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Amiga Forever

amigaforever.com

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Re: Amiga Forever

#91

Post by mikelabatt »

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.

Every demoscene production featured in Amiga Forever was included with permission from their creators. Credits are in the documentation.

Please name one demo that you think should not be in Amiga Forever, and I will check that and report here.

Re: Amiga Forever

#92

Post by vikingerik »

vintermann wrote: post #89
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…

Yes, it would be hard to name a major computer industry company which wasn't boneheaded in those days. It wasn't so much that Commodore made bigger mistakes, more that the industry turned against them and preferred to bet on other horses.

Dell pretty much did everything right, there's really not any stories of anything that went wrong for that company. Although they weren't really innovating and developing a platform, just making (really good) clones of someone else's.

Re: Amiga Forever

#93

Post by mikelabatt »

dotancohen wrote: post #22

Just yesterday I was talking with the parents of friends, who have held onto the floppy discs that their children stored the music and art they created on an Amiga. I'm not sure if these are 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs. If I can dd these discs, is there any way to recover the data in the files, and to convert to modern file formats? Might the audio already be in wav?

While PC floppy drives are mechanically the same as Amiga floppy drives, the controller that is attached to the drive is different. The controller used in PCs can't handle the stream coming from Amiga disks. The first thing I would do is preserve those disks by creating an image with a custom controller. I am positive that the music and art can be converted, but that can be done later. First, save (image) those disks!

Here are some tips to read Amiga floppy disks: https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-118

Re: Amiga Forever

#94

Post by einherjae »

KerrAvon wrote: post #81
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…

x86 would have put Amiga in the same boat as Microsoft: driver hell for eternity. Also why x86 macOS was a bad idea. What they needed to do was invest in the successor Amiga chipset to the original one. Yanking the funding for Amiga R&D in the late 1980’s is what doomed Amiga and Commodore.

x86 has very little to do with driver hell in itself.

Re: Amiga Forever

#95

Post by IronWolve »

I learned unix getting my amiga online via slurp/ppp via a local isp unix shell.

Learned how to compile/modify code. Learned tcp sockets/ports, unix apps/servers, and that's how I started my career as sys admin for isps/telecom.

Re: Amiga Forever

#96

Post by tus666 »

One thing I like about this product is it has no "compatibility" matrix. All compatibility issues are treated as bugs to be fixed.

I bought the lifetime upgrade many years ago, and was pleasantly surprised to get a link to download version 10 this week.

Re: Amiga Forever

#97

Post by snvzz »

tus666 wrote: post #96

One thing I like about this product is it has no "compatibility" matrix. All compatibility issues are treated as bugs to be fixed. I bought the lifetime upgrade many years ago, and was pleasantly surprised to get a link to download version 10 this week.

>One thing I like about this product is it has no "compatibility" matrix. All compatibility issues are treated as bugs to be fixed.

Compatibility is owed to WinUAE, the best Amiga emulator, which is also Open Source.

Credit where it is due. Not Amiga Forever, in this case.

Re: Amiga Forever

#98

Post by snvzz »

mnw21cam wrote: post #36
dotancohen wrote: post #22

Just yesterday I was talking with the parents of friends, who have held onto the floppy discs that their children stored the music and art they created on an Amiga. I'm not sure if these are 5.25 or 3.5 inch discs. If I can dd these discs, is there any way to recover the data in the files, and to convert to modern file formats? Might the audio already be in wav?

The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks because the method to encode bits is different, and the PC floppy drive does the decoding in hardware before the software gets access to it. The Amiga floppy drive just sent the raw data to the computer, and the software would pass it through some dedicated hardware to decode it, but the software had the…

>The standard PC floppy drive (if you can still find one of those) is technically incapable of reading Amiga disks because the method to encode bits is different, and the PC floppy drive does the decoding in hardware before the software gets access to it.

This is accurate except it's not the drive, but the controller (in the PC's motherboard).

Most of these drives can be directly used with an Amiga, while all of them can be used with a GreaseWeazle

>Third-party floppy drives with the raw data access such as greaseweazle can access Amiga floppy disks.

I own one of these and absolutely recommend it.

Re: Amiga Forever

#99

Post by snvzz »

AndrejXY wrote: post #88
bogantech wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Cloanto could work a little bit on their webpage's look Too expensive I bet, all the money they make selling software someone else wrote over 30 years ago is spent suing other parties who do the same thing they do

What lawsuits are you talking about? Cloanto never sued anyone, other than having been dragged in the case of lawyer-owned Hyperion Entertainment. Hyperion is owned by a litigator who is well known for his tactics in his home country of Belgium. When Hyperion failed to deliver on their 2001 Amiga OS outsourced development contract, they did what lawyers do best: they sued Amiga. They sued Amiga once in 2007, and they…

I will respect Cloanto when they respect AmigaOS by publishing the source code under an Open Source license.

It is a shame that they are still bickering about this historical piece of software, not allowing the community to move on.

Meantime, our Atari friends are enjoying emuTOS + MiNT.

Re: Amiga Forever

#100

Post by mrwh »

xd wrote: post #7
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.

Probably not; if the disks exist they're almost thirty years old, and probably best kept running in some corner of my memory. I came across an old box of 3.5 discs a few years back that I had stored away since the early 90's. I recovered them using ddrescue to create images using a cheap USB floppy drive.. was great fun.

Excellent, there's hope then!
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