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Exploring the Amiga – Part 1 (2018)

90 points by codezero 5y ago

kencausey 5y ago
This appears to link to all 8 parts: https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/categories/amiga/ https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/categories/amiga/
- codezero 5y ago
  Dang, I should have posted that one! Thanks for sharing. I’ve been planning a small Amiga 68000 assembly project and this series inspired me. Edit: last year around this time I was planning a Commodore 64 6502 assembly project, and I didn’t follow through, so, yeah, that.
  - mrspeaker 5y ago
    I got into C64 6502 coding last year - had a pretty decent game prototype working (before had to relocate and life got in the way!). If anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole, I recommend the Twitch streamer "Shallan" (https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k). All his old videos are on YouTube too, and tonnes of great info to get started and motivated.
    - codezero 5y ago
      Thanks so much for sharing this, I’ll get to the project eventually, I bet. :)
    - royjacobs 5y ago
      I might as well plug my 6502 assembler MOS[1] again. It's written in Rust and comes with a full language server implementation that does things like full code formatting, refactoring support (go to symbol, renaming, etc) and if you're using the VICE emulator for the c64 it even integrates with the Visual Studio Code debugger. [1] https://mos.datatra.sh https://mos.datatra.sh
thedigicat 5y ago
Thank you for sharing, guys. The next posts in the series have been in the works for a bit too long, this reminded me that I should keep writing =) Thanks!
- unwind 5y ago
  Thank you, this was refreshingly deep and technical for a retro article. Straight to assembly in part 1 is nice! :) As someone growing up coding MC68k assembly, I think I was still not aware of the existance of the "vasm" cross-assembler. That might push me to clean up and make buildable a really old game I wrote, that would give some nice closure. :) Thanks!
- bgr80 5y ago
  Just a heads up to the author. Your global Atom RSS feed seems to be broken. https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/atom.xml https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/atom.xml The one for retro is ok.
  - thedigicat 5y ago
    Ouch! Thanks for the heads up, I'll fix it asap!
  - thedigicat 5y ago
    I just fixed it. That was caused by ANSI escape codes in Celery's output that I copied in one of my posts :shrug: Thanks again!
Lucretia9 5y ago
I learnt m68k on an Amiga 500+ in a week, it's a decent assembly language which a lot of CPU manufacturers could learn a lot from.
- codezero 5y ago
  Did you learn on an amiga, or did you build on another platform? What tools did you use?
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It was a very clean ISA at the time, which made it quite easy to learn. Though if you want to learn a modern ISA today you'd pick RISC-V which is almost as simple.
richrichardsson 5y ago
This is a fantastic cross-platform project for VSCode : https://github.com/prb28/vscode-amiga-assembly https://github.com/prb28/vscode-amiga-assembly There are also similar project(s) that target Windows only and give some nice extra features such as profiling. I've been using the above on macOS to get back into demo coding after a 25+ year break and it's been great fun/nostalgic.
rbanffy 5y ago
I often wonder what a computer would need to be in order to become a phenomenon similar to the Amiga. The Amiga blew people's minds by having impressive graphics for the time, excellent multimedia and a very responsive multitasking graphical environment when most Windows machines couldn't format a floppy and move the mouse at the same time. The only solution space I can imagine for this is something so alien to our desktop computers (everything today is a multi-core processor coupled to a GPU and SSD storage) that it could cause the perception that it's not just an evolution, but revolutionary. I keep returning to something that merges CPU and GPU like Intel's Larrabee, which became Xeon Phi, or Esperanto's RISC-V MIMD+SIMD monster. It could be something with cores of more than 2 sizes of core, but it'd need to be something different enough to enable the things we consider impossible today. Which brings something else to the discussion - we no longer have science fiction to guide us here - apart from AGI, uploaded human personalities, and fully immersive brain-connected (or upload-friendly) virtual reality, there isn't much in sci-fi that our machines can't handle.
- newswasboring 5y ago
  This comment has a fascinating structure. You laid out what made amiga a great product in human terms. But when describing what can be like that today, there were no human terms just technology. And that is the pitfall for which the last part of the comment gives the reason. We really do not have much to guide us any more. The things golden age of scifi put as guidance has been more or less achieved.
- ako 5y ago
  Home trainable AI hardware; something like Tesla's AI hardware, but completely usable & customizable by hobbyists?
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    But what would such machine be capable of? What would be the use that would make us all wow ourselves the way we did when we first saw an Amiga?
- agent327 5y ago
G3rn0ti 5y ago
If you're specifically interested in Amiga demo programming a scene insider has a nice Youtube series running: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3ltHgmiidpK-s0eP5hTKJnjdTHz0_bW https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3ltHgmiidpK-s0eP5hTKJnj... It's quite enjoyable to watch at the beginning explaining basic assembler but also Amiga specific hardware programming like "copper lists". It gets pretty hardcore later on which was too much for me.

90 points by codezero 5y ago

This appears to link to all 8 parts: https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/categories/amiga/ https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/categories/amiga/

codezero 5y ago
Dang, I should have posted that one! Thanks for sharing. I’ve been planning a small Amiga 68000 assembly project and this series inspired me. Edit: last year around this time I was planning a Commodore 64 6502 assembly project, and I didn’t follow through, so, yeah, that.
- mrspeaker 5y ago
  I got into C64 6502 coding last year - had a pretty decent game prototype working (before had to relocate and life got in the way!). If anyone wants to go down that rabbit hole, I recommend the Twitch streamer "Shallan" (https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k https://www.twitch.tv/shallan50k). All his old videos are on YouTube too, and tonnes of great info to get started and motivated.
  - codezero 5y ago
    Thanks so much for sharing this, I’ll get to the project eventually, I bet. :)
  - royjacobs 5y ago
    I might as well plug my 6502 assembler MOS[1] again. It's written in Rust and comes with a full language server implementation that does things like full code formatting, refactoring support (go to symbol, renaming, etc) and if you're using the VICE emulator for the c64 it even integrates with the Visual Studio Code debugger. [1] https://mos.datatra.sh https://mos.datatra.sh

thedigicat 5y ago

Thank you for sharing, guys. The next posts in the series have been in the works for a bit too long, this reminded me that I should keep writing =) Thanks!

unwind 5y ago
Thank you, this was refreshingly deep and technical for a retro article. Straight to assembly in part 1 is nice! :) As someone growing up coding MC68k assembly, I think I was still not aware of the existance of the "vasm" cross-assembler. That might push me to clean up and make buildable a really old game I wrote, that would give some nice closure. :) Thanks!
bgr80 5y ago
Just a heads up to the author. Your global Atom RSS feed seems to be broken. https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/atom.xml https://www.thedigitalcatonline.com/atom.xml The one for retro is ok.
- thedigicat 5y ago
  Ouch! Thanks for the heads up, I'll fix it asap!
- thedigicat 5y ago
  I just fixed it. That was caused by ANSI escape codes in Celery's output that I copied in one of my posts :shrug: Thanks again!

Lucretia9 5y ago

I learnt m68k on an Amiga 500+ in a week, it's a decent assembly language which a lot of CPU manufacturers could learn a lot from.

codezero 5y ago
Did you learn on an amiga, or did you build on another platform? What tools did you use?
zozbot234 5y ago
It was a very clean ISA at the time, which made it quite easy to learn. Though if you want to learn a modern ISA today you'd pick RISC-V which is almost as simple.

richrichardsson 5y ago

This is a fantastic cross-platform project for VSCode : https://github.com/prb28/vscode-amiga-assembly https://github.com/prb28/vscode-amiga-assembly There are also similar project(s) that target Windows only and give some nice extra features such as profiling. I've been using the above on macOS to get back into demo coding after a 25+ year break and it's been great fun/nostalgic.

rbanffy 5y ago

I often wonder what a computer would need to be in order to become a phenomenon similar to the Amiga. The Amiga blew people's minds by having impressive graphics for the time, excellent multimedia and a very responsive multitasking graphical environment when most Windows machines couldn't format a floppy and move the mouse at the same time. The only solution space I can imagine for this is something so alien to our desktop computers (everything today is a multi-core processor coupled to a GPU and SSD storage) that it could cause the perception that it's not just an evolution, but revolutionary. I keep returning to something that merges CPU and GPU like Intel's Larrabee, which became Xeon Phi, or Esperanto's RISC-V MIMD+SIMD monster. It could be something with cores of more than 2 sizes of core, but it'd need to be something different enough to enable the things we consider impossible today. Which brings something else to the discussion - we no longer have science fiction to guide us here - apart from AGI, uploaded human personalities, and fully immersive brain-connected (or upload-friendly) virtual reality, there isn't much in sci-fi that our machines can't handle.

newswasboring 5y ago
This comment has a fascinating structure. You laid out what made amiga a great product in human terms. But when describing what can be like that today, there were no human terms just technology. And that is the pitfall for which the last part of the comment gives the reason. We really do not have much to guide us any more. The things golden age of scifi put as guidance has been more or less achieved.
ako 5y ago
Home trainable AI hardware; something like Tesla's AI hardware, but completely usable & customizable by hobbyists?
- rbanffy 5y ago
  But what would such machine be capable of? What would be the use that would make us all wow ourselves the way we did when we first saw an Amiga?
agent327 5y ago

G3rn0ti 5y ago

If you're specifically interested in Amiga demo programming a scene insider has a nice Youtube series running: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3ltHgmiidpK-s0eP5hTKJnjdTHz0_bW https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc3ltHgmiidpK-s0eP5hTKJnj... It's quite enjoyable to watch at the beginning explaining basic assembler but also Amiga specific hardware programming like "copper lists". It gets pretty hardcore later on which was too much for me.