5 ms·

Similarly, I'm really enjoying my subscription to Freeze64: https://freeze64.com/ https://freeze64.com/

by drcode 6y ago

tialaramex 6y ago
The nice thing about 64-fandom is that the fans are aware that it's history. So you can't sell them a $5000 "new" C64 that promises to have a four core 64-bit ARM CPU because that's not what they're here for - they specifically like the Commodore 64 which they're aware is not a modern computer. Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.
- drcode 6y ago
  I think part of it is that there is clearly a much larger theoretical space of possibilities in hardware & OS software than what we currently see with the Linux/Microsoft/Apple triopoly. There really were some compelling ideas in old systems, such as AmigaOS, BeOS, LispMachineOS, Altos, etc etc that still need to be fully realized at some point in the future. Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.
  - firecall 6y ago
    I'll never forget the excitement as a kid of walking into an electronics store in the UK in the mid 80s! So much choice and an amazing array of machines! It seemed like endless possibilities! It was fun and interesting. It's perhaps similar to the early days of the web design when we had experimentation with Flash interfaces and all sorts of crazy browser experiences! Now it's all the same same on the web :-/ I love macOS - but it's so boring these days. It's kinda joyless. Feature rich, but just no fun any more. I've been a life long Apple users, and used to work there in the late 90s. I tolerate and use Windows for gaming and to mix it up a bit. But right now I've been using and enjoying Ubuntu on older Intel hardware with cobbled together updates. And it's more fun. I like things to be fun :-) That is part of the point of the Amiga and retro computing - it's actually fun! FWIW we were an Atari ST household! :-D
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    I would love to see this, but unfortunately cost of entry is too high for it to happen. There would have to be a truly overwhelming USP/benefit, and that's unlikely with current technology. Most of the 8/16-bit interest is really just personal nostalgia. I don't know how many people really care passionately about recreating AmigaOS in 2020, but I would be surprised if it's more than four figures, most likely with a median age over 40.
  - squarefoot 6y ago
    > Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this. AROS showed that it can be done. The OS is aimed at AmigaOS compatibility and it's really fast and small. Porting it to smaller ARM single board computers would give unprecedented performance on small hardware where a full fledged Linux could not run at proper speed. http://www.aros.org/ http://www.aros.org/ Related links worth a look: http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php http://icarosdesktop.org/ http://icarosdesktop.org/
- sundvor 6y ago
  "I want to upgrade from my simple eight bits, but will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?" Therein lies the question; for me, the past is in the past.
- rasz 6y ago
  Its especially weird/funny when you consider 99% of existing Amiga software was specifically hardcoded to floppy only A500 with 1MB ram, and doesnt benefit from any acceleration. It was also one of the reasons for its downfall.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    I replaced the clock crystal in my A3000 with a faster one and that definitely benefited my Amiga software.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    That might be true for games. It's absolutely not true for most system-friendly software.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Part of the issue is that there are still things many people - even those of us who haven't used an Amiga in years - miss from AmigaOS. The tight integration of everything via AREXX, for example (though AREXX is an awful language, the expectation of a tightly integrated AREXX port in applications was important). The device model that led to a plethora of device drivers and filesystem drivers doing interesting things (e.g. FrexxEd, an editor co-written by Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame, exposes a filesystem where you can find all open files, so anything that can read or write a file can manipulate the editor buffer directly). Datatypes. Widespread "standard" libraries for pluggable compression. A culture of tightly controlled APIs to the point that e.g. the default file requester etc. was easily replaced across huge swathes of applications just by dropping in new libraries. It's especially notable that none of it is down to technical limitations of modern OS's, but cultural differences. You could do the above trivially in Linux (or any other OS) if you wanted to, for example, but it only matters if it gets wide traction. Amiga had a culture of quickly coalescing around standards that promoted reusability and modularity and sticking to them. And that is also part of the reason why some of the hardcore fans stick to it: Their 30+ year old applications can open modern file types if someone writes a datatype for it (and they often do). Their 30+ year old apps can transparently compress and decompress new formats if someone writes a suitable library for it, and so on. I'm not going back to AmigaOS, but I do still wish we'd see a resurrection of that culture, because in the ~25 years since I used AmigaOS as my primary OS, while we've surpassed it in a whole lot of areas, there are still areas where it was more pleasant to use an Amiga.
  - richardjdare 6y ago
    Yes, I think the high degree of integration, the ease with which you could work with the full capability of the hardware, and the lack of cruft made the Amiga a highly immersive environment for the enthusiast user. I think about this a lot. I really want to know what the "Amiga feeling" was made of so I can reproduce or encourage it today. It was one of the main things I enjoyed about computers in the first place. I also think its important for Amiga people to pass these notions along somehow, in a similar way to people who've worked with Symbolics Lisp machines or other innovative technologies whose core ideas were not taken up by a mainstream that surpassed them for reasons unrelated to the actual value of those technologies.
- bartread 6y ago
  > Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans. I think there's more to it than that. I want to push beyond the base A500 (in fact I don't even own one of those at present, even though that was the machine I had back in the day), preferring instead the A1200, but don't in any way see Amiga or AmigaOS as "the future". This manifests as a (very slow) mission to build what would have been my ultimate Amiga circa 1992. So, yes, I'm adding a 68030 accelerator board with a 68882 FPU, and I'm taking advantage of modern conveniences like Flash storage, but fundamentally I'm not departing too much. I may add an FPGA accelerator at some point but, with that, it feels like you can quickly stray into "Is it even an Amiga any more?" territory.
- rob74 6y ago
  Well... the C64 was an 8-bit computer, so the platform was simply too limited for doing anything other than games, simple BASIC programming etc. Of course there were some "serious" apps available too that pushed the limits of the platform, but I guess once more performant computers (like the IBM PC/clones, the Apple Mac, the Amiga or the Atari ST) became affordable, people wouldn't think twice about using a C64 for those tasks anymore. The Amiga however was already from the next generation, with a "real" OS and really suitable for business, productivity, multimedia and other "serious" applications. Two of those 16-bit machines (or rather their evolved descendants) are still with us today - the PC and the Mac. So you can't blame people for phantasizing about what could have become of the Amiga platform if Commodore had managed it better. But today of course thinking that the platform could be revived and updated to become mainstream again is a pretty fringe view...

Similarly, I'm really enjoying my subscription to Freeze64: https://freeze64.com/ https://freeze64.com/

by drcode 6y ago

Similarly, I'm really enjoying my subscription to Freeze64: https://freeze64.com/ https://freeze64.com/

The nice thing about 64-fandom is that the fans are aware that it's history. So you can't sell them a $5000 "new" C64 that promises to have a four core 64-bit ARM CPU because that's not what they're here for - they specifically like the Commodore 64 which they're aware is not a modern computer. Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans.

drcode 6y ago
I think part of it is that there is clearly a much larger theoretical space of possibilities in hardware & OS software than what we currently see with the Linux/Microsoft/Apple triopoly. There really were some compelling ideas in old systems, such as AmigaOS, BeOS, LispMachineOS, Altos, etc etc that still need to be fully realized at some point in the future. Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this.
- firecall 6y ago
  I'll never forget the excitement as a kid of walking into an electronics store in the UK in the mid 80s! So much choice and an amazing array of machines! It seemed like endless possibilities! It was fun and interesting. It's perhaps similar to the early days of the web design when we had experimentation with Flash interfaces and all sorts of crazy browser experiences! Now it's all the same same on the web :-/ I love macOS - but it's so boring these days. It's kinda joyless. Feature rich, but just no fun any more. I've been a life long Apple users, and used to work there in the late 90s. I tolerate and use Windows for gaming and to mix it up a bit. But right now I've been using and enjoying Ubuntu on older Intel hardware with cobbled together updates. And it's more fun. I like things to be fun :-) That is part of the point of the Amiga and retro computing - it's actually fun! FWIW we were an Atari ST household! :-D
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  I would love to see this, but unfortunately cost of entry is too high for it to happen. There would have to be a truly overwhelming USP/benefit, and that's unlikely with current technology. Most of the 8/16-bit interest is really just personal nostalgia. I don't know how many people really care passionately about recreating AmigaOS in 2020, but I would be surprised if it's more than four figures, most likely with a median age over 40.
- squarefoot 6y ago
  > Some day, a startup might finally figure out a new hardware/software combination that really proves this. AROS showed that it can be done. The OS is aimed at AmigaOS compatibility and it's really fast and small. Porting it to smaller ARM single board computers would give unprecedented performance on small hardware where a full fledged Linux could not run at proper speed. http://www.aros.org/ http://www.aros.org/ Related links worth a look: http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php http://archives.aros-exec.org/index.php http://icarosdesktop.org/ http://icarosdesktop.org/
sundvor 6y ago
"I want to upgrade from my simple eight bits, but will you still love me when I'm sixty-four?" Therein lies the question; for me, the past is in the past.
rasz 6y ago
Its especially weird/funny when you consider 99% of existing Amiga software was specifically hardcoded to floppy only A500 with 1MB ram, and doesnt benefit from any acceleration. It was also one of the reasons for its downfall.
- Fjolsvith 6y ago
  I replaced the clock crystal in my A3000 with a faster one and that definitely benefited my Amiga software.
- vidarh 6y ago
  That might be true for games. It's absolutely not true for most system-friendly software.
vidarh 6y ago
Part of the issue is that there are still things many people - even those of us who haven't used an Amiga in years - miss from AmigaOS. The tight integration of everything via AREXX, for example (though AREXX is an awful language, the expectation of a tightly integrated AREXX port in applications was important). The device model that led to a plethora of device drivers and filesystem drivers doing interesting things (e.g. FrexxEd, an editor co-written by Daniel Stenberg of Curl fame, exposes a filesystem where you can find all open files, so anything that can read or write a file can manipulate the editor buffer directly). Datatypes. Widespread "standard" libraries for pluggable compression. A culture of tightly controlled APIs to the point that e.g. the default file requester etc. was easily replaced across huge swathes of applications just by dropping in new libraries. It's especially notable that none of it is down to technical limitations of modern OS's, but cultural differences. You could do the above trivially in Linux (or any other OS) if you wanted to, for example, but it only matters if it gets wide traction. Amiga had a culture of quickly coalescing around standards that promoted reusability and modularity and sticking to them. And that is also part of the reason why some of the hardcore fans stick to it: Their 30+ year old applications can open modern file types if someone writes a datatype for it (and they often do). Their 30+ year old apps can transparently compress and decompress new formats if someone writes a suitable library for it, and so on. I'm not going back to AmigaOS, but I do still wish we'd see a resurrection of that culture, because in the ~25 years since I used AmigaOS as my primary OS, while we've surpassed it in a whole lot of areas, there are still areas where it was more pleasant to use an Amiga.
- richardjdare 6y ago
  Yes, I think the high degree of integration, the ease with which you could work with the full capability of the hardware, and the lack of cruft made the Amiga a highly immersive environment for the enthusiast user. I think about this a lot. I really want to know what the "Amiga feeling" was made of so I can reproduce or encourage it today. It was one of the main things I enjoyed about computers in the first place. I also think its important for Amiga people to pass these notions along somehow, in a similar way to people who've worked with Symbolics Lisp machines or other innovative technologies whose core ideas were not taken up by a mainstream that surpassed them for reasons unrelated to the actual value of those technologies.
bartread 6y ago
> Amiga is still wrestling with that. There are "classic" fans who thought the 1980s A500 was cool, but unfortunately there are still a loud contingent who are sure that somehow Amiga is the future, and this makes them easy victims for a long parade of hucksters and charlatans. I think there's more to it than that. I want to push beyond the base A500 (in fact I don't even own one of those at present, even though that was the machine I had back in the day), preferring instead the A1200, but don't in any way see Amiga or AmigaOS as "the future". This manifests as a (very slow) mission to build what would have been my ultimate Amiga circa 1992. So, yes, I'm adding a 68030 accelerator board with a 68882 FPU, and I'm taking advantage of modern conveniences like Flash storage, but fundamentally I'm not departing too much. I may add an FPGA accelerator at some point but, with that, it feels like you can quickly stray into "Is it even an Amiga any more?" territory.
rob74 6y ago
Well... the C64 was an 8-bit computer, so the platform was simply too limited for doing anything other than games, simple BASIC programming etc. Of course there were some "serious" apps available too that pushed the limits of the platform, but I guess once more performant computers (like the IBM PC/clones, the Apple Mac, the Amiga or the Atari ST) became affordable, people wouldn't think twice about using a C64 for those tasks anymore. The Amiga however was already from the next generation, with a "real" OS and really suitable for business, productivity, multimedia and other "serious" applications. Two of those 16-bit machines (or rather their evolved descendants) are still with us today - the PC and the Mac. So you can't blame people for phantasizing about what could have become of the Amiga platform if Commodore had managed it better. But today of course thinking that the platform could be revived and updated to become mainstream again is a pretty fringe view...