14 ms·

Personal Computing on an Amiga in 2021

214 points by shortformblog 5y ago

bovermyer 5y ago
Wait, so... Amiga OS 3.2 is newer than 3.9?
- Perstone 5y ago
  Yes. Both are updates to Amiga OS 3.1. Amiga 3.5 and 3.9 were created by a German company back in 1999/2000 and require a 68020 or better processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS#AmigaOS_3.5,_3.9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS#AmigaOS_3.5,_3.9 3.1.4 and 3.2 were created by Hyperion Entertainment. 3.1.4 and 3.2 by the looks of it support all the 68000 series processors and these as stated in the article are more recent.
- herio 5y ago
  Yup. They also were not developed by the same company. 3.5 and 3.9 were developed by Haage & Partner, 3.1.4 and 3.2 were developed by Hyperion Entertainment. There's even an AmigaOS 4.0 from Hyperion which is PowerPC only. For extra bonus points, there's MorphOS which is a heavily AmigaOS influenced OS. PowerPC only, runs on some of the older PPC Macs. And there's also the open source AROS reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 (with a lot of extras). (I'm sure I got a lot of details wrong, been years since I last did Amiga stuff.)
myth_drannon 5y ago
There is a coffeetable style book on Amiga demoscene https://www.editions64k.fr/index.php/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years-vol-1/ https://www.editions64k.fr/index.php/product/demoscene-the-a... Volume 2 is on IndieGOGO
herjazz 5y ago
Just have to say I loved my Amigas back in the day. First an A500 and then a dual floppy 1500. Never quite recaptured that feeling with Linux.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  If you ever have an opportunity play around with an SGI Irix box, an Indy or an Indigo.
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    I've got such opportunity. Now, every time somebody jokes about the "it's a UNIX system. I know that!" I have to explain that that file manager actually exists but still looks like sci-fi for mere mortals even today.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Irix was the most clean and integrated Unix for the desktop that I've ever used, even Sun didn't come close with their offerings.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        The most shocking thing on the Suns back then compared to the SGIs was the mouse movement. While the SGIs had a smooth movement, Suns mouse ended up jumping dozens of pixels between refreshes. Suns were not really designed for desktop use - they more or less aimed for the generic case. SGIs, however, were built to be experienced.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        marcodiego 5y ago
        I remember the first time I used a Sun Workstation. From a PC background, I was impressed by the fact that the keyboard housed the beeper, the keyboard was a serial device and the bios equivalent had a built-in command line. It is a shame that such a small set of features jumped from workstations to the PC.
        5y ago
eludwig 5y ago
A lot of computer history is filled with machines that were obviously a link in a chain between earlier times and later times. They felt "transitional", in a sense. To me, both the Amiga & the original Mac had a "ding an sich", a such-ness that made them feel timeless. They stand alone as objects (art?) that can still be enjoyed today in and of themselves, no excuses needed. There are probably a bunch of other machine candidates that feel this way to someone out there!
- marban 5y ago
  Still using my heavily upgraded G4 Cube on a regular basis. The transitional part your're referring to is the Dot-Com times this Mac reminds me of — In addition to simply being a joy to look at.
- munificent 5y ago
  > To me, both the Amiga & the original Mac had a "ding an sich", a such-ness that made them feel timeless. I know the exact sensation you describe here. But I can never decide whether it's a property of the thing itself, or where I was in my life when I stumbled onto it. My hunch is that it's mostly the latter: artifacts feel seminal when they hit as a formative time when we first gained a new capability. I'll always have a fondness for the Apple IIe and the early Macintosh because those were what I had when I first started using computers to create. I'll always love late 90s electronica because that's when I fully discovered my love of music. My Lodge Dutch oven will hold a special place in my heart because I got it right when I was really learning how to cook.
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    We're probably of very similar age, as I feel much the same. That being said, I do think there is something special about that era of machines, even outside of our right-place/right-time nostalgia for them. I cut my early computing teeth first on a Timex 1000, later on a Commodore 128, and finally an Amiga. The Timex was... ok. It was fun enough to pfaff about with, but so limited that it didn't really capture my attention in a special way. The Commodore? Amazing. It is responsible for my entire technical career trajectory. I loved exploring its edges. It was a powerful-enough system that Real Things™ could be done, yet still simple enough that the entire machine could live in your head, so to speak. The Amiga? It was amazing, but it was almost too much. I couldn't hold the whole machine in my mind any more, and had to rely of greater level of abstractions to get things done. What was doable was incredible, but there was an undeniable sense of loss, too. At least for me.
marcodiego 5y ago
I don't want to bash amiga, actually I really envy the history and capabilities of that system. Nevertheless, posts like this are almost always seen through a bit of rose tinted glasses. The part about DataTypes: "Datatypes describe a file format and tell the OS how to handle it. Any datatype-aware program can use any file format as long as a relevant datatype is present." Doesn't looks that different from how codecs are used in modern OS's. AFAIK, as soon as ffmpeg or gstreamer learns new formats or how to use hardware codecs, so does every program using them without the need of even recompiling. Of course, doing that 30 years ago is another thing. And: "RAD: is a fixed-size bootable RAM disk that survives soft reboots. Equivalents exist for most modern Operating Systems. They’re worth trying out. You don’t really know how useful they are till you lose them." Maybe I can change my mind if I use them, but I really don't feel the need. On my notebook, I simply close the lid and when I open it, it is mostly in the same state I left; some system I used are stable enough to have months of uptime; using /tmp/ seems enough for me. I once had I power failure and recovering whatever was on /tmp/required booting from a keychain but it was easy to do and a very rare occurrence. The "RAD:" may be interesting on not specially stable, non high uptime, /tmp/-lacking systems but I can't see how they can be relevant on modern OS's.
- vidarh 5y ago
  There is a fundamental difference in that you can drop in a new datatype without any program like ffmpeg or gstreamer having to learn new formats. More importantly, how many applications actually use these as their primary means of accessing file types? Chrome doesn't learn a new image type if I drop in a file. LibreOffice doesn't. Certainly not from the same one. Gimp doesn't. There's no reason why all of those should not be able to load a new image type without updating the applications themselves, just by dropping in a datatype/codec. The concept isn't anything magical - or new -, but it's still largely forgotten and ignored outside of small islands of use. We have all kinds of little API's to do this for specific types of files, like e.g. ImageMagick's "convert" for images, ffmpeg for video etc. as you mention, but what we lack is a unified API, the ability to drop plugins in for new file types, and for applications to actually unify around using a specific standard. Heck, we even have a workaround to avoid needing application support: A FUSE filesystem to trigger conversion to suitable target filetypes. This is the same issue with a lot of the things we're missing from AmigaOS. They're not hard to do. E.g. "assigns" are conceptually largely a OS-provided way of creating PATH's for everything you'd like, for example - it can also easily be provided via a FUSE filesystem. Dbus "almost" gets us to what AREXX provided, but is just not supported as widely or as simple for regular users to get started with. What was special with the Amiga in that respect was that these things were embraced fully across the board, and integrated into the culture surrounding the Amiga.
markus_zhang 5y ago
Dreaming about getting my own Macintosh plus and be productive on it, too. Wonder anyone doing the same? It's also a good way to learn low level programming on a 68000 chip.
- Palomides 5y ago
  I'd recommend a later machine with a 68030 at least, the plus is pretty damn slow maybe a classic II or an SE/30 if you want the original form factor
  - NoGravitas 5y ago
    The SE/30 is actually a pretty amazing machine. It could run A/UX, which meant a very decent Unix workstation in the classic Mac form factor, with X apps running alongside MacOS (classic; System 7-era) apps. One of my hallmates in uni had one.
    - gattilorenz 5y ago
      And to test A/UX, there's the Shoebill emulator: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Thanks! Both look awesome. I'm going to run some emulation to see whether I'm comfortable with any and check out the price and inventory. I guess most of the expense is spare parts and shipping?
    - floren 5y ago
      SE/30's have become harder to find cheaply, because they now have the reputation as The Best Compact Mac. I've been looking for one here in the San Francisco area for a while now and had no luck; I don't want to get one shipped because I don't trust it to arrive intact.
dekhn 5y ago
when i arrived at college in 1991 with a 286 and a broken hard drive, my roommate showed me his amiga. where I was stuck in DOS textland, he had a fully interactive windowing system with high quality graphics, audio, and video capture. I stuck with PCs and I don't think I had anything that was nearly as "pretty" even 10 years later.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  I arrived at college in 1990 with my trusty Amiga 2000 in hand. I then quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations. I have to admit that the Amiga soon after started collecting a lot of dust.
  - zengargoyle 5y ago
    I arrived in 1987 with my Amiga 1000 in tow, quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations (Sun 3/50, 3/60) and started using my Amiga more. They had the same a.out format so you could compile on the Sun systems with the Unix fun stuff, link with a different library, side-load it onto the Amiga and you're good to go. That A1000 ended up with 4MB, 14MHz 68020, SCSI controller, and 80MB of disk 'borrowed' from a Sun. Sure the OS was a bit different, but it's basically a cut-rate Sun 3/60. So many earl Amiga devs were Unix nerds sitting in front of Suns all day and wanting something close to that feeling for home. Macintosh (lol), IBM PC (lol DOS). Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all.
    - TacticalCoder 5y ago
      > Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all. This. I got lucky to experience a SGI Indy when it came out and although going from my beloved Amiga to a 386 running DOS "because CPU speed" (and because the PC was obviously where it was heading) was a really bitter move. Then a 486. Then I discovered Linux and my 486 + Linux was my "poor boy's SGI Indy". Great memories (and still rocking desktop linux on my workstation on a daily basis).
- icedchai 5y ago
dep_b 5y ago
I love that demo. You can definitely see how much better something on the Amiga can become once you can feed it better samples and images. It looks so much newer while it's the same A500 I started with mid 80's!
schemescape 5y ago
Does anyone have any idea how much of this could be done on stock Amiga hardware (without hardware upgrades)? I’m not anti-upgrades—-just curious :)
- mnd999 5y ago
  Depends on the system. My A1200 (6mb Ram, HD) is same spec as it was back in the day will run Wordsworth, Protext and DPaint IV just fine but doesn’t really do web browsing. I added a basic PCMCIA WiFi card though and it copes with ftp okay over open WiFi. Don’t expect a screen resolution anything like the ones shown in the article though and RAM and the 68020 become an issue fast working with a lot of recent files. The author has a lot more RAM than me and it definitely shows.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Don’t expect a screen resolution anything like the ones shown in the article Up to the 3000, IIRC, Amigas were tied to TV frequencies, so you wouldn’t get more than 200x640. You could do interlacing and get 400 lines, but you’d want to claw your ever out in 10 minutes.
    - zandorg 5y ago
      I had an Amiga 1200 and got it working with a VGA monitor soldered onto the connector (like a VGA adapter on Ebay now) and a setup VGA file in Workbench 3. It looked great in 640x480, no chunkiness. So it is possible.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        The 1200 launched after the 3000. I think it was the last model to be launched.
- robsan 5y ago
  On my A600 with 1Mb RAM it was a challenge to use the internet, especially using a TCP/IP stack that had a MUI GUI (don't recall the name). I had to use a custom startup config where Workbench did not load to save memory, to be able to use AmIRC and the like, after connecting to the internet.
coldacid 5y ago
Only Amiga Makes It Possible!
agumonkey 5y ago
I cannot shake some fondness for those old blocky UIs. It's so less capable than 2020s js/css3 but still it's so grounded to me.
- ant6n 5y ago
  What's less capable about it? To me it looks less slick, but in terms of affordances it's way better.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    dom + css (+ layered compositing) is an extremely versatile and free form UI system the old ui widgets can't really (I assume) vary that much in properties or location (the layouting is stricter and will break if you push it too hard)
    - herio 5y ago
      You'd be surprised how flexible some of the GUI toolkits on the Amiga actually were. MUI is based on the concept that layout is dynamic and flexible. It would dynamically calculate a minimum window size based on the components inside and you could then resize the window as you wanted with things calculating and resizing as you go, adapting to font selections and themes. The actual implementation is archaic by todays standards but it did use attributes on UI objects to determine min/max sizing and other things, similar to CSS in concept.
      - agumonkey 5y ago
        oh ok, I assumed wrong. Is there any video I can see about that ?
        agent327 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNEwb7eRmXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNEwb7eRmXo Sadly no font sensitivity on display (possibly because Amiga owners take it so much for granted that they don't think of it as special), but it shows what MUI can do in terms of GUI elements, window resizing, etc. After leaving the Amiga for Windows, the three biggest things I hated about its GUI were all those endless non-resizeable windows, the complete lack of font sensitivity, and the horrible scrollbars that didn't show your actual content size (and that snapped back if you moved out of some invisible box). And here we are, twenty years later, and nothing has improved at all...
krylon 5y ago
I have heard/read enough people sing high praises of AmigaOS that I wonder how intimately it is tied to the hardware platform. In other words, would it make sense to port it to the PC or maybe Raspberry Pi? It sounds like it would be fun to play with it, but I lack the hardware, and I am not sure I'm willing to sink money into it without having an idea of what I am getting into.
- chriswarbo 5y ago
  AmigaOS/Workbench relied pretty heavily on custom parts of the Amiga hardware, which is how it performed so well compared to other architectures with similar specs. That can be overcome with enough brute force; although emulators like FS-UAE can still struggle to keep realtime with some workloads. There are FPGA reimplementations of Amiga hardware, if you wanted something more 'realistic'.
  - boomlinde 5y ago
    That's mostly been overcome by now. Retargetable graphics for example let you use a graphics card instead of the built-in chipset, and AHI is an abstraction layer for audio that's not at all tied to any particular hardware. The bigger issue is applications that bypass the hardware abstraction layer or throw away the OS entirely, typically games and quite a few productivity applications. I suggest looking at MorphOS and AROS
- classichasclass 5y ago
  Basically, you want AROS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
- squarefoot 5y ago
  You can experience something very close to it with AROS, which is free both as in speech/beer, can be used either native stand alone or hosted, that is, as process under other operating systems without requiring any installation. There's also an ARM port which runs native on the Raspberry PI or hosted under Android devices. https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/
cronix 5y ago
Several of the key personnel at Commodore went on to create products that have touched the ears of most people on this planet in a way that Commodore didn't. They went on to found Ensoniq, a digital synthesizer company, who was later acquired by Emu Systems. Both Ensoniq and Emu synths/samplers were used in a wide array of music crossing many genres in the 80's, early 90's. Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Madonna and a ton more on top-100 radio all used them. > Ensoniq was founded in 1982 by former MOS Technology engineers Robert "Bob" Yannes (designer of the MOS Technology SID chip for the Commodore 64 home computer), Bruce Crockett, and Al Charpentier. Their first product was a software drum machine that ran on a home computer. > In January 1998, ENSONIQ Corp. was acquired by Creative Technology Ltd. for $77 million, and merged with E-mu Systems to form the E-Mu/Ensoniq division. The fusion with E-mu sealed Ensoniq's fate: after releasing an entry-level E-mu MK6/PK6 and Ensoniq Halo keyboards - essentially keyboard versions of the Proteus 2500 module - in 2002, the E-Mu/Ensoniq division was dissolved and support for legacy products was discontinued soon afterward. https://www.keyboardkountry.com/blog/the-amazing-ensoniq/ https://www.keyboardkountry.com/blog/the-amazing-ensoniq/
- zandorg 5y ago
  I once emailed Bob Yannes in 1998 about the C64 SID chip. I mentioned my soft synth (SoftSID) and the Elektron Sidstation. But all he was bothered about was his Ensoniq Fizmo. I'd love to get my hands on one of those now. I told him of the bad review in Future Music. He was a bit annoyed but explained what they had missed in the review. A nice guy.
mastazi 5y ago
In that Unstable Radio sound set (which is great by the way!)[1], do you think the trackers on the 2 Amigas are synced somehow? Or he is just very skilfully starting the clips at the right time? I guess it's the latter, but I was wondering if any of the classic mod trackers had external sync capabilities. Back when I was still using them I never investigated if I could sync. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpTvMSA4m04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpTvMSA4m04
cable2600 5y ago
I think the Amiga One is expensive considering it uses a low level PowerPC chip. Some MacMini G4 can run AmigaOS 4.X I heard. If you want a Free AmigaOS try AROS: https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/ it can run on PCs and 68K Amigas and has a Kickstart ROM replacement.

214 points by shortformblog 5y ago

bovermyer 5y ago

Wait, so... Amiga OS 3.2 is newer than 3.9?

Perstone 5y ago
Yes. Both are updates to Amiga OS 3.1. Amiga 3.5 and 3.9 were created by a German company back in 1999/2000 and require a 68020 or better processor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS#AmigaOS_3.5,_3.9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS#AmigaOS_3.5,_3.9 3.1.4 and 3.2 were created by Hyperion Entertainment. 3.1.4 and 3.2 by the looks of it support all the 68000 series processors and these as stated in the article are more recent.
herio 5y ago
Yup. They also were not developed by the same company. 3.5 and 3.9 were developed by Haage & Partner, 3.1.4 and 3.2 were developed by Hyperion Entertainment. There's even an AmigaOS 4.0 from Hyperion which is PowerPC only. For extra bonus points, there's MorphOS which is a heavily AmigaOS influenced OS. PowerPC only, runs on some of the older PPC Macs. And there's also the open source AROS reimplementation of AmigaOS 3.1 (with a lot of extras). (I'm sure I got a lot of details wrong, been years since I last did Amiga stuff.)

myth_drannon 5y ago

There is a coffeetable style book on Amiga demoscene https://www.editions64k.fr/index.php/product/demoscene-the-amiga-years-vol-1/ https://www.editions64k.fr/index.php/product/demoscene-the-a... Volume 2 is on IndieGOGO

herjazz 5y ago

Just have to say I loved my Amigas back in the day. First an A500 and then a dual floppy 1500. Never quite recaptured that feeling with Linux.

jacquesm 5y ago
If you ever have an opportunity play around with an SGI Irix box, an Indy or an Indigo.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  I've got such opportunity. Now, every time somebody jokes about the "it's a UNIX system. I know that!" I have to explain that that file manager actually exists but still looks like sci-fi for mere mortals even today.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Irix was the most clean and integrated Unix for the desktop that I've ever used, even Sun didn't come close with their offerings.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      The most shocking thing on the Suns back then compared to the SGIs was the mouse movement. While the SGIs had a smooth movement, Suns mouse ended up jumping dozens of pixels between refreshes. Suns were not really designed for desktop use - they more or less aimed for the generic case. SGIs, however, were built to be experienced.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - marcodiego 5y ago
        I remember the first time I used a Sun Workstation. From a PC background, I was impressed by the fact that the keyboard housed the beeper, the keyboard was a serial device and the bios equivalent had a built-in command line. It is a shame that such a small set of features jumped from workstations to the PC.
        5y ago

eludwig 5y ago

A lot of computer history is filled with machines that were obviously a link in a chain between earlier times and later times. They felt "transitional", in a sense. To me, both the Amiga & the original Mac had a "ding an sich", a such-ness that made them feel timeless. They stand alone as objects (art?) that can still be enjoyed today in and of themselves, no excuses needed. There are probably a bunch of other machine candidates that feel this way to someone out there!

marban 5y ago
Still using my heavily upgraded G4 Cube on a regular basis. The transitional part your're referring to is the Dot-Com times this Mac reminds me of — In addition to simply being a joy to look at.
munificent 5y ago
> To me, both the Amiga & the original Mac had a "ding an sich", a such-ness that made them feel timeless. I know the exact sensation you describe here. But I can never decide whether it's a property of the thing itself, or where I was in my life when I stumbled onto it. My hunch is that it's mostly the latter: artifacts feel seminal when they hit as a formative time when we first gained a new capability. I'll always have a fondness for the Apple IIe and the early Macintosh because those were what I had when I first started using computers to create. I'll always love late 90s electronica because that's when I fully discovered my love of music. My Lodge Dutch oven will hold a special place in my heart because I got it right when I was really learning how to cook.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  We're probably of very similar age, as I feel much the same. That being said, I do think there is something special about that era of machines, even outside of our right-place/right-time nostalgia for them. I cut my early computing teeth first on a Timex 1000, later on a Commodore 128, and finally an Amiga. The Timex was... ok. It was fun enough to pfaff about with, but so limited that it didn't really capture my attention in a special way. The Commodore? Amazing. It is responsible for my entire technical career trajectory. I loved exploring its edges. It was a powerful-enough system that Real Things™ could be done, yet still simple enough that the entire machine could live in your head, so to speak. The Amiga? It was amazing, but it was almost too much. I couldn't hold the whole machine in my mind any more, and had to rely of greater level of abstractions to get things done. What was doable was incredible, but there was an undeniable sense of loss, too. At least for me.

marcodiego 5y ago

I don't want to bash amiga, actually I really envy the history and capabilities of that system. Nevertheless, posts like this are almost always seen through a bit of rose tinted glasses. The part about DataTypes: "Datatypes describe a file format and tell the OS how to handle it. Any datatype-aware program can use any file format as long as a relevant datatype is present." Doesn't looks that different from how codecs are used in modern OS's. AFAIK, as soon as ffmpeg or gstreamer learns new formats or how to use hardware codecs, so does every program using them without the need of even recompiling. Of course, doing that 30 years ago is another thing. And: "RAD: is a fixed-size bootable RAM disk that survives soft reboots. Equivalents exist for most modern Operating Systems. They’re worth trying out. You don’t really know how useful they are till you lose them." Maybe I can change my mind if I use them, but I really don't feel the need. On my notebook, I simply close the lid and when I open it, it is mostly in the same state I left; some system I used are stable enough to have months of uptime; using /tmp/ seems enough for me. I once had I power failure and recovering whatever was on /tmp/required booting from a keychain but it was easy to do and a very rare occurrence. The "RAD:" may be interesting on not specially stable, non high uptime, /tmp/-lacking systems but I can't see how they can be relevant on modern OS's.

vidarh 5y ago
There is a fundamental difference in that you can drop in a new datatype without any program like ffmpeg or gstreamer having to learn new formats. More importantly, how many applications actually use these as their primary means of accessing file types? Chrome doesn't learn a new image type if I drop in a file. LibreOffice doesn't. Certainly not from the same one. Gimp doesn't. There's no reason why all of those should not be able to load a new image type without updating the applications themselves, just by dropping in a datatype/codec. The concept isn't anything magical - or new -, but it's still largely forgotten and ignored outside of small islands of use. We have all kinds of little API's to do this for specific types of files, like e.g. ImageMagick's "convert" for images, ffmpeg for video etc. as you mention, but what we lack is a unified API, the ability to drop plugins in for new file types, and for applications to actually unify around using a specific standard. Heck, we even have a workaround to avoid needing application support: A FUSE filesystem to trigger conversion to suitable target filetypes. This is the same issue with a lot of the things we're missing from AmigaOS. They're not hard to do. E.g. "assigns" are conceptually largely a OS-provided way of creating PATH's for everything you'd like, for example - it can also easily be provided via a FUSE filesystem. Dbus "almost" gets us to what AREXX provided, but is just not supported as widely or as simple for regular users to get started with. What was special with the Amiga in that respect was that these things were embraced fully across the board, and integrated into the culture surrounding the Amiga.

markus_zhang 5y ago

Dreaming about getting my own Macintosh plus and be productive on it, too. Wonder anyone doing the same? It's also a good way to learn low level programming on a 68000 chip.

Palomides 5y ago
I'd recommend a later machine with a 68030 at least, the plus is pretty damn slow maybe a classic II or an SE/30 if you want the original form factor
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  The SE/30 is actually a pretty amazing machine. It could run A/UX, which meant a very decent Unix workstation in the classic Mac form factor, with X apps running alongside MacOS (classic; System 7-era) apps. One of my hallmates in uni had one.
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    And to test A/UX, there's the Shoebill emulator: https://github.com/pruten/shoebill https://github.com/pruten/shoebill
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Thanks! Both look awesome. I'm going to run some emulation to see whether I'm comfortable with any and check out the price and inventory. I guess most of the expense is spare parts and shipping?
  - floren 5y ago
    SE/30's have become harder to find cheaply, because they now have the reputation as The Best Compact Mac. I've been looking for one here in the San Francisco area for a while now and had no luck; I don't want to get one shipped because I don't trust it to arrive intact.

dekhn 5y ago

when i arrived at college in 1991 with a 286 and a broken hard drive, my roommate showed me his amiga. where I was stuck in DOS textland, he had a fully interactive windowing system with high quality graphics, audio, and video capture. I stuck with PCs and I don't think I had anything that was nearly as "pretty" even 10 years later.

technothrasher 5y ago
I arrived at college in 1990 with my trusty Amiga 2000 in hand. I then quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations. I have to admit that the Amiga soon after started collecting a lot of dust.
- zengargoyle 5y ago
  I arrived in 1987 with my Amiga 1000 in tow, quickly discovered the school's Unix workstations (Sun 3/50, 3/60) and started using my Amiga more. They had the same a.out format so you could compile on the Sun systems with the Unix fun stuff, link with a different library, side-load it onto the Amiga and you're good to go. That A1000 ended up with 4MB, 14MHz 68020, SCSI controller, and 80MB of disk 'borrowed' from a Sun. Sure the OS was a bit different, but it's basically a cut-rate Sun 3/60. So many earl Amiga devs were Unix nerds sitting in front of Suns all day and wanting something close to that feeling for home. Macintosh (lol), IBM PC (lol DOS). Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all.
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    > Pretty much wasn't until Linux that the PC actually became useful at all. This. I got lucky to experience a SGI Indy when it came out and although going from my beloved Amiga to a 386 running DOS "because CPU speed" (and because the PC was obviously where it was heading) was a really bitter move. Then a 486. Then I discovered Linux and my 486 + Linux was my "poor boy's SGI Indy". Great memories (and still rocking desktop linux on my workstation on a daily basis).
icedchai 5y ago

dep_b 5y ago

I love that demo. You can definitely see how much better something on the Amiga can become once you can feed it better samples and images. It looks so much newer while it's the same A500 I started with mid 80's!

schemescape 5y ago

Does anyone have any idea how much of this could be done on stock Amiga hardware (without hardware upgrades)? I’m not anti-upgrades—-just curious :)

mnd999 5y ago
Depends on the system. My A1200 (6mb Ram, HD) is same spec as it was back in the day will run Wordsworth, Protext and DPaint IV just fine but doesn’t really do web browsing. I added a basic PCMCIA WiFi card though and it copes with ftp okay over open WiFi. Don’t expect a screen resolution anything like the ones shown in the article though and RAM and the 68020 become an issue fast working with a lot of recent files. The author has a lot more RAM than me and it definitely shows.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Don’t expect a screen resolution anything like the ones shown in the article Up to the 3000, IIRC, Amigas were tied to TV frequencies, so you wouldn’t get more than 200x640. You could do interlacing and get 400 lines, but you’d want to claw your ever out in 10 minutes.
  - zandorg 5y ago
    I had an Amiga 1200 and got it working with a VGA monitor soldered onto the connector (like a VGA adapter on Ebay now) and a setup VGA file in Workbench 3. It looked great in 640x480, no chunkiness. So it is possible.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      The 1200 launched after the 3000. I think it was the last model to be launched.
robsan 5y ago
On my A600 with 1Mb RAM it was a challenge to use the internet, especially using a TCP/IP stack that had a MUI GUI (don't recall the name). I had to use a custom startup config where Workbench did not load to save memory, to be able to use AmIRC and the like, after connecting to the internet.

coldacid 5y ago

Only Amiga Makes It Possible!

agumonkey 5y ago

I cannot shake some fondness for those old blocky UIs. It's so less capable than 2020s js/css3 but still it's so grounded to me.

ant6n 5y ago
What's less capable about it? To me it looks less slick, but in terms of affordances it's way better.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  dom + css (+ layered compositing) is an extremely versatile and free form UI system the old ui widgets can't really (I assume) vary that much in properties or location (the layouting is stricter and will break if you push it too hard)
  - herio 5y ago
    You'd be surprised how flexible some of the GUI toolkits on the Amiga actually were. MUI is based on the concept that layout is dynamic and flexible. It would dynamically calculate a minimum window size based on the components inside and you could then resize the window as you wanted with things calculating and resizing as you go, adapting to font selections and themes. The actual implementation is archaic by todays standards but it did use attributes on UI objects to determine min/max sizing and other things, similar to CSS in concept.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      oh ok, I assumed wrong. Is there any video I can see about that ?
      - agent327 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNEwb7eRmXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNEwb7eRmXo Sadly no font sensitivity on display (possibly because Amiga owners take it so much for granted that they don't think of it as special), but it shows what MUI can do in terms of GUI elements, window resizing, etc. After leaving the Amiga for Windows, the three biggest things I hated about its GUI were all those endless non-resizeable windows, the complete lack of font sensitivity, and the horrible scrollbars that didn't show your actual content size (and that snapped back if you moved out of some invisible box). And here we are, twenty years later, and nothing has improved at all...

krylon 5y ago

I have heard/read enough people sing high praises of AmigaOS that I wonder how intimately it is tied to the hardware platform. In other words, would it make sense to port it to the PC or maybe Raspberry Pi? It sounds like it would be fun to play with it, but I lack the hardware, and I am not sure I'm willing to sink money into it without having an idea of what I am getting into.

chriswarbo 5y ago
AmigaOS/Workbench relied pretty heavily on custom parts of the Amiga hardware, which is how it performed so well compared to other architectures with similar specs. That can be overcome with enough brute force; although emulators like FS-UAE can still struggle to keep realtime with some workloads. There are FPGA reimplementations of Amiga hardware, if you wanted something more 'realistic'.
- boomlinde 5y ago
  That's mostly been overcome by now. Retargetable graphics for example let you use a graphics card instead of the built-in chipset, and AHI is an abstraction layer for audio that's not at all tied to any particular hardware. The bigger issue is applications that bypass the hardware abstraction layer or throw away the OS entirely, typically games and quite a few productivity applications. I suggest looking at MorphOS and AROS
classichasclass 5y ago
Basically, you want AROS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AROS_Research_Operating_System
squarefoot 5y ago
You can experience something very close to it with AROS, which is free both as in speech/beer, can be used either native stand alone or hosted, that is, as process under other operating systems without requiring any installation. There's also an ARM port which runs native on the Raspberry PI or hosted under Android devices. https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/

cronix 5y ago

Several of the key personnel at Commodore went on to create products that have touched the ears of most people on this planet in a way that Commodore didn't. They went on to found Ensoniq, a digital synthesizer company, who was later acquired by Emu Systems. Both Ensoniq and Emu synths/samplers were used in a wide array of music crossing many genres in the 80's, early 90's. Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Madonna and a ton more on top-100 radio all used them. > Ensoniq was founded in 1982 by former MOS Technology engineers Robert "Bob" Yannes (designer of the MOS Technology SID chip for the Commodore 64 home computer), Bruce Crockett, and Al Charpentier. Their first product was a software drum machine that ran on a home computer. > In January 1998, ENSONIQ Corp. was acquired by Creative Technology Ltd. for $77 million, and merged with E-mu Systems to form the E-Mu/Ensoniq division. The fusion with E-mu sealed Ensoniq's fate: after releasing an entry-level E-mu MK6/PK6 and Ensoniq Halo keyboards - essentially keyboard versions of the Proteus 2500 module - in 2002, the E-Mu/Ensoniq division was dissolved and support for legacy products was discontinued soon afterward. https://www.keyboardkountry.com/blog/the-amazing-ensoniq/ https://www.keyboardkountry.com/blog/the-amazing-ensoniq/

zandorg 5y ago
I once emailed Bob Yannes in 1998 about the C64 SID chip. I mentioned my soft synth (SoftSID) and the Elektron Sidstation. But all he was bothered about was his Ensoniq Fizmo. I'd love to get my hands on one of those now. I told him of the bad review in Future Music. He was a bit annoyed but explained what they had missed in the review. A nice guy.

mastazi 5y ago

In that Unstable Radio sound set (which is great by the way!)[1], do you think the trackers on the 2 Amigas are synced somehow? Or he is just very skilfully starting the clips at the right time? I guess it's the latter, but I was wondering if any of the classic mod trackers had external sync capabilities. Back when I was still using them I never investigated if I could sync. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpTvMSA4m04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpTvMSA4m04

cable2600 5y ago

I think the Amiga One is expensive considering it uses a low level PowerPC chip. Some MacMini G4 can run AmigaOS 4.X I heard. If you want a Free AmigaOS try AROS: https://aros.sourceforge.io/ https://aros.sourceforge.io/ it can run on PCs and 68K Amigas and has a Kickstart ROM replacement.