4 ms·
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 commonplac
by 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 agoSome 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