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Amiga Forever

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Re: Amiga Forever

#101

Post by squarefoot »

amiga386 wrote: post #87
squarefoot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 £969.9…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#102

Post by squarefoot »

runjake wrote: post #75
squarefoot wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 t…

> 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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#103

Post by asveikau »

KerrAvon wrote: post #81
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.

x86 macOS had a long and successful run.

Or perhaps you mean porting Classic Mac in the 90s would have been a bad idea?

Re: Amiga Forever

#104

Post by zozbot234 »

amiga386 wrote: post #69
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 w…

How did you grab that amiga386 username 32 days before writing this comment? Do you have a TARDIS in your backyard or something? Spooky!

Re: Amiga Forever

#105

Post by mgk123 »

actionfromafar wrote: post #49
mgk123 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoa! That's a rudimentary compression scheme to decrease latency.

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://bigbookofamigahardware.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

Re: Amiga Forever

#106

Post by KurvaKing »

actionfromafar wrote: post #49
mgk123 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoa! That's a rudimentary compression scheme to decrease latency.

No post body was provided.

Re: Amiga Forever

#107

Post by AndrejXY »

snvzz wrote: post #99
AndrejXY wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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).

Re: Amiga Forever

#108

Post by bogantech »

AndrejXY wrote: post #88
bogantech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Thanks for letting me know, I stand corrected

Re: Amiga Forever

#109

Post by MagerValp »

rbanffy wrote: post #63
indymike wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

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.

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#110

Post by AndrejXY »

zozbot234 wrote: post #65
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

You mean OS/2? :-)
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