Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

Post by anthk » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:20 AM UTC

mickelsen wrote: post #34

phs318u wrote: post #2

I’m sure that to the younger members here, you may be rolling your eyes at yet another “halcyon days of computing” post which will inevitably draw the rose-tinted comments from the boomers and gen-x-ers. Believe me when I say I get how tiring that must be. However it is impossible for those that experienced this new dawn to overstate how amazing this was. A friend got his hands on an A1000 and when I saw it and spent…

I'm a millennial and I discovered the Amiga, the demoscene, the lore and so on way after its era thanks to the catchy tracker music and demos. I've had several different re-introductions over different stages in my life, but the first was by trying to figure out as a kid how the tunes of my games could pack so much in less than 1MB per song, when my mental model was only MIDIs, WAVs or MP3s. Then I figured it out and…

Post by fredoralive » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:27 AM UTC

0x1ceb00da wrote: post #41

zedr wrote: post #33

Some features of the Amiga that are peculiar even today: 1. The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes 2. A screen can be divided into multiple resolutions, e.g. you can have a half a screen in high res and half in low res and with double the amount of simultaneous colors (or even HAM mode) 3. It can genlock natively, i.e. match its s…

> The mouse is a hardware sprite and its movement stays responsive and smooth even under heavy load and even when the OS freezes Modern macbooks do something really interesting when the OS freezes. If the OS OOMs or something like a kernel panic happens, the trackpad stops clicking! There's something in the trackpad hardware that polls the OS and locks the trackpad when the OS stops responding so that it can't be pre…

Post by emj » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:30 AM UTC

dev0p wrote: post #32

elpocko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o8E3ycB7Aw In case someone wants to see for themselves how "instantly" it really was. Skip to ~9:50 when it gets real sluggish. Edit: if you don't wear nostalgia glasses, you can watch the bits of screen being redrawn piece by piece after something moves or a menu closes. Everything is flickering. Opening and closing a menu takes up to one second. The text being typed in the editor la…

Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :) The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not…

Post by krige » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:31 AM UTC

Post by vidarh » Thu, Jul 23, 2026, 9:37 AM UTC

emj wrote: post #46

dev0p wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence the caveat "Aside from the loading times," :) The "instantly" refers to user input: clicking a button, typing, or moving the mouse was as fast as it could possibly get because of how close the OS was to the bare metal, with no fluff bogging down the experience. Simply put, there were no wasted frames, as there were none to waste. Nowadays, at the very least, you get a couple millisecond of latency. That was not…

The GUI was fast because it was fixed layout, MUI on the Amiga was slow as well. We tend to go that way to get UI that is easy to create. You see the same in all GUI libraries the more CPU you have the more you use it.