[HN Gopher] Amiga Forever
___________________________________________________________________
Amiga Forever
Author : ibobev
Score : 170 points
Date : 2022-12-20 09:41 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.amigaforever.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.amigaforever.com)
| tus666 wrote:
| One thing I like about this product is it has no "compatibility"
| matrix. All compatibility issues are treated as bugs to be fixed.
|
| I bought the lifetime upgrade many years ago, and was pleasantly
| surprised to get a link to download version 10 this week.
| snvzz wrote:
| >One thing I like about this product is it has no
| "compatibility" matrix. All compatibility issues are treated as
| bugs to be fixed.
|
| Compatibility is owed to WinUAE, the best Amiga emulator, which
| is also Open Source.
|
| Credit where it is due. Not Amiga Forever, in this case.
| efficax wrote:
| Anyone know how this runs under wine?
| mbg721 wrote:
| Were Amigas considered to be exclusively entertainment machines,
| or did they try to get people to use them for work? I grew up
| with an IBM XT my dad had on loan from his job, and got the
| impression that everything else was a (cooler) gaming computer.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| They were very popular for video editing, particularly by
| shops/studios that didn't have the money for the SGI or Montage
| systems. NewTek, now known for the TriCaster, built a
| successful business off of Amiga, first with the Video Toaster
| and then with Lightwave 3D, one of the first special effects
| programs.
|
| This is all before my time, but from what professional
| broadcast and film editors have told me, the lore of Amiga's
| dominance in this field is a little bit overblown. They were
| popular, but it was hardly the industry standard. The high-
| budget places used other stuff (often proprietary or custom-
| built) and a lot of broadcasters used live edit bays that were
| probably less technically capable than a Video Toaster, but
| were huge and already integrated with their much more complex
| live camera setups. But the Amiga kicked off what wound up
| upending post production and live broadcast.
|
| Amiga was definitely ahead of the curve, but Avid, then Adobe
| and finally Apple, took over starting in 1993 or so (the same
| year Commodore went bankrupt) and x86 and PowerPC machines got
| powerful enough that even SGI or Sun boxes weren't that useful
| outside of Pixar-style edit farms.
| micv wrote:
| They were used for video work in their day. Babylon 5 used them
| for effects shots.
|
| I think the big box Amigas were more common across the pond,
| used for work stuff, in the US than they were in Europe, where
| the Amiga 500 sold relatively big numbers and was a big gaming
| machine in the late 80s/early 90s.
| retro64 wrote:
| The entire art department at my university used Amigas. They
| had a couple of video toasters as well. They kept them at least
| into the mid-90's too.
|
| Otherwise, yeah, I can't recall ever seeing an Amiga in a US
| business (other than a computer repair shop). IBM dominated the
| "serious" market, and Apple was in the schools (with some
| Commodore).
| rvba wrote:
| Amigas were very popular in video editing.
|
| "Basic" video editing like adding subtitles or logos to live
| stream tv (what was not basic at that time) was done with the
| relatively cheap Amigas. For example the local news program on
| cable TV could have used an Amiga for rudimentary graphics or
| transitions between scenes.
|
| I think they also used Amigas for music production, but here it
| was also Atari ST.
| timc3 wrote:
| That site design takes me back.
| samstr wrote:
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Definitely remember it being the exact same as when I viewed it
| on Windows 2000, 5 computers ago.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I find it somewhat curious that they bundle demoscene productions
| in their _PAID_ for software, even offering more demos when you
| pay more. This is completely against the demoscene ethos. A lot
| of demos even had notices forbidding the commercial PD libraries
| of the time from distributing their wares.
| mikelabatt wrote:
| Every demoscene production featured in Amiga Forever was
| included with permission from their creators. Credits are in
| the documentation.
|
| Please name one demo that you think should not be in Amiga
| Forever, and I will check that and report here.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| OK, well that changes things. This wasn't immediately obvious
| from the page linked, nor the demoscene link[1] contained
| therein. I understood from that page that the links to ADA,
| Pouet etc. were sources of demos with copyright holder
| permission (I'm not actually sure this is 100% true), not
| that Cloanto had sought permission from the demo creators in
| question for their blessing to bundle their wares with Amiga
| Forever.
|
| I can't actually find this list of demos in the documentation
| though, is it online?
|
| [1] https://www.amigaforever.com/demoscene/
| mikelabatt wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. The page [1] has been updated to
| clarify this detail. The documentation is installed with
| the package (Help menu, or press F1 to open it), but if you
| would like to contact me @mikelabatt I can send you a copy.
|
| Me and my colleague Nicola were the ones who asked for
| these permissions. Iconic demos like Roots 2.0 and World of
| Commodore could not be included in the historical context
| for the reasons you mentioned. If someone does not want
| their work to appear in a commercial book project or in an
| electronic curation, I respect that. We could do better,
| like featuring more recent works. Perhaps one day it will
| be done, like the website (OTOH, some say that it has a
| Craigslist-like appeal to it). This always was a niche
| project driven by passion, and resources are tight.
| dark-star wrote:
| that's just one of the reasons why Cloanto has kind of a bad
| reputation among Amiga enthusiasts.
|
| Don't use them unless you want that warm and fuzzy feeling of
| having legally obtained the Kickstart ROMs instead of just
| grabbing them from archive.org...
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I still own Amigas, I have no qualms in using the downloaded
| ROMs since I could in theory rip them myself, so it doesn't
| feel like I'm committing any kind of offence (not a lawyer
| though).
| AndrejXY wrote:
| You mean it would be legal to copy Windows 11 from one PC,
| and put the copy on a barebone system? :-D
| glonq wrote:
| Even though it's a commercial (non-free) emulator, I can see that
| they're not wasting any of that money on frivolities like _modern
| website design_ /s
| karteum wrote:
| That's great ! Except
|
| > _Amiga Forever Value Edition comes in a dedicated Windows
| version, which is easy to install and run. If you do not intend
| to use Amiga Forever on a Windows system we recommend that you
| purchase the Plus Edition or the Premium Edition, which include
| both Windows and non-Windows content._
|
| (so non-windows users cannot use the (much) cheaper edition...)
| chris_j wrote:
| I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the
| Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my
| Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more
| painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just
| bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks.
|
| (I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get
| the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.)
|
| EDIT: typo.
| bogantech wrote:
| It seems they offer an .iso download link now alongside the
| one for the .msi
|
| The kickstart ROMs are still encrypted on the ISO and AF
| stores unencrypted versions on disk after you run it but if
| you're on a Mac/Linux you can use romtool to decrypt them
|
| https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/romtool.html
| dark-star wrote:
| AFAIR the "encryption" is just an XOR with their license
| text file (LICENSE.txt?) as a large key
|
| That was some time ago when I got it, so maybe it's
| different now
| antihero wrote:
| Also it seems to have to ship on DVDs? So anyone win a recent
| laptop has to factor in the cost of an external DVD drive.
| EB-Barrington wrote:
| Razengan wrote:
| The core appeal of those 1980s "console-computers" could still be
| relevant today: Something you can start coding on as soon as you
| switch it on and run all software* on it without worrying about
| hardware or OS compatibility.
|
| Does no one else realize that enough to make a modern product
| like that?
|
| * (made for that platform)
| vardump wrote:
| > Something you can start coding on as soon as you switch it on
| and run all software
|
| There's no such Amiga. You had to boot it up to the Workbench
| GUI to load any programming environment. (Ok, you could also
| start something from an AmigaDOS prompt too, but that's not how
| most people used the system.)
| rbanffy wrote:
| At the time Commodore made PCs, it could have been worthy to port
| AmigaOS to x86 (8088 was a bit too puny, but 286 and 386 could
| compare to 68K). An earlier lost opportunity was when Sun
| approached the offering to market the 3000/UX as a low-cost Unix
| workstation.
|
| The world could be a lot different had Commodore management been
| so boneheaded.
|
| OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had,
| those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense.
| burnte wrote:
| Commodore was known for years for making bad business
| decisions. The bankruptcy surprised no one.
| wslh wrote:
| Even enjoying a Commodore Amiga as a teenager we cannot forget
| Atari 1040ST competitor which included MIDI and was also
| innovative. Just read that was popular in some locations for
| CAD.
|
| It is difficult to talk about failed business, business many
| many times are successful for reasons beyond the technology
| involved. Just look nowadays how organizations are using
| Microsoft Teams, they could be locked, have a high cost for
| migration, bad management, and the core business working
| seamlessly beyond this.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| Built-in MIDI and the excellent 100Hz monochrome screen were
| very strong selling points for the ST back then, for
| different niches of the market. Especially given the strong
| audio capabilities of the Amiga, including a MIDI interface
| should have been a no-brainer for Commodore to position it in
| the music production industry. On the other end of the
| market, the always slightly flickering 1081/1084 color
| monitor made the Amiga not very suitable for an 8 hour office
| job.
| chris_j wrote:
| The ST in mono was alas only around 71hz. Still very nice.
| Sadly my family could not afford a mono monitor and and I
| used my ST through the family TV but I used a friend's mono
| monitor a few times and it was very nice.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Something I always thought odd; why would just _having_
| MIDI ports make the ST popular with musicians? Getting an
| Amiga MIDI adapter was super cheap and easy... although
| most early Amiga MIDI and stave-notation software (Sonix,
| Music-X, DMCS) fell out of favour as trackers stormed on
| the scene; most Amiga musicians preferred to use the Amiga
| as a sample sequencer than as the controller of other MIDI
| devices.
|
| Is it really just default ports? If the Amiga had had a
| line in port rather than required an external sampler,
| would it have been known as "the sampling machine"?
|
| The Amiga did famously form the backbone of 1990s NTSC
| broadcast television production as the Video Toaster, but
| that was because the Amiga chipset was able to genlock with
| an external video signal, i.e. it was an inherent feature
| of the machine rather than the default ports and
| peripherals it came with.
| MagerValp wrote:
| Put yourself in the shoes of the developer of a midi
| sequencer in the 80s. You could target the Atari, where
| midi ports are standard and everyone with an interest in
| music is a potential customer. Or you can target the
| Amiga where there's no standard, effectively forcing you
| to source or develop a midi dongle yourself to sell with
| the software, increasing the price by at least $20 or
| $30, and adding complexity and development costs up
| front.
| amiga386 wrote:
| That's a good point. Something being a noted feature of
| the device would encourage people to develop software for
| it. The DSP in the Atari Falcon was a big draw as well.
|
| Commodore did eventually promote a standard library for
| MIDI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Amiga_MIDI_
| Driver) in 1990, perhaps too late to take anything from
| the lead the 520ST had gained
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea that the ST had 100hz modes. That's so
| cool.
|
| Folks who grew up in the post-CRT era might not realize
| what a difference 100hz vs. 60hz could make with CRT
| monitors when you were staring at a screen for 8+ hours a
| day.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Commodore _had_ an extremely expensive, weird 15Hz flicker
| free and very high resolution monitor. If I recall
| correctly, it divided the screen in 4 rectangles and
| painted each rectangle as a mini screen, one after another.
| That would have been a lot of flickering, except that the
| phosphor was very long glowing. Edit: _wrong_ , see
| comment below.
| mgk123 wrote:
| That would be the A2024 which is emulated by WinUAE. It
| did not flicker or have long persistence phosphor. What
| it did have was frame buffer RAM on-board. The video
| signal output by the Amiga determined which 1/4 or 1/6 of
| the screen was refreshed. The driver code had a feature
| where the pane containing the mouse pointer could be
| refreshed more frequently.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Whoa! That's a rudimentary compression scheme to decrease
| latency.
| mgk123 wrote:
| If you want to know the details of how it works, see US
| patent 4851826:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/US4851826A/en
|
| BBoAH has a pic of an actual A2024: https://bigbookofamig
| ahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=863
|
| There was also a separate video card containing the
| framebuffer hardware, that could be connected to a
| "normal" high-res mono monitor:
| http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/moniterm
| KurvaKing wrote:
| bitwize wrote:
| 286 and 386 were NOT comparable to 68k. Much Amiga development
| was done in 68k assembly which was an absolute joy compared to
| x86, and mapped almost directly to C. Plus the PC was starved
| for IRQ lines, and the Amiga environment lives and dies on
| interrupts. Because PCs lacked the Agnus and Paula chips that
| made the Amiga so compelling, AmigaOS on the PC would have
| struggled, especially during the 80s, had it been written. Most
| likely the developers of the day would have declared the task
| impossible.
|
| IBM licensed some Amiga technology for OS/2 in the 90s, which
| is probably about as good a "PC AmigaOS" as we'd ever get
| (absent recent efforts like AROS).
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| By the time x86 was really competitive architecturally with 68k
| -- by which I mean non-segmented, 32-bit, etc -- it was already
| too late for Commodore and Atari. They were already pretty much
| dead financially.
|
| Both sold PC clones, and I suspect if those lines had been very
| successful $$ wise they may have attempted to do something like
| what you said. Or more likely some kind of Amiga-esque runtime
| environment overtop of (choke, gag) DOS. We would have all
| screamed bloody murder about it though.
|
| In any case, AmigaOS and Atari's TOS were pretty heavily tied
| into the 68k ecosystem. Switching ISAs would have really been
| starting over.
|
| Moving from 68k to PowerPC almost killed off Apple, and they
| were many multiples the size of Commodore & Atari.
|
| Myself I made the switch from 68k Atari ST to 486+early-Linux
| in 1992. At that point we were already doing Unix-like things
| on the Atari (MiNT with unix ports, or, on the 030/020 systems,
| full NetBSD Unix), so it felt like a natural jump. SVGA + a 486
| was a pretty damn competitive workstation-like system at that
| point.
| Aloha wrote:
| I dont think the platform move was.. a cause of Apple's
| troubles, it was mostly poor product planing, marketing and
| OS related issues (which were not really made better or worse
| by the ISA move)
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't think it was a unitary cause, sure. But I think in
| retrospect it's clear Apple could not afford this kind of
| ISA move in addition to all the crazy OS work they were
| doing (and never finishing). It was half-baked until OS 8.
|
| In 1996 I helped administrated a group of MacOS boxen, all
| PowerPC. At that point in time only half the applications
| were running native PowerPC, and it was buggy as hell. If I
| recall, even parts of the OS were still running 68k
| emulated.
|
| In an OS with no memory protection or even proper dynamic
| memory allocation, it was just a shitstorm. Could not run
| FileMaker and Netscape at the same time without dying all
| over the place. I was shocked, because a couple years
| earlier I remember finding the 68k Macs I used extremely
| stable, even with Multifinder, etc. Limited, but stable.
|
| IMHO Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the
| mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls
| in the air.
| MagerValp wrote:
| But they had to do _something_, staying on the 68k wasn't
| an option. It couldn't compete with the Pentium and
| Motorola had effectively abandoned the series, focusing
| their efforts on the PowerPC.
|
| Apple made a lot of bad decisions in the 90s, but I don't
| see how the switch to PPC was one of them.
| pieter_mj wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if AmigaOS was tightly integrated with
| its custom chipset (denise, fat agnus comes to mind as a
| colorful name for some of these), making it a lot more
| difficult to port it to x86.
| gbraad wrote:
| Harsh? Truth... Commodore under Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali was
| a sinking ship due to severe mismanagement.
| Razengan wrote:
| I only thing I remember about the name "Mehdi Ali" from
| various documentaries etc. is that he was a serial ship-
| sinker.
| gbraad wrote:
| Irving saved Commodore several times, but he had no idea
| about computers and never used one. This also led to issues
| of understanding with CEO's, like Jack Tramiel. He left
| Commodore and went to Atari... and in a revenge move,
| worked on the Atari ST. While Jack didn't have deep
| knowledge on computers itself, he knew what businesses
| wanted and had an acumen for driving it, and especially on
| the idea of cost. This you can clearly see in how the ST
| got positioned; it was more of a business machine. The
| Amiga was more of a funtainment machine that was good at
| everything. This made it challenging to target a certain
| audience. It was great at video, music, and even did games,
| with a floppy drive, and a full-size keyboard, etc.
| MArketing had a difficult time to properly advertise it.
| Several CEOs followed, and Thomas Rattigan made the company
| profitable again, but drama followed very soon ... and only
| got worse with Ali; https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-
| history/mehdi-ali-the-end...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| The best part of the whole "Jack Tramiel leaves
| Commodore, buys Atari" story is the part about Atari
| floating debt to Amiga. The debt was coming due around
| the time Tramiel bought Atari and, at the last minute,
| Commodore acquired Amiga and Atari was paid-off. There
| was litigation following-- Tramiel was never one to let
| something go quietly-- but in the end we got the
| Commodore Amiga.
|
| In some alternate universe there were Atari Amigas and
| likely no Atari ST.
| indymike wrote:
| The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it
| possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat
| memory mode and other differences that would have made a port
| of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in
| capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge
| issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but
| wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series competitor, and I
| believe it came out about the same time as the 68030 - so by
| the time Intel chips could compete with Motorola, four years
| had passed (and in that era, four years was like two decades).
| rbanffy wrote:
| Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level
| APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs
| would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics
| being _very_ different from Amiga modes (although somewhat
| superior).
|
| Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| ISTM that if Microsoft had managed to add preemptive
| multitasking to Windows 3.x in a backward-compatible way,
| this would've given us as close to an Amiga-like OS as one
| could ever hope to run on 8086 and 286 hardware. Perhaps
| even more so, if hardware could be expected to have
| multimedia capabilities as a standard, without relying on
| 3rd-party drivers - PC had this on the PCjr, and later
| Tandy.
| indymike wrote:
| > ISTM that if Microsoft had managed to add preemptive
| multitasking to Windows 3.x in a backward-compatible way,
| this would've given us as close to an Amiga-like OS as
| one could ever hope to run on 8086 and 286 hardware.
|
| 8086 didn't have the instruction set to do preemptive,
| and the 286's memory model was 64kb pages... and barely
| good enough. The enabler for MPC (Multimedia PC) was the
| combination of 386 (and 386sx) + 16 bit sound card +
| CDROM + PCI VGA+.
| AndrejXY wrote:
| You mean OS/2? :-)
| amiga386 wrote:
| I say this with respect, but I don't think it would. The
| x86 architecture had an absolute paucity of registers, the
| mixture of MMIO and PMIO was insane, and it just didn't
| have any PC-relative addressing modes. Relocation for a
| flat address space would be an annoyance. Prior to PCs
| becoming about a billion times faster and the compact
| encoding coming into its own, x86 code is not fun to write.
|
| Saying "some programs would be difficult to port" is
| putting it mildly; a huge part of the Amiga's software
| catalogue was written in assembler, and pretty much every
| single game wrote directly to the hardware, in a way that
| can't be abstracted without a complete emulation of that
| hardware. The Commodore graphics APIs were absolutely too
| slow to do anything except productivity software. There
| were retargetable graphics APIs (e.g. CyberGraphX, Picasso
| 96), introduced to allow well-behaved software to access
| expensive graphics cards you could buy for big-box Amigas.
| But generally you wouldn't use them for game graphics
| (unless it's a very simple game).
|
| The Amiga really held well together; the custom chips were
| well designed to fit with the 68000. Perhaps too well, and
| that coupling became the downfall when the computer
| hardware moved faster than Amiga software could be brought
| along. It was destroyed once games became more about per-
| pixel operations (1990s 3D games) than blitting large areas
| (1980s platform games); the existence of VGA mode 13h made
| the former so much easier to write. Commodore even added a
| chip to provide a form of hardware-accelerated chunky-to-
| planar conversion, but it was too late, only in the CD32
| and just couldn't compete with a native chunky framebuffer.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| How did you grab that amiga386 username 32 days before
| writing this comment? Do you have a TARDIS in your
| backyard or something? Spooky!
| amiga386 wrote:
| It was the most incongruous noun-number combo I could
| think of, and a month later someone's genuinely proposing
| it...
| MagerValp wrote:
| Well look no further than AROS:
| https://aros.sourceforge.io/
|
| It's a reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 that runs on x86,
| ppc, and m68k.
| nonesuchluck wrote:
| Could have packaged up the Amiga chipset on an ISA card, an
| all-in-one video/audio/io gizmo. Sell that to 386 owners
| and give the OS away. Bonus points for a ROM socket to
| insta-boot AmigaOS with no disk.
| icedchai wrote:
| By the time they would've decided to do this, the Amiga
| chipset was looking pretty dated. 386's with SuperVGA and
| SoundBlaster cards were becoming common place in the
| early 90's. Once the 486 came out (1989), the price of
| 386 hardware dropped fast. Commodore seemed more
| interested in going the other direction: putting an x86
| (BridgeBoard) into an Amiga.
|
| I was an Amiga fan from roughly 1988 through 1994,
| started with an A500, expanded it, then moved on to an
| A3000. The platform was incredible. I learned a ton from
| it and taught myself C on that system. But by 1994, I
| wanted a Linux system, so a 486 it was...
| btbuildem wrote:
| It blew my mind when I was able to set the viewport pointer
| to where my program code was, and SEE THE CODE AS IT RAN.
| Like, watch the bits flip as counters incremented, etc etc.
|
| It was a wonderful, impactful lesson in foundations of
| software engineering, before I even knew what any of that
| meant.
| runjake wrote:
| > OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they
| had, those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense.
|
| I don't think you are. At the time, we in the Amiga community
| were wondering wtf was going on back then, when it was
| happening.
|
| It was pretty clear the leadership were making bad decisions,
| when they weren't absent.
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes, it would be hard to name a major computer industry company
| which wasn't boneheaded in those days. It wasn't so much that
| Commodore made bigger mistakes, more that the industry turned
| against them and preferred to bet on other horses.
| vikingerik wrote:
| Dell pretty much did everything right, there's really not any
| stories of anything that went wrong for that company.
| Although they weren't really innovating and developing a
| platform, just making (really good) clones of someone else's.
| mattl wrote:
| I had a Commodore branded Escom PC running OS/2 in early 1996
| but I'm guessing they made PCs before that in some parts of the
| world? In Europe it was all Amiga in the 90s
| Cockbrand wrote:
| They did in fact build PC clones from the 1980s onwards,
| starting with the XT compatible PC-10 and the AT compatible
| PC-20. These were made in Germany, IIRC. Apparently they
| weren't bad, but back then I didn't understand the point when
| they had the much more powerful Amiga platform.
| squarefoot wrote:
| Their point was that the Amiga was a gaming machine, and
| they had no intention to make a full personal computer out
| of it, at least that was their idea when they stubbornly
| refused to ship it without a hard disk. That would be
| understandable given the high prices of storage back then,
| but they also insisted with low res graphics and lack of a
| cheap RTC chip, which killed almost all chances to use it
| in offices. I consider myself brave for having drawn my own
| business cards using Pagestream on a A500 with one megabyte
| of RAM and a flickering interlaced TV screen.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I'm looking at an advert in Amiga Format 54 (the
| Christmas 1993 edition from 29 years ago)... probably the
| pinnacle of the Amiga's popularity. Here are some sample
| prices:
|
| Amiga 600 standalone: PS194.99
|
| Amiga 1200 standalone: PS289.99
|
| 20MB HDD PS89.99
|
| 60MB HDD PS179.99
|
| 80MB HDD PS195.99
|
| 120MB HDD PS219.99
|
| 210MB HDD PS359.99
|
| Amiga 600 with 20MB HDD PS289.99
|
| Amiga 1200 with 85MB HDD PS499.99
|
| Amiga 4000/030 with 120MB HDD PS969.99
|
| Amiga 4000/040 with 4MB Fast RAM and 120MB HDD PS1699.99
|
| RTC fix: PS14.99
|
| Commodore 10884ST monitor (requires interlace for
| 640x512) PS199.99
|
| Commodore 1940 monitor (640x512 without interlacing)
| PS284.99
|
| You can see how the prices add up very quickly and make
| things unaffordable for the typical family. A business
| could afford to pay PS1300 per computer, but a family
| likely could not. Most people plugged their machine into
| their existing TVs, as it seems did you.
|
| If anything, this gives a good example of how technology
| has beaten inflation. The 20MB HDD is PS4.50 per
| megabyte, or PS4.7 million per terabyte. Today you can
| get a 16TB drive for PS215, or PS13.44 per terabyte,
| which is 351,000 times cheaper
| squarefoot wrote:
| I agree pretty much on everything, adding a hard disk
| would have placed the smaller machines in a whole
| different segment. I however recall also the A2000 was
| sold without a hard disk, just to advertise it ad a lower
| price, which I find absurd since that way it was
| essentially an A500 plus expansion slots.
| runjake wrote:
| I remember things differently. While the Amiga was a
| great gaming machine, I remember Commodore pushing it as
| a desktop productivity machine, more emphasizing stuff
| like paint and music apps.
|
| IIRC, the lack of a hard drive issue came down to keeping
| costs down.
|
| I don't remember a specific issue with "low res
| graphics". Of course the flicker issue was present, but
| that didn't really become an an issue until later in the
| Amiga's life, and only on the low end models.
|
| Regardless, it was certainly a very well-rounded
| platform. Definitely not "just a game machine" by any
| stretch.
|
| Caveat: I was in the Amiga world in the
| 1000/500/2000/3000 days. I've never used or seen the
| later generation stuff, such as the 4000 or A1200.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > I was in the Amiga world in the 1000/500/2000/3000
| days. I've never used or seen the later generation stuff,
| such as the 4000 or A1200.
|
| I had the 500, then the 2000 and finally 4000/040, with
| RAM expansion, hard disk and a decent monitor. It was a
| wonderful machine but suffered from the same limitation
| of the former models: AGA was better than AA, but too
| little too late.
|
| No bashing it any way, I just wish things went
| differently. What I learned on the Amiga helped me
| immensely with my jobs years later; I only have to be
| thankful for having the opportunity to use it and learn
| from it: a multitasking OS on hardware without memory
| protection forces one to be careful when writing code,
| for a small memory leak or invalid pointer can either
| render the system unusable pretty quickly or crash it
| altogether.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| x86 would have put Amiga in the same boat as Microsoft: driver
| hell for eternity. Also why x86 macOS was a bad idea.
|
| What they needed to do was invest in the successor Amiga
| chipset to the original one. Yanking the funding for Amiga R&D
| in the late 1980's is what doomed Amiga and Commodore.
| einherjae wrote:
| x86 has very little to do with driver hell in itself.
| asveikau wrote:
| x86 macOS had a long and successful run.
|
| Or perhaps you mean porting Classic Mac in the 90s would have
| been a bad idea?
| icedchai wrote:
| The core of MacOS (NeXTStep) was already ported to x86 long
| before Apple was even involved. Remember NeXTStep ran on
| x86 in the early 90's, as they exited the hardware
| business. It was _not_ compelling for server workloads. It
| was also very picky on drivers, as the other poster
| implies. Plus it was difficult to build open source
| software for (SunOS was the gold standard for commercial
| Unix at the time. Everything you downloaded ran on Sun!)
|
| I knew guys who ran early ISPs, tried it for servers, then
| realized they'd be better off with a Sun box and then
| eventually early Linux (Slackware). They were trying to run
| a news server off of it, IIRC.
| asveikau wrote:
| I know this history.
|
| However, the point remains that Apple ran consumer
| products on Intel chips for 14 years or so and this was
| successful. I'm trying to parse out the claim being made.
| Eg. Is it an argument that the timing would have been bad
| in the 1990s? Notable that Apple also killed the
| experiment around PowerPC clones around the time Jobs
| came back.
| ekianjo wrote:
| The missing turn was rather not to open source the whole OS...
| crayonviking wrote:
| Fuck all y'all. Atari 800XL for the win! :)
|
| Ok, ok, so it was because my family couldn't afford an Amiga, but
| still...
| unwind wrote:
| Meta: perhaps this should have the new version number ("10")
| added to the title.
|
| According to Wikipedia [1] release 10 is five days old which
| would seem to make it news-worthy.
|
| I think Cloanto could work a little bit on their webpage's look,
| and add release history (or at least release date) so it's easier
| to figure out if it's really NEW as they state in their headline.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Forever
| bogantech wrote:
| > I think Cloanto could work a little bit on their webpage's
| look
|
| Too expensive I bet, all the money they make selling software
| someone else wrote over 30 years ago is spent suing other
| parties who do the same thing they do
| AndrejXY wrote:
| What lawsuits are you talking about?
|
| Cloanto never sued anyone, other than having been dragged in
| the case of lawyer-owned Hyperion Entertainment. Hyperion is
| owned by a litigator who is well known for his tactics in his
| home country of Belgium. When Hyperion failed to deliver on
| their 2001 Amiga OS outsourced development contract, they did
| what lawyers do best: they sued Amiga. They sued Amiga once
| in 2007, and they sued Amiga again in 2018 (case number
| 2:2018cv00381 filed March 13, 2018). This was completely
| unprovoked, and was largely seen as an attempt to trigger a
| "catch all" clause in the 2009 settlement with Amiga.
| Hyperion was hoping for Amiga to default. Instead, Cloanto
| helped them, as they always did.
|
| If you want to educate yourselved on the Hyperion vs. Amiga
| case, "Amiga Documents" is as good as it gets:
|
| https://twitter.com/amigadocuments
|
| https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/
| snvzz wrote:
| I will respect Cloanto when they respect AmigaOS by
| publishing the source code under an Open Source license.
|
| It is a shame that they are still bickering about this
| historical piece of software, not allowing the community to
| move on.
|
| Meantime, our Atari friends are enjoying emuTOS + MiNT.
| AndrejXY wrote:
| You are blaming the wrong people.
|
| Amiga wanted (wants) to make an open source branch.
| Cloanto said the same on multiple occasions. I know
| people who saw settlement drafts with Hyperion, the
| provision was there. Ask the 3.1.4 developers in the
| forums.
|
| Hyperion lawyer-owner Ben Hermans, who is an "experienced
| IT litigator" is the one who keeps blocking it, like he
| keeps blocking the 2019 acquisition and the transfer of
| all assets into Amiga Corporation. He even sued his own
| managing director, Timothy DeGroote, to stop the
| settlement with the Amiga parties
| (Amiga/Itec/Amino/Cloanto).
| bogantech wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know, I stand corrected
| Daviey wrote:
| I'm always touched seeing Amiga content, it really changed my
| view on technology and drove me into my career.
|
| I did think to myself, wouldn't it be funny if they had a Guru
| Meditation error on 404 page errors, and of course they do:
|
| https://www.amigaforever.com/some_page_that_doesnt_exist/
| ultrablack wrote:
| Good times :)
|
| When I want some time to myself at work, I book meetings with
| the title "Guru meditation". Obviously. :)
| squarefoot wrote:
| I find strange that nobody thought of creating "Guru
| Meditation" flashing signs in the style of the Amiga one, to
| be used in place of "Do not disturb" signs. I know a good
| number of nostalgic Amiga users like me who would absolutely
| love such a gadget.
| mrwh wrote:
| I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many
| years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for
| my A1200, and whether any of the games I wrote for myself way
| back when, in Amos and then Amiga E, are still recoverable.
| Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old,
| and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I'll
| try though.
| xd wrote:
| _Probably not; if the disks exist they 're almost thirty years
| old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my
| memory._
|
| I came across an old box of 3.5 discs a few years back that I
| had stored away since the early 90's. I recovered them using
| ddrescue to create images using a cheap USB floppy drive.. was
| great fun.
| treme wrote:
| true time capsules
| mrwh wrote:
| Excellent, there's hope then!
| MagerValp wrote:
| Absolutely, barring any environmental issues (moisture or
| heat), they will probably image just fine. But please note
| that Amiga formatted disks won't be possible to read in a
| standard PC floppy drive. You'll either need to use an
| Amiga with some kind of transfer software, or custom
| hardware for disk imaging.
|
| Edit: I just noticed that they are discussing this very
| thing a little further down the thread, with lots of
| concrete options.
| hhdave wrote:
| In February 2019 I decided to try retrieving some information
| from some 5.25" floppy disks for the Apple 2c we had since the
| 80s. They had some of the first bits of programming I had done
| amongst other things (school work etc). Using ADTPro I think I
| only encountered 1 disk which I couldn't transfer - I've got 19
| of them. I was then able to get information off them quite
| easily. So you may have more success than you think.
|
| I notice now the internal drive of said 2c isn't working and
| won't boot anything (I could get ADTPro onto a spare floppy
| without booting anything). I did use it to do the transfer in
| 2019. I can boot from an external drive with some patching from
| the monitor program. I suspect the drive either needs heads
| cleaning or some realignment, but I haven't had more time to
| try.
|
| Sadly I no longer have my A1200 (or A600). I have a few disks
| from it still.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Please recap your old hardware _before_ powering it on, and use
| a newly made power supply - way too much stuff gets fried when
| people neglect these things. Also if your Amiga has a working
| RTC, that 's powered by a battery that will often leak and ruin
| your motherboard. So you'd need to replace that as well.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| IIRC Amiga 1200 PSUs are not so bad, it's the C64 and oldest
| Amiga 500 PSUs which stink. A1200 does not have RTC in
| standard configuration. (Amiga 4000 and 3000 have.)
|
| A standard ATX (or AT) power supply can be used with an Amiga
| 1200, so that's an easy route if you have one. Cut off the
| cables (Amiga PSU donates connector), some electrical tape,
| and a paper clip to jumpstart the ATX PSU, and Bob's your
| uncle.
| richardw wrote:
| Similar here. Got an A500 and am emigrating, so I need to sell
| or keep or do something with it. Will test the disks so I know
| what I have.
|
| I think the Amstrad CPC-464 I had, had even more core memories.
| But this thing was a beast in its day.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| I've been on a spree of this, so far most of the disks have
| worked!
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I can totally still read my 35+ years old Workbench disks,
| which have been booted from hundreds of times. It's amazing,
| really.
| zero_iq wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've had better luck reading Amiga and ST
| floppies from the 80s and 90s than floppies from the 2000s.
| I'm guessing disk quality took a nosedive somewhere around
| 2000..?
| Cockbrand wrote:
| That said, I've created images of the important diskettes
| from my youth, so I still have them even when the media
| eventually fail.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after
| many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the
| attic for my A1200
|
| By an incredible stroke of bad luck the first Covid lockdown
| (the one that lasted months) happened when I was far from my
| wife and kid. By chance I was in my childhood home (alone).
|
| Out of boredom I started watching YouTube videos about fixing
| and maintaining old computers. It motivated to go the attic and
| garage and find all my old computers. Took the battery out of
| an old Mac. Greased my Commodore 128's 1570 drive. Booted the
| C128 and checked which floppies were still working.
|
| And quite some still worked: it was a complete and total blast
| from the past to see the game _Commando_ , with its incredible
| soundtrack, booting!
|
| I don't know if the A1200 is prone to leaking capacitors or
| not: if it is send it to someone who can recap for you.
|
| It was really fun to get these old machines back to life: I
| really encourage you to do it.
| a1r wrote:
| I recently did this and found pretty much everything still
| worked. The creator of AMOS is still around at
| https://www.aoz.studio and their Discord will help you with any
| AMOS issues!
| wazoox wrote:
| I have heaps of mid and late 80s floppies (5.25" and 3.5" DD),
| and almost all of them work just fine. Until the late 90s,
| floppies were incredibly sturdy and reliable. Late 2000s HD
| floppies are crap, OTOH.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Do try. I'm certain the Amiga community would love to see it.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Good luck!
|
| You may want to get some kind of removable media for your
| Amiga, many people use a compact flash card as a hard drive,
| then use an IDE to CF adapter [1] to attach it to an
| A600/A1200/A4000. You can format the CF card as a standard
| Amiga hard drive, then you can remove it and read the Amiga
| drive on a more modern computer with unadf [2] and you can
| convert your AMOS source code to readable text with listamos
| [3]
|
| [1] e.g. https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-Hardware/Amiga-
| classic-h... but I'm not endorsing this specific shop or its
| products
|
| [2] https://github.com/lclevy/ADFlib
|
| [3] https://github.com/kyz/amostools
| IronWolve wrote:
| I learned unix getting my amiga online via slurp/ppp via a local
| isp unix shell.
|
| Learned how to compile/modify code. Learned tcp sockets/ports,
| unix apps/servers, and that's how I started my career as sys
| admin for isps/telecom.
| postexitus wrote:
| I have no idea why this is on HN - but anything Amiga would get
| my upvote.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| It's a new release:
|
| > Stable release: December 12, 2022; 5 days ago - Version 10
| jug wrote:
| Ahh... I was wondering the same thing.
|
| Here's an announcement: https://www.amigaforever.com/news-
| events/af-10/
| dotancohen wrote:
| Just yesterday I was talking with the parents of friends, who
| have held onto the floppy discs that their children stored the
| music and art they created on an Amiga. I'm not sure if these are
| 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs. If I can dd these discs, is there any way
| to recover the data in the files, and to convert to modern file
| formats? Might the audio already be in wav?
| mikelabatt wrote:
| While PC floppy drives are mechanically the same as Amiga
| floppy drives, the controller that is attached to the drive is
| different. The controller used in PCs can't handle the stream
| coming from Amiga disks. The first thing I would do is preserve
| those disks by creating an image with a custom controller. I am
| positive that the music and art can be converted, but that can
| be done later. First, save (image) those disks!
|
| Here are some tips to read Amiga floppy disks:
| https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118
| bogantech wrote:
| They will be 3.5" DD disks but they won't be readable by a
| standard usb floppy drive.
|
| Using a Greaseweazle[1] you can create an .adf image of the
| disks then using xdftool[2] or amigaexplorer[3] you'd be able
| to copy the files out of the disk image.
|
| Images will likely be .IFF files which I think you can still
| open with irfanview and gimp, the music files will most likely
| be some tracker format. There is software to play tracker files
| but I don't know about that myself.
|
| [1]https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
|
| [2]https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/xdftool.html
|
| [3]https://www.amigaforever.com/ae/
| richrichardsson wrote:
| VLC can play MOD. files quite reasonably. There is also a
| cross platform modern clone of ProTracker 2 available :
| https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone
| mnw21cam wrote:
| The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of
| those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks because
| the method to encode bits is different, and the PC floppy drive
| does the decoding in hardware before the software gets access
| to it. The Amiga floppy drive just sent the raw data to the
| computer, and the software would pass it through some dedicated
| hardware to decode it, but the software had the option of doing
| the decoding differently, which is why the Amiga can read PC
| floppies but not the other way around.
|
| Third-party floppy drives with the raw data access such as
| greaseweazle can access Amiga floppy disks.
|
| Then you need to decode the filesystem. There are tools for
| that.
|
| Once you have the files, it is likely that the music will be in
| MOD format. The music player mikmod will play these quite
| happily. Sampled sound will likely be in IFF or WAV format, and
| most sensible sound apps should be able to load these. The
| images are likely to be in IFF format, and something like GIMP
| should be able to load them.
| snvzz wrote:
| >The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of
| those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks
| because the method to encode bits is different, and the PC
| floppy drive does the decoding in hardware before the
| software gets access to it.
|
| This is accurate except it's not the drive, but the
| controller (in the PC's motherboard).
|
| Most of these drives can be directly used with an Amiga,
| while all of them can be used with a GreaseWeazle
|
| >Third-party floppy drives with the raw data access such as
| greaseweazle can access Amiga floppy disks.
|
| I own one of these and absolutely recommend it.
| bni wrote:
| You will probably be able to see the files on the Amiga. The
| hard part will be transferring the files off the Amiga.
|
| Gotek in external drive enclosure + usb thumb drive is what I
| used.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| A serial cable will also do. ("Nullmodem".)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I'm not sure if these are 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs.
|
| Very likely 3"1/2 inches disks although most of _my_ Amiga
| disks, which I still have, are 5 "1/4 (5"1/4 were way cheaper
| than 3"1/2 so we'd mod our Amiga by adding an external 5" 1/4
| drive and then we'd buy the much cheaper 5" 1/4 floppies).
|
| Now... After all these years several of these floppies may not
| be fully readable anymore so don't wait too long before ripping
| them. My C64 5"1/4 started failing badly. I'd say maybe 2/3rd
| of them are still readable without errors. Haven't tried
| reading my Amiga floppies yet.
|
| And I don't know if the 3"1/2 age better than the 5"1/4 or not.
|
| But they'll eventually start failing.
| a1r wrote:
| You can convert a cheap USB floppy drive into one that reads
| Amiga disks using a Drawbridge from
| https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/ - I've done this and it works.
| Notice Amiga Forever 10 adds direct support for this setup, so
| the emulator can read from that drive plugged into your PC.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The 68k was about a year too late to be considered for the IBM
| PC. I do wonder what an alternate world in which 68k based PCs
| were the norm would have been like.
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