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Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

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Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#111

Post by dosisking »

vidarh wrote: post #18
quadpro wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last sentence of the article about waiting for the rest of the world to catch up really describes how I felt for way too long after 1994. In addition to the things mentioned in the article and the comments here, by that time I was used to having a standard OS-supplied scripting language that every self-respecting software program integrated with (ARexx), a standardized localization mechanism for software (locale…

I'm still waiting... I know there's a lot of rose tint involved, but things like ARexx, datatypes, screens, and assigns still feel hopelessly missing. Every time I get a file open dialog without a list of assigns I can also use in the shell, for example? What is that bullshit. I've started building small things to paper over the worst of it for my own use, but it also makes me wonder how many other great innovations…

Being able to simply write to the SPEAK: device was nice

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#112

Post by spankibalt »

vidarh wrote: post #85
smallstepforman wrote: post #65

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 A3000 had a ficker fixer.

That's demonstratably false. But the A3000 was a ficker fixer.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#113

Post by marbletiles »

flohofwoe wrote: post #37

For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical use…

> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then

Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple screens to this day)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#114

Post by spankibalt »

The PC made it. Decisively and on all accounts. Save one. You Amiga nerdlingers got adequate enough hardware in them nice wedge-style keyboard computer cases (i. e. not counting Amiga buckets).

AFAIK the highest high a (vintage) PC reaches here is the Japanese Epson PC-286C with a 486SLC CPU and the matching FasMath FPU upgrade. Time to change that. :)

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#116

Post by deepsummer »

The Amiga was a great computer when it came out, but it was not 10 years ahead of anything. Things progressed incredibly fast back then.

The graphics were not 10 years ahead, not even 3 years. First SVGA cards came out in 1987, with a 320x200 in 256 color mode that was far more practical than Amiga's 4096 color mode, and with resolutions of up to 800x600. By 1995, resolutions of 1280x1024 with 256 colors were widely available, and Nvidia released their first graphics accelerator.

The first SoundBlaster cards came out in the late 80s. The SoundBlaster 32 released in 1995 was far superior to the Amiga.

And the state-of-the-art CPU in 1995 was the Pentium 133, faster than a 7Mhz 68k by orders of magnitude.

The Amiga 1000 was an awesome computer. But technically obsolete by 1990.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#117

Post by bluGill »

mellosouls wrote: post #115

Terrific, but not sure about the ten years ahead. Let's not forget this was also the era of Atari ST and the birth of ARM with the incredible Acorn Archimedes arriving just a couple of years later.

Somehow the Atari ST is panned because it lacked preemptive multitasking (I'm not sure if this is true). They didn't mention any of the other GUIs that unix was working with - X11 already existed back then, and several unix vendors had their own windowing system that was arguably better (at least their marketing said so - I never used any). Of course Unix systems would have been much more expensive.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#118

Post by flohofwoe »

dosisking wrote: post #81
flohofwoe wrote: post #64

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

Hard to argue with that tbh, what a beauty.

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#119

Post by Annatar »

krs_ wrote: post #102
detritus wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, at the time I thought there was a lot more parity between the ST and the 500 but when I watch videos of the two these days, I realise just how much better the Amiga was. I'd always assumed the sound would be great on the Atari because it was midi-compatible, but I was horrified to hear how tinny and bleepy the sound effects were in a game I knew from the Amiga. Oh, to go back in time and use that in an ar…

I somehow do really like the sound that some managed to squeeze out of that YM2149 sound chip in the ST though. It was an old low-end chip when the ST was new already, and most games do indeed sound like ass. But the people in the demoscene worked their magic on it to great effect.

[dead]

Re: Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time

#120

Post by flohofwoe »

marbletiles wrote: post #113
flohofwoe wrote: post #37

For some aspects, the Amiga is still ahead of today's tech. AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then. The Amiga team envisioned a desktop environment future which focused on being a productivity tool instead of an interface for passive media consumption and doom scrolling, where graphical use…

> AmigaOS 2.x layed out a vision of the desktop UI as a malleable and personalizable toolbox (or one might say "workbench" heh) like no other operating system since then Can you say more? I had (and loved) an A1200 and appreciated what things like ARexx could do, but I don't know what you're alluding to here that things like the Mac didn't ultimately implement as well (though sometimes less well; I miss multiple scre…

Back on the Amiga 3000 we had built our asset creation tools for a game that eventually ended up as Urban Assault on the PC. This was a wild mix of custom-made and standard tools wired together via AREXX and controlled with a little macOS dock like icon toolbar, and all integrated with the workbench file manager.

E.g. one such custom workflow would be to "pipe" an image file created in DPaint into some standard image processing tool (forgot the name, basically like ImageMagick, but as a UI tool) to change the pixel format, scale and filter, then piping the resulting output image into a custom tool to convert into an engine specific texture format, all the while updating some asset database files, and IIRC also creating an icon file in the process.

Most of this can also be achieved with a pure cmdline workflow today via Python or Node (by glueing together tools like ImageMagick, ffmpeg, various asset pipeline tools), but the special sauce on the Amiga was that most 'modern' UI tools adhered to standards defined by the Amiga team for cmdline usage and scripting.

The 'plugin architecture' was mostly about datatypes (globally available file format encoders/decoders), BOOPSI UI components and 'Commodities' (IIRC small background tools that could intercept and manipulate system events).

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