This Tesseract project is such an interesting study in what it takes to build a computer from scratch.
I think Amigas occupy such a cool middle ground between eminently discoverable - one can learn how everything works in them - while at the same time, with a heap of extra RAM and a faster CPU - you can run an almost modern desktopenvironment on them, including development environment.
And these machines were originally built at a time when everything was simpler. We’re like space aliens arriving from the future, applying our advanced tech to build an old human relic. A couple motivated people can do it.
30 years from now: “HardwareGPT, make me an Amiga but with ZX Spectrum keys”
I think there is an opportunity to use modern microcontrollers to created a similar simplified environment. The lack of a virtualizing mmu constrains ram sizes, which in turn constrains the degree of abstraction level bloat that otherwise occurs. Like living in a tiny house, everything must earn its continued place. That enables the understandability we remember. And a modern microcontroller has about the same memory as an amiga 1k while using a tiny fraction of the power for several times the processing capability.
I suppose we could just use contikiOS, it has a browser of sorts even. But I think the thread model that allows premptive threads has some footguns to adopt as a general desktop system, and a browser for these systems needs a more elegant way to handle web pages that are several times its ram size than just grabbing text.
Still, it's amazing to me that we can build stuff which is vaguely comparable to our current commercial capabilities.
Another similar observation... I loaded an LLM (local llama.cpp) on a 2015 laptop, almost a decade old, and had a coherent "conversation" with it.
If someone had time-travelled back in 2015 and started for me that very same program on the same laptop in 2015, it would have been confusing and downright scary. I would have started looking for network connections to the remote super computer which surely must be running this thing...
I suspect that if I had the time, I could create a desktop from scratch, but I now believe it would take more years than I have left, and it would be less fun than I want anyway.
The Amiga custom chips are still simple enough that their functionality can be easily understood and emulated in software or FGPAs (arguably, they're conceptually simpler than the C64 VIC-II and SID custom chips).
Every time I read something like this I remember back to the alt groups and people talking about the impossibility of emulation at all (if ever) of an amiga. What I find interesting about emulation is the amount of 'slop' that many programs can endure. Where the emulation is not quite right or even downright missing or wrong yet the program chugs along and just sort of works. Now some stuff needs that but it is kind of rare. Which is interesting.
I hear that claim, but it seems like we're still on the fringes. I understand we finally got to the point where you can build a C64 free of Commodore-exclusive parts only like a year ago. Is there a full suite of FPGA replacements for the Amiga chipset?
There's definitely some tangible appeal of building a robust '80s machine. Even with a quality software or FPGA emulator, the "feelies" are missing-- there's no opportunity to slide in an expansion card or manually fit it with a bunch of DIP RAM, or load stuff of of physical floppies.
Building a solder-it-yourself XT clone was a lot of fun for me, but I've sort of balked at the Amiga-flavoured projects in the space. It seems like they all start with "first get these five chips that really only can be harvested from a dead Amiga and cost a small fortune, so you'd better pray you don't put them in the socket backwards."
Maybe the middle ground would be using a FPGA to replace the custom chips, but the board is still designed with the right slots and sockets to fit an A2000 (or ATX) case and it still takes commodity parts like the 68000. Or maybe some 680x0 project targeting EmuTOS-- I'd expect it, as an open project, to be more adaptable to differing hardware than "must run exactly 1987 Amiga software with zany copy-protection and timing gimmicks".
I had SAS/C which came on 5 or 6 floppies and my A2000 had no hard disk at the time so compiling meant lots and lots of disk swapping and I used the RAM Disk a lot. Later, for a princely sum I recall being over a grand, I got a SCSI controller card and a massive 40mb hard drive which made the process so much more pleasant.
Really loved the Amiga, and used it way past its supposed expiration date. I really think if it wasn't for commodores mismanagement, this computer would have a lot more potential than Macs or PCs nowadays.
You might be interested in the recently announced Kickstarter which explores what might have been if Commodore hadn’t suffered from extraordinary management incompetence. It’s based on plans the actual people had at the time and seems like a fun read.
I often think about what the computing landscape would be like if some of these other companies had been more successful. The hard thing though is that most of them died so early in computing history, that we can't really know how they would have evolved. It's like imagining Windows 11 while using Windows 3.1. It's a shame there isn't a windows 11 like version of the Amiga OS, or something like GEOS with 30 extra years of development.
When you see projects like this from start to finish you get to appreciate both how they used to squeeze so much out of the hardware, but also just how efficient our modern computers are in terms of materials.
I mean a Raspberry Pi Zero would run circles around this thing and that is awesome but it also loses a little of the charm at the same time.
What's sort of neat with a Raspberry Pi - as far as retrocomputing - is that you can run RISC/OS, the operating system for the Acorn Archimedes, which was the first ARM computer and sort of the British Amiga. On real ARM hardware, even. I haven't figured out a use for that, but it's so cool.
I think Amigas occupy such a cool middle ground between eminently discoverable - one can learn how everything works in them - while at the same time, with a heap of extra RAM and a faster CPU - you can run an almost modern desktop environment on them, including development environment.