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Amiga Forever

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Re: Amiga Forever

#81

Post by KerrAvon »

rbanffy wrote: post #20

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 deci…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#82

Post by filmgirlcw »

mbg721 wrote: post #31

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.

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#83

Post by burnte »

rbanffy wrote: post #20

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 deci…

Commodore was known for years for making bad business decisions. The bankruptcy surprised no one.

Re: Amiga Forever

#84

Post by glonq »

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

Re: Amiga Forever

#86

Post by wazoox »

mrwh wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#87

Post by amiga386 »

squarefoot wrote: post #57
Cockbrand wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 con…

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: £194.99

Amiga 1200 standalone: £289.99

20MB HDD £89.99

60MB HDD £179.99

80MB HDD £195.99

120MB HDD £219.99

210MB HDD £359.99

Amiga 600 with 20MB HDD £289.99

Amiga 1200 with 85MB HDD £499.99

Amiga 4000/030 with 120MB HDD £969.99

Amiga 4000/040 with 4MB Fast RAM and 120MB HDD £1699.99

RTC fix: £14.99

Commodore 10884ST monitor (requires interlace for 640x512) £199.99

Commodore 1940 monitor (640x512 without interlacing) £284.99

You can see how the prices add up very quickly and make things unaffordable for the typical family. A business could afford to pay £1300 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 £4.50 per megabyte, or £4.7 million per terabyte. Today you can get a 16TB drive for £215, or £13.44 per terabyte, which is 351,000 times cheaper

Re: Amiga Forever

#88

Post by AndrejXY »

bogantech wrote: post #14
unwind wrote: post #2

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_Forev…

> 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

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/

Re: Amiga Forever

#89

Post by vintermann »

rbanffy wrote: post #20

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 deci…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#90

Post by vardump »

Razengan wrote: post #55

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)

> 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.)

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