Amiga what am I missing

[zack4mac]

I have owned Amiga's and Amstrad's and always thought what is the big deal with the Amiga?  I always enjoyed playing the Amstrad games more.

[VincentGR]

My first ever computer was my trusty 6128.
Loved the games and basic & cp/m.

Later I bought an Amiga.
The Amiga has fancy colors, sound, multitasking and you can do lot's of things that unfortunatell cpc can only dream.
My friends just played games and never touched their creative side.
It is a fantastic computer, and they're both in my heart.

[tjohnson]

My bro had an Amiga back when we were kids.  I was never allowed to touch it.  I've recently bought myself one to see what all the fuss is about.

[LambdaMikel]

I attended this event which had a good panel discussion with some relevant Commodore staff:

https://youtu.be/ta2rL6brXmI


It was for the movie premiere of "The Commodore Story".
I think it is worth watching, and covers a lot of Amiga history and its impact, but to my surprise I am seeing that the documentary got mixed reviews. Well, I really liked it and backed it on Kickstarter.

The Amiga was a technical wonder and breakthrough machine in its days. It had capabilities no other machine would come even close to, for years to follow.

I also find it surprising how (negatively biased) the review about the Intuition Workbench is


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_(Amiga)


I guess the "winners of the war" are (re)writing history...

[zack4mac]

Yes I remember the 1980s they were great times for technology that we will never see again  

I remember Christmas morning and nothing will ever compare to how I felt when playing games on my C64 and playing through the night to complete a game in relays with friends and family, no nothing compared, Not the Amstrad, Atari ST, Amiga, Mega drive, Apple Mac or PC all of which I have owned, there was always something missing but I know they are all good enjoyable machines in their own right.
It sounds daft but they never felt as responsive, but I think bias effects judgment on a subconscious level.  This continues until this day, I own a XBOX 360 and have never really enjoyed playing it!

   The Amiga was a great machine used by the majority for games, Jay Miner loved to build things too make people happy and seemed a cool guy, the problem was Commodore was not a place for that type of person to flourish, this can be seen earlier when the likes of Al Charpentier, Charles Winterble and Bob Yanes not forgetting Chuck left.   I always felt the Amiga OS was limited but in fairness is wasn't the OS, it was trapped inside the limited ram and storage capabilities of the base system that most had available at the time and games did not really shine out from the pack until it was too late!

It was a great multimedia machine that very few used to its full potential, which was partly not realized because the internet had not arrived. I still own a few Amiga, Atari ST and 68000 macs and if you ask me if I would have preferred Commodore or Atari to be the last standing ready to be baled out by Microsoft then the answer would be yes. But sadly the demise of the home computer made the cost of running a supper fast Amiga that is comparable to a PC non cost effective.
 

[LambdaMikel]

I always felt the Amiga OS was limited but in fairness is wasn't the OS, it was trapped inside the limited ram and storage capabilities of the base system that most had available at the time and games did not really shine out from the pack until it was too late!
   

The Amiga OS was far superior in almost any aspect at that time, compared to the competition (device drivers, memory expansions that could be mapped into different address spaces, multitasking, Unix-like CLI, ...) The biggest problem was of course that memory protection wasn't "invented" yet (well it was of course, but...) But other than that, it was state of the art (unlike DOS or Apple's Finder).


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS

John C. Dvorak stated in 1996:

The AmigaOS "remains one of the great operating systems of the past 20 years, incorporating a small kernel and tremendous multitasking capabilities the likes of which have only recently been developed in OS/2 and Windows NT. The biggest difference is that the AmigaOS could operate fully and multitask in as little as 250 K of address space. Even today, the OS is only about 1 MB in size. And to this day, there is very little a memory-hogging CD-ROM-loading OS can do the Amiga can't. Tight code — there's nothing like it.
I've had an Amiga for maybe a decade. It's the single most reliable piece of equipment I've ever owned. It's amazing! You can easily understand why so many fanatics are out there wondering why they are alone in their love of the thing. The Amiga continues to inspire a vibrant — albeit cultlike — community, not unlike that which you have with Linux, the Unix clone."[22]

[zack4mac]

Yes like Acorn who developed ARM was ahead of its time and had a lot of potential but sadly we live in a PC dominated world and them great companies have gone for ever!  To me the nearest thing to a hobby machine is the Raspberry PI.


Its been nice chatting with you but its 11.30pm here in the UK and my pillow is calling me, goodnight my retro computer friend

[LambdaMikel]

Yes like Acorn who developed ARM was ahead of its time and had a lot of potential but sadly we live in a PC dominated world and them great companies have gone for ever!  To me the nearest thing to a hobby machine is the Raspberry PI.

Acorn is legendary... such brilliant folks. Really enjoy watching their interviews and documentaries about the making of all that marvelous stuff. (Hermann Hauser, Christopher Curry, Andy Hopper, Steve Furber, Sophie Wilson and others).

Well, but then, look - the ARM is actually the dominant CPU these days. There are far more ARM cores around than Intel CPUs. So it hasn't been all bad after all.     

[zack4mac]

Hello my friend, yes the ARM processor is a great cpu, but to me there is very little in the way of original ideas, the ARM system was the evolution from CISC and 6502 we look at the Mac this was Jobs `borrowing' ideas from visits to XEROX and Amiga.  Epson printers are the result of Seiko ripping designs while manufacturing commodores printers.  Even the Amiga has it beginnings after Jay was inspired by a million dollar flight sim and utilizing a Blitter this again was based on Xeros parcs bit blit processor! Even the father of the 6502 was heavily `influenced' by the Motorola 6800.

What I am greatfull for is mavericks who broke with convention who wanted to share great hardware. 

I am not the Mac's biggest fan preferring Woz's 65816 designs this would have made the perfect CPU for the Amiga allowing excellent backward compatibility with the C64 later maybe combining ARM with the advanced video and sound chips the sad truth is architecture development was stagnated when the people who designed these great machines, Al Charpentier, Bob yanes, Chuck peddle and later Jay Miner would leave, because of Commodores shortsightedness, without these great people the only option was cost reduction and design recycling. 

When the Amiga was first launched in the UK people were happy with the upgrade offered from 16 bit machines like the Atari ST which compared to existing 8 bit machines was mind blowing, people in the UK did not see enough of of an advantage, even most Amiga owners did not appreciate the advanced capabilities.

I have heard it asked why the Atari was such a big success with music professionals? this was because the all inclusive design was convenient when your lunging sound equipment around usally with drink in your system, trying too reach your next gig was convenient you dont want cartridges to be sticking out from the side! and external bricks! would be troublesome, added to that Commodores past poor psu designs with their 8 bit machines!
This would also be the case with some friends who owned CPC's who were sick of lunging around a massive Amstrad monitor.  I know a  lot of people who upgraded to the ST from the Spectrum and Amstrad seeing it as the latest value machine! 

The  mistakes Commodore made was the C128 this should have been similar specs to the Mega ST and the CDTV should have been offered at a lower price, utilized a riser expansion with the inclusion of a floppy disk drive and keyboard.

Sadly there were plenty of missed opportunities and hindsight is a wonderful thing


Best regards
Jon

[keith56]

Apart from backwards compatibility... I can't see any benefit to the 65816 over the 68000, it seems slower, harder to program, and less flexible.

I really struggle to believe anyone who owned an Amiga was missing backwards compatibility with the C64, and the inferior 65816 would have killed the Amiga... as far as I can see the SNES only did so well because of it's powerful graphics chips allowing to make up for the weak CPU

personally, I didn't really know anyone in the early 90's with an Amiga, but it was just because no-one could afford one so we 'made do' with the 8 bits...

I'd have swapped my CPC in a second if I had been offered one... but by the mid 90's the PC made the amiga no longer relevant.

[VincentGR]

SNES was an 8bit system 
Check pcb and cpu schematics.

[keith56]

SNES was an 8bit system 
Check pcb and cpu schematics.

Yeah, well... I mean lets be honest, if the 65816 is a 16 bit CPU, then the Sinclair QL's 68008 is 32 bit.

and the QL's CPU performance is horrid!

[VincentGR]

True true

[zack4mac]

Yes on the face of it the 65816 is a less capable chip at around 45% that of the 68k, but  its not outside the realms of possibility that programmers and the chip itself would have evolved and would give Commodore control of supply.  I could understand the idea of the 68008 being preposterous because it would be swapping one 8 bit for another that suffers from a crippled 8 bit bottleneck?  Although this is supposition and therefor can never be proved or disproved.

Interesting you say SNES is technical classed has a 8 bit although it was much more capable than the MD which I preferred!  I was never a fan of the game Mario it irritated me! Although I loved donkey Kong.





The reason for choosing the 65816 would not entirely be C64 compatibility which I'm quite certain would have ensured my parents buying me the Amiga over the ST, but also the ability to easily utilize a genuine sid chip which like the 6816 could evolved!  The  sid is the thing I missed when I got my ST, this is what gave the definitive advantage to the C64 over the CPC, ZX+ ATARI ST. 


The C64 graphics were exaggerated by subjective owners of the C64 and usually in truth the beauty was in the eye of the beholder!  This can be seen till this day within forums such as this. Personally the graphics were aided by the included artwork and what you would see within pages of Zzap that in all honesty were nothing like the games they represented, but managed to feed the imagination.


 

[VincentGR]

I don't think that SNES is better than MD.
Smaller resolution made gameplay area smaller especially in port games so they could maintain the aspect ratio.
Sound was PCM like the Amiga but with a small chunk of audio RAM we had a muffle result.
Colors were more but the real arcade feeling was with SEGA.

[tjohnson]

When everyone was getting an amiga, megadrive or snes I was putting them all to shame with my gx4000 !

[zack4mac]

Interesting points about the SNES, but going back to the 65816 according to wiki the chip is a selectable 8-16 bit design with a 24 but memory address.

[VincentGR]

The databus is 8bit though and if you process 16bit code will still chop them in half.
It's like naming MD and A500 32bit machines as stated above.

[zack4mac]

It's not what it is, but what could have been! I know the 65816 is about 45% of the 68000, but with the in house hardware expertise that Commodore seemed good at loosing, the silicon could be improved while maintaining compatibility! Which is important and buying new gear every time you changed systems is the reason people payed a premium to join the PC user group, you could upgrade the ATARI ST to get it somewhere between a 386/486 but it would cost around the same to create Jenga setup with everything hanging and wires everywhere and when you want more power you then go and start again!  Unless you have the option to upgrade the CPU, It's no fun, I was there and did it several times.


Objectively yes the 65816 is limited, by lack of investment and never tested by design, the 68000 was invested in but was limited by its fundamental design and MOTOROLA and APPLE realized this and developed PPC again that was limited and had been costly to develop,  so they switched to Intel. 


The 65816 was in its infancy! My scenario relies on keeping engineers that would continue to develop new silicon,  the AMIGA to me is not 68000  if so the ATARI ST and MAC are AMIGA! No the AMIGA at the beginning is Angus, Denise and Paula and like the Acorn which was able to makeup for not having custom chips with the ARM chip alone! This to me is the natural progression, eventually culminating in a Commodore ARM PC with graphics and sound driven by the AMIGA advanced adapters with crippled versions sold to other manufacturers.  Risc is now, its everywhere even inside the depths of INTEL chips!


Commodores strength was not the AMIGA, it was not even the C64 what made Commodore a success was owning the MOS fabs producing chips at cost which in turn allowed eight bit computers to be produced at an amazing price point! this could and should have continued.


But without development in new architecture they lost their greatest asset.

[VincentGR]

Jay show to the world how a computer should be.
Started with customs since the atari years.
Now even pcs turned to that plan and left behind the raw cpu power based machines.
He also made some extraordinary customs that commodore scrapped.


Oh well, this is how things turned.

[zhulien]

Amstrad CPC was my first computer from 1986 I think.  Before that I dreamed of getting a Sega SC3000H (which eventually I did) and C64 (also got).  But then I got an Amiga but some things I still prefer on CPC.  I had periods of a few years sometimes didn't use CPC but always went back.  Amiga isn't fun to program (not to me).  CPC is.  Then for work, I am always using Windows, and being a programmer have to program on that - and start to love the tools available.  Microsoft who we always picked on in Amiga days makes really great development tools, who would have thunk? Then internet programming came, so job focused on making desktop-like applications on the internet which not many people do - but really can be as good as desktop but with collaboration - since emulators can run in browsers, they run full OS inside them, why not many people making really good internet software? So... I still use Windows, Amiga and CPC. Windows mostly, CPC secondly and Amiga sadly 3rd place - even though it is now an undead AGA Amiga 500.


Now here is the stinker, who would have thunk that a CPC is easier to get online these days than Amiga 500?  Sad eh?

[Gryzor]

I think it is worth watching, and covers a lot of Amiga history and its impact, but to my surprise I am seeing that the documentary got mixed reviews. Well, I really liked it and backed it on Kickstarter.

I found it to be quite mediocre myself; I learned nothing new, the questions asked were quite mundane and the sound was horrible (including those really off-topic tunes that played in the "background" that actually covered the speaker at times)