I could string an IDE cable out and use a cheap 3.5" HDD
(which was sitting in a separate enclosure with its own power source).

When I switched it had already been painfully obvious for years that there
would never be an Amiga capable of competing with PC again. It is in a way sad
that it played out the way it did and it's easy for me to get nostalgic when I
read pieces like this.

~~~
lgieron
I actually moved my A1200 to the PC desktop case! My father and I moved
motherboard and other components there (motherboard actually didn't quite fit
- we needed to saw off a piece of it). Those were the days...

------
Mithaldu
Enjoy some of the most recent demos released for the amiga platform:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc)
\- Hot Dots by Focus Design (Revision 2012)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmqiR-
zT5OQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmqiR-zT5OQ) \- LEMON. 2013 RINK A DINK
REDUX (A500)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiftizQoNY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKiftizQoNY)
\- Amiga Scenedemo - Smoke & Mirrors by Ghostown and Loonies (Revision 2013)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBX-
TRkkx0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcBX-TRkkx0) \- Traction - Past is
Prologue

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6dfLG7wowQ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6dfLG7wowQ)
\- Boogietown by Ghostown & RNO

And if this makes you curious, dig a bit through this:
[http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&...](http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&platform%5B1%5D=Amiga+OCS%2FECS&platform%5B2%5D=Amiga+PPC%2FRTG&page=1&order=views)

Or even better, come to a demoparty near you (
[http://www.demoparty.net/](http://www.demoparty.net/) ), meet amiga coders of
the current age and get to poke at the actual machines. :)

------
nols
Did you see this in yesterday's story about OS/2? Good article.

[http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-
sy...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/11/half-an-operating-system-the-
triumph-and-tragedy-of-os2/)

------
hilti
Just booted up my A1000 with Workbench 1.3. This machine is so beautiful and I
think the Amiga were the only computers which stay responsive when accessing
floppy disks.

Maybe some day I'll upgrade this A1000 to a G. Braun "Super 1000".

[http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/gba1000/gba1000.htm](http://www.illuwatar.se/project_pages/gba1000/gba1000.htm)

~~~
vidarh
The effort they went to in order to maintain responsiveness is amazing. You
don't truly appreciate it until you dive into the internals of the OS. I don't
think most people at the time even realized just the lengths they went to.

E.g. consider cut and paste.

Easy? Right? You just have an app hand you a representation of the data to
cut, and store it until someone chooses paste.

Except you're on a machine with 512KB RAM, where T: ("/tmp") might be on a
floppy to save RAM.

The consequence is that "everything" in AmigaOS runs in its own "task"
(process/thread - the distinction doesn't mean much since there's no memory
protection). In a typical shell, when you do cut and paste, at least the
following are involved:

\- input.device (mouse handling)

\- console.device ("low level" console window processing. This one doesn't
"own" a window but can render to any window, and handles things like escape
codes)

\- console-handler ("high level" console window processing; this one
opens/owns the window, and can handle things like line editing)

\- ConClip (this one registers handlers to handle cut and paste, and mediates
the process)

\- clipboard.device (mediates read/writes to clipboard "units", so you can
have multiple clipboards; knows where to write the clips)

\- (possibly, depending on where T: is mounted: trackdisk.device, handling low
level writes to floppy, or one of the ram disk devices)

\- The shell process itself.

If you do a "copy", the input device sends the raw mouse events to the
console.device, which "cooks them" into higher level events it sends to the
console-handler, which then calls a library function in the clipboard device
which will start a background write of data to the appropriate storage device.
Each of those exchanges apart from calling into clipboard device (which is a
bit of a hack, to be honest, but ultimately leads to another async message
AFAIK) is an entirely async message exhange.

If the clipboard was on a slow device, who cares? It'd get written in the
background, and the source task would be informed when it was safe to change
the contents of the buffer (cut and paste in general was accomplished by
pointer passing, and it was up to the source application whether it wanted to
make a copy, or avoid modifying the source buffer until it was safe).

The path back, to, where console-handler might send codes to trigger
highlighting the text to the console.device, which renders to screen (and the
window handling is mediated by yet another task, handling Intuition, the GUI).

All in all, it's not unusual for a keypress to be processed by half a dozen
tasks, and the resulting action to work it's way back through another half a
dozen tasks before you see the result on screen.

All of this has lots of overhead, of course, even on a non-MMU single address
space OS - there's lots of context switches, and lots of memory allocation for
messages etc., all of which was anathema to most people writing OS's for home
computers at the time.

But it is exactly this that made the OS so responsive: You sacrifice absolute
throughput for a system that took great care to do "everything" async, so the
system was nearly always responsive.

(you see the same in Amiga hardware, which ironically lost out to the brute
force approach of the eras PCs, only for us today to make it back to the "co-
processor" model: My servers at work has an ARM core in every harddisk, and a
PPC or ARM core on the RAID controllers, and many modern ethernet cards has
SOCs with ARM cores too; much like my Amiga 2000 back in the day had a 6502
compatible on the keyboard, a Z80 on my SCSI controller, a 68020 accelerator
for the main CPU and a 286 accelerator on a bridge board....)

Having worked on AROS (an AmigaOS compatible OS) console support, I can say
that sometimes that division is really annoying - having to think long and
hard about which task something belongs in. But it leads to a system that is
still usable on a 7.16MHz 68000 CPU... On a modern machine (AROS runs on any
modern x86 hosted under Linux, and "native" on some x86, ARM, PPC and m68k
hardware; albeit still only single core) it _flies_.

In fact, you truly appreciate how light these OS's were if you try them on
modern hardware: I have an AROS setup that "boots" the Linux hosted version
straight into FrexxEd (a great editor; one of the original authors is the guy
behind CURL). On my laptop, it boots AROS and starts FrexxEd in less time than
it takes a console-only build of Emacs to start....

------
code_duck
The Amiga brings up so many topics and memories for me that it's hard to know
where to start.

People who had an Amiga back then may agree that technically and conceptually
it was so far advanced compared particularly to Microsoft's offerings, that
any comparison of merits vs market success led to frustration.

I had an Amiga 3000, which was pretty rare and one of the first workbench 2.0
machines. It was quite buggy in the firmware and more when we first got it,
but Commodore was very good to us partially because my father worked at a
private university in the Northeast. They replaced two machines that were
fried by NewTek digiview almost immediately for free (The DigiView board was
really pushing the limit of the Amiga 2000 and 2500, and had some
incompatibility with the 3000 that actually fried our motherboards).

The Amiga also had some amazing software, such as AmivaVision – object
oriented visuals scripting that was like a visual HyperCard/PowerPoint, back
in 1992.

When Linux came along, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I felt quite at
home in its environment since the Amiga had a unix-like directory structure
and shell environment.

It's great to be seeing the Amiga get this sort of attention. One can only
wonder what sort of computing environments would be common today if it had
been a commercial success instead of Windows and Mac OS.

------
harel
I was an Amiga in a town of PC. They all thought I'm the odd one out, but
still they all came to play Kick Off and Super Cars etc. because their games
were sub par.

~~~
romland
My goodness. :)

Those two games were the ones we played by far the most as well. Just throw in
the game Gravity Force there and you have a winner!

~~~
mnw21cam
Gravity Force 2 is still the best group game I have ever played, in terms of
enjoyment and laughs, closely followed by Worms Director's Cut (also Amiga)
and Mario Kart Double Dash.

------
sanoli
Nive history of the Amiga documentary:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTIrJu7NbE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfTIrJu7NbE)

------
gdubs
Excited to read the rest of this series. No doubt they will get into the Video
Toaster -- and Lightwave in particular -- which was used heavily in 90's
television production. Fun fact about the Video Toaster: it was developed by
Dana Carvey's brother who was the inspiration for Garth in "Wayne's World".
(Garth actually wears a Video Toaster t-shirt in "Wayne's World 2".)

------
b-johansson
At the time many were wondering why the Amiga just didn't seem to catch on.
The most common speculation was that it was marketed and perceived as a gaming
machine. For some reason this was mutually exclusive with being a serious
business machine.

It's really fascinating how far hardware acceleration was able to take that
machine. It took a long time before I felt that a PC was even close in
responsiveness to my Amiga. Though to be honest at the end it was equipped
with a MC68060 which was no slouch. Using a metal cutter and some force it was
also possible to squeeze a 3.5" hard drive in an A1200. But eventually the
controller hardware broke down and would fry any hard drive connected to it.
This was in 1998 so by that time it was pretty difficult to get spare parts if
I remember correctly and to be honest the Pentium II I had at the time was a
lot faster. So the Amiga went back into its box where it still lives today.

Some of my best programming memories are from assembly coding on that machine.
It taught me so much and I doubt I would be here on Hacker News today if not
for its creation.

~~~
vacri
A couple of years ago, I was doing the nostalgia thing with a friend. I used
to have an Amiga 500, and I recounted about another friend who had the Acorn
Archimedes, and who was constantly espousing how awesome the machine was (and
it had a great 3D tank game I can't recall...). Amiga died an unhappy death,
but "Whatever happened to Acorn?" I mused, wondering if they'd gone the same
way.

"What do you know about ARM... ?"

~~~
toyg
Not sure if it's a serious question, but the Acorn people went on to found
ARM...

~~~
toyg
Damn, didn't see the last line -- news:yc badly needs an update...

------
ChuckMcM
That brings back some memories. I remember saying a lot of silly things on
comp.sys.amiga :-). For me the most interesting was the whole "whole machine
games" debate where I found myself alternating sides. The question was could a
multi-tasking machine run a quality video game and at the same time provide a
credible 'computer' user experience. This came up on the Amiga because you
could sometimes 'pull down' the screen with the game on it, and often get to
the Desktop on the screen behind it.

People argued long into the night that the only way to get decent games was to
run 'on the metal' and the other side claimed it could be done while behaving
nicely. These days the question is moot of course[1]. But that you could have
the debate was wonderful back in 1986 and it didn't surface on the PC until
easily 10 years later.

[1] These days of course you can run full up command and conquer in a VM
running Win98 if you want with DirectX 8 as an example, while running a nice
Linux desktop.

------
epenn
It was the summer of 1996. I was 12 years old and really into exploring older
computers, especially the Commodore brand, after my grandmother gave me an old
Commodore Plus/4 that she had won as a door prize somewhere many years earlier
and never used. I was also able to tinker with others that belonged to my
friends or that I found in thrift stores (PET, 64, 128, etc). Unfortunately
everything Amiga had eluded me thus far.

I somewhat got to know the Amiga through the UAE Amiga emulator which at the
time was only in a semi-working state at best. My 66mhz 486DX Packard Bell
didn't exactly do the greatest job of running it at full speed or really even
usable speed. But it was still enough that I became enamored with the look-
and-feel (and ARexx to some degree) and knew I needed to get my hands on a
real one someday. It was the holy grail of my ancient computer quest.

Then one day that fateful summer it finally happened. I was in the Montgomery
Ward department store in Indiana, PA with my mom. I was poking through the
electronics section and saw a very large stack of reduced-price VCR boxes on
one of the shelves out on the open floor. I was looking over the stack from
top to bottom when I noticed there was another box stuck underneath the lowest
ledge of the shelf. I pulled it out and wiped off the unfathomably thick layer
of dust from the box to reveal that it was an unopened Amiga 500, probably
untouched and forgotten for many years. THE DAY WAS MINE.

I was never the type of kid to blow my allowance money on random things. I
saved it all with my eyes on bigger prizes and I had just found the ultimate
prize. The sticker price was $200 and I had roughly that amount saved up at
the time. I asked my mom if I could use my allowance money to buy it.
Naturally an argument ensued but ultimately I won and was allowed to make the
purchase. When I took it up to the counter the lady remarked that she hadn't
seen one of those in several years and didn't realize they still sold them.
She rung it up and it was still apparently in their inventory system, so the
Amiga was mine.

Emulators be damned, I finally got to explore it in real life. It was every
bit as magical as I had hoped. I couldn't help but make comparisons to my
aforementioned Packard Bell. 4096 colors vs a meager 256. Deluxe Paint vs MS
Paint. An operating system with true preemptive multitasking and a very
responsive GUI vs DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Turrican vs. anything that wasn't
Turrican. There was no going back. I had left Plato's Cave and seen the light.
I didn't ever want to be away from the light again.

Unfortunately we all know how the allegory of the cave ends. No man can give
light to the blind. My mom decided that I had spent way too much of my saved
allowance on the Amiga, especially since I already owned an old but still
working Packard Bell. Then just shy of a month later, while still within the
timeframe of the return policy, she forced me to pack it all up and take it
back. Just as quickly as I had found the holy grail and drank sweet Amiga-
brand kool aid from it, it was gone.

I guess the main point of my post is that the Amiga, even in that short period
of time, had a fairly profound effect on me when I was little. At least enough
for me to write this long, rosy-eyed, nostalgic comment. It was also partially
the impetus for me wanting to study computer science and become a software
engineer. My thought being that if someone else can create something so cool,
maybe I can too if I just learn how. (Also, secondarily, wtf mom? Where the
hell else am I going to get a new-in-the-box Amiga 500 now?)

~~~
vidarh
> (Also, secondarily, wtf mom? Where the hell else am I going to get a new-in-
> the-box Amiga 500 now?)

There was a warehouse full of unopened Amiga 1200's discovered recently... A
new-in-the-box Amiga 500 might be hard, but there's plenty of Amiga gear for
sale still, including FPGA reimplementations (with or without improvements).

Thought frankly, at this stage, if you were to consider buying one for the
nostalgia, avoid machines that has not been owned by enthusiasts, as there are
known problems, such as capacitors that are likely to leak acid and damage
motherboard traces, so if you want to pick one up you'd do better picking one
up from someone who is/has been aware of the problems and has dealt with them
already...

~~~
ekianjo
ffor Fpga implementatios, check out the Minimig.

------
axilmar
What truly disappointed me is the lack of any hardware for 3d graphics.

It was around 1990-91 where it was obvious that computer games were going 3d.

In the arcade, the most amazing coin-ops with 3d graphics had been
consistently Sega's, with amazing hardware sprite scaling and rotation.

At home, Catacomb 3D was already raising eyebrows, Wolfenstein 3D was in
development, but the most amazing game of that era was Wing Commander, with 3d
graphics that the Amiga couldn't do at all.

But instead of planning a new Amiga with improved 3d capabilities, Commodore
was developing...CD32. When CD32 came out in 1993, it didn't have whizzbang
sprite scaling and rotation nor did it have 3d graphics capabilities.

Commodore couldn't have been more shortsighted with the Amiga.

------
camus2
Still have mine , 1 Mo , deluxe paint , real 3d and Turrican 2, it was a
killer machine and a lot of famous game programmers started on it. Too bad
commodore screwed up.

~~~
richardjdare
I recently used DPaint 4 to do some pixel art for an iPhone game I am working
on :) Photoshop was just too annoying when working at the pixel level.

I really regret not having made any Amiga games/programs when I was a
teenager. I just didn't have the money to buy books or development tools. If I
ever had time to work on a project of no consequence, I would probably write
an Amiga game in 68000 assembly language, just to say I finally did it.

It's funny. My emulator setup is better than any Amiga I could have owned, and
thanks to ebay I now have a complete set of programming manuals that I would
have killed for when I was 17

------
awjr
Ah the fun I had playing with this machine. First bit of 3D animation I ever
did was on the Amiga.

Trying to rack my brain as to the music sequencer I used to spend hours with.

~~~
mnw21cam
OctaMED?

~~~
wgx
_nostalgia overload_

------
gcb0
is arstechnica re-publishing all the osnews.com pieces? i've seen a bunch of
os/2 history, comodore history, etc on the HN frontpage recently...

