
Google employee ports Amiga emulator to Chrome - bane
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57615373-93/google-emulates-1980s-era-amiga-computer-in-chrome/
======
gaius
The Amiga had a recognizably modern GUI, multi-tasking, interprocess
communication, a universal scripting language and a bunch of other stuff, in
256k of memory (later 512k), running on a 7.1Mhz CPU. What's amazing is not
that you can emulate it in a browser now, but how little real progress has
been made.

~~~
pjmlp
Just goes to show how modern computer resources are being wasted in this pile
of VMs and bending an application for showing interactive documents into a
platform.

------
ChuckMcM
Nicely done. I feel a bit about the Amiga like I do about the Moon landings in
1969. So much of a feeling of "wow, the future has arrived" and then it
didn't.

Nothing was quite so cool as 'pulling down the screen' to reveal another
screen behind it.

~~~
JunkDNA
It took me until 2005 to have a computer I liked nearly as much as the Amiga:
I bought a Mac mini running OS X to tinker with and I ended up switching to
Mac OS about 9 - 10 months later. It still wasn't the same though.

I think the frustrating thing about the Amiga is how painfully long we had to
wait to get all of that stuff again. When I relented and got a PC in the early
1990's, I had to screw with getting a Pro Audio16 (Soundblaster competitor) to
work in DOS. You had to mess with jumpers, DMA settings, IRQ settings,
conflicts, etc.... All to get stereo sound that the Amiga had in 1987. And the
sound produced by the card wasn't even that good! Same with video. PC's were
stuck with 256 color VGA for what seemed like an eternity.

Having an Amiga was like being teleported to the future in a time machine and
then being cruelly yanked back to the present and being forced to watch people
"discover" all of this stuff you had grown accustomed to.

~~~
egypturnash
I always described the Amiga experience as "a computer from ten years in the
future... then Commodore sat on their thumbs for twenty." Or at least that's
what it felt like when I got my A1000 versus abandoning my 1200.

I've been using Macs since the time I put my last Amiga away, and it's never
felt as cool as the Amiga did. More useful, much more powerful, but never as
flat-out _cool_.

God I'm getting old.

------
JunkDNA
If you missed the Ars series on the history of the Amiga, you owe it to
yourself to read the whole thing: [http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-
the-amiga/](http://arstechnica.com/series/history-of-the-amiga/)

I missed it when it came out, but got sucked in while reading the history of
OS/2 that was posted here a couple of weeks ago. I was too young to care about
all that stuff at the time, but it was a fascinating read. Especially since I
now live a stone's throw from where the Commodore headquarters once was.

~~~
Macha
Reading this at the moment, and I found this quote:

> Amiga, Inc. didn't have a lot of money left over for shipping its prototype
> to the show, and the engineers were understandably nervous about putting
> such a delicate device through the rigors of commercial package transport.
> Instead, RJ Mical and Dale Luck purchased an extra airline seat between the
> two of them and wrapped the fledgling Amiga in pillows for extra security.
> According to airline regulations, the extra "passenger" required a name on
> the ticket, so the Lorraine became "Joe Pillow," and the engineers drew a
> happy face on the front pillowcase and added a tie! They even tried to get
> an extra meal for Joe, but the flight attendants refused to feed the
> already-stuffed passenger.

Somehow I can't imagine that working on a modern airline...

~~~
jdietrich
Musicians often book an extra seat for their instrument, because fine musical
instruments are often irreplaceable antiques. These days you can just book a
ticket in the name EXTRA SEAT, but it used to be common to book a guitar in as
Mr Gibson or a cello as Mr Stradivarius.

------
felipe
The title is misleading. It should read "Google employee ports Amiga emulator
to Chrome"

From the FAQ:

"The code was forked from PUAE, the Portable Universal Amiga Emulator, from
GnoStiC's GitHub repo [1]"

[1] [https://github.com/GnoStiC/PUAE](https://github.com/GnoStiC/PUAE)

"I work for Google. I was a member of the Chrome team, and more specifically
the Native Client team, from August 2010 to June 2013."

------
julianpye
In 1990 I worked for 5 weeks during holidays at Ikea so I could afford that
box :)

Lattice C was spread across 4 disks. After 7 minutes of disk swapping, I'd get
my linker errors.

Anyway, need to check it out and see if it does run Shadow of the Beast!

~~~
OneOneOneOne
I was an Aztec C user. That was the second compiler I ever purchased (after
Abacus C for the C64). Damn... I'm still buying compilers today thanks to
Microsoft.

~~~
bjackman
Bit of topic, but out of interest, why do you buy/use/need the Microsoft
toolchain?

(I work on open source stuff and I've only ever used GCC and Clang - I'm not
asking this as a rhetorical way to say you're stupid, I'm genuinely ignorant
of the advantages).

~~~
georgemcbay
I can't speak for the original poster's use case, but wanted to point out that
the Microsoft compilers are free (as in beer) anyway. They do charge an arm
and a leg for things like Team Foundation Server or whatever but the fully
functional (32 and 64 bit) compilers, linkers, nmake, etc ship with the free
Windows SDK. And even most of the useful IDE stuff is available for free in
the VS Express editions.

------
melling
Someone should do an asm.js version to compare performance.

"Chrome emulates the old operating system by a Chrome-specific version of the
Open Source Universal Amiga Emulator. Stefansen brought its 400,000 lines of
code, written in the C programming language originally, to the Portable Native
Client (PNaCl) foundation built into Chrome."

------
nine_k
Basically this is emulation using PNaCl, an almost-native-code execution layer
in Chrome. A little bit like ActiveX, but multi-platform.

I wonder if a complete QEMU can be shoehorned into this technology, so that
you could more old OSes in a browser.

I also wonder how hard it would be to create an Amiga emulator in pure JS.
Probably a lot harder than a Linux console-more emulator which already exists.

~~~
flohofwoe
I wish people would stop mentioning ActiveX and PNaCl in the same sentence,
because the two are nothing alike at all :) ActiveX (and NPAPI) plugins run
completely unprotected code and are OS and CPU specific. PNaCl runs in a
security sandbox, and provides a CPU and OS agnostic runtime environment.

~~~
stelonix
But like ActiveX, it still needs to be supported by the underlying
architecture.

~~~
haberman
No, PNaCl is CPU-agnostic. It runs on both x86 and ARM, and could be ported to
others.

You may be thinking of NaCl, which is CPU-specific.

~~~
nine_k
Yes, I was definitely mistaking it for NaCl, the CPU-specific approach.

------
archgrove
40 year olds? My first machine was an A500, and I'm early 30s!

~~~
psykotic
I'm 31 and grew up with a C64 and then an A500. My first PC was a 486-DX2 66
MHz in the middle of the nineties. In the 386 days, the PC still felt far
inferior to much older Amigas.

------
mrbill
"On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore" by Brian Bagnall
covers quite a bit of the Amiga development.

[http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-
Commodore/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Edge-Spectacular-Rise-Fall-
Commodore/dp/0973864907)

However, the rewritten / "second edition", "Commodore: A Company on the Edge"
stops with the 8-bit machines, as there were plans to have two volumes - one
for the 8-bit systems, and one for the Amiga days:

[http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-
Bagnall/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Company-Edge-Brian-
Bagnall/dp/0973864966)

The second edition, "Commodore: The Amiga Years" has been unfortunately
cancelled, but is still listed on Amazon:

[http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian-
Bagnall/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Commodore-Amiga-Years-Brian-
Bagnall/dp/0973864990)

How does Maher's book on the Amiga compare to Bagnall's first edition?

~~~
vidarh
Maher's book takes a very different approach. It focuses on presenting an
outsider view on the technology and its impact on computing, rather than on
the company and all the drama surrounding Commodore and its people.

There were times reading Maher's book that I was annoyed that he seemed to me
to miss the point, though I'd say probably with the best of intentions (there
were no issues that were so egrerious to me that I still remember the
specifics), but it is relatively even-handed and worth a read, and presents a
very interesting counter-point to Bagnall's book(s).

------
Jupe
This is awesome... really takes me back. Amazing what you can deliver in a
browser these days. I'd simply love to run my first product again (its been 20
years!)

PS: Anyone know the process to get AmigaDOS 2.04 running on one of these (and
download a LHA file and install it?)

------
VonGuard
This is highly interesting, considering RJ Mical works at Google now.

------
ahoge
Ported to Chrome? That editorialized headline is kinda wrong. It's pNaCl. With
pNaCl, you can have an Emscripten fallback, if you want.

~~~
pcwalton
Not with this emulator, since it uses threads.

------
diydsp
hey amiga fans - - - i have exactly one Amiga disk left that boots into an
amazing cracktro with music that I have wanted to record.... I can't find the
song on youtube anywhere...

but my A500 as a broken floppy drive. Are there any fanatics anywhere near
Boston within 100 miles who would be willing to let me boot this disk on their
machine and record the song?

~~~
voltagex_
Are you able to give any more information on the cracktro? Which group? What
was cracked?

~~~
diydsp
Bamiga Sector One was the group. The game was either Virus or Mah Jong. From
about 1991. It's a beautiful, 4-voice counterpoint tune with somewhat unusual
synth patches (sampled Kawaii-ish).

I would be totally fine if the tune is out there somewhere, but I scan youtube
every few months/years and it hasn't tu

~~~
voltagex_
Worth a tweet to @textfiles (Jason Scott) about preserving the disk.

