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I first saw an Amiga on Computer Chronicles in the late 80s or early 90s and remember being blown away that they could edit cartoons and show 3D graphics. I ha

I first saw an Amiga on Computer Chronicles in the late 80s or early 90s and remember being blown away that they could edit cartoons and show 3D graphics. I had a (gulp) Mac Plus at the time and remember that was the first time that I was really disappointed in my computer! Macs wouldn't have similar abilities until the 60 MHz PowerPC came out. Tragically Apple's weakest link was always unimaginative hardware, which made most Macs unable to play even the simplest 386-era PC games. My first experience with crippled Apple hardware was trying to blit a 256 color screen on a Mac LC II with BlockMove() and if I recall, it only ran at 20 or 30 fps because the ram bus was only 16 bits wide instead of 32. A quick back of the napkin calculation showed that 640x480@256 should have gotten around 100 fps on a 16 bit, 16 MHz bus, but something about how the VRAM worked cut that by 2-4x. I wasted a lot of years on things like interlaced lines and 2x enlargement blitters that never could quite make up for the lack of a 320x240 video resolution. The system also didn't allow direct access to the palette entries, so palette animation blocked for 1/60 of a second so games couldn't use it. As an aside, the other system libraries for sound, input and networking all had various failings so I found myself reinventing the wheel at every turn. To me, those shortsighted decisions were a big part of why Apple almost went out of business before the second coming of Steve Jobs and the iMac (which had a decent enough video card to at least do 2D in thousands or millions at 60 fps). Of course, Amiga realized all of this early on and went completely around the problem by providing decent video hardware. Whenever I hear people talking about various limitations with 3D graphics, physics or AI today, I mourn the lack of outside-the-box thinking that Amiga exemplified. Our hands are tied by the CPU/GPU/OS oligarchies for the foreseeable future. I did a quick search for Amiga and found these videos, not sure if there are more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hJ_3MvH7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-hJ_3MvH7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_zuSrjRMWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_zuSrjRMWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rssl5hbJI_0

lawtguy 13y ago
Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS: http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html. Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS. It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't think any of that was important to selling computers.
- nevster 13y ago
  Pertinent link: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com http://www.freetoolsassociation.com Click on '2GS Best of' and then 'Demos' to see some of the IIGS demos. Also : http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&page=1 http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&pag...
- vidarh 13y ago
  The Apple IIGS is/was nothing like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities. The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US (while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore US didn't think any of that was important to selling computers).
  - nevster 13y ago
    This is true in terms of graphics but in terms of sound, the IIGS was better. Also, the OS had some neat stuff like File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      > but in terms of sound That may be so, but that's also pretty much it. Then again, for that price you could buy an Amiga 500 and a synth :D (amusingly, Ensoniq was founded by ex Commodore/MOS engineers, including Bob Yannes, who created the SID chip found in the C64) > File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats. Just like the Amiga. There's dozens of filesystem implementations for the Amiga - you just drop a device file in the right directory, and add a very simple configuration. E.g. here's a small selection from Aminet: http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem There's even at least one editor (FrexxEd) that exposed it's currently open buffers as files in a filesystem (so you can e.g. run your compiler directly on the editors buffer without going via a temp file, and have the compiler output go directly to another buffer, without any explicit support in the editor)
bane 13y ago
It's worth watching the first link to the news desk portion at the end where they introduce the CD-ROM as well.

lawtguy 13y ago

Apple did make a machine comparable to the Amiga 500, the Apple IIGS: http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html http://oldcomputers.net/appleiigs.html. Similar in graphics and sound ability along with GUI OS and full Apple IIe emulation. It was certainly capable of playing great games: I spent many fun hours playing Dungeon Master on my IIGS. It was pretty much a cheaper color Mac that gave Apple II users a straight-forward upgrade path and was great at games to boot. But I guess Apple didn't think any of that was important to selling computers.

nevster 13y ago
Pertinent link: http://www.freetoolsassociation.com http://www.freetoolsassociation.com Click on '2GS Best of' and then 'Demos' to see some of the IIGS demos. Also : http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&page=1 http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform[]=Apple+II+GS&pag...
vidarh 13y ago
The Apple IIGS is/was nothing like an Amiga 500 in terms of capabilities. The CPU was pretty much intentionally underpowered to avoid eating into Mac sales. It was ludicrously priced. Graphics wise it lacked hardware sprites, as well as support functionality equivalent to the copper and blitter. Add in a primitive OS, and it was DOA everywhere but the US (while the Amiga, ironically, was DOA in the US largely because Commodore had a decade of mismanaging their US distribution chain and marketing; Commodore US didn't think any of that was important to selling computers).
- nevster 13y ago
  This is true in terms of graphics but in terms of sound, the IIGS was better. Also, the OS had some neat stuff like File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    > but in terms of sound That may be so, but that's also pretty much it. Then again, for that price you could buy an Amiga 500 and a synth :D (amusingly, Ensoniq was founded by ex Commodore/MOS engineers, including Bob Yannes, who created the SID chip found in the C64) > File System Translators - it could read and write all sorts of disk formats. Just like the Amiga. There's dozens of filesystem implementations for the Amiga - you just drop a device file in the right directory, and add a very simple configuration. E.g. here's a small selection from Aminet: http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem http://aminet.net/search?query=filesystem There's even at least one editor (FrexxEd) that exposed it's currently open buffers as files in a filesystem (so you can e.g. run your compiler directly on the editors buffer without going via a temp file, and have the compiler output go directly to another buffer, without any explicit support in the editor)

bane 13y ago

It's worth watching the first link to the news desk portion at the end where they introduce the CD-ROM as well.