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It was quite interesting to have an Amiga with a super fast m68060 around the time of the m68k -> PowerPC transition. Many things on the '060 were faster than e

It was quite interesting to have an Amiga with a super fast m68060 around the time of the m68k -> PowerPC transition. Many things on the '060 were faster than even native PowerPC apps on the first generation Power Macs. With real DMA Fast SCSI-2, 256 megs of memory and true multitasking, it was a beast of a machine. ShapeShifter is quite good. I still have it, and it's still productive :) http://lilith.zia.io/ http://lilith.zia.io/

actionfromafar 5y ago
Yep, came here for this. There were a couple of strange twilight years when Commodore was almost (then actually) dead, and at the same time: An Amiga with external third party graphics card, 68060 third party CPU, SCSI-2 was faster and cheaper running MacOS than anything Apple could offer. Notably Photoshop was faster, because it took quite a while for all filters to be competently ported to PPC, and as OP said, the PPC in the Macs weren't even that fast in the first models. Edit: I think I might have had an account on that BSD Amiga of yours, at one time? Early 2000s if true. Someone gave me shell access to a tricked out A1200, I wonder if it could have been yours. If I recall correctly, some people had web pages there, including some musician called Zia. (You!?)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  The 68k had become a dead end by that time, this is what really killed the Amiga platform. Meanwhile PPC was in active development (and modern versions of IBM POWER are still in development today, for what it's worth).
  - actionfromafar 5y ago
    What mostly killed the Commodore Amiga, was brutal mismanagement by Commodore itself.
    - coldacid 5y ago
      This. Between Irving Gould sucking Commodore blood like a vampire, and his hatchet-man Mehdi Ali's endless stream of bad decisions, Commodore was already doomed years before it finally went bankrupt in '94.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    If Commodore hadn't gone under, the next generation Amigas would have been using HP-RISC, though, with an A1200-on-a-chip for running older software. (That SoC was supposed to include a 68k core plus the AGA chipset cores, kind of like the Apollo Vampire).
- johnklos 5y ago
  Yes, zia.io / ziaspace.com are the same, and yes, that's the same Amiga 1200 - small world! Now the primary shell server for email / web hosting / development is an AlphaServer DS25. Of course the Amiga needed a recapping a handful of years ago, and since the early 2000s the storage has been upgraded a few times, but it's still happily running, serving Aminet files and compiling pkgsrc packages. It's funny - if you look at the pictures on the mini web site it hosts, you can tell they were taken with a real film camera and digitized. That machine was an excellent Mac workstation, and now it's a very stable and reliable server. I really got my money's worth from it :)
scarface74 5y ago
I was around arguing with Amiga fanboys in this era. It was a very brief period of time - maybe less than a year after the PowerPCs were introduced when this was true. By the 1995, Apple released the second generation emulator, all of the apps any one cared about were native, and even none native apps were calling mostly native OS routines.

actionfromafar 5y ago

Yep, came here for this. There were a couple of strange twilight years when Commodore was almost (then actually) dead, and at the same time: An Amiga with external third party graphics card, 68060 third party CPU, SCSI-2 was faster and cheaper running MacOS than anything Apple could offer. Notably Photoshop was faster, because it took quite a while for all filters to be competently ported to PPC, and as OP said, the PPC in the Macs weren't even that fast in the first models. Edit: I think I might have had an account on that BSD Amiga of yours, at one time? Early 2000s if true. Someone gave me shell access to a tricked out A1200, I wonder if it could have been yours. If I recall correctly, some people had web pages there, including some musician called Zia. (You!?)

zozbot234 5y ago
The 68k had become a dead end by that time, this is what really killed the Amiga platform. Meanwhile PPC was in active development (and modern versions of IBM POWER are still in development today, for what it's worth).
- actionfromafar 5y ago
  What mostly killed the Commodore Amiga, was brutal mismanagement by Commodore itself.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    This. Between Irving Gould sucking Commodore blood like a vampire, and his hatchet-man Mehdi Ali's endless stream of bad decisions, Commodore was already doomed years before it finally went bankrupt in '94.
- coldacid 5y ago
  If Commodore hadn't gone under, the next generation Amigas would have been using HP-RISC, though, with an A1200-on-a-chip for running older software. (That SoC was supposed to include a 68k core plus the AGA chipset cores, kind of like the Apollo Vampire).
johnklos 5y ago
Yes, zia.io / ziaspace.com are the same, and yes, that's the same Amiga 1200 - small world! Now the primary shell server for email / web hosting / development is an AlphaServer DS25. Of course the Amiga needed a recapping a handful of years ago, and since the early 2000s the storage has been upgraded a few times, but it's still happily running, serving Aminet files and compiling pkgsrc packages. It's funny - if you look at the pictures on the mini web site it hosts, you can tell they were taken with a real film camera and digitized. That machine was an excellent Mac workstation, and now it's a very stable and reliable server. I really got my money's worth from it :)

scarface74 5y ago

I was around arguing with Amiga fanboys in this era. It was a very brief period of time - maybe less than a year after the PowerPCs were introduced when this was true. By the 1995, Apple released the second generation emulator, all of the apps any one cared about were native, and even none native apps were calling mostly native OS routines.