12 ms·

i never got to play with one as my family had a 16-bit income. thankfully, there was the $600 atari 520st that you could plug into the tv if you had to. amiga

by a-dub 5y ago

i never got to play with one as my family had a 16-bit income. thankfully, there was the $600 atari 520st that you could plug into the tv if you had to. amigas always seemed like they were mismatched to the market. obscenely expensive for hobbyist or kids' machines, but not really suitable to the business/prosumer market. (except for the video toaster, i guess, which seemed to be the niche they ultimately filled- other than overpriced home computers with limited software options)

pavlov 5y ago
The Amiga 500 was reasonably priced, at least in most of Europe. It was a very popular gaming computer for a few years.
- a-dub 5y ago
  interesting. i remember the 1000, 2000 and 3000 being "look, but don't touch" and i have vague memories of the 500 but i remember some good reason to dismiss it beyond "it's not what i have." i wish i could remember what it was. i want to say high peripheral costs- or it was missing something big... but i can't remember now. was it that the os was designed for more powerful machines and there wasn't much space left for user programs maybe?
  - pavlov 5y ago
    I never had an Amiga, but I don’t think the 500 owners necessarily interacted with the OS very much beyond launching programs. That kind of usage was commonplace since other popular computers (C-64, MS-DOS PCs) barely had an OS anyway. I think it was fairly common to use TV output on the Amiga 500, since it was much more affordable than buying a proper computer monitor. You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing, but it worked fine for games and low-res text mode. So really the Amiga 500 was directly for the Commodore 64 market, while the 2000/3000 were more like oddball low-end workstations — and didn’t have a clear market.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Some of the early Amiga models did support TV output but the display quality was so terrible as to be effectively unusable. I and all the other Amiga owners I knew used actual monitors.
    - snvzz 5y ago
      >You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing As long as you had a good PAL TV, such as a Sony Trinitron with SCART (RGB) input, it was VERY feasible. On a composite-only TV, for actual work, you'd be better off with the Mono "composite without color" output A500 had than the horror which is actual composite. 720x256 (overscan and no interlace) & virtual desktops (screens) enabled effective multitasking. 720x512 (interlaced) was of course better, but with great care taken on selecting screen colors to minimize interlaced-related annoyance. This is true even with an A500 with 512KB CHIP + 512KB SLOW RAM and single floppy drive, on AmigaOS 1.3. I know for a fact, because A500+A501+Trinitron was my setup for several years.
    - emrah 5y ago
      > A500+A501+SonyTrinitron I had this combo as well. Not as crisp as a 1084S but still quite decent
  - nradov 5y ago
    The Amiga 500 had almost identical hardware specifications to the 1000. The OS ran fine. They just packed everything into a smaller, cheaper case with reduced expandability. Peripherals such as hard drives were expensive because it used a proprietary model-specific expansion port.

by a-dub 5y ago

pavlov 5y ago

The Amiga 500 was reasonably priced, at least in most of Europe. It was a very popular gaming computer for a few years.

a-dub 5y ago
interesting. i remember the 1000, 2000 and 3000 being "look, but don't touch" and i have vague memories of the 500 but i remember some good reason to dismiss it beyond "it's not what i have." i wish i could remember what it was. i want to say high peripheral costs- or it was missing something big... but i can't remember now. was it that the os was designed for more powerful machines and there wasn't much space left for user programs maybe?
- pavlov 5y ago
  I never had an Amiga, but I don’t think the 500 owners necessarily interacted with the OS very much beyond launching programs. That kind of usage was commonplace since other popular computers (C-64, MS-DOS PCs) barely had an OS anyway. I think it was fairly common to use TV output on the Amiga 500, since it was much more affordable than buying a proper computer monitor. You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing, but it worked fine for games and low-res text mode. So really the Amiga 500 was directly for the Commodore 64 market, while the 2000/3000 were more like oddball low-end workstations — and didn’t have a clear market.
  - nradov 5y ago
    Some of the early Amiga models did support TV output but the display quality was so terrible as to be effectively unusable. I and all the other Amiga owners I knew used actual monitors.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >You’re not going to do much GUI productivity multitasking on a PAL TV because of interlacing As long as you had a good PAL TV, such as a Sony Trinitron with SCART (RGB) input, it was VERY feasible. On a composite-only TV, for actual work, you'd be better off with the Mono "composite without color" output A500 had than the horror which is actual composite. 720x256 (overscan and no interlace) & virtual desktops (screens) enabled effective multitasking. 720x512 (interlaced) was of course better, but with great care taken on selecting screen colors to minimize interlaced-related annoyance. This is true even with an A500 with 512KB CHIP + 512KB SLOW RAM and single floppy drive, on AmigaOS 1.3. I know for a fact, because A500+A501+Trinitron was my setup for several years.
  - emrah 5y ago
    > A500+A501+SonyTrinitron I had this combo as well. Not as crisp as a 1084S but still quite decent
- nradov 5y ago
  The Amiga 500 had almost identical hardware specifications to the 1000. The OS ran fine. They just packed everything into a smaller, cheaper case with reduced expandability. Peripherals such as hard drives were expensive because it used a proprietary model-specific expansion port.