Does anyone remember CygnusEd? To this day nothing I use scrolled as nice as that text editor did. Such fluid scrolling. Sigh.
AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
31–40 of 59 posts
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, my first thought was "this board looks great for testing big-endian". Would be nice to see comparisons to e.g. the G5.
Sure. I bought back in the day a G4 Mac Mini just for that purpose (running both Linux and OSX) :-)
In which case do you need to test big endian? Compiler or low-level library development?
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#33Does anyone remember CygnusEd? To this day nothing I use scrolled as nice as that text editor did. Such fluid scrolling. Sigh.
Yeah, it was a very nice experience.
Also, a mouse pointer that was synced to vertical blank together with a mouse that seemed to feed the computer with events fast enough to make it non-laggy and fluid.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#34Does anyone remember CygnusEd? To this day nothing I use scrolled as nice as that text editor did. Such fluid scrolling. Sigh.
LOL. Yes. That's what inspired me to write my own Windows text editor with smooth scrolling: http://deadfrog.co.uk
It's a bit rubbish.
It is written in the Amiga style of every-byte-matters though. If it wasn't for the embedded Python interpreter, the entire install would be about 300k.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. I bought back in the day a G4 Mac Mini just for that purpose (running both Linux and OSX) :-)
In which case do you need to test big endian? Compiler or low-level library development?
TD-linux develops codec libraries.
I develop crypto code. Testing on BE is nice, not just because of endian neutral code but testing on something 'weird' can turn rare faults into common ones.
Beyond endianness I've found interesting bugs by running code on HP-PA (stack grows in the reverse direction) and on Itanium (misalignment causes a trap to the kernel)...
I wish there were a qemu supported fake architecture that made every optional decision differently (or at least every one that works with most code...).
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#36Does anyone remember CygnusEd? To this day nothing I use scrolled as nice as that text editor did. Such fluid scrolling. Sigh.
I do. CED was simply amazing both feature wise and for its speed and smoothness. Text searching and replacing was really fast too. Later I became a registered user of GoldEd which was more programmer oriented and incredibly rich in features, scriptable etc, still it could not reach CED speed.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#37Can someone tell me what makes "real" Amiga so wonderful that it's worth paying $1500 for an objectively outdated computer? What does legit Amiga do that something like, for example, AROS doesn't do?
The Amiga has a small but really enthusiastic fanbase that doesn't want to admit that it's dead. That's it, as far as I can tell. All of the modern Amiga hardware seems to suffer from similar issues to the ones mentioned here - it's expensive, slow by modern standards, has strange and annoying hardware and driver issues, and there's just not much software for PPC Amiga. It can't even run modern web browsers. (Unless…
I had a maxed out Amiga 500 (with sidecar expansion) back in the day and it was awesome (for games and 2D graphics) in 1988, amazing in 1990, and then Commodore ate it owing to monumental incompetence.
Even at the height of its technical superiority, it was crippled for serious work. Its pixels weren't square in any graphics mode, and in the highest resolution mode you needed to endure flicker unless you had a special monitor.
I remember when our 512k mac's power supply died and we tried to use our (maxed out) Amiga for word processing we discovered the top-rated word processors became unresponsive with documents over 4-5 pages (WriteNow on the Mac was cheerfully handling hundred page documents with graphics). And its print quality was atrocious even setting aside the whole non square pixel problem.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Amiga has a small but really enthusiastic fanbase that doesn't want to admit that it's dead. That's it, as far as I can tell. All of the modern Amiga hardware seems to suffer from similar issues to the ones mentioned here - it's expensive, slow by modern standards, has strange and annoying hardware and driver issues, and there's just not much software for PPC Amiga. It can't even run modern web browsers. (Unless…
Rationally you are 100% on the money, but people are not always rational and I actually love it that they did this simply because they could. Bringing a machine to life at this level is an adventure all by itself and given the rather boring nature of the compute landscape I'm all for people taking the long way home and enjoying the scenery rather than just being driven by price and practicalities.
As a nostalgic Amiga user I agree on principle, sadly this platform has little to do with original Amigas; I applaude their effort but wouldn't spend even 100 euros to buy one.
The Amiga success was a result of genius, money and time constraints, being in the right place at the right moment and a huge users niche still untouched by IBM/Apple/Atari; it's impossible to repeat, period. However I we wondered what if the surviving original developers banded together again and designed something new to be produced by some Chinese fab in Shenzhen, like small companies like Friendly Elec or the guys behind the Orange Pi can do today like twice a month. That could be an interesting move to give new life to a concept.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#39I was going to be short. Still, even if large, I won't price this above two cents. I am saddened to say, but everything that made the Amiga great when it was launched seems meh by today's standards. Amigas had preemptive multitasking before any other home computer. Today it's the norm. Amigas could switch video modes every scanline. Today, even the concept of a scanline takes a while to explain to someone born in the…
That's more or less what I wanted to say (as a former Amiga owner and enthusiast, back in the '90s). These nostalgic operations that keep popping up every few months or years are basically denying the spirit of the original Amiga, which was that of a machine ahead of its time. A completely new machine instead, entirely different and totally incompatible with the old Amiga, based on some radically different architecture from the current desktop computers, would be truer to its original spirit.
Re: AmigaOne X5000 – first impression
#40I just can't swallow that it looks like a generic tower PC. What if they actually went with the A1200/A500 form factor?