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Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
41–50 of 51 posts
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#42Lots of Amiga concepts live on today with DragonflyBSD. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ And it’s shockingly performant (on par with Linux, sometimes even better), given the tiny development team. Messaging passing, etc are core Amiga ideas that exist today only in Dfly.
Message passing in some form dates from at least as far back as the 1970's, possibly the late 60's. Generally, BSDs were influenced by Mach to the extent that they've adopted some microkernel ideas. I'd be surprised to learn there's any genuine link between AmigaOS and Dragonfly.
Prepare to be surprised. The genuine link is Matt Dillon, who developed the Amiga "DICE" C compiler and also started DragonFly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Dillon
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The Atari ST was even more reasonably priced, but of course it lacked the Amiga's custom hardware chipset so it was a lot more boring on the gaming and multimedia front.
And did not support properly colour on its first iterations.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#44> 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…
Yeah, that should probably read 160x200. IIRC, most C64 games ran at that resolution. This was called “high resolution graphics” in the marketing material, mind you :)
C64 hi-res graphics was 320x200, two selectable colors for each 8x8 char sized block. So 16 colors on the screen, but...
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Early DOS days. By the early 90s the raw processing power of a 486 with VGA and a Soundblaster pretty easily trounced the Amiga in raw capability, inelegant as it may have been. A bunch of demos of the period document this conflict.
Smooth 60 Hz scrolling was still a challenge on VGA.
Smooth 60 Hz 320x240 256 color "mode-x" scrolling was for free on VGA. Just had to update the start address and panning registers. You could also have a hardware supported stationary portion.
70 Hz 320x200 mode 13 was a different matter. Had to use CPU to update it.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#46oNLY aMiGa mAKES iT pOSSiBLe
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
The Atari ST was even more reasonably priced, but of course it lacked the Amiga's custom hardware chipset so it was a lot more boring on the gaming and multimedia front.
> The Atari ST
I remember these commercials, because they were on a VHS recording I had of Back to the Future, along with a brief news clip of the only Soviet Shuttle flight.
Amiga 500 commercial (1988)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2KiNpqATUY
Atari 1040ST Computer Commercial 1988 With 1 Megabyte Of Memory!
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#48oNLY aMiGa mAKES iT pOSSiBLe
Amiga rules forever.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that should probably read 160x200. IIRC, most C64 games ran at that resolution. This was called “high resolution graphics” in the marketing material, mind you :)
C64 hi-res graphics was 320x200, two selectable colors for each 8x8 char sized block. So 16 colors on the screen, but... See: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/High_Resolution
That makes much more sense, thanks! I mixed something up there, or I just misunderstood the marketing material as a kid.
Re: Why is the Amiga so beloved in the demoscene? (2023 essay)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pixels were actually rectangular. Imagine that 640x400 has square pixels (which it pretty much does on a then-contemporary screen). When you have half the amount of vertical pixels at 640x200, you can either have square pixels at half the image height, or double the height of the pixels (making them rectangular) and fill the entire vertical space.
CRT TV screens and monitors come in a 4:3 aspect ratio, so you need 320x240 or 640x480 for a "true" square pixel grid. (Unless you manually adjusted the horizontal and vertical stretch on the monitor to letterbox the image, but very few people would've done that). None of the common screen resolutions on the Amiga matches that exactly, though the 320x256 and 640x512 (interlaced) PAL resolutions were reasonably close…
> were reasonably close for casual purposes.
That's pretty much what I was going for.