7 ms·

I have never played with an Amiga so I am curious as to what made it so fun to write code for?

Mithaldu 11y ago
I've owned one, though i never programmed for it. But from what i know, i guess the answer is that the amiga is very close to a modern computer, in that it has specialized chips for graphics and sound (Denise and Paula), making many tasks quite easy, but is still weak enough to force most programs to be relatively simple. At the same time there's also still a very active competitive amiga programming community², making things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK3Kp7-0zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK3Kp7-0zU -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOjC-nhs_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOjC-nhs_o -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok ² http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&platform%5B1%5D=Amiga+OCS%2FECS&platform%5B2%5D=Amiga+PPC%2FRTG&page=1&order=thumbup http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&...
vidarh 11y ago
Consider that when the Amiga arrived most PCs had monochrome text only displays, and the PC speaker was the only sound option. In 1987 VGA arrived and you would start to get the opportunity to compete with still images, but it still took a while before most PCs would use more than 16 colours. And prior to the Soundblaster in 1989, most PC users still had no proper sound. And until 1995 most PC users had not used a pre-emptively multitasking OS. Meanwhile the Amiga shipped with a fully multitasking windowed OS, 4096 colours, higher resolutions (until VGA), the copper (a coprocessor that let you update things like the palette and video registers synced to the raster beam, e.g. to let you combine multiple graphics modes on the same screen, or duplicate hardware sprites multiple times on the screen without involving the CPU), the blitter (letting you move areas of memory; geared towards moving graphical objects while the CPU did other things), 4 voices of sampled music, and a CPU (M68000) that was simply far more pleasant to program for. For most of us who saw Amigas in the early days, the PC looked like a dinosaur.
- incepted 11y ago
  The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else. That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture. To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Ultimately the Amiga painted itself into a corner; so finely tuned for 2D that it couldn't easily just slot in a 3D card like a PC could. I still have mine, suped up with a 68010, that'll get you 5% in a tight loop.
    - digi_owl 11y ago
      I wonder where the Amiga would have been today if those chips had been sitting on one or more easily swappable boards like what most of the PC did. What seemed to sink the Amiga in the long run was that to go from OCS to ECS or AGA you basically had to buy a new computer. But a PC could go from EGA to VGA by swapping out a card. Never mind that the first 3D accelerators were pass through concoctions, where the VGA card had a short cable run over to the 3D card that in turn was connected to the screen.
      - david-given 11y ago
        I still have an original 3DFX Voodoo Graphics somewhere that worked like that. Alas, it didn't do any sane from of OpenGL, so eventually I just used it to show X on a second monitor, via a full-screen texture. It worked astonishingly badly. Now completely unusable, of course, like its Hercules cousin, because it was an ISA bus device.
      - vidarh 11y ago
        The big box Amiga's did get graphics cards with decent specs. The problem wasn't so much that, but that the vast majority of the Amiga volume was the low end machines. You'd never get an Amiga500 or A1200 style machine with card slots usable like that at the time. The big box Amigas sold too little, and the accelerator cards were equivalently high priced niche products. That, and of course that Commodore management consistently messed up and delayed the better options. What is a real shame is that Hombre didn't get finished before he bankruptcy [1]: A 64 bit 3D graphics chipset with an integrated PA-RISC and DSP, coupled with an AGA-Amiga-on-a-chip for backwards compatibility, and with Windows NT compatibility (back in the days when NT ran on multiple hardware architectures; though at that time I probably would have thought Commodore had sold it's soul to the devil if I'd seen the Win NT compatibility). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset
bane 11y ago
Absolutely amazing book on the tech and history behind the Amiga http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/02620...
ChuckMcM 11y ago
There was a very thin layer between writing code and having something on the screen. The original 3Dfx voodoo libraries had a similar feel. You could write 30 - 40 lines of code and poof, something neat would be on the screen. In contrast at PCs picked up more interesting graphics they also got DirectX which always felt like you needed 500 lines to do what you could do on other platforms in a tenth of that, and CaMeLCaSe drove me NUTS at first. As a result I spent more time trying to figure out how to say what I wanted in DirectX3 than actually thinking about the code that actually drew interesting things into the frame buffer. The Amiga it was just a call to open screen with some allocated "chip" ram for the frame buffer and you were off to the races.
- skrebbel 11y ago
  You might want to try coding your entire demo in shaders, it gives you a similar feel, and you can skip all the gl/d3d mess. For examples, shadertoy.com is full of cool shader-only effects and entire demos.
yodsanklai 11y ago
For one thing, it was very easy. As there were no protection mechanism in the 68000, you had direct access to all the hardware in your programs (basically, your programs ran in kernel mode). So you could bypass all the OS layer and program your coprocessors and graphical cards. With enough perseverance, a little documentation (that we found here and there) and a logical mind, it was very easy to produce cool things, even for a kid.

I've owned one, though i never programmed for it. But from what i know, i guess the answer is that the amiga is very close to a modern computer, in that it has specialized chips for graphics and sound (Denise and Paula), making many tasks quite easy, but is still weak enough to force most programs to be relatively simple. At the same time there's also still a very active competitive amiga programming community², making things like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK3Kp7-0zU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK3Kp7-0zU -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOjC-nhs_o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOjC-nhs_o -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok ² http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&platform%5B1%5D=Amiga+OCS%2FECS&platform%5B2%5D=Amiga+PPC%2FRTG&page=1&order=thumbup http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&...

vidarh 11y ago

Consider that when the Amiga arrived most PCs had monochrome text only displays, and the PC speaker was the only sound option. In 1987 VGA arrived and you would start to get the opportunity to compete with still images, but it still took a while before most PCs would use more than 16 colours. And prior to the Soundblaster in 1989, most PC users still had no proper sound. And until 1995 most PC users had not used a pre-emptively multitasking OS. Meanwhile the Amiga shipped with a fully multitasking windowed OS, 4096 colours, higher resolutions (until VGA), the copper (a coprocessor that let you update things like the palette and video registers synced to the raster beam, e.g. to let you combine multiple graphics modes on the same screen, or duplicate hardware sprites multiple times on the screen without involving the CPU), the blitter (letting you move areas of memory; geared towards moving graphical objects while the CPU did other things), 4 voices of sampled music, and a CPU (M68000) that was simply far more pleasant to program for. For most of us who saw Amigas in the early days, the PC looked like a dinosaur.

incepted 11y ago
The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else. That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture. To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.
- gaius 11y ago
  Ultimately the Amiga painted itself into a corner; so finely tuned for 2D that it couldn't easily just slot in a 3D card like a PC could. I still have mine, suped up with a 68010, that'll get you 5% in a tight loop.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    I wonder where the Amiga would have been today if those chips had been sitting on one or more easily swappable boards like what most of the PC did. What seemed to sink the Amiga in the long run was that to go from OCS to ECS or AGA you basically had to buy a new computer. But a PC could go from EGA to VGA by swapping out a card. Never mind that the first 3D accelerators were pass through concoctions, where the VGA card had a short cable run over to the 3D card that in turn was connected to the screen.
    - david-given 11y ago
      I still have an original 3DFX Voodoo Graphics somewhere that worked like that. Alas, it didn't do any sane from of OpenGL, so eventually I just used it to show X on a second monitor, via a full-screen texture. It worked astonishingly badly. Now completely unusable, of course, like its Hercules cousin, because it was an ISA bus device.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      The big box Amiga's did get graphics cards with decent specs. The problem wasn't so much that, but that the vast majority of the Amiga volume was the low end machines. You'd never get an Amiga500 or A1200 style machine with card slots usable like that at the time. The big box Amigas sold too little, and the accelerator cards were equivalently high priced niche products. That, and of course that Commodore management consistently messed up and delayed the better options. What is a real shame is that Hombre didn't get finished before he bankruptcy [1]: A 64 bit 3D graphics chipset with an integrated PA-RISC and DSP, coupled with an AGA-Amiga-on-a-chip for backwards compatibility, and with Windows NT compatibility (back in the days when NT ran on multiple hardware architectures; though at that time I probably would have thought Commodore had sold it's soul to the devil if I'd seen the Win NT compatibility). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

bane 11y ago

Absolutely amazing book on the tech and history behind the Amiga http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202 http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/02620...

ChuckMcM 11y ago

There was a very thin layer between writing code and having something on the screen. The original 3Dfx voodoo libraries had a similar feel. You could write 30 - 40 lines of code and poof, something neat would be on the screen. In contrast at PCs picked up more interesting graphics they also got DirectX which always felt like you needed 500 lines to do what you could do on other platforms in a tenth of that, and CaMeLCaSe drove me NUTS at first. As a result I spent more time trying to figure out how to say what I wanted in DirectX3 than actually thinking about the code that actually drew interesting things into the frame buffer. The Amiga it was just a call to open screen with some allocated "chip" ram for the frame buffer and you were off to the races.

skrebbel 11y ago
You might want to try coding your entire demo in shaders, it gives you a similar feel, and you can skip all the gl/d3d mess. For examples, shadertoy.com is full of cool shader-only effects and entire demos.

yodsanklai 11y ago

For one thing, it was very easy. As there were no protection mechanism in the 68000, you had direct access to all the hardware in your programs (basically, your programs ran in kernel mode). So you could bypass all the OS layer and program your coprocessors and graphical cards. With enough perseverance, a little documentation (that we found here and there) and a logical mind, it was very easy to produce cool things, even for a kid.