The Amiga Thread

[English Invader]

I've spent a good chunk of this summer on a personal mission to get more out of the Amiga. It's been a very frustrating system for me and I regard it as the most user-hostile system ever.

I started by running Amibian on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. Amibian is a Linux distribution that focuses solely on running UAE and my aim was to configure the system as a virtual A1200 to run WHDLoad games. I put the Pi in a 3D printed A500 style case and spent ages watching various YT tutorials until it all finally sank in and I got the system up and running. This is a great option for anyone on a budget or for those who want a user-friendly entry point into the Amiga - you've got the FAT32 file system, the USB and micro-SD file storage, HDMI out and plenty of USB ports for the gaming mouse, keyboard and controller of your choice. Just remember to put heatsinks on the Pi and use the official PSU and you're good to go.

The real hardware is a lot harder and there are a lot of things you'll take for granted if you've been around the block a few times with other systems but you won't find them with the Amiga - at least not without a lot of research and hard work. The first thing you can forget about is that quick pop the game file on the SD card and fire up the system number - the Amiga uses a completely different file system. You have to format your CF or SD card as an Amiga hard drive and then create a virtual desktop environment in WinUAE to facilitate file transfer (not FS-UAE to make things more difficult for the Linux user) because WinUAE has the facility to pick up an Amiga formatted hard drive while FS-UAE doesn't. I've had to dig out one of my old XP laptops and take files over from my main Linux system to copy them over to my Amiga drive.

I've added an IDE-CF to my A600. I had planned to add some 4MB fast RAM but I didn't like the way it fitted on the CPU so I just stuck with the 2MB chip RAM I already had. I've added some hard disk installable games from my game collection like Championship Manager 93 and Microprose F1 Grand Prix as well as a few WHDLoad games. It's a nice system for enjoying disk originals and a bit extra.

I also took the plunge and bought an A1200. I've added an IDE-SD with a 15cm IDE cable so I'm able to leave it hanging outside the case for easy access instead of having to go into the system every time I want to add some files. I also added 8MB fast RAM in the expansion slot. I bought a pre-prepared SD card on eBay with the whole WHDLoad library and Amiga OS 3.1 installed. Many of the games don't work though; I just get a black screen when I click on them. I'm going to post around for a solution but in the short term I'm going to prepare my own hard disk on another SD card with Classic Workbench as the OS which I expect to be more WHDLoad compatible.

I also want to try and get the PCMCIA up and running as that will not only make file transfer easier but allow me to get ADF files over to floppy disk. The holy grail is the shareware game Beavis and Butt-Head: Breaking the Lawn which I have wanted to run on the real hardware for years:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gra37DBk0WM

Anyone else here like the Amiga?

[chysn]

I bought an Amiga 600 after saving my part-time dishwasher money over the summer of 1992. I really wanted an A1200, but they were kind of unobtanium at the Ann Arbor Amiga store (which actually existed). When my university financial aid disbursement came in in the fall, I ordered the Kickstart ROM that supported a hard drive, and got an internal hard drive. I don't remember how big the hard drive was, but I want to say it was 40 megabytes. I also maxed out the chip RAM to 2MB. So, essentially, I had the most pimped-out possible A600.

I liked it a lot. I learned AREXX and really enjoyed how many applications exposed AREXX commands for scripting various actions.

My A600 saw me through a few years, for the remainder of my bachelor's degree, and a year beyond. I graduated in the spring of 1994, and Commodore folded like two days before my graduation.

I don't have a good recollection about what happened to my Amiga. It died, I know that, and I spent the next ten miserable years using Windows. I regret not keeping the Amiga around. But I was pretty nomadic back then and didn't really have "storage" space for things that didn't work.

I think in 1993, Amiga's OS was superior to anything else out there. Mac OS7? Gorgeous but a bit closed. Windows 3.1? Please. Linux? Not yet.

[English Invader]

I think in 1993, Amiga's OS was superior to anything else out there. Mac OS7? Gorgeous but a bit closed. Windows 3.1? Please. Linux? Not yet.

It takes quite a bit of getting used to but it seems like there is a tool for everything on the Amiga once you know what to look for. I can see why many Amiga users held out until the new millennium before moving over to PC and you can even add Windows era features like MP3 and MPEG support if you feel so inclined.

I grew up with the ST and found that one a lot easier to bring into the 21st century thanks to the ROM based desktop and convenient FAT32 support. A 4MB STe will give you access to everything there is to do on an Atari ST while an Amiga 1200 needs 8MB RAM for WHDLoad games because half the memory is taken up by the desktop environment.

The A600 is under-appreciated. I remember seeing one in a Tandy store when I was a kid and it was the Amiga that called out to me when I went looking for one as an adult. I've had a lot more software compatibility issues with a stock A1200 than I've ever had with the A600's ECS (and ReloKick easily remedies that) and I've certainly never missed the numeric keypad.

[chysn]

I've had a lot more software compatibility issues with a stock A1200 than I've ever had with the A600's ECS (and ReloKick easily remedies that) and I've certainly never missed the numeric keypad.

Back when I was buying (and sometimes, um, not-buying) A600 software, I never had compatibility issues. The biggest problem I had was that the 68000 was amazingly slow.

[Gyro Gearloose]

I've had a lot more software compatibility issues with a stock A1200 than I've ever had with the A600's ECS (and ReloKick easily remedies that) and I've certainly never missed the numeric keypad.

Back when I was buying (and sometimes, um, not-buying) A600 software, I never had compatibility issues. The biggest problem I had was that the 68000 was amazingly slow.

Commodore was the first green company: they recycled the same stuff endlessly...

[chysn]

Commodore was the first green company: they recycled the same stuff endlessly...

Yeah, they were pretty green if you don't count the MOS chemical leaks.

I pondered long and hard over whether to get the A600 or find a used A500. The A500 was almost certainly a better buy, having the ability to upgrade to a post-1979 processor. But I wanted something new, even if it turned out to be sort of a dead end.

[Gyro Gearloose]

Yeah, they were pretty green if you don't count the MOS chemical leaks.

But how many superheroes did that create?

[tlr]

I think in 1993, Amiga's OS was superior to anything else out there. Mac OS7? Gorgeous but a bit closed. Windows 3.1? Please. Linux? Not yet.

That's why I was sticking to it as well. I was fortunate to have an A3000-25. When it came out it was basically the fastest home computer you could get (for a year or two ). Would have liked real memory protection but that wasn't available on win or macos anyway. The ultrix machines at school did have it but ultrix used static linking (!). That, combined with seriously lacking memory space made it an awful experience to run.

[English Invader]

I grew up with the ST and found that one a lot easier to bring into the 21st century thanks to the ROM based desktop and convenient FAT32 support. A 4MB STe will give you access to everything there is to do on an Atari ST while an Amiga 1200 needs 8MB RAM for WHDLoad games because half the memory is taken up by the desktop environment.

Another advantage the ST has over the Amiga is the standardisation of memory upgrades. You're either using a Marpet kit for the standard ST or PC SIMM modules for the STe and the end result is that every user gets the same experience. With the Amiga, there are too many chefs offering memory upgrades of different types and varying quality so one person's 8MB A1200 will be very different to another person's 8MB A1200.

[PhotoJim]

I haven't used my Amiga in a long time (I really should check it) but sometimes, I miss it. It was a really fun system to use.

Granted, this was before I had a computer network or even the Internet. I did use BBSes on it a lot.

I started with a stock Amiga 500 with A590 sidecar, eventually maxed out the RAM in the 590, and then disabled that in favour of an 8 MB SupraRAM RX expander. It took until fairly modern releases of Linux before I had the same easy combination of a graphical user interface plus a powerful shell. (Granted, Linux multitasks a lot more elegantly. No guru meditation errors.)

[Kweepa]

Who needs an Amiga?
Here's a boing ball in basic on a 6502 based beeb.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuC484vzUHk[/youtube]

[English Invader]

Who needs an Amiga?
Here's a boing ball in basic on a 6502 based beeb.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuC484vzUHk[/youtube]

Very nice piece of coding there. Thanks for sharing.

One of the main problems both Commodore and Atari had back in 1985 was that both systems were technologies in search of a purpose and it wasn't clear what these systems were able to do that the 8-bitters couldn't that would be of benefit to the end user. The ST found its niche with musicians thanks to the built-in MIDI interface and Cubase. The Amiga had Trip Hawkins and Deluxe Paint. This episode of the Computer Chronicles covers both systems at launch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kX5N8lWpqLM

[PhotoJim]

I felt the A500 was a huge upgrade over my C64. (A 128 would have resulted in a smaller upgrade, with the 80-column screen - something I used to great benefit with my modem use.) The upgrade in gaming quality was significant - stereo sound, much better graphics. And multitasking was no small thing. (I often played Sim City and a few other games that were system friendly while my BBS was running.)

The one thing I disliked the most about the Amiga was the difficulty in understanding the hardware. I never did get very accomplished at coding on it, whereas I was pretty good on my C64. The hardware on the Amiga is a lot more complex. (That's actually one of the reasons that I think I'm going to focus on the VIC-20 for awhile; understanding the hardware will be a lot easier than even reacquainting myself with the C64, and most of what I learn will be transportable to the C64 and C128 when I get to them anyway.)

[English Invader]

The one thing I disliked the most about the Amiga was the difficulty in understanding the hardware. I never did get very accomplished at coding on it, whereas I was pretty good on my C64. The hardware on the Amiga is a lot more complex. (That's actually one of the reasons that I think I'm going to focus on the VIC-20 for awhile; understanding the hardware will be a lot easier than even reacquainting myself with the C64, and most of what I learn will be transportable to the C64 and C128 when I get to them anyway.)

That was the fundamental advantage of the ROM Basic. Instead of relying on professional companies to create software, you had a swiss army knife to create any software you wanted. A knife that had become heavily blunted by the time it got to the Amiga.