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Amiga Forever

amigaforever.com

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Re: Amiga Forever

#111

Post by MagerValp »

amiga386 wrote: post #78
Cockbrand wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 re…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#112

Post by richrichardsson »

mikelabatt wrote: post #91
richrichardsson wrote: post #43

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.

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.

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/

Re: Amiga Forever

#113

Post by richrichardsson »

dark-star wrote: post #76
richrichardsson wrote: post #43

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.

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...

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).

Re: Amiga Forever

#114

Post by MagerValp »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #73
Aloha wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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, eve…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#115

Post by AndrejXY »

richrichardsson wrote: post #113
dark-star wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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).

You mean it would be legal to copy Windows 11 from one PC, and put the copy on a barebone system? :-D

Re: Amiga Forever

#116

Post by MagerValp »

mrwh wrote: post #100
xd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excellent, there's hope then!

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#117

Post by icedchai »

nonesuchluck wrote: post #70
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.

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.

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...

Re: Amiga Forever

#118

Post by icedchai »

asveikau wrote: post #103
KerrAvon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#119

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#120

Post by amiga386 »

MagerValp wrote: post #111
amiga386 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 re…

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 de…

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

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