81–90 of 181 posts
Though the Atari ST was a superior machine.
Ok I had to upvote you for old times sake and to honor the eternal Amiga-vs-Atari flamewars. But of course you are obviously and objectively very wrong. Amiga 4 Ever! :D
I was trying to figure out it's contemporaries, the i386 was still a few months away, you could get a sun-2, which had a sweet 4 MB of ram, but wikipedia sez that would cost you a eye watering 29 thousand dollars, in 1985, for the low end monochrome graphics version, oh, you want color that is "just" a cool 50k. Yeah Sun is not really playing the same game. The mac was probably the closest equivalent, it came out the…
The Mac hit a completely different market. Nobody I knew got a Mac until after the iMac. Lots had Amigas. In the 80's Mac's were expensive machines for professionals, and while the Amiga due to Commodore's persistent sales and marketing failures were also pigeon holed in professional markers in the US, in Europe the Amiga was also the step up from 8-bit home computers, and the Mac didn't compete in that space at all.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok I had to upvote you for old times sake and to honor the eternal Amiga-vs-Atari flamewars. But of course you are obviously and objectively very wrong. Amiga 4 Ever! :D
Of course, everybody knows that the X68000 is better than both the Amiga and Atari ST
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In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…
I think the Acorn Archimedes (1987) might be the closest UK vision to the Amiga. Of course it was 2 years later. But, mouse-oriented interface, graphics central, kind of 32 bit CPU with limitations (similar to the 68k which is 16 bit aspiring to be 32 bit), thoroughly weird desktop environment.
This was unlike the "24-bit" 68000 where the hardware package actually only had 24 address lines, but its address registers and PC were 32-bit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/26-bit_computing#Early_ARM_pro...
The ARM3 resolved the situation by adding a separate 32-bit clean PC register and a separate status register, instead of the combined monstrosity. All software had to be rewritten to use the new registers if it wanted to be "32-bit clean", unlike 68000 software which either just worked fine, or revealed the programmer was an imbecile who thought they could get away with storing random data in the top 8 bits of addresses.
Bonus: the Archimedes memory map (00000000-03FFFFFF, i.e. 26 bits) https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~theom/riscos/docs/ArcMem...
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In the UK, its main contemporary in the non-PC realm was the Atari ST, which was cheaper, arrived on the market sooner, and took the “professional” market because of its excellent mono monitor (“small, but perfectly formed”). The ST didn’t multitask, but Amiga multitasking wasn’t memory-protected, so crashing something meant you could (would) lose everything running. It also couldn’t do the graphical tricks the Amiga…
To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.
Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases.
I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that it would be possible to retrofit at least limited memory protection onto AmigaOS, but it's decidedly not something that'd be simple to do, and most likely you'd need to basically sandbox old apps and create new API's for new apps to do it properly.
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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…
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders! This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen. The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers trigger…
The Amiga was the best and worst thing to happen to a kid in the late 80s. It was heartbreaking watching Commodore die, but it was an amazing introduction to the possibilities of computing. I made a ton of music with OctaMED, learned a bunch about programming, learned how to use all sorts of graphics tools, made all my own icons and wallpaper images, wrote an interactive book in AmigaGuide (an early hypertext system)…
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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…
To give a corresponding example, try moving the mouse while loading from floppy disk on Windows 95, ten years later. The mouse pointer judders! This does not happen on a 1985 Amiga, even with a fraction of the CPU power, which it needs all of it to redraw UI damage as seen. The reason is that the Amiga system prioritised input processing above normal tasks, it had preemptive multitasking where hardware timers trigger…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To support protected memory, you need an MMU, and the base 68000 did not ship with an MMU, however the 68020 and later did. The Amiga 3000 onwards should have defaulted to MMU and had a flicker fixer and chunky graphics and 16 bit sound to really succeed. Another multiverse timeline, perhaps.
The A3000 had a ficker fixer. If you meant that the other later models should have also included it, I agree. Regarding the MMU, the problem was/is the OS. AmigaOS uses message passing between processes extensively, and those messages often involved passing pointers to structures that the receiver expected to be able to dereference and even writ to in some cases. I'm on record repeatedly arguing over the years that i…
The API is already there! AllocMem(, MEMF_PUBLIC) allocates shared memory, otherwise you get private memory.
You can then enforce memory protection around that, but obviously the entire OS is still built on message-passing between tasks where the message itself remains at exactly the same (public) address and isn't copied between private memory spaces, and there's a gentlemens' agreement as to who currently owns it (PutMsg/ReplyMsg)
Software like Enforcer and MuGuardianAngel already checked this, and dinged your program for accessing non-allocated memory.
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…
But of course only horizontally. The Copper made it happen.