5 ms·

Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multim

Younger (hehe) generation might not know this, but Amiga was so ahead of its time. PCs, Macs and others (yes, there were other systems) were nowhere near multimedia capabilities Amiga had. Not for the price a kid could afford or bought for (such as an SGI machine). Vivid colors, fast graphics, great sound, all in a small box. Whereas PCs and Macs seemed like several generations behind it. What made it special was that every kid (and an older person) that used it dabbled with games, programming, music, everything it had to offer. You can still see that core foundation Amiga enabled those users in their everyday work they do today. It's not something that has happened before or since. I wish kids today have something like it. On paper they do. Computers today are beyond imagination a few decades ago, but something is lacking. Maybe the abundance of power? Back then, graphics, sound, interactive storytelling and interactivity were just coming at full force to home users and they were exploring. Today it's taken for granted, so maybe not many care (everything looks the same feeling).

flukus 9y ago
I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.
- Keyframe 9y ago
  Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).
  - DerekL 9y ago
    I just looked it up. It turns out that Myst was ported to the Amiga, like I thought it would have been, but not until 1997!
  - wowtip 9y ago
    I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin. Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.
    - kiksy 9y ago
      From a gaming point of view Doom, really hit the Amiga hard. Gloom and Alien Breed 3D were poor attempts at replicating Doom (at least on standard Amiga hardware). This was at a time when it seemed every other game release was a Doom clone and where the hype was. It's a shame as the Amiga had so much more to offer.
    - Annatar 9y ago
      Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that! Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.
      - yason 9y ago
        They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket. Never. You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000. All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.
- function_seven 9y ago
  Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.
  - gmueckl 9y ago
    Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?
    - TomMarius 9y ago
      > was I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.
      - gmueckl 9y ago
        Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example. The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.
        jacobush 9y ago
        Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.
  - mhd 9y ago
    I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA). Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish. (I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)
- gaius 9y ago
  The Future Was Here: https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331311090&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262...
Annatar 9y ago
Yep. I had and own many different computers, and the only one which ever came close to my Amiga 1200 in terms of multimedia and multitasking capabilities was a (then) $60,000 USD sgi Indigo2 R10000, which was my main workstation for a while. Meanwhile, my (then) brand new Amiga 1200 cost 800,- DM (Deutschmarks for non-Europeans), which is 400,- €. Later on, I had 34 MB of RAM in it - one couldn’t run out of memory no matter what one did. And the system boots in under three seconds.
- rasur 9y ago
  Been there, done that at a UK Telco Research Lab back in the mid 90's. Now those _were_ the good old days. I miss my Amigas (I had 4 over the years, now all gone. sob).
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    I've collected all the Amigas I've lusted after as a child now I have more means to afford them. A500, A500+, A600 and A1200 to date. Looking for other to add to the collection. Would love to get a 2000.
- kiksy 9y ago
  34MB! One feature I loved in Workbench was the RAM disk. I only had 2MB so was a little limited what I could do with it, but "installing" simple apps or games into RAM they were so quick!

flukus 9y ago

I remember the profound disappointment when I finally "upgraded" to a PC (early Pentium or 686 from memory) from my Amiga 500, the graphics and sound were worse than the now decade old machine that it replaced and ease of use had taken I giant step backward. It was then that I realized just how ahead of it's time the Amiga was. Getting the same out of the PC would have required more expensive expansion cards but whther your software would work with them was a crapshoot (no openGL equivalent at the time). Eventually I accepted the new machine because it did have some things our Amiga lacked (and were impossible to purchase by then), like a hard drive, a CDROM, and 8MB of RAM which opened up some new capabilities but it was never the huge upgrade I'd imagined.

Keyframe 9y ago
Those later PCs, like 486 and up had what Amiga didn't. Interactive CD-based games (like Myst, Rebel Assault, etc) and could run faster (Doom anyone?). Still lacked "something", even though some of the software started to migrate over with the advent of Windows NT (Lightwave for example). Earlier machines, 386s and Quadras were a joke compared to Amigas (1200 and 4000).
- DerekL 9y ago
  I just looked it up. It turns out that Myst was ported to the Amiga, like I thought it would have been, but not until 1997!
- wowtip 9y ago
  I still think Wolfenstein 3D / Doom was what put the final nail in Amiga's coffin. Not so much Amiga wasn't as fast as PC at the time, but rather something with the bitplane based graphics system not being suited for the psuedo 3D kind of games.
  - kiksy 9y ago
    From a gaming point of view Doom, really hit the Amiga hard. Gloom and Alien Breed 3D were poor attempts at replicating Doom (at least on standard Amiga hardware). This was at a time when it seemed every other game release was a Doom clone and where the hype was. It's a shame as the Amiga had so much more to offer.
  - Annatar 9y ago
    Amiga uses the planar system to display graphics, which gives her natural blending capabilities but is computationally expensive for 3D texture mapping because each pixel has to be manipulated up to eight times on every bitplane and then OR’ed with the rest of the bits up to eight times again, as opposed to the VGA where one pixel is one byte, which is easy to manipulate. However, doing alpha blending on a VGA was a nightmare - good luck with that! Amiga coders compensated for this with very fast, insanely optimized assembler code. They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket.
    - yason 9y ago
      They were so good that a multiple times computationally slower Motorola processor would run a Doom clone at the speed comparable to a contemporary PC bucket. Never. You just could not get a VGA-on-i486 level rendering performance out of 256-color AGA fullscreen, even with Motorola 68040 on the Amiga 4000. All the fast 3D demos and games I saw were partial-screen, with 2x2 pixels, or both. Good-looking ones were slow. An example with at least some commercial success was Alien Breed 3D. Check the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksQG8vnvlpg Because it was so hard to do per-pixel rendering on Amiga all these 3D graphics demos and games on Amiga basically concentrated on delivering the graphics only, with shallow content and amateur-grade playability. Doom had a lot else going on despite the smooth graphics, and that actually made Doom a good game.
function_seven 9y ago
Same story here. I had an Amiga 1000 from 1985 all the way through 1995. Never with a hard drive or modem either. I was still disappointed by the 486DX2 (4MB!) that replaced it. It was better in every "bullet point" way, but lacking in a hard-to-describe way.
- gmueckl 9y ago
  Could it be that your "hard to describe way" was simply the difference between an exceptionally well designed system (hardware and software) and a stack of weird kludges that was the PC at that time?
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    > was I actually think it's way worse now. It's only tolerable because computers are faster.
    - gmueckl 9y ago
      Is it really that much worse? If PC hardware wouldn't require obscure old hardware features for software compatibility, the resulting architecture based on the newer stuff only (e.g. PCI) is way better. The cores of the available operating systems also improved a lot over the years. Windows now has a rather decent kernel at its core, for example. The whole package is far from perfect, but it is better than what would have resulted from continued engineering at the level that we had in the 80s and 90s.
      - jacobush 9y ago
        Not sure... maybe I’m old, but the current system is alive, but not in a beautiful way. Instead, it’s like metastasis of cancer, runtime after runtime of duplicated and slightly different versions of Nodejs, .Net and who knows what, and not in perfect harmony. It’s chaotic.
- mhd 9y ago
  I remember my Amiga buddies having the same issues (I myself went from a C64 to a 286 earlier than they). Main complaints were the OS (i.e. Windows, whether it's 3.11 or 95), and a general lack of smoothness (again, OS and multi-tasking, smooth scrolling not being something you get for free with a VGA). Also, the PC, assuming VGA and at least SoundBlaster, had fewer limitations there, compared to e.g. the Amiga's half-bright modes. It was way easier to get something more garish. (I felt a bit like that regarding the C64's SID sounds to the more generic-feeling samples of the Amiga. Especially when the latter veered towards Eurodance)
gaius 9y ago
The Future Was Here: https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262017202/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331311090&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/0262...

Annatar 9y ago

Yep. I had and own many different computers, and the only one which ever came close to my Amiga 1200 in terms of multimedia and multitasking capabilities was a (then) $60,000 USD sgi Indigo2 R10000, which was my main workstation for a while. Meanwhile, my (then) brand new Amiga 1200 cost 800,- DM (Deutschmarks for non-Europeans), which is 400,- €. Later on, I had 34 MB of RAM in it - one couldn’t run out of memory no matter what one did. And the system boots in under three seconds.

rasur 9y ago
Been there, done that at a UK Telco Research Lab back in the mid 90's. Now those _were_ the good old days. I miss my Amigas (I had 4 over the years, now all gone. sob).
- alex_hitchins 9y ago
  I've collected all the Amigas I've lusted after as a child now I have more means to afford them. A500, A500+, A600 and A1200 to date. Looking for other to add to the collection. Would love to get a 2000.
kiksy 9y ago
34MB! One feature I loved in Workbench was the RAM disk. I only had 2MB so was a little limited what I could do with it, but "installing" simple apps or games into RAM they were so quick!