
Why use Amiga in 2011? (AmigaOS 4, MorphOS, AROS, AmigaOS 3.9) - darkduck
http://www.feelgoodtech.com/retro/why-use-amiga-in-2011-amigaos-4-morphos-aros-amigaos-3-9/
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brudgers
£750 for a compatible motherboard at AROS?

Don’t get me wrong, Amiga OS was great, but its greatness was in part due to
the bang for the buck Commodore delivered, e.g. you could almost purchase an
entire Amiga 500 for the price of a 16 color ISA card…and have more than four
times the pixels with overscan and ten more bits of color depth in HAM mode.

~~~
stan_rogers
Let's not forget the apps, either. It was a long time before anything
comparable to Caligari or NewTek's Video Toaster (required an outboard
interface, but the Amiga's NTSC-compatible video made that cheaper than it
would have been otherwise) were running on the Mac or PC. If we had the ease
of multimedia distribution then that we have today, desktop video rather than
desktop publishing might have been the driver, and the personal computer
landscape might look a lot different today.

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prytane
I run WinUAE and a copy of ClassicWB ADV in the background while at work.
Often I'm listening to mods downloaded from Aminet. The Amiga had a great
music scene. I keep an AmigaShell open and edit C code in Vim and compile it
using SAS/C. I plan to do some 68000 assembly. Like Attic Greek, Amiga 3.X is
a dead and a stable platform to develop for. The "Amiga Hardware Reference
Manual" and the "Amiga Guru Book" have very detailed information for would-be
Amiga programmers.

Having never grown up with an Amiga, this hobby can not be attributed to
nostalgia. The Amiga has a damn fine UI and a nice DOS environment. Netsurf
has recently been ported to it, so it now has a decent browser, though it is
only practical in emulation or until Natami comes out.

I never got into AmigaOS 4.X or MorphOS. It would be great if the source for
3.X were opened

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jfb
Answer: nostalgia. I'd also like an Atari ST running on reasonably (~10 yr
old) hardware. I mean, I occasionally bid on old SGI workstations on eBay that
I have no earthly reason to own, except that I _really_ wanted one, back in
the day.

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alphamale3000
You guys are crazy. What a waste. Heavy machines, power hungry machines. How
much carbon is spent to deliver and run these? What an environmental waste!

Donate to a charity instead.

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fractallyte
You might be surprised: my Amiga 4000T with a 68060 processor, and full
complement of cards (graphics, network, sound) has no fans other than the case
fan - all running off a _very_ modest (by current standards) power supply:
because there's very little heat generated.

And while I'm missing many of my favorite modern apps, for many tasks the
productivity is still unequalled: near-instant bootup, hugely responsive, and
a beautiful _elegant_ operating system.

~~~
alphamale3000
It was more about the parent's post SGI nostalgia.

It's all nice, but my machine's power adapter is 60W. That's its maximal
theoretical output. (okay, with 90% efficiency that's 67W). It typically uses
20W to 40W depending on the load.

Plus, it auto-sleeps. Then it consumes just about 1W. Talk about efficiency.

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motters
Nice, although you would have to be of a certain age to appreciate this. There
are people out there running even older 8 bit microcomputers for single
dedicated applications.

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SwellJoe
I sold my Amigas a few years ago, and soon after bought a Commodore 64, which
I still have and still tinker with occasionally.

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samlittlewood
FPGA emulation of Amiga and other platforms:

<http://www.fpgaarcade.com/>

It's full of wires:

<http://www.fpgaarcade.com/atari_amiga.htm>

Now that he has found someone competent to assemble them without a crippling
NRE, I believe Mike has just got his hands on the first run of boards.

(No connection other than that I used to be on the software side of his day
job)

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aliem
My dear Pegasos2 is sitting near my desktop, it's light is still on,
enlightening my steps at night.

It's nice to turn it on to feel amiga once more.

~~~
msh
Was it just nostalgia, or did you have a use for it?

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bromagosa
Hmmm but I didn't hear any explanation of why use it, just a demo of how it
works...

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mhd
Hmm, MorphOS on PowerPC sounds quite neat. I've got a few old Macs and
applications that run on 10.5 are getting fewer (or you're forced to stick
with ancient versions). An interesting OS to play around with would be quite
appreciated. An alternative to sticking with 10.4/10.5 or using Linux/BSD…

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doomlaser
"nostalgia"

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crag
Yeah. I have an old TRS 80 I fire up now and then. Just for nostalgia sake.

I've tried to throw it out. Just can't do it.

~~~
51Cards
2 Commodore PET's do it for me... a 2001 and a SuperPet. Some of the old
cassette tapes still read though most of the floppies don't anymore.

