Anyone know how this runs under wine?
Amiga Forever
61–70 of 158 posts
Re: Amiga Forever
#62At the time Commodore made PCs, it could have been worthy to port AmigaOS to x86 (8088 was a bit too puny, but 286 and 386 could compare to 68K). An earlier lost opportunity was when Sun approached the offering to market the 3000/UX as a low-cost Unix workstation. The world could be a lot different had Commodore management been so boneheaded. OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those deci…
By the time x86 was really competitive architecturally with 68k -- by which I mean non-segmented, 32-bit, etc -- it was already too late for Commodore and Atari. They were already pretty much dead financially. Both sold PC clones, and I suspect if those lines had been very successful $$ wise they may have attempted to do something like what you said. Or more likely some kind of Amiga-esque runtime environment overtop…
I dont think the platform move was.. a cause of Apple's troubles, it was mostly poor product planing, marketing and OS related issues (which were not really made better or worse by the ISA move)
Re: Amiga Forever
#63At the time Commodore made PCs, it could have been worthy to port AmigaOS to x86 (8088 was a bit too puny, but 286 and 386 could compare to 68K). An earlier lost opportunity was when Sun approached the offering to market the 3000/UX as a low-cost Unix workstation. The world could be a lot different had Commodore management been so boneheaded. OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those deci…
The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat memory mode and other differences that would have made a port of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series co…
Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior).
Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
Re: Amiga Forever
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Harsh? Truth... Commodore under Irving Gould and Mehdi Ali was a sinking ship due to severe mismanagement.
I only thing I remember about the name "Mehdi Ali" from various documentaries etc. is that he was a serial ship-sinker.
Irving saved Commodore several times, but he had no idea about computers and never used one. This also led to issues of understanding with CEO's, like Jack Tramiel. He left Commodore and went to Atari... and in a revenge move, worked on the Atari ST. While Jack didn't have deep knowledge on computers itself, he knew what businesses wanted and had an acumen for driving it, and especially on the idea of cost. This you can clearly see in how the ST got positioned; it was more of a business machine. The Amiga was more of a funtainment machine that was good at everything. This made it challenging to target a certain audience. It was great at video, music, and even did games, with a floppy drive, and a full-size keyboard, etc. MArketing had a difficult time to properly advertise it. Several CEOs followed, and Thomas Rattigan made the company profitable again, but drama followed very soon ... and only got worse with Ali; https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-history/mehdi-ali-the-end...
Re: Amiga Forever
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat memory mode and other differences that would have made a port of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series co…
Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior). Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
ISTM that if Microsoft had managed to add preemptive multitasking to Windows 3.x in a backward-compatible way, this would've given us as close to an Amiga-like OS as one could ever hope to run on 8086 and 286 hardware. Perhaps even more so, if hardware could be expected to have multimedia capabilities as a standard, without relying on 3rd-party drivers - PC had this on the PCjr, and later Tandy.
Re: Amiga Forever
#66I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200, and whether any of the games I wrote for myself way back when, in Amos and then Amiga E, are still recoverable. Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I'll try though.
I can totally still read my 35+ years old Workbench disks, which have been booted from hundreds of times. It's amazing, really.
Anecdotally, I've had better luck reading Amiga and ST floppies from the 80s and 90s than floppies from the 2000s. I'm guessing disk quality took a nosedive somewhere around 2000..?
Re: Amiga Forever
#67Were Amigas considered to be exclusively entertainment machines, or did they try to get people to use them for work? I grew up with an IBM XT my dad had on loan from his job, and got the impression that everything else was a (cooler) gaming computer.
The entire art department at my university used Amigas. They had a couple of video toasters as well. They kept them at least into the mid-90's too.
Otherwise, yeah, I can't recall ever seeing an Amiga in a US business (other than a computer repair shop). IBM dominated the "serious" market, and Apple was in the schools (with some Commodore).
Re: Amiga Forever
#68I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200, and whether any of the games I wrote for myself way back when, in Amos and then Amiga E, are still recoverable. Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I'll try though.
> I'm returning to my childhood home in a couple of days after many years away, and now I'm wondering about searching the attic for my A1200
By an incredible stroke of bad luck the first Covid lockdown (the one that lasted months) happened when I was far from my wife and kid. By chance I was in my childhood home (alone).
Out of boredom I started watching YouTube videos about fixing and maintaining old computers. It motivated to go the attic and garage and find all my old computers. Took the battery out of an old Mac. Greased my Commodore 128's 1570 drive. Booted the C128 and checked which floppies were still working.
And quite some still worked: it was a complete and total blast from the past to see the game Commando, with its incredible soundtrack, booting!
I don't know if the A1200 is prone to leaking capacitors or not: if it is send it to someone who can recap for you.
It was really fun to get these old machines back to life: I really encourage you to do it.
Re: Amiga Forever
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat memory mode and other differences that would have made a port of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series co…
Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior). Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
I say this with respect, but I don't think it would. The x86 architecture had an absolute paucity of registers, the mixture of MMIO and PMIO was insane, and it just didn't have any PC-relative addressing modes. Relocation for a flat address space would be an annoyance. Prior to PCs becoming about a billion times faster and the compact encoding coming into its own, x86 code is not fun to write.
Saying "some programs would be difficult to port" is putting it mildly; a huge part of the Amiga's software catalogue was written in assembler, and pretty much every single game wrote directly to the hardware, in a way that can't be abstracted without a complete emulation of that hardware. The Commodore graphics APIs were absolutely too slow to do anything except productivity software. There were retargetable graphics APIs (e.g. CyberGraphX, Picasso 96), introduced to allow well-behaved software to access expensive graphics cards you could buy for big-box Amigas. But generally you wouldn't use them for game graphics (unless it's a very simple game).
The Amiga really held well together; the custom chips were well designed to fit with the 68000. Perhaps too well, and that coupling became the downfall when the computer hardware moved faster than Amiga software could be brought along. It was destroyed once games became more about per-pixel operations (1990s 3D games) than blitting large areas (1980s platform games); the existence of VGA mode 13h made the former so much easier to write. Commodore even added a chip to provide a form of hardware-accelerated chunky-to-planar conversion, but it was too late, only in the CD32 and just couldn't compete with a native chunky framebuffer.
Re: Amiga Forever
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 268 had a segmented memory model which effectively made it possible to only access RAM in 64K pages. The 68000 had a flat memory mode and other differences that would have made a port of AmigaOS to a 286 very difficult because of the downgrade in capabilities (video controller architecture is another huge issue, too). In many ways the 286 should have been awesome, but wasn't. The 386 was more of a 68000 series co…
Indeed, a 286 would cause some breakage and some OS-level APIs would need more complicated code, and some programs would be difficult to port due to HGA, VGA, and SVGA graphics being very different from Amiga modes (although somewhat superior). Still, would be fun to have a 386 version of the Amiga OS.
Could have packaged up the Amiga chipset on an ISA card, an all-in-one video/audio/io gizmo. Sell that to 386 owners and give the OS away. Bonus points for a ROM socket to insta-boot AmigaOS with no disk.