4 ms·

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 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.
    - flohofwoe 5y ago
      DICE C by Matt Dillon (of DragonFly BSD fame) was a great low-cost option for C coding on the Amiga.
  - zeroc8 5y ago
    C was a pain in the ass, at least for those like me who only had one disk drive. That's why assembly language was the natural progression from Basic back then.
squarefoot 5y ago
I've owned the A500, 2000 and 4000 models. The A500 helped me to study how digital gates and ICs work using a software that allowed their emulation plus the excellent Don Lancaster cookbooks. I managed to "build" a device that could grab a value on a port, store it into a memory, get it back and send it over a serial line to be reconstructed back on the other side. It was awfully slow, of course, but the experience turned out of great help to me. I also made some bucks by building and selling MIDI interfaces, ADC0804 based parallel port audio samplers and a very simple device which would activate a beeper whenever there was a disk write. Most viruses replicated by writing themselves on the bootblock as soon as a diskette was inserted so an unexpected beep could be a sign that something was going on. With the A2000 plus the Dr.T's KCS sequencer I managed to compose and record my first over 20 minutes long prog rock song using a Roland R8 drum machine, a Yamaha TX81Z expander for bass and a TX802 for guitars and other intruments, then a Roland Juno 2 for solos and pads. It was amazing how the 8MHz Amiga 500 and 2000 (actually 7.16 MHz as the system clock was synced to the video clock which in my case was PAL) could record a very fast realtime double stroke roll without a hiccup (sw/hw limit was 1/384). I used this seemingly unique feature of the R8 by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad, and the Amiga didn't complain. (Any Neil Peart fans out there should understand what I was trying to accomplish:^) On all machines I made my first experiences with 68K assembly and other languages, also developing along with a friend a chat system for the Dialog Pro BBS software. The Amiga also taught me how fast an user interface can be if well developed, and how to make use of system resources without wasting them. I would probably never think that Android on a 2GHz phone today is slow if I didn't experience AmigaOS on a 25MHz computer back then. Also, AmigaOS had no memory management, so if I allocated say one byte and exited from my program, that byte would remain unavailable until next reboot (short of using dangerous low level tools to free it). This forced developers to be very careful when using resources: each allocation would need its corresponding free before exiting, and situations where one would need to allocate A, then B, then C, and one of them wasn't available had to be taken into account (usually by conditionally freeing in reverse order). So did I do anything great with the Amiga? Probably not, but the knowledge and experience turned out useful in all my jobs, and still is today. To me, using the Amiga alone was the great accomplishment.
s-lted 5y ago
I wonder sometimes about the opportunities and impetuses surrounding different people, thinking that we need a lot of the right things before anything is at all likely to germinate.

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.
  - flohofwoe 5y ago
    DICE C by Matt Dillon (of DragonFly BSD fame) was a great low-cost option for C coding on the Amiga.
- zeroc8 5y ago
  C was a pain in the ass, at least for those like me who only had one disk drive. That's why assembly language was the natural progression from Basic back then.

squarefoot 5y ago

I've owned the A500, 2000 and 4000 models. The A500 helped me to study how digital gates and ICs work using a software that allowed their emulation plus the excellent Don Lancaster cookbooks. I managed to "build" a device that could grab a value on a port, store it into a memory, get it back and send it over a serial line to be reconstructed back on the other side. It was awfully slow, of course, but the experience turned out of great help to me. I also made some bucks by building and selling MIDI interfaces, ADC0804 based parallel port audio samplers and a very simple device which would activate a beeper whenever there was a disk write. Most viruses replicated by writing themselves on the bootblock as soon as a diskette was inserted so an unexpected beep could be a sign that something was going on. With the A2000 plus the Dr.T's KCS sequencer I managed to compose and record my first over 20 minutes long prog rock song using a Roland R8 drum machine, a Yamaha TX81Z expander for bass and a TX802 for guitars and other intruments, then a Roland Juno 2 for solos and pads. It was amazing how the 8MHz Amiga 500 and 2000 (actually 7.16 MHz as the system clock was synced to the video clock which in my case was PAL) could record a very fast realtime double stroke roll without a hiccup (sw/hw limit was 1/384). I used this seemingly unique feature of the R8 by pressing both flam and roll buttons while modulating the dynamics on the instrument pad, and the Amiga didn't complain. (Any Neil Peart fans out there should understand what I was trying to accomplish:^) On all machines I made my first experiences with 68K assembly and other languages, also developing along with a friend a chat system for the Dialog Pro BBS software. The Amiga also taught me how fast an user interface can be if well developed, and how to make use of system resources without wasting them. I would probably never think that Android on a 2GHz phone today is slow if I didn't experience AmigaOS on a 25MHz computer back then. Also, AmigaOS had no memory management, so if I allocated say one byte and exited from my program, that byte would remain unavailable until next reboot (short of using dangerous low level tools to free it). This forced developers to be very careful when using resources: each allocation would need its corresponding free before exiting, and situations where one would need to allocate A, then B, then C, and one of them wasn't available had to be taken into account (usually by conditionally freeing in reverse order). So did I do anything great with the Amiga? Probably not, but the knowledge and experience turned out useful in all my jobs, and still is today. To me, using the Amiga alone was the great accomplishment.

s-lted 5y ago

I wonder sometimes about the opportunities and impetuses surrounding different people, thinking that we need a lot of the right things before anything is at all likely to germinate.