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Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User
- kstenerud 6y agoOMG that Epyx joystick [1] in the screenshot brings it all flooding back! I hated that thing so much that I went to my local arcade parts dealer, bought a stick and buttons, built a plexiglass housing and circuit board (designed in Deluxe Paint) in the electronics lab at my high school, and cannibalized that horrible Epyx joystick for its plug. Best decision I ever made! SOTB and Turrican were so much nicer with an arcade stick. I even added toggle switches to reroute one of the buttons to "up" (since many games used up for jump). I still have the buttons and joystick, though the home-built plexiglas housing didn't fare so well over the years. [1] https://bytecellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/a2000.jpg https://bytecellar.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/a2000.jpg
- teddyh 6y agoYou should have bought a Wico Command Control.
- reaperducer 6y agoEveryone loved the Wico Command Control. But to me, the Wico Boss was the best joystick ever made. And those crazy alligator switches that Wico used made it impossible to break the way all the others using dome switches eventually would.
- makach 6y agoWhat a great computer. Way ahead of its time. Still usable today. It is one of the last computers produced where all the components are well documented. The legacy it left behind is huge. Whenever I meet another dev and find out that we have similar background it is like meeting an old friend. The computer might be discontinued but it's legacy will live on forever.
- zozbot234 6y agoVery good point. The combination of technical excellence and easily available, open documentation for all system components is also what I find most compelling about that whole ecosystem, and I haven't seen it replicated since. Hopefully we'll see something like that in the not-too-far future, as newer open architectures become available.
- jl6 6y agoIf ever the modern open source community needed a Manhattan project / holy grail, it is this: > “... [a computer] where all the components are well documented.” I am convinced that the appeal of the Amiga, and retro-computing in general, isn’t just nostalgia - it’s making a stand against the bottomless complexity and disempowerment of modern computing.
- LIV2 6y agoIt is this for me - since it's so heavily documented and we have the schematics it's super easy to troubleshoot these machines and to build new expansions for them today.
- AussieWog93 6y ago>I am convinced that the appeal of the Amiga, and retro-computing in general, isn’t just nostalgia - it’s making a stand against the bottomless complexity and disempowerment of modern computing. Agreed 100%. I was born well after the original home computer movement was over and the idea of doing things like graphics and audio simply by writing to registers seems nothing short of magical.
- rchase 6y agogood god, man. well said.
- Teckla 6y agoI think the Commander X16 intends to be that computer where all the components are well documented and simple enough for a single person to fully (or almost fully) understand.
- twsted 6y agoCouple of years older, but his experience matches mine completely. Even that Personal Computing issue.
- blakespot 6y agoIt took me a great deal of time to track it down - and I only have it as a PDF, never found a physical copy. Long-running saved eBay search still active for it. :-)
- larrrypage22 6y agoThis is awesome, thanks
- dep_b 6y agoI totally agree it's the biggest leap I've ever seen in a computer, I just thought everything would be getting better at the same rate for years. The only thing that happened was that PC CPU's got so fast you could have real time 3D graphics at a given point but things would not get dramatically better in terms of colors, resolution or sound anymore. Especially given the fact most people came from an Apple II, bleep bloop 4 generous colors PC or Commodore 64 the difference was just day and night. Only Mac users had a similarly large improvement but it was still black and white and silent.
- snvzz 6y ago>Only Mac users had a similarly large improvement but it was still black and white and silent. The Mac was a clever marketing feat. The hardware could be summarized as 68000 + unaccelerated 1bit framebuffer. The OS had an easy to use GUI, but didn't even multitask at first, and had only clunky cooperative multitasking later. But it sold well. Despite the ask price was insane for what it was.
- jfb 6y agoThis isn't even remotely true. Well, the insane price part is, I guess. But speaking as someone who was around then, the Mac was impossibly advanced, compared to the C64, Apple II, IBM PC.
- snvzz 6y ago>But speaking as someone who was around then, the Mac was impossibly advanced, compared to the C64, Apple II, IBM PC. In 1984? Against computers with CPUs that were trash next to 68000? Sure. But then came the Amiga in 1985.
- ricardo81 6y agoAgreed on leap I went from a Commodore 16, Amstrad CPC 464 to Amiga 500. IIRC the Amiga was about £100 more than the CPC in the later eighties. I'm sure many a user could run off a list of their top 10 games. I still play Civ to this day, about the only game I play actually.
- vardump 6y agoI still know Amiga inside out, even after all these years. I don't have to look up that $dff180 is palette entry 0. Or how to set up BPLCON and bitplane pointers, etc. in a copper list to set up a graphics mode. Alternatively you could of course do those the "proper" way through exec.library vector at address $4. But the name of the game was to extract all the performance available and that meant bypassing the operating system. :-) Programming Motorola 68000 was so simple and enjoyable. A very elegant and orthogonal design! I miss Amiga.
- cafard 6y agoImpressive.
- stinkytaco 6y agoI enjoy seeing how people use old tech. I never really understood the appeal of just "getting them working", which seems like fixing up a classic car and not driving it. But seeing how they are still in production is interesting to me. About 15 years ago I was at a cable access station and they were still using an Amiga; I think it was for captioning. HD did it in, I expect, but it was neat to see it getting use in the 21st century.
- teknopurge 6y agoI love these articles. Brings back fond memories of the BBS and public domain scene with my 1000 and 1200 baud modem. (Kickstart 1.0/Guru Meditation crew checking in)
- egypturnash 6y agoI had the third Amiga in New Orleans. And a 2000, and a 1200. I finally gave up the platform around 2000 when I got a used Mac. It was a decade ahead of everything else when it launched but Commodore sat on their asses for twenty years.