10 ms·

What made the Amiga so great

137 points by harel 5y ago

spiritplumber 5y ago
I had an Amiga until the PC finally surpassed it, which took... 11 years?
zibzab 5y ago
What made Amiga great was all the awesome stuff you could play with once you get tired of playing with the best games ever written. The Workbench 3.0 Utility disk included a copy of MicroEmacs. Decades later still my favourite editor and top 5 piece of software.
aidos 5y ago
Amiga just felt so fun to explore. There was a sort of playfulness to it, but actually it was still this amazing creative machine.
rbanffy 5y ago
Bitplane graphics was probably a bad decision. It's good for games, but terrible for any program where you want to change one pixel at a time - If you have a linear frame buffer, lighting up a pixel means a read from memory, some OR'ing and a write. When you have 5 bit-planes, you need as many reads as bits change in the color value, up to 5, and then 5 writes. Good for games, but bad for mostly everything else. Also, the keyboard, it came out a good couple years after the DEC LK201, which is very similar to both the Amiga and the STs. The IBM enhanced came out at about the same time, but, IIRC, the 122 key layout dates back to the Model F family. I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context.
- TacticalCoder 5y ago
  > Bitplane graphics Fun fact regarding bitplane: a friend of mine realized that he could use only 16 colors instead of 32, have all colors from, say, 0 to 15 be black, then clear the whole screen by zero'ing only the first bitplane (so effectively only blitting one-fifth of what would typically need to be blitted in case you wanted to clear the whole screen between two frames). Problem is: running the Amiga in 16 colors mode (instead of 32) was faster than using that trick in 32 colors mode. However... That trick worked on the Atari ST. It was a very fast way to clear the whole screen. But as the Atari ST only had 4 bitplanes to start with, then you'd end up with only 8 usable colors if you used that trick. We're talking decades ago, but I'm pretty sure I remember this correctly (as in: we actually tried and timed all this on both the Amiga and the Atari ST back in the days). > I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context. Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today. Yeah... Computers used to be more exciting. And don't forget the M1.
- crazydoggers 5y ago
  Bitplane graphics allowed the Amiga to do a lot of graphical tricks other machines, given the limited memory of the times, just couldn’t do. Examples include halfbrite and HAM modes. It’s part of the reason anyone who saw Amigas in the early days felt like it was decades ahead of the competition. By the time chunky mode graphics and 3D rendering really started to have an advantage, computers were moving to seperate graphics cards anyway, so I don’t see it as a bad choice. Had Amiga continued I’m sure we would still be using Nvidia and AMD graphics cards in them now. In fact 3rd party graphics cards did start appearing for the Amiga. The bad decisions for Amiga all came down to Commodore sucking it dry and not putting any money into the engineering division.
  - spiritplumber 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg
- phire 5y ago
  Changing a single pixel at a time wasn't a common operation in the 80s when the Amiga was popular. The main class of application that would have used single-pixel modifications would be paint-style programs, and the cpu was generally fast enough to keep up with user input. There are advantages to planar graphics that can help applications too. Being able to dynamically change the number of bitplanes based on an application's color requirements both saves ram and increases cpu performance. It wasn't really until about 1992 that the lack of chunky graphics really became a liability, with the rise of 3D games like Doom and various multimedia applications, like streaming video off CD-ROM and more advanced productivity apps. If Amiga had actually delivered the AAA chipset in 1993 with it's various chunky graphics modes, maybe the platform would have survived.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > single-pixel modifications would be paint-style programs Any app that draws a pixel as a single operation does that. In order to make this faster, you'll need to keep a bitmap to hold the image and then, maybe, use the blitter to render it to the screen. Bitplanes allow some tricks with games, when you split the planes into more than one playfield, or could even use it for windowing, putting the active window on one group of bitplanes above the rest so that you wouldn't bother to redraw windows because oclusion isn't destructive.
    - phire 5y ago
      Yes, but I'm having a hard time thinking of many applications from the late 80s and very early 90s that required per-pixel control of the frame buffer. Text rendering is not done per-pixel, it's done in character sized blocks. Most UI elements at the time were tiled-based. You can do a lot with just blocks of pixels. And with anything that's done in large block (especially blocks that are multiples of 8 pixels wide), the per-pixel cost is atomized and becomes much less of an overhead.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        If you are predominantly working with bitmaps, there aren't many reasons to operate on a pixel basis, but, take, for instance, drawing a line of n pixels. For a linear 8-bit frame buffer, you'll need up to n reads and n writes (because the 68000 had a 16-bit bus). For an 8-plane buffer (for the sake of simplicity), you'll need 8 times as many operations, one for each plane. If you know you'll be setting or unsetting a pixel in the same 16 pixel region, you can collapse those in-plane ops into a single write, but that requires some cleverness (like off-screen rendering to fast RAM).
- mrandish 5y ago
  > Bitplane graphics was probably a bad decision. The original Amiga shipped in 1985 and at that time the bitplane approach offered a reasonable trade-off versus chunky pixels by enabling some uniquely powerful capabilities. When Commodore died of self-inflicted wounds in 1994, a much more powerful new chipset codenamed "Hombre" had been created and was working on prototype boards. Hombre had chunky pixels among other cool things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset. Too bad it never shipped
  - sys_64738 5y ago
    Akiko was The planar to chunky chip in the Amiga CD32 console in 1993.
TacticalCoder 5y ago
What made the Amiga great is that this was not just a bit but way more advanced than anything out there. When I had to, reluctantly, switch to a 386 PC, this was very painful because it felt like going backwards in time by several years. A friend of mine had an Amiga 1000 (it came out in 1985, before the 500 whic surfaced in 1987): going to his home was witnessing the future. Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.
- 300bps 5y ago
  I went 64->128->8088. When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128. The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time. In all I’m happy I went the IBM compat route.
  - joegahona 5y ago
    Wow, “Lt. Kernal 20 MB” is something I haven’t thought about in ages. A friend of mine bought whatever the competitor to the Lt. Kernal was at the time, used, and it was a complete lemon — he never got it working and never recouped his money. I wish I could remember the name of it — he was going to start his own BBS called and I was going to be a subop. I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
- function_seven 5y ago
  My Dad bought the family computer for Christmas, 1985. It was an Amiga 1000 and I still vividly remember him teaching me to type "dpaint" at the command line to fire up DeluxePaint. (IRRC, the DeluxePaint disk didn't come with even a minimal Workbench environment on it, just an AmigaDOS window). I was 6 years old. I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things. It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit. I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.
BrissyCoder 5y ago
My generation had the Amiga. This generation has Crypto and Web 3.0. The future is bleak.
- skybrian 5y ago
  Imagine if we got a glimpse of Minecraft back then. This and probably many future generations have that.
  - harel 5y ago
    Minecraft would have made a great Amiga game. Probably would have been it's killer app that would have made it the mainstream computer.
    - ben174 5y ago
      No generation of Amiga that was commercially available could come even close to rendering the real-time 3D graphics of Minecraft. The Amiga was impressive but even running something like Doom (or Gloom - since Doom was never officially ported) was a struggle on the cutting edge Amiga 1200.
      - democracy 5y ago
        speccy fans tried ))) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw&t=160s&ab_channel=yerzmyey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw&t=160s&ab_channe...
        BrissyCoder 5y ago
  - pndy 5y ago
    Weren't Lego sets very popular around Amiga best times?
snarfy 5y ago
As a kid in a computer store in 1987, it was a pretty easy choice. The PC was either monochrome or 4 color CGA graphics. The amiga had a 3d ray traced animation of juggling spheres.
- fzzzy 5y ago
  The Mac II had millions of colors at 640x480.
  - Jedd 5y ago
    > The Mac II had millions of colors at 640x480. The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time. From wikipedia: "The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..." There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'. Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations." Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.
    - detaro 5y ago
      Or later in 1987 an Amiga 500 for 699.
    - drzaiusapelord 5y ago
      That Mac II cost $14,000 in 2021 money. Its just incredible how expensive computers were back then.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        Yes, I'm always surprised when I hear people saying they got an early Mac as a present or when they went to college.
    - 5y ago
cassiopeia 5y ago
Way better gfx and sound than the Atari ST;)
- bhauer 5y ago
  As a former Atari ST user, I admit this is the truth.
- harel 5y ago
  Now you're just trying to pick a fight :-)
  - scarygliders 5y ago
    They're correct, though! :trollface: ;)
    - harel 5y ago
      They are. I had an Amiga, and would have said the same to any ST owner I met, when I was trying to pick a fight :)
      - snvzz 5y ago
        lol, atari.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Graphics, yeah, easily, but the Atari STE surely had better sound!
  - harel 5y ago
    It just had midi ports and cool shaped function buttons
- butlerm 5y ago
  The Atari ST made up for a lot with better, separate black and white and color monitors in the early versions.
harel 5y ago
The site this links to, 8bitnews.io, is a wonderful resource to a lot of retro news and projects and they have a mailing list that does not suck.
- snvzz 5y ago
  It would be fairly cool if it had RSS, but alas. They offer email subscription instead. I'll pass.
  - jroesner 5y ago
    8bitnews here: RSS is coming ...
    - snvzz 5y ago
      I hope so. Once it shows up, I'll add to my aggregator.
    - harel 5y ago
      Hey! Thank you for 8bitnews. I don't remember a single "newsletter" I was actually happy to receive before it. Great work!
G3rn0ti 5y ago
If you’re really interested in what made the Amiga so great back in its day, checkout this book: The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_P0PG67PXCAY8RPVPD7JK https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i... Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine. For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS. It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be. I loved it!
- city41 5y ago
  I haven't read that book, but your description reminds me of this recent video which I thought did a good job explaining why the Amiga was so great: https://youtu.be/PHN8ANlR8KI https://youtu.be/PHN8ANlR8KI
  - richrichardsson 5y ago
    I know my comment is useless, but: LOL. This is literally the linked video in the article. (it's a good one though, watched it last night)
tiffanyh 5y ago
Amiga lives on in spirit with DragonflyBSD. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ Matt Dillon has brought a ton of design from Amiga to his FreeBSD fork called DragonflyBSD. And its extremely performant, which is impressive given how few work on DragonflyBSD vs Linux & other BSDs. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-freebsd13-dfly6&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-f...
- vidarh 5y ago
  As much as I respect Dillon, I can't say I've seen anything about DragonflyBSD that suggests it includes anything of what made AmigaOS interesting. Maybe there's more in the internals. I'd love to know more about it.
  - tiffanyh 5y ago
    This entire HN thread is a good overview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466 And a bit here too https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.html?m=1 https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.h...
    - vidarh 5y ago
      That doesn't really feel like it's giving you anything worthwhile. AROS and UAE provides more than good enough abilities to run old AmigaOS code. But old AmigaOS code doesn't really bring any of what was great to a modern system. I hope it's exaggerating the similarities of Hammer and FFS, because FFS was dated already a couple of decades ago. It was never a strength of AmigaOS.
scarygliders 5y ago
The Amiga had a true multi-tasking operating system, years before Apple Macs and Windows. That alone made it pretty awesome.
- bni 5y ago
  Still today it is a special feeling multitasking on the Amiga. Pressing Amiga-M to switch screens. Sliding the screens up and down, revealing what is behind, every screen having its own palette. You are at a mercy of every program behaving though. But that is part of its charm.
neom 5y ago
AmigaOS felt more powerful than windows, but less intimidating than linux. Simply put: It was a lot of fun.
mrandish 5y ago
The Amiga 1200 was arguably the last and best of the golden era "console computers", (meaning all-in-ones with the CPU inside the keyboard and could display on a standard analog TV). This style of home computer largely reigned the consumer market between 1980 and 1990, beginning with 8-bit machines like the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and Apple II, evolving to 16-bit with the Amiga 500 and Atari 1040STE and ending with the 32-bit Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 was based on a Motorola 68020, had a hardware-based bit blitter and could display 320x240 in 256 colors, basically the holy grail of analog gaming graphics modes. It was the only widely distributed home computer capable of faithfully emulating the vast majority of 1980-90 dedicated arcade machines with few compromises. I have all the machines mentioned above in pristine working condition and still enjoy playing around with them. It was a special era in computer history because every platform had its own unique hardware and operating system providing different capabilities and trade-offs. This gives each platform an unmistakable (and strongly-opinionated) 'personality'.
- wk_end 5y ago
  The 68020 is probably the last great CPU to write pure assembly in, too. The instruction set is rich enough to make it straightforward to write by hand - unlike RISC-ier chips, C is almost superfluous for many tasks - but simple and clean enough to keep in your head (unlike x86). It cleans up some of the rough edges from the 68000, and adds some great features and a ton of speed. But: no MMU, no complex pipeline or branch prediction, and the cache is instruction-only, meaning you rarely need to think about it to get optimum performance.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    I disagree that RISC chips are especially hard to write for by hand - plenty of people did exactly that for the Acorn Archimedes. (And writing by hand can still be worthwhile even when you're lacking fancy CISC instructions, because you can design bespoke, custom-use "calling conventions" that make way better use of the register file. This is hard to do in C even when theoretically possible-- via fancy, non-standard asm intrinsics-- because you don't know beforehand how the compiler will choose to allocate registers.) The MC68k architecture proved a dead end, and this is ultimately what would have doomed the Amiga installed base, even if Commodore hadn't been mismanaged to the extent it was.
l33tman 5y ago
The A1000/A500 reigned from 1985 to 1990 or so, more or less the same platform for 5 years, a platform I could write all programs I wanted to in pure assembler, and eventually knowing every register and bits of HW in the entire system. Essentially just the right amount of complexity for individuals (kids, even) to learn without the knowledge getting obsolete before you mastered it. It was "lightning in a bottle" so to speak. I'm glad the Arduino, RPi and other small devices exist today, that don't evolve as fast as desktop OSes or mobile SDKs do, that give the chance for curious minds to learn before their knowledge gets obsoleted.
- sys_64738 5y ago
  1987 to 1993 in Britain.
mastazi 5y ago
13:21 in the linked video: using the copper to change palette below a certain scanline - that is genius! I really like how creative the 80's and early 90's platforms were!
- 13of40 5y ago
  I think that was also the idea behind the HAM(?) image format, that allowed you to display images with more than 256 colors, by dynamically changing the pallette as the frame is drawn. A similar trick was used to change the location of the screen memory midway through the frame, and that's how they implemented the guru meditation error drop-down. Unfortunately, IIRC, the CPU was so slow the raster would travel about ten pixels between changes, so it was mostly just good for effects that used full scan lines, like raster bars, etc. You couldn't use it to programmatically draw a high resolution image or anything like that.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    >A similar trick was used to change the location of the screen memory midway through the frame, and that's how they implemented the guru meditation error drop-down. A simpler example, the support for showing multiple virtual desktops (Amiga called them screens) at once. The DMA registers in the Agnus and the video mode in Denise would be set to the next screen at a certain point @ raster, triggered by the copper.
julianeon 5y ago
I see a lot of hymns to the Amiga, and people reading them would naturally think, if I had an Amiga think what I could've done... Well, I had an Amiga, and all I did was use it to play games; maybe those games were a little aesthetically better, but in the end, I didn't do much with it. So even if you didn't have an Amiga, don't worry - you might never have done anything great with it anyway (like me).
- sien 5y ago
  Yep. I had an Amiga and learnt to code in Basic on it. But anything beyond that was so much harder than it is today. Sure, there was a GNU C-Compiler for the Amiga, but in the 1980s people didn't know about those things because so few people had internet access. Today if you're a bright kid and want to learn coding there are so many resources and free languages. Of course the distractions are much better too really.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    GCC must also have been painfully slow on Amiga hardware compared with other available C compilers?
    - ChainOfFools 5y ago
      the only other option IIRC was Lattice C, and that was painfully slow as well. there's only so much 7.16 mhz can do.
      - squarefoot 5y ago
        I seem to recall that Dice-C was faster than Lattice/SAS. If C compatibility wasn't required, then Amiga-E was possibly the best option if one wanted a (very) fast compiler paired with a high lever powerful language. https://strlen.com/amiga-e/ https://strlen.com/amiga-e/
      - butlerm 5y ago
        Aztec C was a commercially available, and very popular, C compiler available for the Amiga at the time. And for any reasonable size program, it was fast enough. I worked on one unusually large program for the comparable Atari ST that took about half an hour to build. Most "normal" programs compiled a lot faster.
bane 5y ago
I remember, sometime in '91 or '92 getting into a flaming argument on a local BBS message board about why the Amiga was better than the PCs at the time. While Amigas weren't common in the U.S. mid-Atlantic at the time they did have a small following of die-hards (even then!) and even a very nice retail store at the local mall. A couple of my friends even had Amigas that I enjoyed playing games on from time to time. The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on. Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match. It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up. Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation. What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk. It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.
- 01100011 5y ago
  By '91 the PC was finally starting to catch up. In the late 80s the Amiga was far superior, at least as far as consumer priced equipment goes. I was in the process of switching from my beloved A500 to a 386sx-40(IIRC) in '91 when law enforcement confiscated them all, but I remember wanting a PC for more power.
phendrenad2 5y ago
The Amiga was hackable. While the PC ecosystem cut corners, and the Macintosh tried to keep people from knowing the internal details, the Amiga enjoyed a hacker/tinkerer culture from the start.
awful 5y ago
So many great (and bad) things: The Aminet repository. AREXX language. Directory Opus utility customizable file manager. Ability to sync w/ TVs. Hundreds of rich assembler coded video, audio, and graphics Demos of international origin. Cinemaware games. NewTek DigiPaint. Diga telecomm tool. Miami TCP/IP (I helped H.K. to get PPP working with NT Server). Unixy and open source tools available. Lattice C. Very capable multi-tasking. Hardware accelerators, FPU, SCSI boards. Dragging dropdown virtual screens. A single fixed root vector for OS (I no longer remember why important but the obvious), Logical Volumes and automatic mount requesters; good for small storage systems as the system knows to search and otherwise ask you to insert the correct disk, data or program. Dungeon Master. FA-18. Music Tracker and mods. Good enough quality sound. Again Directory Opus and Im sure I missed a lot.
zengargoyle 5y ago
I think about half the comments I've ever made here on HN are about my Amiga 1000 that I got in 1985. By 1989 it had a 14MHz 68020/68881 with 4MB Fast RAM, an 80 MB SCSI drive, and a MIDI interface that I built myself from diagrams from a Byte Magazine article. Such an awesome piece of kit. I worked in front of a Sun 3/50 (that's were I got the SCSI disk) and used the Sun compilers to write my Amiga code. Poor person's Sun workstation it was.
jl6 5y ago
Doom is probably the most obvious example of how the PC eventually came to overtake the Amiga’s graphical capabilities, but I think it’s less well known that it took even longer for anything to overtake the Amiga’s audio capabilities. Demoscene creators were putting out fantastically creative polyphonic rich music on Amigas for years while Doom-playing PCs were still blip-blopping. Even when Sound Blaster type cards (with sampled instruments) became popular, MIDI was the standard of PC audio, which couldn’t hold a candle to MODs. The MOD music format actually outlived the Amiga, being used in 1998 in Unreal and in 2000 in Deus Ex.
- zibzab 5y ago
  Doom is actually what made me to scrap my Amiga and get a PC. Some guy showed me his collection of pirated id software games and although the machine was big and ugly and the sound was crap i know i just had to have one. Sounds crazy, but that's how the mind works.
- ticklemyelmo 5y ago
  The Gravis Ultrasound was a 3rd or 4th generation PC soundcard that came out 7 years after the Amiga. Its claim to fame was basically that it was as good as an Amiga.
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Copper.
zeroc8 5y ago
There is a guy on yt coding a full Amiga demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vPpj_x4wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vPpj_x4wo Quite a fascinating blast from the past. The C128 and later the Amiga are the main reasons I became a developer. My parents kept bugging me for wasting my time. Now, almost 40 years later, they understand ;)

137 points by harel 5y ago

I had an Amiga until the PC finally surpassed it, which took... 11 years?

What made Amiga great was all the awesome stuff you could play with once you get tired of playing with the best games ever written. The Workbench 3.0 Utility disk included a copy of MicroEmacs. Decades later still my favourite editor and top 5 piece of software.

aidos 5y ago

Amiga just felt so fun to explore. There was a sort of playfulness to it, but actually it was still this amazing creative machine.

rbanffy 5y ago

Bitplane graphics was probably a bad decision. It's good for games, but terrible for any program where you want to change one pixel at a time - If you have a linear frame buffer, lighting up a pixel means a read from memory, some OR'ing and a write. When you have 5 bit-planes, you need as many reads as bits change in the color value, up to 5, and then 5 writes. Good for games, but bad for mostly everything else. Also, the keyboard, it came out a good couple years after the DEC LK201, which is very similar to both the Amiga and the STs. The IBM enhanced came out at about the same time, but, IIRC, the 122 key layout dates back to the Model F family. I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context.

TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Bitplane graphics Fun fact regarding bitplane: a friend of mine realized that he could use only 16 colors instead of 32, have all colors from, say, 0 to 15 be black, then clear the whole screen by zero'ing only the first bitplane (so effectively only blitting one-fifth of what would typically need to be blitted in case you wanted to clear the whole screen between two frames). Problem is: running the Amiga in 16 colors mode (instead of 32) was faster than using that trick in 32 colors mode. However... That trick worked on the Atari ST. It was a very fast way to clear the whole screen. But as the Atari ST only had 4 bitplanes to start with, then you'd end up with only 8 usable colors if you used that trick. We're talking decades ago, but I'm pretty sure I remember this correctly (as in: we actually tried and timed all this on both the Amiga and the Atari ST back in the days). > I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back then to properly place these machines in their historical context. Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today. Yeah... Computers used to be more exciting. And don't forget the M1.
crazydoggers 5y ago
Bitplane graphics allowed the Amiga to do a lot of graphical tricks other machines, given the limited memory of the times, just couldn’t do. Examples include halfbrite and HAM modes. It’s part of the reason anyone who saw Amigas in the early days felt like it was decades ahead of the competition. By the time chunky mode graphics and 3D rendering really started to have an advantage, computers were moving to seperate graphics cards anyway, so I don’t see it as a bad choice. Had Amiga continued I’m sure we would still be using Nvidia and AMD graphics cards in them now. In fact 3rd party graphics cards did start appearing for the Amiga. The bad decisions for Amiga all came down to Commodore sucking it dry and not putting any money into the engineering division.
- spiritplumber 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omMOuyTLmyg
phire 5y ago
Changing a single pixel at a time wasn't a common operation in the 80s when the Amiga was popular. The main class of application that would have used single-pixel modifications would be paint-style programs, and the cpu was generally fast enough to keep up with user input. There are advantages to planar graphics that can help applications too. Being able to dynamically change the number of bitplanes based on an application's color requirements both saves ram and increases cpu performance. It wasn't really until about 1992 that the lack of chunky graphics really became a liability, with the rise of 3D games like Doom and various multimedia applications, like streaming video off CD-ROM and more advanced productivity apps. If Amiga had actually delivered the AAA chipset in 1993 with it's various chunky graphics modes, maybe the platform would have survived.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > single-pixel modifications would be paint-style programs Any app that draws a pixel as a single operation does that. In order to make this faster, you'll need to keep a bitmap to hold the image and then, maybe, use the blitter to render it to the screen. Bitplanes allow some tricks with games, when you split the planes into more than one playfield, or could even use it for windowing, putting the active window on one group of bitplanes above the rest so that you wouldn't bother to redraw windows because oclusion isn't destructive.
  - phire 5y ago
    Yes, but I'm having a hard time thinking of many applications from the late 80s and very early 90s that required per-pixel control of the frame buffer. Text rendering is not done per-pixel, it's done in character sized blocks. Most UI elements at the time were tiled-based. You can do a lot with just blocks of pixels. And with anything that's done in large block (especially blocks that are multiples of 8 pixels wide), the per-pixel cost is atomized and becomes much less of an overhead.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      If you are predominantly working with bitmaps, there aren't many reasons to operate on a pixel basis, but, take, for instance, drawing a line of n pixels. For a linear 8-bit frame buffer, you'll need up to n reads and n writes (because the 68000 had a 16-bit bus). For an 8-plane buffer (for the sake of simplicity), you'll need 8 times as many operations, one for each plane. If you know you'll be setting or unsetting a pixel in the same 16 pixel region, you can collapse those in-plane ops into a single write, but that requires some cleverness (like off-screen rendering to fast RAM).
mrandish 5y ago
> Bitplane graphics was probably a bad decision. The original Amiga shipped in 1985 and at that time the bitplane approach offered a reasonable trade-off versus chunky pixels by enabling some uniquely powerful capabilities. When Commodore died of self-inflicted wounds in 1994, a much more powerful new chipset codenamed "Hombre" had been created and was working on prototype boards. Hombre had chunky pixels among other cool things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset. Too bad it never shipped
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Akiko was The planar to chunky chip in the Amiga CD32 console in 1993.

TacticalCoder 5y ago

What made the Amiga great is that this was not just a bit but way more advanced than anything out there. When I had to, reluctantly, switch to a 386 PC, this was very painful because it felt like going backwards in time by several years. A friend of mine had an Amiga 1000 (it came out in 1985, before the 500 whic surfaced in 1987): going to his home was witnessing the future. Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4 Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2 disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive and 30 5"1/4 floppies than it was to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that drive one of these days and see how it was made.

300bps 5y ago
I went 64->128->8088. When I went with the 10 MHz 8088 with a 40 MB hard drive I also looked at the alternatives of getting either the Amiga 500 or just getting a Lt. Kernal 20 MB hard drive for my 128. The driving factor for needing more storage of course was for my BBS at the time. In all I’m happy I went the IBM compat route.
- joegahona 5y ago
  Wow, “Lt. Kernal 20 MB” is something I haven’t thought about in ages. A friend of mine bought whatever the competitor to the Lt. Kernal was at the time, used, and it was a complete lemon — he never got it working and never recouped his money. I wish I could remember the name of it — he was going to start his own BBS called and I was going to be a subop. I was a hard-core BBS user back in that era but never actually ran one, so I went 64 > 128 > Amiga 500 > 386.
function_seven 5y ago
My Dad bought the family computer for Christmas, 1985. It was an Amiga 1000 and I still vividly remember him teaching me to type "dpaint" at the command line to fire up DeluxePaint. (IRRC, the DeluxePaint disk didn't come with even a minimal Workbench environment on it, just an AmigaDOS window). I was 6 years old. I used that machine for 10 years. I made drawings and animations (DP III), added titles to the silly camcorder tapes my friends and I made (DeluxeVideo), wrote book reports (ProWrite), made Christmas and birthday cards (various), composed music (Music Studio), played games, and did some light exploring of the system itself, playing with startup-sequence to improve boot times and customize things. It wasn't until I was a junior in high school that I switched to a 486, and it felt like a step backward in many ways. Of course it was much faster, and had a hard-drive (my first ever), and the resolution was (only a bit!) better. But it was still limited to 16 colors, only 640x480, and all the software was bland business-y bullshit. I have nothing but fond memories of that machine, and I wish Amiga had been more successful in the market. It took a decade to get back to where they would have been had the trajectory continued from their 1985 launch.

BrissyCoder 5y ago

My generation had the Amiga. This generation has Crypto and Web 3.0. The future is bleak.

skybrian 5y ago
Imagine if we got a glimpse of Minecraft back then. This and probably many future generations have that.
- harel 5y ago
  Minecraft would have made a great Amiga game. Probably would have been it's killer app that would have made it the mainstream computer.
  - ben174 5y ago
    No generation of Amiga that was commercially available could come even close to rendering the real-time 3D graphics of Minecraft. The Amiga was impressive but even running something like Doom (or Gloom - since Doom was never officially ported) was a struggle on the cutting edge Amiga 1200.
    - democracy 5y ago
      speccy fans tried ))) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw&t=160s&ab_channel=yerzmyey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v7cFGneuaw&t=160s&ab_channe...
      - BrissyCoder 5y ago
- pndy 5y ago
  Weren't Lego sets very popular around Amiga best times?

snarfy 5y ago

As a kid in a computer store in 1987, it was a pretty easy choice. The PC was either monochrome or 4 color CGA graphics. The amiga had a 3d ray traced animation of juggling spheres.

fzzzy 5y ago
The Mac II had millions of colors at 640x480.
- Jedd 5y ago
  > The Mac II had millions of colors at 640x480. The Mac II could display millions of colours, but not at the same time. From wikipedia: "The Macintosh II includes a graphics card that supports a true-color 16.7 million color palette and was available in two configurations: 4-bit and 8-bit. The 4-bit model supports 16 colors on a 640×480 display and 256 colors (8-bit video) on a 512×384 display ..." There were optional video RAM upgrades, but none that gave you 'millions of colours at 640x480'. Wikipedia also notes: "The video card does not include hardware acceleration of drawing operations." Also, for comparison, in 1987 when the Mac II came out (two years after the Amiga 1000) you could buy a Mac II for USD$5,500 or the Amiga for USD$1300.
  - detaro 5y ago
    Or later in 1987 an Amiga 500 for 699.
  - drzaiusapelord 5y ago
    That Mac II cost $14,000 in 2021 money. Its just incredible how expensive computers were back then.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      Yes, I'm always surprised when I hear people saying they got an early Mac as a present or when they went to college.
  - 5y ago

cassiopeia 5y ago

Way better gfx and sound than the Atari ST;)

bhauer 5y ago
As a former Atari ST user, I admit this is the truth.
harel 5y ago
Now you're just trying to pick a fight :-)
- scarygliders 5y ago
  They're correct, though! :trollface: ;)
  - harel 5y ago
    They are. I had an Amiga, and would have said the same to any ST owner I met, when I was trying to pick a fight :)
    - snvzz 5y ago
      lol, atari.
GordonS 5y ago
Graphics, yeah, easily, but the Atari STE surely had better sound!
- harel 5y ago
  It just had midi ports and cool shaped function buttons
butlerm 5y ago
The Atari ST made up for a lot with better, separate black and white and color monitors in the early versions.

harel 5y ago

The site this links to, 8bitnews.io, is a wonderful resource to a lot of retro news and projects and they have a mailing list that does not suck.

snvzz 5y ago
It would be fairly cool if it had RSS, but alas. They offer email subscription instead. I'll pass.
- jroesner 5y ago
  8bitnews here: RSS is coming ...
  - snvzz 5y ago
    I hope so. Once it shows up, I'll add to my aggregator.
  - harel 5y ago
    Hey! Thank you for 8bitnews. I don't remember a single "newsletter" I was actually happy to receive before it. Great work!

G3rn0ti 5y ago

If you’re really interested in what made the Amiga so great back in its day, checkout this book: The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_P0PG67PXCAY8RPVPD7JK https://www.amazon.de/dp/0262535696/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i... Unlike other books about retro it does not only try to trigger your nostalgia but is an actual deep dive into the history and the technology about this machine. For example: It explains in detail how the famous „Boing Ball“ demo used all of the Amiga‘s custom chips to keep the CPU almost idle while running. This was important for showing off the preemptive multitasking capabilities of the Amiga OS. It also includes a thorough look into the implementation details of Deluxe Paint I and how the IFF format came to be. I loved it!

city41 5y ago
I haven't read that book, but your description reminds me of this recent video which I thought did a good job explaining why the Amiga was so great: https://youtu.be/PHN8ANlR8KI https://youtu.be/PHN8ANlR8KI
- richrichardsson 5y ago
  I know my comment is useless, but: LOL. This is literally the linked video in the article. (it's a good one though, watched it last night)

tiffanyh 5y ago

Amiga lives on in spirit with DragonflyBSD. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ https://www.dragonflybsd.org/ Matt Dillon has brought a ton of design from Amiga to his FreeBSD fork called DragonflyBSD. And its extremely performant, which is impressive given how few work on DragonflyBSD vs Linux & other BSDs. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-freebsd13-dfly6&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=corei9-f...

vidarh 5y ago
As much as I respect Dillon, I can't say I've seen anything about DragonflyBSD that suggests it includes anything of what made AmigaOS interesting. Maybe there's more in the internals. I'd love to know more about it.
- tiffanyh 5y ago
  This entire HN thread is a good overview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12221466 And a bit here too https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.html?m=1 https://www.trollaxor.com/2012/05/miss-amiga-try-dragonfly.h...
  - vidarh 5y ago
    That doesn't really feel like it's giving you anything worthwhile. AROS and UAE provides more than good enough abilities to run old AmigaOS code. But old AmigaOS code doesn't really bring any of what was great to a modern system. I hope it's exaggerating the similarities of Hammer and FFS, because FFS was dated already a couple of decades ago. It was never a strength of AmigaOS.

scarygliders 5y ago

The Amiga had a true multi-tasking operating system, years before Apple Macs and Windows. That alone made it pretty awesome.

bni 5y ago
Still today it is a special feeling multitasking on the Amiga. Pressing Amiga-M to switch screens. Sliding the screens up and down, revealing what is behind, every screen having its own palette. You are at a mercy of every program behaving though. But that is part of its charm.

neom 5y ago

AmigaOS felt more powerful than windows, but less intimidating than linux. Simply put: It was a lot of fun.

mrandish 5y ago

The Amiga 1200 was arguably the last and best of the golden era "console computers", (meaning all-in-ones with the CPU inside the keyboard and could display on a standard analog TV). This style of home computer largely reigned the consumer market between 1980 and 1990, beginning with 8-bit machines like the Commodore 64, Atari 400/800 and Apple II, evolving to 16-bit with the Amiga 500 and Atari 1040STE and ending with the 32-bit Amiga 1200. The Amiga 1200 was based on a Motorola 68020, had a hardware-based bit blitter and could display 320x240 in 256 colors, basically the holy grail of analog gaming graphics modes. It was the only widely distributed home computer capable of faithfully emulating the vast majority of 1980-90 dedicated arcade machines with few compromises. I have all the machines mentioned above in pristine working condition and still enjoy playing around with them. It was a special era in computer history because every platform had its own unique hardware and operating system providing different capabilities and trade-offs. This gives each platform an unmistakable (and strongly-opinionated) 'personality'.

wk_end 5y ago
The 68020 is probably the last great CPU to write pure assembly in, too. The instruction set is rich enough to make it straightforward to write by hand - unlike RISC-ier chips, C is almost superfluous for many tasks - but simple and clean enough to keep in your head (unlike x86). It cleans up some of the rough edges from the 68000, and adds some great features and a ton of speed. But: no MMU, no complex pipeline or branch prediction, and the cache is instruction-only, meaning you rarely need to think about it to get optimum performance.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I disagree that RISC chips are especially hard to write for by hand - plenty of people did exactly that for the Acorn Archimedes. (And writing by hand can still be worthwhile even when you're lacking fancy CISC instructions, because you can design bespoke, custom-use "calling conventions" that make way better use of the register file. This is hard to do in C even when theoretically possible-- via fancy, non-standard asm intrinsics-- because you don't know beforehand how the compiler will choose to allocate registers.) The MC68k architecture proved a dead end, and this is ultimately what would have doomed the Amiga installed base, even if Commodore hadn't been mismanaged to the extent it was.

l33tman 5y ago

The A1000/A500 reigned from 1985 to 1990 or so, more or less the same platform for 5 years, a platform I could write all programs I wanted to in pure assembler, and eventually knowing every register and bits of HW in the entire system. Essentially just the right amount of complexity for individuals (kids, even) to learn without the knowledge getting obsolete before you mastered it. It was "lightning in a bottle" so to speak. I'm glad the Arduino, RPi and other small devices exist today, that don't evolve as fast as desktop OSes or mobile SDKs do, that give the chance for curious minds to learn before their knowledge gets obsoleted.

sys_64738 5y ago
1987 to 1993 in Britain.

mastazi 5y ago

13:21 in the linked video: using the copper to change palette below a certain scanline - that is genius! I really like how creative the 80's and early 90's platforms were!

13of40 5y ago
I think that was also the idea behind the HAM(?) image format, that allowed you to display images with more than 256 colors, by dynamically changing the pallette as the frame is drawn. A similar trick was used to change the location of the screen memory midway through the frame, and that's how they implemented the guru meditation error drop-down. Unfortunately, IIRC, the CPU was so slow the raster would travel about ten pixels between changes, so it was mostly just good for effects that used full scan lines, like raster bars, etc. You couldn't use it to programmatically draw a high resolution image or anything like that.
- snvzz 5y ago
  >A similar trick was used to change the location of the screen memory midway through the frame, and that's how they implemented the guru meditation error drop-down. A simpler example, the support for showing multiple virtual desktops (Amiga called them screens) at once. The DMA registers in the Agnus and the video mode in Denise would be set to the next screen at a certain point @ raster, triggered by the copper.

julianeon 5y ago

I see a lot of hymns to the Amiga, and people reading them would naturally think, if I had an Amiga think what I could've done... Well, I had an Amiga, and all I did was use it to play games; maybe those games were a little aesthetically better, but in the end, I didn't do much with it. So even if you didn't have an Amiga, don't worry - you might never have done anything great with it anyway (like me).

sien 5y ago
Yep. I had an Amiga and learnt to code in Basic on it. But anything beyond that was so much harder than it is today. Sure, there was a GNU C-Compiler for the Amiga, but in the 1980s people didn't know about those things because so few people had internet access. Today if you're a bright kid and want to learn coding there are so many resources and free languages. Of course the distractions are much better too really.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  GCC must also have been painfully slow on Amiga hardware compared with other available C compilers?
  - ChainOfFools 5y ago
    the only other option IIRC was Lattice C, and that was painfully slow as well. there's only so much 7.16 mhz can do.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      I seem to recall that Dice-C was faster than Lattice/SAS. If C compatibility wasn't required, then Amiga-E was possibly the best option if one wanted a (very) fast compiler paired with a high lever powerful language. https://strlen.com/amiga-e/ https://strlen.com/amiga-e/
    - butlerm 5y ago
      Aztec C was a commercially available, and very popular, C compiler available for the Amiga at the time. And for any reasonable size program, it was fast enough. I worked on one unusually large program for the comparable Atari ST that took about half an hour to build. Most "normal" programs compiled a lot faster.

bane 5y ago

I remember, sometime in '91 or '92 getting into a flaming argument on a local BBS message board about why the Amiga was better than the PCs at the time. While Amigas weren't common in the U.S. mid-Atlantic at the time they did have a small following of die-hards (even then!) and even a very nice retail store at the local mall. A couple of my friends even had Amigas that I enjoyed playing games on from time to time. The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on. Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match. It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up. Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation. What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk. It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.

01100011 5y ago
By '91 the PC was finally starting to catch up. In the late 80s the Amiga was far superior, at least as far as consumer priced equipment goes. I was in the process of switching from my beloved A500 to a 386sx-40(IIRC) in '91 when law enforcement confiscated them all, but I remember wanting a PC for more power.

phendrenad2 5y ago

The Amiga was hackable. While the PC ecosystem cut corners, and the Macintosh tried to keep people from knowing the internal details, the Amiga enjoyed a hacker/tinkerer culture from the start.

awful 5y ago

So many great (and bad) things: The Aminet repository. AREXX language. Directory Opus utility customizable file manager. Ability to sync w/ TVs. Hundreds of rich assembler coded video, audio, and graphics Demos of international origin. Cinemaware games. NewTek DigiPaint. Diga telecomm tool. Miami TCP/IP (I helped H.K. to get PPP working with NT Server). Unixy and open source tools available. Lattice C. Very capable multi-tasking. Hardware accelerators, FPU, SCSI boards. Dragging dropdown virtual screens. A single fixed root vector for OS (I no longer remember why important but the obvious), Logical Volumes and automatic mount requesters; good for small storage systems as the system knows to search and otherwise ask you to insert the correct disk, data or program. Dungeon Master. FA-18. Music Tracker and mods. Good enough quality sound. Again Directory Opus and Im sure I missed a lot.

zengargoyle 5y ago

I think about half the comments I've ever made here on HN are about my Amiga 1000 that I got in 1985. By 1989 it had a 14MHz 68020/68881 with 4MB Fast RAM, an 80 MB SCSI drive, and a MIDI interface that I built myself from diagrams from a Byte Magazine article. Such an awesome piece of kit. I worked in front of a Sun 3/50 (that's were I got the SCSI disk) and used the Sun compilers to write my Amiga code. Poor person's Sun workstation it was.

jl6 5y ago

Doom is probably the most obvious example of how the PC eventually came to overtake the Amiga’s graphical capabilities, but I think it’s less well known that it took even longer for anything to overtake the Amiga’s audio capabilities. Demoscene creators were putting out fantastically creative polyphonic rich music on Amigas for years while Doom-playing PCs were still blip-blopping. Even when Sound Blaster type cards (with sampled instruments) became popular, MIDI was the standard of PC audio, which couldn’t hold a candle to MODs. The MOD music format actually outlived the Amiga, being used in 1998 in Unreal and in 2000 in Deus Ex.

zibzab 5y ago
Doom is actually what made me to scrap my Amiga and get a PC. Some guy showed me his collection of pirated id software games and although the machine was big and ugly and the sound was crap i know i just had to have one. Sounds crazy, but that's how the mind works.
ticklemyelmo 5y ago
The Gravis Ultrasound was a 3rd or 4th generation PC soundcard that came out 7 years after the Amiga. Its claim to fame was basically that it was as good as an Amiga.

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Copper.

zeroc8 5y ago

There is a guy on yt coding a full Amiga demo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vPpj_x4wo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-vPpj_x4wo Quite a fascinating blast from the past. The C128 and later the Amiga are the main reasons I became a developer. My parents kept bugging me for wasting my time. Now, almost 40 years later, they understand ;)