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I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every time I r

I loved my Amiga 500 and, in many ways, it's still my favourite computer of all those I've owned, but I can't help feeling rather sad and wistful every time I read recent Amiga announcements and articles. There's always this sense of them trampling over my rose-tinted recollections of adolescence. I mean, is the X5000 really an Amiga? The thing with the Amiga was that in the 1980s it was streets ahead of pretty much anything else that was available at the time, albeit only for a relatively short period. It had all this super cool custom hardware and a great OS. Whereas the X5000 is a kind of mid-tier desktop computer with somewhat interesting hardware (a point in its favour Amiga-wise, especially that loopy custom chip, granted) and a whopper of a price tag. I like the idea of a widely available computer with a different hardware architecture and operating system than the currently available choices (which basically boils down to PCs... and expensive PCs that run OSX) but, as the X5000 stands, what would I do with it? Where is the software? How could I do my job with it? Where are the games (a big draw on the original Amiga)? I hate to be a downer because I really loved the Amiga but, guys, it's over. It just is. It's been over for decades. And it makes me sad but it's not going to change without, for one thing, a much better capitalised company behind it, as well as an end to all the trademark nonsense.

starsinspace 9y ago
I have similar feelings regarding today's use of the Amiga name. I still have my A500 and it's the best computer I ever had, and maybe ever will. So when I talk about Amiga, I like to specifically say "Commodore-Amiga", to emphasize that I mean the Amiga-branded hardware of that specific period only.
adrianmonk 9y ago
Where is the software? I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of the experience? When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the software is available".
- bartread 9y ago
  Haha - yeah, I think you nailed it there. Although in the early 90s I certainly never lacked the software I needed: programming, games, music making, word processing, bitmap graphics, vector drawing and CAD, ray tracing, fractals, basic utilities, even a bit of DTP. Picked up so much stuff from magazine cover disks back in the day (I was still at school so had very little cash). That being said, my requirements as a GCSE (and somewhat as an A-level) pupil are perhaps a bit different from what they are today. In some ways they were perhaps greater and more demanding, in others less.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  The software is in AmiNet. Accounting software existed even at the time. What did not exist is the business community - by going for the consumer media market, Commodore inadvertently alienated the more boring business customers.
icedchai 9y ago
I feel the same way. I grew up on the Amiga, getting an Amiga 500 when I was an early teen. I was blown away the first time I saw Shadow of the Beast. Totally amazing... I had upgraded from an Apple II. It was like night and day. A local BBSer convinced me I should get an Amiga instead of a Mac Plus, and the rest was history...
- richev 9y ago
  I remember being in awe just at the parallax scrolling on Shadow of the Beast on a friend's Amiga. At home we still just had a lowly C64.
  - bartread 9y ago
    I remember seeing that for the first time: I think it might have been in John Menzies. I'd never seen anything like it before, certainly not from a home computer. Totally blown away.
13of40 9y ago
I had an Amiga 1000 and loved it. That said, a lot of the things we thought were so epic about it were just smoke and mirrors. The iconic bouncing ball demo, for example, was made to spin by switching the color palette and made to move by changing the address of the video buffer in memory. The same elegant system couldn't have extended to something as simple as a second ball on a different trajectory or rotating at a different speed. A modern computer, on the other hand, could render 1000 of those balls and grab coffee between frames. It's hard to imagine what you could throw together on some breadboards in your garage that would be streets ahead of the mid-range PC you're lamenting.
- deaddodo 9y ago
  But that's what you have to do on limited hardware. Raycasting is awesome, but it's a hacked, inverse raytracing limited to a single ray plane. What made the bouncing ball awesome was the fact that it could be done thanks to the planar video setup and powerful blitter compared to the chunked video system IBM-compatible's were using up through SVGA.
  - bitwize 9y ago
    Most of the PC's graphical memory layouts in the 80s and early 90s were planar; the major exceptions were CGA and 320x200 MCGA 256-color. That had a lot to do with why PC gaming was so bad; without a blitter, graphics had to be drawn on-screen by shifting the bit patterns "by hand" and drawing them on the appropriate bitplanes. Many games got around this by only drawing sprites or scenery elements on 8-pixel boundaries. John Carmack figured out a way to use the EGA's scrolling registers and off-screen video memory to create smoothly scrolling backgrounds; for sprites he stored four copies of each sprite, each shifted to a different bit position so they could easily be drawn on screen. Chunky graphics is what saved the PC, gaming-wise, and made Doom and Quake possible. Drawing an image became a matter of writing the color-table index for each pixel to that pixel's memory location. Screens of considerable complexity could be drawn with the CPU alone.
- danielbarla 9y ago
  On the other hand, I distinctly remember having Imagine or Lightwave doing actual ray tracing in the background (clearly taking up 100% CPU), while I was playing some simple game in a window in the foreground. Having set the foreground window to high priority somehow seems to have worked back then, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to work on today's typical PCs. Random things seem to make ridiculously powerful machines pause for whatever reason, even without having processes take up 100% of the CPU.

starsinspace 9y ago

I have similar feelings regarding today's use of the Amiga name. I still have my A500 and it's the best computer I ever had, and maybe ever will. So when I talk about Amiga, I like to specifically say "Commodore-Amiga", to emphasize that I mean the Amiga-branded hardware of that specific period only.

adrianmonk 9y ago

Where is the software? I think you just answered your own question about whether it is really an Amiga. If you really want to relive the Amiga glory days, isn't that part of the experience? When I bought my Microbiotics 8-Up! card from the local Amiga dealer, they rang my order up on an IBM PC that they used for accounting and inventory tracking and such. I asked if they couldn't do that on an Amiga, and they enthusiastically said they were looking forward to that "just as soon as the software is available".

bartread 9y ago
Haha - yeah, I think you nailed it there. Although in the early 90s I certainly never lacked the software I needed: programming, games, music making, word processing, bitmap graphics, vector drawing and CAD, ray tracing, fractals, basic utilities, even a bit of DTP. Picked up so much stuff from magazine cover disks back in the day (I was still at school so had very little cash). That being said, my requirements as a GCSE (and somewhat as an A-level) pupil are perhaps a bit different from what they are today. In some ways they were perhaps greater and more demanding, in others less.
AstralStorm 9y ago
The software is in AmiNet. Accounting software existed even at the time. What did not exist is the business community - by going for the consumer media market, Commodore inadvertently alienated the more boring business customers.

icedchai 9y ago

I feel the same way. I grew up on the Amiga, getting an Amiga 500 when I was an early teen. I was blown away the first time I saw Shadow of the Beast. Totally amazing... I had upgraded from an Apple II. It was like night and day. A local BBSer convinced me I should get an Amiga instead of a Mac Plus, and the rest was history...

richev 9y ago
I remember being in awe just at the parallax scrolling on Shadow of the Beast on a friend's Amiga. At home we still just had a lowly C64.
- bartread 9y ago
  I remember seeing that for the first time: I think it might have been in John Menzies. I'd never seen anything like it before, certainly not from a home computer. Totally blown away.

13of40 9y ago

I had an Amiga 1000 and loved it. That said, a lot of the things we thought were so epic about it were just smoke and mirrors. The iconic bouncing ball demo, for example, was made to spin by switching the color palette and made to move by changing the address of the video buffer in memory. The same elegant system couldn't have extended to something as simple as a second ball on a different trajectory or rotating at a different speed. A modern computer, on the other hand, could render 1000 of those balls and grab coffee between frames. It's hard to imagine what you could throw together on some breadboards in your garage that would be streets ahead of the mid-range PC you're lamenting.

deaddodo 9y ago
But that's what you have to do on limited hardware. Raycasting is awesome, but it's a hacked, inverse raytracing limited to a single ray plane. What made the bouncing ball awesome was the fact that it could be done thanks to the planar video setup and powerful blitter compared to the chunked video system IBM-compatible's were using up through SVGA.
- bitwize 9y ago
  Most of the PC's graphical memory layouts in the 80s and early 90s were planar; the major exceptions were CGA and 320x200 MCGA 256-color. That had a lot to do with why PC gaming was so bad; without a blitter, graphics had to be drawn on-screen by shifting the bit patterns "by hand" and drawing them on the appropriate bitplanes. Many games got around this by only drawing sprites or scenery elements on 8-pixel boundaries. John Carmack figured out a way to use the EGA's scrolling registers and off-screen video memory to create smoothly scrolling backgrounds; for sprites he stored four copies of each sprite, each shifted to a different bit position so they could easily be drawn on screen. Chunky graphics is what saved the PC, gaming-wise, and made Doom and Quake possible. Drawing an image became a matter of writing the color-table index for each pixel to that pixel's memory location. Screens of considerable complexity could be drawn with the CPU alone.
danielbarla 9y ago
On the other hand, I distinctly remember having Imagine or Lightwave doing actual ray tracing in the background (clearly taking up 100% CPU), while I was playing some simple game in a window in the foreground. Having set the foreground window to high priority somehow seems to have worked back then, but for whatever reason doesn't seem to work on today's typical PCs. Random things seem to make ridiculously powerful machines pause for whatever reason, even without having processes take up 100% of the CPU.