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Amiga Forever

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Re: Amiga Forever

#71

Post by runjake »

rbanffy wrote: post #20

At 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…

  > OK. I'm being harsh. At the time, with the information they had, those decisions that now appear stupid could make sense.
I don't think you are. At the time, we in the Amiga community were wondering wtf was going on back then, when it was happening.

It was pretty clear the leadership were making bad decisions, when they weren't absent.

Re: Amiga Forever

#72

Post by amiga386 »

mrwh wrote: post #4

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, 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.

Good luck!

You may want to get some kind of removable media for your Amiga, many people use a compact flash card as a hard drive, then use an IDE to CF adapter [1] to attach it to an A600/A1200/A4000. You can format the CF card as a standard Amiga hard drive, then you can remove it and read the Amiga drive on a more modern computer with unadf [2] and you can convert your AMOS source code to readable text with listamos [3]

[1] e.g. https://www.amiga-shop.net/en/Amiga-Hardware/Amiga-classic-h... but I'm not endorsing this specific shop or its products

[2] https://github.com/lclevy/ADFlib

[3] https://github.com/kyz/amostools

Re: Amiga Forever

#73

Post by cmrdporcupine »

Aloha wrote: post #62
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I don't think it was a unitary cause, sure. But I think in retrospect it's clear Apple could not afford this kind of ISA move in addition to all the crazy OS work they were doing (and never finishing). It was half-baked until OS 8.

In 1996 I helped administrated a group of MacOS boxen, all PowerPC. At that point in time only half the applications were running native PowerPC, and it was buggy as hell. If I recall, even parts of the OS were still running 68k emulated.

In an OS with no memory protection or even proper dynamic memory allocation, it was just a shitstorm. Could not run FileMaker and Netscape at the same time without dying all over the place. I was shocked, because a couple years earlier I remember finding the 68k Macs I used extremely stable, even with Multifinder, etc. Limited, but stable.

IMHO Apple was lost in the wilderness for most of the mid-90s and a big part of it was just having too many balls in the air.

Re: Amiga Forever

#74

Post by dark-star »

bogantech wrote: post #17
chris_j wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought Amiga Forever a few years ago in order to get the Kickstart ROMs that I needed to play some games in FS-UAE on my Mac. Trying to actually get the content onto my Mac was more painful than I'd anticipated. "To install the stuff you've just bought, just double click this .msi installer". Heh, thanks. (I can't remember what I did in the end but I did manage to get the Kickstart ROMs into my Mac.) EDIT: typo.

It seems they offer an .iso download link now alongside the one for the .msi The kickstart ROMs are still encrypted on the ISO and AF stores unencrypted versions on disk after you run it but if you're on a Mac/Linux you can use romtool to decrypt them https://amitools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tools/romtool.html

AFAIR the "encryption" is just an XOR with their license text file (LICENSE.txt?) as a large key

That was some time ago when I got it, so maybe it's different now

Re: Amiga Forever

#75

Post by runjake »

squarefoot wrote: post #57
Cockbrand wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did in fact build PC clones from the 1980s onwards, starting with the XT compatible PC-10 and the AT compatible PC-20. These were made in Germany, IIRC. Apparently they weren't bad, but back then I didn't understand the point when they had the much more powerful Amiga platform.

Their point was that the Amiga was a gaming machine, and they had no intention to make a full personal computer out of it, at least that was their idea when they stubbornly refused to ship it without a hard disk. That would be understandable given the high prices of storage back then, but they also insisted with low res graphics and lack of a cheap RTC chip, which killed almost all chances to use it in offices. I con…

I remember things differently. While the Amiga was a great gaming machine, I remember Commodore pushing it as a desktop productivity machine, more emphasizing stuff like paint and music apps.

IIRC, the lack of a hard drive issue came down to keeping costs down.

I don't remember a specific issue with "low res graphics". Of course the flicker issue was present, but that didn't really become an an issue until later in the Amiga's life, and only on the low end models.

Regardless, it was certainly a very well-rounded platform. Definitely not "just a game machine" by any stretch.

Caveat: I was in the Amiga world in the 1000/500/2000/3000 days. I've never used or seen the later generation stuff, such as the 4000 or A1200.

Re: Amiga Forever

#76

Post by dark-star »

richrichardsson wrote: post #43

I find it somewhat curious that they bundle demoscene productions in their PAID for software, even offering more demos when you pay more. This is completely against the demoscene ethos. A lot of demos even had notices forbidding the commercial PD libraries of the time from distributing their wares.

that's just one of the reasons why Cloanto has kind of a bad reputation among Amiga enthusiasts.

Don't use them unless you want that warm and fuzzy feeling of having legally obtained the Kickstart ROMs instead of just grabbing them from archive.org...

Re: Amiga Forever

#77

Post by EvanAnderson »

gbraad wrote: post #64
Razengan wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The best part of the whole "Jack Tramiel leaves Commodore, buys Atari" story is the part about Atari floating debt to Amiga. The debt was coming due around the time Tramiel bought Atari and, at the last minute, Commodore acquired Amiga and Atari was paid-off. There was litigation following-- Tramiel was never one to let something go quietly-- but in the end we got the Commodore Amiga.

In some alternate universe there were Atari Amigas and likely no Atari ST.

Re: Amiga Forever

#78

Post by amiga386 »

Cockbrand wrote: post #28
wslh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even enjoying a Commodore Amiga as a teenager we cannot forget Atari 1040ST competitor which included MIDI and was also innovative. Just read that was popular in some locations for CAD. It is difficult to talk about failed business, business many many times are successful for reasons beyond the technology involved. Just look nowadays how organizations are using Microsoft Teams, they could be locked, have a high cost…

Built-in MIDI and the excellent 100Hz monochrome screen were very strong selling points for the ST back then, for different niches of the market. Especially given the strong audio capabilities of the Amiga, including a MIDI interface should have been a no-brainer for Commodore to position it in the music production industry. On the other end of the market, the always slightly flickering 1081/1084 color monitor made t…

Something I always thought odd; why would just _having_ MIDI ports make the ST popular with musicians? Getting an Amiga MIDI adapter was super cheap and easy... although most early Amiga MIDI and stave-notation software (Sonix, Music-X, DMCS) fell out of favour as trackers stormed on the scene; most Amiga musicians preferred to use the Amiga as a sample sequencer than as the controller of other MIDI devices.

Is it really just default ports? If the Amiga had had a line in port rather than required an external sampler, would it have been known as "the sampling machine"?

The Amiga did famously form the backbone of 1990s NTSC broadcast television production as the Video Toaster, but that was because the Amiga chipset was able to genlock with an external video signal, i.e. it was an inherent feature of the machine rather than the default ports and peripherals it came with.

Re: Amiga Forever

#79

Post by indymike »

zozbot234 wrote: post #65
rbanffy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

8086 didn't have the instruction set to do preemptive, and the 286's memory model was 64kb pages... and barely good enough. The enabler for MPC (Multimedia PC) was the combination of 386 (and 386sx) + 16 bit sound card + CDROM + PCI VGA+.

Re: Amiga Forever

#80

Post by btbuildem »

indymike wrote: post #56
rbanffy wrote: post #20

At 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…

It blew my mind when I was able to set the viewport pointer to where my program code was, and SEE THE CODE AS IT RAN. Like, watch the bits flip as counters incremented, etc etc.

It was a wonderful, impactful lesson in foundations of software engineering, before I even knew what any of that meant.

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