I've always been impressed by the Amiga. However, it's one of the few machines that the more I learn about it, the MORE impressed I am. I didn't have one "in the day" but I sure love the few I've managed to acquire!
From 1995 to 2001 I used an Amiga 4000T as my primary workstation with a 68060/PPC, 128MB of RAM, Cheetah SCSI drive and a 21" ViewSonic P810 monitor driven by a Cybervision PPC display card. I finally built an overclocked liquid cooled AMD 1900+ peecee with a 64MB GeForce3 vid card. I still have my Amigas and some of them even run. I had a lot more fun with computing in those days.
I haven't yet, other than briefly browsing the Vampires. While I occasionally run backups of all my '90s Amigas in WinUAE I am still more of a hardware purist, which basically ended with the '060. The '080 isn't really a chip, it's more of the idea of a better chip. While I love the Amiga dearly and always will, I can't see using it as a modern computing platform. I dabble with my original Amiga hardware that I bought in the '90s for the retro computing experience. I don't even use them the way I used them when they were new, I mostly play games on them now! Back in the '90s I ran a BBS that grew to 20 phones on an A4000 desktop. I did some DTP and basic non-toaster video work like DCTV and other productivity things, but had stopped playing games around 1992 or so. I have rediscovered my initial Amiga experience, which was heading over to a friend's house with a big box of blank floppies on Friday nights and coming home in the wee hours of Saturday morning with a hundred or two games to try out over the next week. If I found any of them to be worth it I'd buy them. After the BBS went multi-line and I started devoting all my spare time on it I pretty much stopped playing games on the Amigas. Don't get me wrong, I think it is great (and amazing!) that the Amiga platform is still being developed and there is no end in sight, I just enjoy the retro part more than the current efforts to push the Amiga tech to the limit. Long live the Amiga!
That's a really nice setup! still have my A4000+CSPPC and CVPPC too but rarely use it, currently my main Amiga is an A1200 with PiStorm32 and CM4 module. Although it lacks some drivers like warp3D it's breathtakingly fast for an Amiga!
ATM my main Amiga at the moment is an A4000D with a WarpEngine4040 and a CV scandoubler in the vid slot. I have a working CS '060, but I really don't do anything demanding with the 4000 so it really doesn't matter. I have a working 1200 with a math-co and 8MB that works great for most games. If I really need blazing fast I can run WinUAE with all the knobs turned up.
@7:45, if you are using WinUAE, that CPU meter you listed is not how much of the 68000 is being used, it is how much of your PC emulator's CPU is being used emulating the complete Amiga chipset. Yes, the custom Amiga chipset did a lot of things without the need for the 68000 to compute much, but the meter you describe is not telling you the truth about the 68k usage VS it executing 'NOP' statements. Drawing boxes (blit-fill), fills / copying ram (blitting), playing sounds, loading from floppy, anything done withing the first 512kb an an Amiga 1000 only requires the 68000 to set a few registers and send a go to the custom chipset, then the 68000 is free to do anything else while it waits for a completion interrupt. However, for example, drawing angular lines, this is done in code with the 68000 and occupies all of it's attention to render a the line in ram. As for the multitasking, it is the Amiga OS which handled this task, using the custom chipset hardware as interrupt program time sharing management. Since so many actions use the custom hardware to run their functions, while waiting for these tasks, the Amiga OS would allow CPU driven functions in concurrent running software to run at the same time.
The Amiga is always known as a games machine but the multitasking was the thing that always blew my friends' minds when they saw that i was both running my BBS and doing some DOS thing.
Likewise, I was programming with my friends and we were making multi-threaded applications, it was both fascinating and useful. I also scored a dumb terminal and I'd start a shell on that, sat next to the Amiga. It was a fantastic and productive setup. Then I'd go to my work, where we were still using MS-DOS and I'd try to talk about it all and I'd get crap back like 'I can't work on two things at once, what's the point?' from experienced coders who ought to know better!
I always knew it as the platform of the Video Toaster, the workstation for Babylon 5 CGI, and the on air titles machine at the local cable access TV station. I was kind of shocked decades later when I found out it had a bunch of awesome games. None of my friends had one, so for games, I was kind of out of the loop, lol.
I was never lucky enough to own one of these but always wished I did back in the day. They were lightyears ahead of the competition. I’ve got a a500 mini inbound and am going to throw Aminimiga on it just to see what the experience was like. Good videos. Interesting stuff.
The demos were also included in Kickstart/Workbench 1.2. I know because this came with my first Amiga ... but I seem to recall that there were four demo programs. Maybe I'll get around to boring the machine eventually, then I'll be able to check
Its the Fields' demo I remember most, couldn't imagine at the time that kind of area filling running in a separate screen mode. Furthermore the impact of multitasking, which I had only experienced at work in minicomputers was the final 'must have' for me of the Amiga.
Agree with the logic behind this and love this exploration - will definitely follow this series. Nit to pick tho: Sun 2/120 came out in 83. Three years in this era was a generation of computing. A more appropriate comparison would be Sun 3/50. That said, the point you are trying to make would still hold up for that point in time.
This is a really tough one. I chose the 2/120's because that's what Amiga initially used for the second round of system development, and that it used a 68010, but yes, a 3/50 would make sense too.
Back in the late '80s I helped my dad refurbish one of the units in a commercial building he owned and the new tenant was a graphics outfit that had a number of SGI and Sun boxes. It was summer and the A/C guys were late getting the system installed and we had to endure a week of the graphics guys having fits because the heat was crashing some of their machines. My dad had to rent a bunch of portable A/C units for them and their boxes still crashed when it was cool! I got my first Amiga at about that same time. In the '90s I got a DEC AlphaServer 1000 that ran rock solid in 95° heat. I ran that thing 24/7 for over 5 years with no problems.
@@tschak909 you are also very off with the price comparison, in 1986 the Sun 2/120 was way more expensive then beefed up A1000 you present in your video, but had 40% more computing power, 8 times more RAM so you could actually use that power, and proper preemptive multiuser multitasking OS with protected mode and RAM virtualization, backup tape drive and 79MB SCSI HDD as well. Day and night difference to Amiga 1000 that was a toy if compared, with a toy OS with zero security.
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I appreciate your enthusiasm, but I must point out: I was there. A typical 2/120 with a bw2 framebuffer 2 megabytes of RAM, and e.g. an 80 megabyte SMD disk was $29,700. This went up substantially if you (a) increased disk size, (b) increased memory size, (c) swapped out bw2 for cg2. Did you actually use SunOS 2 or 3, on this system? It was _SLOW_ across the board. Yes, There was memory protection. Yes, you had a faster processor, more memory, bigger screen space, an Ethernet adaptor, etc. But it was also considerably more expensive than even a well kitted out Amiga 1000 with 8 megabytes of RAM, and a hard disk (the 8 megabytes coming from a PAL jr. box). This is important when your department's discretionary budget was ZERO for the year, and the HP 9000 you shared with 6 other engineers is severely overloaded. So those of us who needed to get things done improvised. We hooked these systems up to bigger ones to visualize data that was coming in, made DMA cards, hooked up through the parallel or serial ports, whatever we had to do to get shit done. It happened in lots of places, they just weren't publicized. It's _very_ tiring to argue with some of you who seem to think you know better than everyone else how things actually happened in the real world. I am trying to make my point based on my own experiences, and those of whom I knew and worked with, that the Amiga did fit the gap nicely during this time period, and did so better than many of its contemporary personal computers, by a long shot.
@@tschak909 I was "there" as well, and the 2/120 had 4MB RAM as a baseline. And the fact that Amiga DOS has zero security and no memory protection makes it a one person computer, and that is a decisive point. Yes the Sun was overpriced since there was not much option, that is the reason Apple, Commodore and Atari wanted in the UNIX workstation business, piles of money, the 68k line was not cutting it right after SPARC and MIPS introduction. And to call something a workstation you have to be able to serve more then one user at a time, which is Amiga unable to do. Otherwise for the price of your usable baseline A1000 you could have two and a half ATARI ST, so if price was the important factor then you could have a huge scientific lab fully equipped with so many computers that you didnt have so many lab workers. And it had SM-124 VGA 72Hz mono monitor, so much more useful then Amiga RGB crap, and still being 10-20% faster in computing power. And no, the Sun wasnt slow across the board, what are you talking about, did you ever ran anything on it? Of course if couple of users shared it then it could get slow, but that is a thing you could not do on toy preemptive OS like Amiga DOS. What I mean for a single user computer the Amiga DOS was a gimmicky overkill, but it wasnt really usable for anything else. As a single task one person computer it was good enough. I didnt see a single lab in Europe using Amiga... All full of Atari ST, TT030, PCs and real workstations and even minicomputers like PDP-11. Where did you work? You may have used your Amiga for same tasks as you would a Sun workstation, but that is far from calling it a workstation. And yes its very tiring to listen to Amiga fanboys after all those decades dreaming how Amiga was ahead of its time, it was a great computer (well the A1000 not, the A500/2000 was) but it was nothing special, it didnt bring anything groundbreaking into computers. And the Amiga DOS was a toy with zero added value to average user, and the Workbench GUI was cumbersome and slow to work with and in fact the 1.x versions are not even a GUI at all.... Sorry for my heated tone, I calm down in future.
I went on a university (UK) visit in the late eighties and discovered that they had a room full of Amigas, I remember one with a video digitiser capturing grey scale images, they were doing some kind of image processing/ computer vision research. You can bet that I applied there, but I didn't get in. :-( Amusingly, the place I did get in had a room full of STs but I never had cause to use them. My own Amiga got me through uni and I used it for my final year project.
In November1989 I picked an A1000 one up on closeout for $189 as the salesman was duped by Apple rep who brainwashed him into thinking Commodore was going out of business. They were switching to only Mac sales and service... Due to this fake news I snatched up the A1000 for a song and was able to: Go online via a 2400 baud modem, print, use an RGB monitor and Genlock live cable tv into it and back onto a VCR. I could multitask... all of this at the same time. The system had 512K Chip RAM , I purchased a slap on the side 2MB fast ram from MAST in Las Vegas Nevada....and I picked up three external second-hand floppy drives giving me essentially a 3.5 MB hard drive. Amazing functionality for the time. My daily driver until 1994.
Loved my Amiga1000 and still own it! It took me through university and the only time I had to use a PC was later in the 90's when my work required using AutoCAD
With SAS/C and a modem - this thing was a weapon. I got hold of an Amiga2000HD with an 030 accelerator at university, I would use slip to connect to their network and everything that shared Solaris server did slow, I could do fast.
Preemptive multitasking on a desktop system was groundbreaking. Coupled with awesome graphics capability compared to everything else available made this the most world-changing personal computer of the century. Every computer maker spent the next decade trying to get their computers to imitate the Amiga. I felt sorry for Atari fans who couldn't look past the logo on the STs and see the actual next-generation Atari in the Amiga.
I had an Atari 800 in the early '80s until moving to an Amiga 500 and I never looked back. I have never loved another platform as much as I loved the Amiga.
actually Atari ST was way better computer for half the money of Amiga 1000, absolute no brainier. Most of showed here is just a gimmick nothing you could use in real life. Also ST outsold A1000 so bad that Commodore almost went bankrupt, the only thing that saved Commodore was very good selling C64 and huge chunk of money injected by Erwing Gould, otherwise there would never be A500/A2000 the first successful Amiga... The flopped A1000 was in mass production for less then a half year and could not be sold out up until late 1989, four years after its production ended, so great was this computer...
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 .... posted from a personal computer featuring preemptive multitasking and a GPU, because the personal computer industry considers these features gimmicks.
Something that always gets lost is that the Amiga is the true successor to the Atari 8-bit computers, and not the Commodore 64. Interestingly, the Atari ST is arguably the successor to the Commodore 64.
The companies played a big round of musical chairs with their engineers. If you understand anything about how the Atari 8 bits work, it's obvious how the Lorraine got its specs.
Correct. If you read the ROM Kernel Manuals (in particular the Libraries volume), you'll find how original ideas on the Atari 8-bit system evolved onto the Amiga. archive.org/details/amiga-rom-kernel-reference-manual-libraries-and-devices/page/n9/mode/2up
@@tschak909 also too the basis of one of the lawsuits brought against Miner et al. They were creating off the back of Atari technology. The fact the same engineers (Miner, Decuir) were involved reminds me when John Foggerty was sued for 'infringing copyright' with 'Old Man Down the Road v' Run Through the Jungle. It took years for Foggerty to win that one.
I was (still am) a big fan of programming the Atari 8bits (so it's no surprise I've ended up subscribing to Thomas' channel!); when the ST was announced in the magazines of the time, I looked at the articles about programming for it, and I was disappointed. 'Where are the sprites?!' I saved my money and later bought an A500. Back then I didn't know any of the history of the Amiga, but it all makes so much sense now!
@@madigorfkgoogle9349 I did games for both. Liked the ST like I loved the Spectrum. The underdog ! But the Amiga like the C64 had better tech. Jay Miner’s custom chips on the Amiga are legendary !
