In what way?
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Motorola's 68000 CPU was probably way ahead of its time
- Thread starter BAW
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In what way?
Do you guys remember the Apple Macintosh emulators that the Amiga had? They were emulating the Apple faster then a real Apple
Btw the Amiga demogroup "The Silents" is nowdays called DiCE, if you didnt know
Hardwired by The Silents/Crionics is my favourite Amiga demo:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=2CGOh-jb4QM
Jesper Kyd's music was quality.
Yeah, but he said that they are still not at the same level.
Memory management
In what possible way is it better than a modern OS with protected memory?!
The way the AmigaOS used memory and allowed us to manipulate it (even after a hard reset/turning off the computer) gave more freedom and possibilities at the time
Is protected memory better for the end user today? Yes, especially with how complex and convoluted most modern OSes are (remember that the Workbench was fully stored within 300k of ram). The Use of a Ramdisk made total sense and was accessible within the OS itself (and had a ram drive icon on the workbench).
It made file manipulation at a time when everyone was working on floppy drives and extremely slow HDDs incredibly usefull and "advanced" compared to what you could do (and still can today) within Windows and MacOS.
The fact that you have to use third party application to have the same features within those two OSs today, almost 30 years after the Amiga is rather amusing (for example, ImDisk on windows).
Yeah it was, the first true multimedia system. The Amiga was so forward thinking with jumps in all areas to pull graphics and sound together and integrate it all together beautifully.
16-bit colour (4096 colours, a massive jump in 1985), full sampled stereo sound (also a massive jump), hardware sprites, scrolling and dual-playfields, the display co-processor that could change colours and even resolutions on the fly as the screen was drawn, genlock capabilities to combine and sync video with the Amiga's output which kickstarted the desktop video scene.
All supported by an incredibly efficient multitasking OS with GUI. It was a dream to work with, the Amiga just covered so many bases.
Man, I pined after an Amiga for years. I got a C64 in 1991 and I loved it, but seeing the game comparisons in Zzap! 64 just blew me away. My cousin got an A600 two years later which made my longing that much worse. Around mid-1993, my mother told me that if I did well in my Junior Cert, she'd get me an Amiga for my birthday that year (which is in July). Summer came around, my results came in, and they were good. When I asked my mother... she couldn't afford it. We'd moved house from an estate near town to a house out in the country five miles away, and all of my parents' money had been put into that and the founding of a riding school. She was really sorry, but since I'd wanted to move out there myself, it wasn't too hard a blow to take.
Still, looking at those Silca adverts in the magazines, my love of the Amiga never diminished, and I promised I'd get myself one, even after Commodore died that year. For some reason, I never did manage to do that; on the other hand, my mother, seeing my disappointment in not getting one, spent years saving up so that on my 21st birthday, she bought me a pc, back in 1999, which was the year I finally stopped using my Commodore hardware (I had amassed a small collection of two C128's, two C64's, two 1541-II's, a 1670 1200bps modem, a 1351 mouse, Final Cartridge III, Currah Speech 64 and a library of some 1,500 games). From then on, I became a pc user, and the dream of getting an Amiga began to fade, though it was always there. I learned to build my own computers, and aside from a Nintendo console always accompanying it, the pc was - and still is - my main gaming machine.
Fast forward to 2010, when after years of happy pc and Nintendo gaming, my mother started clearing everything out of the house, preparing to move. While I'd given most of my stuff to a friend, I still had plenty of boxed C64 games lying around. I intended to give them away to someone on the Lemon64 forum, but the interest was so great, the offers so big, that I eventually sold them to someone there, and with that money I bought a pc case that is still in use today. Aside from that, I also had my box of home discs, and I couldn't dump that as on those discs were years of C64 stuff that I'd written or swapped with that friend I mentioned - we'd pass each other in school and hand each other a 5.25" disc, which would contain a program called a "noter" - something you loaded up that had whatever text you wrote accompanied by snazzy effects and music. Also on those discs were whatever was left of the Public Domain group I'd been involved in.
Torn between sending the discs to someone who could make them in to .d64's and not wanting to due to what would undoubtedly be the personal nature of some of those noters, I caved and bought a 1541-II (the friend I mentioned gave away all of his and my hardware when he moved to Denmark, after we'd had a falling out) and a 1541XM cable. I copied what discs I could on my flatmate's computer, which was the only one in the apartment which had a parallel port. Still, despite having all the working discs copied, I couldn't find it in myself to dump the disc container, and, wanting the feel of Commodore hardware under my fingers again, I bought a C128. I now had a working system through which I could properly test all my discs, which I happily did so. This went on for several months, when I decided to get a 1541 Ultimate II, and turn my C128 into a retro station. Once that was setup, with a C64G I'd bought because I'd always liked the look of them, I began to wonder about the Amiga once more.
I'd never stopped wanting one, and I now had a large desk with only the C64, disk drive and monitor sitting on it. There was plenty of space for an Amiga. So feck it, I thought, registered myself on Amibay and began to look around. I wasn't sure which Amiga to get - I'd wanted an A1200 back in the day, but I knew there weren't many games that took advantage of AGA. I always loved the look of the A500, but that would limit me to OCS stuff only. In the end, I decided on the A1200 - OCS and ECS compatibility with the advantage of AGA for what few software uses it. In 2011, I bought an A1200 with a Blizzard 1230 MKII accelerator with 32MB, and there began my odyssey with getting the damn thing to work. I eventually sent off the Blizzard to the guy I'd bought it from, and while he tried to fix it, I learned all I could about my new Amiga. I learned how to build my own Workbench setup with Scalos, how to unpack .LHA files and install programs.
Coming up to September last year, the guy I'd bought the A1200 from gave up on the Blizzard - he'd keep working on it, and in fact he sent it off to someone else who could do more with it, and promised to send it back to me if he gets it working again - and bought me a new ACA1220 with 128MB from Amigakit, with the promise of upgrading to a faster '020 when the warranty is up. For the last year and a half I'd been pretty much without a workable Amiga, but now I could boot her up and learn all about her again, which I had much fun doing. Now, at long last, my Amiga is happily sitting on the desk next to my C64, and I'm able to boot her up any time I want and play any of those games I'd lusted for throughout all those years.
And here she is, sitting next to her sister
Great post! I'm presently renovating my basement to allow for a bigger office - then I can get my Amiga 2000HD and Commodore 64 out of storage. Usually I pull them out at least once a year during the summer to show the kids what Real Games™ used to be like, but when it's done I'll have year-round access to Supercars, Wacky Darts, Gods, Death Sword, Obliterator and the like.
Sooooooooon....
DECK'ARD explained it more succinctly than I could, given the blind rage your post just triggered :|
Schrade
Member
I just want to thank you for posting the Deathbed Vigil YouTube links. Every other year or so I kept wanting to buy a copy of the disc but never got around to mucking with PayPal and whatnot.
It was so goddamn sad to see just how much the engineers loved the Amiga and just how horribly marketing and the "business" guys fucked it all up.
So many people that were so passionate about what they were doing. You really could feel the love that they had for the Amiga.
Love the speedbump stories. I remember seeing mentions of speedbumps here and there throughout the years when I used to frequent Amiga sites, UseNet, and Magazines. Now I know what the heck they were talking about.
Oh what could have been if the Amiga had been handled by a competent company. It was so far ahead of everything else.
I did a quick search for some Amiga videos and came across this one that talks about the latest (in 2011) goings on with AmigaOS, MorphOS ARos, etc. Interesting watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1RsvEm7UrU
My nerd buddy and I ran the Mac version of "Harpoon," the naval war sim game, on his A500 using some sort of software Mac emulator (cant recall the name) and the Amiga ran it faster than the Mac we had on hand. That was with the stock 68000 which the Mac also used.
I'm currently in Computer Engineering second year, and am currently taking a course called computer organization. We are going to be learning assembly with the NIOS II processor.
The reason why I'm posting all this is because it brings me joy to be able to remotely understand what's being discussed here
And also, my prof does indeed mention motrola 68K again and again in his examples.
The reason why I'm posting all this is because it brings me joy to be able to remotely understand what's being discussed here
And also, my prof does indeed mention motrola 68K again and again in his examples.
LamerDeluxe
Member
Still have my Amiga 4000 with 604 PowerPC / 68060 and CyberVision videocard, as well as an Amiga 500.
Programming the custom chips directly in assembly was great, such a friendly architecture with DMA and interrupts for most tasks. The fast multitasking OS was far ahead of its time. No memory management, but you usually knew exactly what bugs applications had, so you could work around them. I was really surprised when I started working on a PC that it used to crash at unexpected times.
Released a commercial software package for the Amiga at one point and programmed the realtime graphics for a television quiz again by programming the hardware directly in assembly, using a lot of tricks to get the maximum speed. The Amiga was really popular in the broadcast industry at the time.
The Philips CD-i also used an 68000 BTW and the Motorola Coldfire was a later variation used a lot for embedded purposes, I have a pair of those in my synthesizer.
Original developers of the Amiga went on to create the Atari Lynx, again a machine with an architecture that was way ahead of its time.
I really need to check the clock battery of my 4000 for leakage.
With Amiga OS the user has priority, the system responds directly to user input, as opposed to Windows where response to user action would often be delayed by OS actions.
Compared to Amiga OS Windows still feels like something mechanical is broken inside.
Amiga OS was a true graphical multitasking OS (that could be booted from an 880KB floppy) when PCs were still running DOS. It could display 4096 colors with complex animation when PCs were doing primitive CGA and EGA graphics, it did four channel 8-bit sampled audio when PCs were making beeping noises using a piezo speaker. It was a really revolutionary system.
My Amiga 4000 cost about $2500 when I bought it in 1992, so indeed pretty expensive, not to mention the PowerPC and videocard I added later on which itself cost as much as a high-end PC.
Programming the custom chips directly in assembly was great, such a friendly architecture with DMA and interrupts for most tasks. The fast multitasking OS was far ahead of its time. No memory management, but you usually knew exactly what bugs applications had, so you could work around them. I was really surprised when I started working on a PC that it used to crash at unexpected times.
Released a commercial software package for the Amiga at one point and programmed the realtime graphics for a television quiz again by programming the hardware directly in assembly, using a lot of tricks to get the maximum speed. The Amiga was really popular in the broadcast industry at the time.
The Philips CD-i also used an 68000 BTW and the Motorola Coldfire was a later variation used a lot for embedded purposes, I have a pair of those in my synthesizer.
Original developers of the Amiga went on to create the Atari Lynx, again a machine with an architecture that was way ahead of its time.
I really need to check the clock battery of my 4000 for leakage.
With Amiga OS the user has priority, the system responds directly to user input, as opposed to Windows where response to user action would often be delayed by OS actions.
Compared to Amiga OS Windows still feels like something mechanical is broken inside.
Amiga OS was a true graphical multitasking OS (that could be booted from an 880KB floppy) when PCs were still running DOS. It could display 4096 colors with complex animation when PCs were doing primitive CGA and EGA graphics, it did four channel 8-bit sampled audio when PCs were making beeping noises using a piezo speaker. It was a really revolutionary system.
My Amiga 4000 cost about $2500 when I bought it in 1992, so indeed pretty expensive, not to mention the PowerPC and videocard I added later on which itself cost as much as a high-end PC.
LamerDeluxe
Member
[double]
Protected memory is less for the OS components and more for the fact that without it a user program can crash the whole system by writing crap over the memory the OS is in or a malicious user program can do what ever it likes including accessing the memory of all other programs and the OS.
OSX also does have inbuilt support for creating RAMDisks (so does Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD ect.).
MrCunningham
Member
Yup, that's unmistakably Jesper Kyd, alright. The name of this demo and Jesper Kyd's involvement makes me wonder if these guys went under the name Zyrinx at some point? Zyrinx was a Sega Genesis developer that showcased off a lot of really cool tech-demo-y like stuff on that console. One pf their games Red Zone went under the name Hardwired originally.
Red Zone has Amiga demo scene developer written all over it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZKsQ09qOk4
Going back to the Star Fox Demo on the Genesis, this reminds me of something I had almost forgotten about. There was a cancelled game on the Genesis/ Mega Drive called ResQ, which was developed by Psygnosis that had Star Fox inspired bonus stages:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sXgFmZ-tM0
Apparently this game was 100% complete, but it was never published for some reason or other. Obviously it's not pushing as many polygons as the SuperFX chip, but it's still a cool little tech demo anyway.
Code:
movea.l 4.w,a6
lea dosname(pc),a1
moveq #0,d0
jsr -552(a6)Aah happy days staying up all night trying to get the last ounce of performance out of the blitter
Where did I put my Amiga RKRMs?...
Back on topic the 68k was so much better than x86 it was unreal. Big endian, nice instruction set and 32 bit registers made programming a dream. I was so glad when my uni lecturer revealed we were to learn 68k over x86. Meant I could skip all the classes and still get a distinction.
Devpac FTW!
Devpac 2.x changed my life, although I'm not entirely sure it was for the better... I think I got it free with Amiga format and spent as much time in the loving meditative embrace of the devpac\deluxe paint combo as my burgeoning appreciation of girls and illicit booze would allow.
Pretty much all my peers in the industry started out (bar a few drunken 8 bit fumbles) with the Amiga. If you've not written a chunky to planar or a chunky to copper rotozoom routine, then you've not lived! Or something.
True, today we have graphics card drivers to do that for us. We don't need badly behaved user programs interfering ;-)
Thanks! XDWelcome to the Brotherhood!
I think Bish may have worked some (Amiga) magic
And thanks bishoptl! XD
LamerDeluxe
Member
DevPac and ASMOne, ofcourse DPaint for the pixel art. And indeed the chunky copper rotozoomer :^) Copper plasma, multiplexed sprite starfields, sinewave scrollers etc. That was so much fun.
Welcome, brother.
Graphics drivers do not crash nearly as much as user programs tho.
Being a kid back then I remember some of my relatives standing next to me at
times while I was operating the Amiga to its fullest. They constantly had their
jaws dropped. They didn't expected to see what the Amiga was able to do, even
less from a computer supposed for gaming. From their reaction one could easily
deduce that the Amiga was pretty much ahead of its time. It's difficult
recreating such a situation today, computer-wise.
times while I was operating the Amiga to its fullest. They constantly had their
jaws dropped. They didn't expected to see what the Amiga was able to do, even
less from a computer supposed for gaming. From their reaction one could easily
deduce that the Amiga was pretty much ahead of its time. It's difficult
recreating such a situation today, computer-wise.
Protected memory also has to do with the memory model presented to applications. With it, an application only sees its own memory space. It doesn't have to worry about how other things are being addressed or even how that memory is actually being handled by the OS, unlike with non-flat models such as DOS's Main/XMS/EMS balancing act.
Without memory protection and an MMU to enforce it, you're just lucky whatever caused your machine to crash didn't corrupt some random bits in the RAM disk.
I bought one of the first Amiga 1000s when they first shipped. Still have it, one with all of the developer's signatures on the inside of the case. Awesome machine for the time.
But you're completely kidding yourself if you think modern OSes aren't about a billion times more advanced than AmigaOS was at its peak under Commodore.
Here's a simple example: AmigaOS had fixed size stacks for its applications. Because there was no MMU in the system, each "Task" (the AmigaOS equivalent of a thread) had to preallocate its stack when it was first launched. Reach the stack limit, and you got yourself a nice Guru meditation or crazy memory corruption bugs. Modern OSes use the MMU to reserve address space, and insert a guard page to dynamically extend the stack as required.
This thread makes me feel bad for not touching my Amiga 1200 in weeks. I received a pcmcia cf adapter and a cf card before Christmas but haven't had enough motivation yet to get it working. I grew up with PCs so I got very excited when I found this Amiga 1200 at the electronic dump back in November. Fully working and not a scratch on it, even the hdd was alive and kicking! I knew the Amiga was amazing before but experiencing it first hand is on a whole different level. The sound it produces makes me look back on my early 90s PC gaming sessions in shame.
AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
Yeah, that is also one of the benefits (as I alluded to with my comment about programs accessing other programs memory without it).
sixteen-bit
Member
Time flies.
And it's still Paula, the original sound chip of the early 80s. Mindblowing.
No "offense" to the myriad of plaftorms produced/released over the years but whenever I think of an impressive, truly ahead of its time hardware there's really nothing like the Amiga.
Absolutely adored the amiga, me and my brother spent the best part of 2 years doing a paper round to afford the thing. Picked one the batman pack which came with batman and f18 interceptor (my first love when it comes to flight sims!). There are too many great games on that machine, gods has been mentioned above, lotus esprit (in fact anything from magnetic fields), shadow of the beast, most psygnosis games.
Still miss the machine, sold it a few years later to fund buying a snes - it was the lure of street fighter 2. I'm in my 40's now, and will eventually buy an amiga again, probably the grand a500 just to see the 1.3 kickstarter logo in real life again.
Still miss the machine, sold it a few years later to fund buying a snes - it was the lure of street fighter 2. I'm in my 40's now, and will eventually buy an amiga again, probably the grand a500 just to see the 1.3 kickstarter logo in real life again.
No problem. Glad to be of service to a fellow Amiga fan.
Yes, It seems like Amiga was really a passion for a lot of the engineers and not just a job. So sad to see such an amazing hardware architecture and talented people go to waste like that.
Also, Escom didn't really do much with Amiga either after they bough the rights from Commodore.
Wacky Races doesn't look like Mode7 to me and certainly not better than anything Mode7. It looks really bad imo.
Having said that I bought myself an Amiga 500 when I was 13, paid for it by working mornings and nights on the market in town before and after school. I wanted one so bad - after enjoying my older brothers Spectrum 48k I was going to buy one for myself when my bros broke. I saw the Amiga 500 in the computer shop and couldn't believe it. The A500 looked indescribably better. Best machine I ever owned but piracy killed it off imo.
Bah, if you have really loved your a500 you would have made do with the crappy and years late Amiga port of SF2 and liked it!
I jest... although if you had worked enough paper rounds you would have been able to buy an MMU and run Enforcer. Giving you very basic protection. Of course you'd still have all the fun of an OS messaging system that consisted of pointers into shared memory...
ASMOne made my head hurt. I think it forced me to meditate way more than my own code did. I still remember the eureka moment when I finally worked out how xenon managed to have such a pretty ship and all those other sprites (bullets etc) on screen. You could (and lots did) do some pretty impressive stuff with multiplexing.
Yeah, the passion they all had for the Amiga and what they were trying to do is the main thing that came across from the Deathbed Vigil video. As well as the obvious frustration at the decisions and mismanagement by the higher-ups. Commodore just didn't have a clue.
A parallel universe where engineering was calling the shots would have been fascinating, the things we could have got.
Yeah I remember the port - reinforced the reasoning behind buying the snes! Playing body blows was enough...
Stiflers Mom
Banned
Amiga was my first real home computer love after having a MSX and C64 before that.
The Amiga was simply mind blowing...
The Amiga was simply mind blowing...
Schrade
Member
Another fun video:
EEVBlog #438 - Amiga 500 Retro Computer Teardown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNVIgsbYrA
If you've never seen the insides of an Amiga 500, this is a fun one. Now I need to find an Amiga 1000 teardown
B52 / Rock Lobster
What an awesome codename.
EEVBlog #438 - Amiga 500 Retro Computer Teardown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNVIgsbYrA
If you've never seen the insides of an Amiga 500, this is a fun one. Now I need to find an Amiga 1000 teardown
B52 / Rock Lobster
What an awesome codename.
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Just consider that some people still have to do that, and coming from even nicer architectures than the venerable 68K ; )