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Amiga Forever

amigaforever.com

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Re: Amiga Forever

#121

Post by amiga386 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #104
amiga386 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

It was the most incongruous noun-number combo I could think of, and a month later someone's genuinely proposing it...

Re: Amiga Forever

#122

Post by asveikau »

icedchai wrote: post #118
asveikau wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#123

Post by mikelabatt »

richrichardsson wrote: post #112
mikelabatt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Forev…

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.

Re: Amiga Forever

#124

Post by cmrdporcupine »

MagerValp wrote: post #114
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it was a bad decision, it was inevitable they had to switch as Motorola left 68k customers in the lurch. The actual bad decision was not investing in better OS development in the 80s.

Put it this way: the Lisa had an MMU, memory protection, and an OS with better multitasking. Yes it was expensive to make, but they could have scaled it down instead of building a whole other, competing system that was technically inferior from an operating system perspective.

The original Mac was built as if it was a one-off product, and they lived with the results of that for two decades. And these were Jobs' choices.

Re: Amiga Forever

#125

Post by guenthert »

JohnBooty wrote: post #53
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…

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.

Not sure what the graphics controller was capable of, but the 'paperwhite' monochrome monitor which was offered then supported 72Hz refresh rate. That was a lot then and most people won't notice the remaining flicker, but it's not 100Hz. Op might be misremembering.

(I'm a bit sensitive -- around that time, I removed a connection on the MB of my Schneider, nee Amstrad, CPC 464 so that it would think it's the NTSC version and would output the screen's content @60Hz and adjusted my monitor accordingly. 60Hz was just about bearable, 50Hz (PAL) only with dark background)

Re: Amiga Forever

#126

Post by icedchai »

asveikau wrote: post #122
icedchai wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

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.

Timing does seem bad, seeing they had transitioned to PowerPC only 4 or 5 years before NeXT was acquired. And Intel had not yet really taken a huge performance lead. PowerPC's were still pretty competitive. It wasn't until the mid-2000's that it was clear they were not going to get a G5 or whatever running in a laptop.

Apple also wasn't rolling in cash like the are today. They were struggling. They wouldn't have had the resources in the late 90's to support consumer-level x86 and the various hardware/driver configurations. NeXT was fine with supporting a limited set of configurations since they weren't targeting the "consumer" anyway. They were targeting high end commercial "workstation" customers. NeXTStep 486 cost something like $800 if I remember. The developer tools were more $$$. The people running that stuff could afford to spec out their machines properly.

Re: Amiga Forever

#127

Post by guenthert »

glonq wrote: post #84

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

Somehow I get the idea their customers just might enjoy the retro look.

Re: Amiga Forever

#128

Post by amiga386 »

squarefoot wrote: post #101
amiga386 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair, the expansion slots were a pretty useful thing and allowed a lot of extra hardware (including the Video Toaster) that the A500 sidecar was incapable of. But yes, the original A2000 was a souped-up A1000, later upgraded to a souped-up A500.

I looked this up and it appears the A2000 launch price was $1495 USD in March 1987, I don't know the UK price but it would've been around £950 at the time. That's ridiculously cheap (until you understand it's an A500 with Zorro and ISA slots). The A3000, probably the best machine Commodore ever made, launched for $3379 USD in 1990.

I don't have any magazines from 1987, but Amiga Format issue 1 (August 1989) has an advertiser selling:

A2000 standalone £799

A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard £1099

A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard and A2090a (HDD controller card for the A2000 because IDE hasn't been invented yet) with 20MB HDD £1369

A2090a with 20MB HDD £479

A2090a with 40MB HDD £750

A2058 (up to 8MB RAM expansion) with 2MB RAM populated £449

I can see why you'd offer a working system, 1MB RAM, floppies only, if it more than halved the visible price.

Re: Amiga Forever

#129

Post by shadowofneptune »

aidenn0 wrote: post #119

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.

The IBM PC would have had a slower start—having an easy path for CP/M devs to become DOS devs meant there were robust offerings early in the 5150's life.

The move to out-of-order 68000 CPUs was harder than for x86. 68k is self-conciously CISC in a way that the 8086 was not, its addressing modes were a particular headache. It's also unliky that Motorola would transform itself into a CPU company like Intel did. Overall, a slower 90s.

Re: Amiga Forever

#130

Post by bitwize »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #77
gbraad wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Probably a Commodore ST, though.
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