4 ms·

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 "P

by 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
- squarefoot 4y ago
  CED was great, however I later discovered and registered to GoldEd which remained my editor of choice until I sold all my Amigas. It later became a full fledged IDE apparently. https://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/cubic/index.html https://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/...
- mrandish 4y ago
  Wow, you just triggered a memory cascade for me. I used Cygnus all the time and had totally forgotten that name. Re: phase of life: I was a teen when I got my first computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer. I can still remember 6809 opcodes and specific memory addresses for that computer.
tyingq 4y ago
>But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?". Do you mean the initial menu where you select different versions of Workbench? If so, that makes sense...you would have just been putting a floppy in that was 1.2, 1.3, etc. The "Workbench" itself is the desktop environment and graphical file manager, so if you used an Amiga, you likely saw it. Does this not look familiar? https://imgur.com/a/zcEl5nd https://imgur.com/a/zcEl5nd
ergonaught 4y ago
Same reaction, generally, despite absolutely loving my Amigas and doing more on them than the C64s/etc. I do remember loving "developing against the OS", the ROM Kernel Manuals, SAS/C and whatever assembler I was using, CygnusEd, and some of the demo scene stuff. And these trigger responses, but just seeing Workbench leaves me numb, unlike the C64 "welcome screen".
- badpun 4y ago
  I, on the other hand, remember it vividly. I even remember what kind of wallpaper I had set in the background (tiling 8-color marble-like thing). I remember playing with loading image files, via the built-in Amiga Datatype plugins (was that the name for this mechanism?). I remember 1024x768 JPEGs took around 30 seconds to load, while similar GIFs loaded under 15 seconds. Both results were from hard-drive (not a floppy), so mostly CPU-bound.
lakomen 4y ago
Or LDA #00 STA $D020 STA $D021 In asm, colors the background and border black. I run https://c64g.com/ https://c64g.com/
pjc50 4y ago
The Amiga, being British, never made it into the cultural nostalgia undercurrent that gets reinforced by US-centric culture. It's made it easier to vanish into a smaller footprint of memory. (I never had one, but I remember being impressed by friends that did)
- LocalH 4y ago
  What? While the Amiga may have been more popular for games in Britain, it was an American creation. Jay Miner was born in Prescott, AZ.
  - detritus 4y ago
    Yes, and Commodore is absolutely an American company. I wish the Amiga had been British! :)
    - lambic 4y ago
      Maybe OP is thinking of the Acorn Archimedes, which was also a fantastic computer and was very British.
      - detritus 4y ago
        I wish I'd appreciated the Archimedes at the time. I didn't. It was a nerdy computer in the IT department at school. A stupid shame for me to realise how wrong I was, so belatedly, given my first computer was an Acorn Electron (then a Spectrum before Amigas). I should have paid more attention to Just How Cool Zarch was, versus the Also Cool Virus on the Amiga. I still plan on buying an Archimedes if I ever get around to having a proper house and making myself a nerd room... .
      - mhd 4y ago
        Or AmigaDOS being closely related to TRIPOS, developed at Cambridge?
stuff4ben 4y ago
I remember doing AmigaBASIC but I have no idea how I did it to this day. Sadly my Amiga 500's wound up in the trash back in 2010 when I decided I finally didn't need them anymore. Along with a broken 1084s. Wished I had kept them for some strange reason...

by TekMol 4y ago

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
squarefoot 4y ago
CED was great, however I later discovered and registered to GoldEd which remained my editor of choice until I sold all my Amigas. It later became a full fledged IDE apparently. https://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/cubic/index.html https://www.softwareandcircuits.com/division/amiga/products/...
mrandish 4y ago
Wow, you just triggered a memory cascade for me. I used Cygnus all the time and had totally forgotten that name. Re: phase of life: I was a teen when I got my first computer, a Radio Shack Color Computer. I can still remember 6809 opcodes and specific memory addresses for that computer.

tyingq 4y ago

>But looking at the Amiga Workbench brings up nothing. I'm like "Hmm.. did I really use this?". Do you mean the initial menu where you select different versions of Workbench? If so, that makes sense...you would have just been putting a floppy in that was 1.2, 1.3, etc. The "Workbench" itself is the desktop environment and graphical file manager, so if you used an Amiga, you likely saw it. Does this not look familiar? https://imgur.com/a/zcEl5nd https://imgur.com/a/zcEl5nd

ergonaught 4y ago

Same reaction, generally, despite absolutely loving my Amigas and doing more on them than the C64s/etc. I do remember loving "developing against the OS", the ROM Kernel Manuals, SAS/C and whatever assembler I was using, CygnusEd, and some of the demo scene stuff. And these trigger responses, but just seeing Workbench leaves me numb, unlike the C64 "welcome screen".

badpun 4y ago
I, on the other hand, remember it vividly. I even remember what kind of wallpaper I had set in the background (tiling 8-color marble-like thing). I remember playing with loading image files, via the built-in Amiga Datatype plugins (was that the name for this mechanism?). I remember 1024x768 JPEGs took around 30 seconds to load, while similar GIFs loaded under 15 seconds. Both results were from hard-drive (not a floppy), so mostly CPU-bound.

lakomen 4y ago

Or LDA #00 STA $D020 STA $D021 In asm, colors the background and border black. I run https://c64g.com/ https://c64g.com/

pjc50 4y ago

The Amiga, being British, never made it into the cultural nostalgia undercurrent that gets reinforced by US-centric culture. It's made it easier to vanish into a smaller footprint of memory. (I never had one, but I remember being impressed by friends that did)

LocalH 4y ago
What? While the Amiga may have been more popular for games in Britain, it was an American creation. Jay Miner was born in Prescott, AZ.
- detritus 4y ago
  Yes, and Commodore is absolutely an American company. I wish the Amiga had been British! :)
  - lambic 4y ago
    Maybe OP is thinking of the Acorn Archimedes, which was also a fantastic computer and was very British.
    - detritus 4y ago
      I wish I'd appreciated the Archimedes at the time. I didn't. It was a nerdy computer in the IT department at school. A stupid shame for me to realise how wrong I was, so belatedly, given my first computer was an Acorn Electron (then a Spectrum before Amigas). I should have paid more attention to Just How Cool Zarch was, versus the Also Cool Virus on the Amiga. I still plan on buying an Archimedes if I ever get around to having a proper house and making myself a nerd room... .
    - mhd 4y ago
      Or AmigaDOS being closely related to TRIPOS, developed at Cambridge?

stuff4ben 4y ago

I remember doing AmigaBASIC but I have no idea how I did it to this day. Sadly my Amiga 500's wound up in the trash back in 2010 when I decided I finally didn't need them anymore. Along with a broken 1084s. Wished I had kept them for some strange reason...