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.
Amiga Forever
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Re: Amiga Forever
#32At 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 deci…
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.
Re: Amiga Forever
#33That site design takes me back.
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Re: Amiga Forever
#34Were 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.
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.
Re: Amiga Forever
#35I have no idea why this is on HN - but anything Amiga would get my upvote.
It’s a new release:
> Stable release: December 12, 2022; 5 days ago - Version 10
Re: Amiga Forever
#36Just 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?
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.
Re: Amiga Forever
#37No post body was provided.
Re: Amiga Forever
#38Were 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.
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.
Re: Amiga Forever
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 t…
Commodore had an extremely expensive, weird 15Hz flicker free and very high resolution monitor. If I recall correctly, i̶t̶ ̶d̶i̶v̶i̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶4̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶t̶a̶n̶g̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶a̶i̶n̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶e̶a̶c̶h̶ ̶r̶e̶c̶t̶a̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶m̶i̶n̶i̶ ̶s̶c̶r̶e̶e̶n̶,̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶a̶f̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶o̶t̶h̶e̶r̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶w̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶f̶l̶i̶c̶k̶e̶r̶i̶n̶g̶,̶ ̶e̶x̶c̶e̶p̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶h̶o̶s̶p̶h̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶g̶l̶o̶w̶i̶n̶g̶.̶
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Edit: wrong, see comment below.
Re: Amiga Forever
#40Just 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?
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.
A serial cable will also do. ("Nullmodem".)