21 ms·

The Amiga Workbench Simulator

99 points by Lutzb 4y ago

EmmEff 4y ago
This brings back fond memories of my A1000 with Workbench 1.3. It's still amazing what this machine was capable of given it's very limited resources back in the day. Anybody remember Fred Fish shareware/public domain? I hung out at a local computer store and copied dozens of floppies in the heydays of the Amiga.
lakkal 4y ago
Hah, and visiting the page with Javascript disabled gives you an "Enable Javascript to continue" message styled like a Guru Meditation error. Nice touch.
Lutzb 4y ago
Also used for the Amega Event 37 page: https://amigaevent.de/WB.html https://amigaevent.de/WB.html
navjack27 4y ago
That's very cool
Max-Ganz-II 4y ago
Memories.
TekMol 4y ago
As a kid, I have spent years of my life in front of the C64 and later the Amiga. When I look at a C64 emulator, it brings up tons of memories. Commands like "POKE 53281,0", games like "Uridium", software like "Giga-CAD". But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?". Strange. Some of the software I wrote on the Amiga can still be found online. With screenshots and everything. I look at those and I can't even remember which language I wrote it in or which editor I used to write the code.
- kramerger 4y ago
  I don't know... Starting from workbench 3.1, Amiga had a far more advanced desktop than PC/Mac would see for a long time. Even today on win11, when you switch from desktop to a game in a different resolution there is a small lag. On Amiga you could have different screens with different resolutions displayed _simultaneously_.
- smeagull 4y ago
  I find it painful to emulate the Amiga to just play games. It feels like using a mac does today - as much as I might develop on it, I develop in the linux portions and the OS itself feels like a place to get away from as soon as possible.
  - detritus 4y ago
    My memory is that games-wise, one vary rarely touched Workbench for playing games. Most of them booted straight from disk, using the kickstart ROM.
- self_awareness 4y ago
  Could you post the links to those tools? I did writing in AsmOne's embedded editor, but since I was just a child, I haven't produced anything meaningful. I still remember some m68k's opcodes though!
- danielbarla 4y ago
  It was Cygnus Editor, of course! :) Your experience is interesting, and oddly I have almost the opposite experience. My guess is that it's somewhat tied to the respective phases of life we might have been in at the time. I was 5 when I started out on the C64, and while I got fairly deep into it, a lot of those memories essentially got wiped a few years later. The Amiga years, mostly from when I was 10 to 15, on the other hand, are crystal clear for me. And then there's he late 90s PC era, which is blurry again.
  - unwind 4y ago
    It was, but later years (at least for me) it was FrexxEd [1,2] which was written by another pair of Swedish dudes, one of which then went on to do some (I guess) hair-related piece of software ... whatitsname ... shampoo? no ... wig? naah ... ah, yeah, curl! :) [1]: http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FrexxEd http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FrexxEd [2]: https://github.com/vidarh/FrexxEd https://github.com/vidarh/FrexxEd
ndsipa_pomu 4y ago
I got a Guru Meditation for having javascript disabled - that's a nice touch
sheerun 4y ago
It gives me warm fuzzy feeling
pjmlp 4y ago
It is not really the same as the real deal, but it looks quite nice.
delibes 4y ago
In development since 2001! Impressively familiar to me
syx 4y ago
this is amazing such smooth design, does anybody know if the source code is available somewhere?
z9znz 4y ago
This is awesome! It really takes me back to when computers seemed amazing. (Yeah they do a million times more things now, but we are used to that.) When Amiga was new, it offered so many incredible things that most people had never seen. PCs were horse drawn carts compared to the Amiga sportscar... 4096 colors! The SID audio which could play multiple tracks and speak far better than anything before. For programming, just a few lines of code could demonstrated pre-emptive multitasking by "racing" two graphic progress bars. Games were mindblowing. Silkworm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syk0yecayBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syk0yecayBo) with two human players on the same computer, multi-parallax background, incredible sampled explosions and music soundrack, etc. etc. Edit - I forgot Lemmings! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgDS-16UFA&t=4372s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgDS-16UFA&t=4372s
- nikau 4y ago
  I think silkworm was the game that used DMA to load graphics tiles on the fly from the floppy disk, was pretty impressive for the time.
- LocalH 4y ago
  SID was the C64/128 sound chip. Amiga used the bespoke Paula chip to drive audio output.
- dm319 4y ago
  I got an Amiga A1200 as a kid at Christmas. The first one was a dud, so slightly disappointed. But my dad came home with a replacement from Dixons a couple days later. I didn't have high hopes of it doing anything, but we put a disk in and powered it up. I distinctly remember that moment the a strange synth pitch bending sound started playing, causing mild alarm, followed by this parallel scrolling scene [1]. There were a few of us there, our collective jaws dropped. I spent many years after that dabbling with electronic painting on Deluxe Paint IV, which had a terrific balance between being fun for someone who had no clue, but also opened up so many advanced features if you dug a bit (animation, morphing, colour cycling, brushes, gradient fills), and I've struggled to find something similarly joyous for my kids. I learnt to make music on Octamed. And I have so many fond memories of all the games I played; the little worlds we created in our heads where computer characters existed. Partly as a result, I have enjoyed playing computer games with my kids. I join in with them playing Zelda BOTW, and minecraft. I know that they will look back fondly on these imaginary worlds. However, I do wish I could get them more interested in the creative side of digital art. Maybe that will come later. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkhNi3RwUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkhNi3RwUY
0x445442 4y ago
Ahhh, a multitasking single user personal computer; the pinnacle of personal computing. AFAIK, Amiga, it’s variants and Haiku are the only OS’s left that fall in this category.
nobleach 4y ago
My Amiga 4000 booted right into VideoToaster. So it took me a couple of months before I really started messing with stuff in Workbench. Turns out, the used machine we bought to run our post production studio, had Directory Opus, Deluxe Paint, a coax NIC, multiple HDs. Our HD failed at one point and we found ourselves trying to reload the Toaster software from our box of floppy disks. One of the last disks was hosed so we had to drive hours to another city where a guy agreed to reload the software from another set of disks... if we gave him our NIC. We never got any of the other software back since we didn't have the original boxes.

99 points by Lutzb 4y ago

This brings back fond memories of my A1000 with Workbench 1.3. It's still amazing what this machine was capable of given it's very limited resources back in the day. Anybody remember Fred Fish shareware/public domain? I hung out at a local computer store and copied dozens of floppies in the heydays of the Amiga.

lakkal 4y ago

Hah, and visiting the page with Javascript disabled gives you an "Enable Javascript to continue" message styled like a Guru Meditation error. Nice touch.

Lutzb 4y ago

Also used for the Amega Event 37 page: https://amigaevent.de/WB.html https://amigaevent.de/WB.html

navjack27 4y ago

That's very cool

Max-Ganz-II 4y ago

Memories.

TekMol 4y ago

As a kid, I have spent years of my life in front of the C64 and later the Amiga. When I look at a C64 emulator, it brings up tons of memories. Commands like "POKE 53281,0", games like "Uridium", software like "Giga-CAD". But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?". Strange. Some of the software I wrote on the Amiga can still be found online. With screenshots and everything. I look at those and I can't even remember which language I wrote it in or which editor I used to write the code.

kramerger 4y ago
I don't know... Starting from workbench 3.1, Amiga had a far more advanced desktop than PC/Mac would see for a long time. Even today on win11, when you switch from desktop to a game in a different resolution there is a small lag. On Amiga you could have different screens with different resolutions displayed _simultaneously_.
smeagull 4y ago
I find it painful to emulate the Amiga to just play games. It feels like using a mac does today - as much as I might develop on it, I develop in the linux portions and the OS itself feels like a place to get away from as soon as possible.
- detritus 4y ago
  My memory is that games-wise, one vary rarely touched Workbench for playing games. Most of them booted straight from disk, using the kickstart ROM.
self_awareness 4y ago
Could you post the links to those tools? I did writing in AsmOne's embedded editor, but since I was just a child, I haven't produced anything meaningful. I still remember some m68k's opcodes though!
danielbarla 4y ago
It was Cygnus Editor, of course! :) Your experience is interesting, and oddly I have almost the opposite experience. My guess is that it's somewhat tied to the respective phases of life we might have been in at the time. I was 5 when I started out on the C64, and while I got fairly deep into it, a lot of those memories essentially got wiped a few years later. The Amiga years, mostly from when I was 10 to 15, on the other hand, are crystal clear for me. And then there's he late 90s PC era, which is blurry again.
- unwind 4y ago
  It was, but later years (at least for me) it was FrexxEd [1,2] which was written by another pair of Swedish dudes, one of which then went on to do some (I guess) hair-related piece of software ... whatitsname ... shampoo? no ... wig? naah ... ah, yeah, curl! :) [1]: http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FrexxEd http://www.texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?FrexxEd [2]: https://github.com/vidarh/FrexxEd https://github.com/vidarh/FrexxEd

ndsipa_pomu 4y ago

I got a Guru Meditation for having javascript disabled - that's a nice touch

sheerun 4y ago

It gives me warm fuzzy feeling

pjmlp 4y ago

It is not really the same as the real deal, but it looks quite nice.

delibes 4y ago

In development since 2001! Impressively familiar to me

syx 4y ago

this is amazing such smooth design, does anybody know if the source code is available somewhere?

z9znz 4y ago

This is awesome! It really takes me back to when computers seemed amazing. (Yeah they do a million times more things now, but we are used to that.) When Amiga was new, it offered so many incredible things that most people had never seen. PCs were horse drawn carts compared to the Amiga sportscar... 4096 colors! The SID audio which could play multiple tracks and speak far better than anything before. For programming, just a few lines of code could demonstrated pre-emptive multitasking by "racing" two graphic progress bars. Games were mindblowing. Silkworm (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syk0yecayBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syk0yecayBo) with two human players on the same computer, multi-parallax background, incredible sampled explosions and music soundrack, etc. etc. Edit - I forgot Lemmings! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgDS-16UFA&t=4372s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgDS-16UFA&t=4372s

nikau 4y ago
I think silkworm was the game that used DMA to load graphics tiles on the fly from the floppy disk, was pretty impressive for the time.
LocalH 4y ago
SID was the C64/128 sound chip. Amiga used the bespoke Paula chip to drive audio output.
dm319 4y ago
I got an Amiga A1200 as a kid at Christmas. The first one was a dud, so slightly disappointed. But my dad came home with a replacement from Dixons a couple days later. I didn't have high hopes of it doing anything, but we put a disk in and powered it up. I distinctly remember that moment the a strange synth pitch bending sound started playing, causing mild alarm, followed by this parallel scrolling scene [1]. There were a few of us there, our collective jaws dropped. I spent many years after that dabbling with electronic painting on Deluxe Paint IV, which had a terrific balance between being fun for someone who had no clue, but also opened up so many advanced features if you dug a bit (animation, morphing, colour cycling, brushes, gradient fills), and I've struggled to find something similarly joyous for my kids. I learnt to make music on Octamed. And I have so many fond memories of all the games I played; the little worlds we created in our heads where computer characters existed. Partly as a result, I have enjoyed playing computer games with my kids. I join in with them playing Zelda BOTW, and minecraft. I know that they will look back fondly on these imaginary worlds. However, I do wish I could get them more interested in the creative side of digital art. Maybe that will come later. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkhNi3RwUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdkhNi3RwUY

0x445442 4y ago

Ahhh, a multitasking single user personal computer; the pinnacle of personal computing. AFAIK, Amiga, it’s variants and Haiku are the only OS’s left that fall in this category.

nobleach 4y ago

My Amiga 4000 booted right into VideoToaster. So it took me a couple of months before I really started messing with stuff in Workbench. Turns out, the used machine we bought to run our post production studio, had Directory Opus, Deluxe Paint, a coax NIC, multiple HDs. Our HD failed at one point and we found ourselves trying to reload the Toaster software from our box of floppy disks. One of the last disks was hosed so we had to drive hours to another city where a guy agreed to reload the software from another set of disks... if we gave him our NIC. We never got any of the other software back since we didn't have the original boxes.