11–20 of 51 posts
Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.
IMO besides being extremely easy to program, they didn't required extensive tooling to make interesting programs specially when you compare with alternatives at the time.
Another interesting aspect was the "statelessness" of the system. You had one disk with your programs, other with data and so on, a crash wound't affect or make you lose everything since you're a reset away from coming back to where you where
Even the simplest programming solution today is way more complicated than what existed back them. I wish we had more boot to work systems to hand to kids without much interruption.
My kids are getting into the age of programming and understanding how hardware and a computer works is way more easy when you don't have tons of abstractions on top of it. That's the reason I've been following the David Murray's commanderX16 initiative anxiously :)
The Amiga isn't remembered as a technology. It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". It's the little computer that could. Where indies would hack cool stuff. It had a well understood spec that didn't change so much, so you could push the metal to its limit. It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. T…
That's an odd turn of phrase considering that both the Mac and the PC predate the Amiga.
If anything surely the Mac's Ridley Scott directed launch Super Bowl ad was the start of "Mac vs PC".
People loved the Amiga because it had a lot of modern features for the time and was reasonably priced. You're definitely right, it's the little computer that could.
The demo scene loved the Amiga because a lot of hardware features were left undocumented ready for you to discover and wow your friends with.
What a mistake...
It took years before PCs were able to match the graphics of the Amiga.
[0] It could take 15 minutes to render pretty pedestrian paper on that machine, but many highschool projects were created on that machine, and printed out on his work's LaserWriter.
I'm not sure where your 120 pixels are coming from, looks like an error. Color mode was half the resolution of the hires mode (2 hires pixels were taken together to represent 4 values that a color pixel could represent; there were 40x25 blocks (corresponding to characters in text mode) where the colors used for each of the 2 or 4 states could be set (with some additional complication as it was using a separate RAM chip for part of that, the details of which escape my memory without looking it up). There were also 8 sprites of 24 (hires) or 12 (color) pixels horizontally, those don't add up to 120 pixels either.
The Amiga isn't remembered as a technology. It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". It's the little computer that could. Where indies would hack cool stuff. It had a well understood spec that didn't change so much, so you could push the metal to its limit. It's from a time where if you wanted games and you were a kid, you most likely pirated them. Wanna learn to code? Start messing with your game's files and hex editors. T…
> It's the ancestor of "Mac vs PC". That's an odd turn of phrase considering that both the Mac and the PC predate the Amiga. If anything surely the Mac's Ridley Scott directed launch Super Bowl ad was the start of "Mac vs PC". People loved the Amiga because it had a lot of modern features for the time and was reasonably priced. You're definitely right, it's the little computer that could. The demo scene loved the Ami…
I've always wondered something, are Dpaint's pixels supposed to be character sized? I know that pixels aren't always necessarily square, but Dpaint seems to exaggerate that a lot.
> the C64 could display a total of 16 colors at a standard resolution of 120 x 200 pixels, though it also has a graphics mode with the higher resolution of 320 x 200 with more limited colors I'm not sure where your 120 pixels are coming from, looks like an error. Color mode was half the resolution of the hires mode (2 hires pixels were taken together to represent 4 values that a color pixel could represent; there wer…
The PC has always been such a mess of incompatible peripherals, it made for a terrible demo platform in the DOS days when the OS didn't abstract any of the graphics and sound stuff in a normalized form. Amiga and C64 included capable multimedia hardware so demo coders could target a known quantity and ship something that Just Worked for the masses.