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The Amiga 1000, Still Receiving New Peripherals 35 Years Later
- immigrantsheep 6y agoThe Amiga is still for me the best computer I ever had and I'm glad there are people still doing this :)
- bantunes 6y agoStill waiting for the definitive, affordable FPGA device that can mimic an Amiga 1200 with RTG graphics.
- mnoga23 6y agohow about vampire v4: http://www.apollo-core.com/v4.html http://www.apollo-core.com/v4.html
- dan1234 6y ago€589 though! That's a very expensive toy.
- einr 6y agoIt's downright affordable compared to what it's mimicking. A decked-out A1200 setup with 060 accelerator and RTG graphics etc is easily $2000 or more, and that would still be a lot slower and less capable than the Vampire. The Vampire is made for a niche of a niche and it's priced accordingly, because building small-run hardware is expensive. If you don't care for the last 1% of accuracy that an FPGA affords compared to an emulator, then you are not the target market, and a Raspberry Pi 4 will make a fine virtual Amiga using something like Amibian.
- jug 6y agoThe MiSTer can do this. It can do MC68020 and will meet and surpass A1200 performance with AGA, and RTG graphics support is in fact there as perhaps the most recent major update. Yes, in 16 bit color and all with very good performance. And it's much, much cheaper (and quicker to get!) than a standalone Vampire. Like a third of the price or something for a pretty complete setup. https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=414&start=25 https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=414&start=25 This should be the install instructions once you have the MiSTer. (the code is closely related to the FPGAArcade RTG support so apparently the procedure is pretty interchangeable) https://www.fpgaarcade.com/kb/how-to-setup-the-rtg-picasso96-drivers/ https://www.fpgaarcade.com/kb/how-to-setup-the-rtg-picasso96...
- rasz 6y agowhy when you can emulate Amiga 1200 with 060 running at ~1GHz?
- cbmuser 6y agoFor anyone interested in open source around the Amiga and the Motorola 68000 architecture, have a look at our m68k community website: > http://m68k.info http://m68k.info The M68k backend for LLVM is still work in progress, but will hopefully get merged in the upcoming months, see: > https://reviews.llvm.org/ https://reviews.llvm.org/ (search for "M68k")
- mattowen_uk 6y agoAs an Amiga 1000 owner, I watched this video with interest... unfortunately the add-on shown costs over $200. Way too expensive for me :( I applaud the developers efforts, but I personally would have preferred an open-source design, using through-hole components, that anyone could build. The time-line of Amiga add-ons over the past 35 years is littered with the corpses of closed hardware that you can no longer buy, or are now so rare that their value pushes them out of most peoples reach.
- teddyh 6y agoIt seems to be endemic with the Amiga culture to have everything be commercial. Open source never got much of a foothold there.
- einr 6y agoTo an extent you are right, lots of Amiga software and hardware has traditionally been commercial and proprietary in a (maybe misguided) effort to save the platform. That said, there is a lot of open source hardware too nowadays, here's a very helpful list: https://github.com/grovdata/Amiga_Sources https://github.com/grovdata/Amiga_Sources
- teddyh 6y agoFrom what I saw, this attutude was there from the very beginning, from the top down. (This has been observed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888726)
- einr 6y agoProbably true. As an aside, coming from a Linux/Windows background and having partially moved to Mac recently, I observe the same of the Mac community. For instance, when Big Sur launched, there was a tiny little utility that did nothing but change the color of the menu bar, and they wanted something like five dollars for it. Lots of stuff like this on Mac, I find. Popular FTP clients and text editors and disk utilities and stuff like that, they all cost money. The equivalents on Windows are more often than not free-as-in-beer. Just an observation. But yeah, surely AmigaOS would benefit from being open source and free software in 2021, like EmuTOS or RISC OS Open. Unfortunately the ownership of the core parts of the OS has fallen into less than optimal hands (Cloanto...) and/or is still encumbered by patents or rights issues. So it goes. There is AROS though of course.
- submeta 6y agoI have very fond memories of my Amiga 2000. There were Atari guys in my hood and Amiga guys, and I was an Amiga guy apperently. It was a hell of a computer. I'd go to a book store, browse through those fat AMIGA ROM Kernel books (could not afford all), go home, hack assembly code, hack C code, compile it with a copy of the Aztec C compiler, all night, go to school sleepless, and talk about graphics, sprites and whatnot with my friends. This was a hell of a time.
- Torwald 6y agobecause the Atari OS was named TOS, some Amiga guys called the Atari guys "tossers"
- lakkal 6y agoIn my case, I loved my Atari 800 and 800XL, but when the Amiga came out and someone brought theirs in to the university lab where I was working, I knew I had to have one. I finally got a 500 a couple of years later and still have it.
- officeplant 6y agoGrowing up in the 90s DOS/Win9x era I feel like I missed out on a crucial part of computing by only using my Dad's C64 for playing games. That same level of computing knowledge necessity just wasn't there for me outside of learning DOS commands. I'm glad I can navigate a CLI easily all these years later, but still feel like I missed out by not having the same drive to learn computers on a more bare metal level.
- submeta 6y agoEventually I subscribed to the point of view that DOS/Win was the way to go. (Amiga was going nowhere with a management that could not draft a vision for the company that was bright enough.) How wrong I was! - A Mac was way to expensive here in Germany, so that was not an option. So I bought a boring PC, learning Wordperfect and whatnot. But the Amiga taught me what 68000er assembly is, what a hex editor is, and all of this (the Amiga Workbench, the games, the graphics) was so much more fun and beautiful then a dry DOS box.
- pjmlp 6y agoThe beauty of 16 bit platforms, a full stack experience.
- fogihujy 6y agoThe 68k are 32-bit, though. The 68000 just happen to have a few 16- and 24-bit parts (yeah, I know, but it's not a proper Amiga thread without bickering about tiny details).
- flohofwoe 6y agoWell, actually... ;) The 68k only has a 16-bit ALU, so at the core it's a 16-bit CPU despite the 32-bits wide registers.
- Narishma 6y agoDoes that mean it was faster at dealing with 16-bit values even if it had 32-bit registers?
- flohofwoe 6y agoHmm, looking at cycle count tables it looks like 8- and 16-bit operations are indeed faster than 32-bit operations (e.g. add.w is faster than add.l).
- bcrl 6y agoDeterministic CPUs seem like such a distant part of the past. I loved the days when Motorola and Intel would ship you a full set of detailed manuals about everything from CPUs to MMUs, UARTs and whatever other chips they made. I still have my Motorola manuals sitting on the shelf. Was such a nice instruction set to learn on after the 6502.
- fulafel 6y agoDepending on what "is" is... It's a 32 bit architecture, what do you care if it is implemented with 4 or 16 bit microarchitecture. Some minicomputers were built from bitslice (1-bit) parts :)
- trestenhortz 6y agoI vaguely recollected having an Amiga 1200 in a box in the shed and one day I went and looked and found two Amiga 1000s plus an a Amiga 1200 in the box.
- rzzzt 6y agoThey multiply!
- bullen 6y agoThe C64 is rather more impressive in this domain of new hardware: cases, motherboards, SIDs, Ethernet and (S)NES Classic/Mini adapters, keycaps; but most of all new software, by the truck load: http://csdb.dk http://csdb.dk The only thing that requires 16-bit is 3D and not much is happening in the Amiga retro scene on that front.
- flohofwoe 6y agoLooking at the 2020 Amiga and C64 releases on pouet.net I'd say both systems are very much alive.
- jailbird_bd 6y agoYep, based on Pouet's statistics, the C64 scene has overtaken even the PC (Windows) scene last year [1]. Huge activity there, even compared to the "golden years" of the scene [2] [1] https://twitter.com/pouetdotnet/status/1345056422757871616 https://twitter.com/pouetdotnet/status/1345056422757871616 [2] http://www.xentax.com/?p=1325&fbclid=IwAR1XAEbZwK6lL4g-_RkyNMX9OHk72_KZaVAnQqsbst1KKg5g-CR4VHc9YDk http://www.xentax.com/?p=1325&fbclid=IwAR1XAEbZwK6lL4g-_RkyN...
- KingOfCoders 6y agoHad a 500 and a 4000/40 but always found the 1000 the most beautiful.
- stuff4ben 6y agoNah, I felt the Amiga 3000 was the most beautiful, followed closely by the 1000. The 2000 and 4000 were just PC desktop looking derivatives. An Amiga 3000 with a Video Toaster (that I'd never have been able to use) was my dream machine back in the day...
- KingOfCoders 6y agoFor me the 3000 looked too much like an IBM PS2. The 1000 looked simple and clean.
- 29athrowaway 6y agoThat is what happens when you build a timeless experience that people enjoy.
- cesaref 6y agoI have very fond memories of the A1000. The one I used was a US import to the UK, so it had a special transformer and monitor to run on foreign screen refresh rates and voltage. That machine with Lattice C was my introduction to modern programming techniques, having been a 6502 and Z80 programmer before. I ended up with an A500, and upgraded it with a 16Mhz processor by putting some TTL logic together to build a suitable clock from the mainbaords 8Mhz. This is obviously in pre-internet days, I have absolutely no memory of how I learnt about that hack, or even where I sourced a suitable processor. Happy days.
- DanielBMarkham 6y agoI had two Amiga 1000s. It's one of several early computers I regret giving away. I guess Amiga enthusiasts are an unusual bunch. If you note in the comments to this post, it devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages on FPGAs.
- ChrisRR 6y agoThat's because it's hackaday. A site for electronics and embedded engineers/hobbyists/tinkerers It's not so much an amiga thing as a hackaday thing
- stuff4ben 6y agoI feel ya! I threw away not one, but two!!! Amiga 500's I had when I moved houses 10 years ago. One wasn't working because I had done the Fat Agnes chip hack where you cut a trace on the MB to enable 1MB of "chip RAM". It worked sporadically and then just stopped one day. The other worked, but my 1084s didn't, so I couldn't use it if I wanted to. Sigh, I wish I hadn't gotten rid of mine...
- rasz 6y ago>devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages That would be me spotting a problem in the design, and Im sure you meant elevates ;-)
- yitchelle 6y agoTalking about retro technology, I am shamelessly promoting my twitter handle for retro tech adverts. https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.
- ChrisRR 6y agoI love the Amiga/C64/ZX Spectrum/Atari ST community. The spirit of still tinkering with your hardware as you did in the 80s/90s in these machines and something that I think large groups of people outside of the UK missed out on How many people learnt to solder on a £99 computer that you could then use. How many people learnt basic by typing in lines from a magazine and then fiddling about with the code to give them extra lives in the game? It really was a golden age in the UK, and I wish more countries got to experience that
- diego_moita 6y agoDoes anyone know a site that lists old/classic technology that still gathers fans? Things like the Amiga, Sun's workstations, Casio's B640 digital watches, Pebble, etc. Sort like the Mustangs and Corvettes of tech...