Some comments have made me chuckle about get a newer machine. Day to day I use a Macbook pro dual core 3ghz with 8gb ram 512gb SSD drive and that is my slow machine. I also have an Nvidia GTX780 powered monster. The bottom line is I love Amiga's just like some people love old cars, they can still get you around and remind you of why you love computers because although I have a soft spot for my Spectrum, my first true computing love was Amiga.
My respect! you are lucky to have an Amiga 3000, i have a Comodore 16, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, and a Mac 1, and yes many time i use it, sometimes i play with my Atary Lynx, for your same reason. And i have Macbook pro and a PC with you same videocard, and i'm Oculus Dev. Those pieces of history led me to be who I am today, for better or for worse. P.S. Every time I start, Beneath a Steel Sky and listening to the music of the intro...is a unique emotion
Apple laptops yuck! I would never buy an apple product based solely on the fact that Apple is the worst company ever, and no one should ever buy there products no matter how good they may be! I have nothing but complete and utter disdain for Apple.
Its 2018 and I just ran into this.. so many memories. had the 500 as a kid and later worked on 3d animations using the 4000 (lightwave). loved painting on the 500 and made some music. Huge part of my childhood. Thanks for the good memories :)
The A2000 was engineered in Germany with help from Dave Haynie. It was based on the technology developed in the USA for the A500 (which is why they are so compatible, just like the later A1200 and A4000). C= Germany wanted to make it as expandable as possible, so they used the same run-off-the-mill big box metal cabinet that they used on their PC range, rather than the more cramped, custom plastic cabinets C= USA tended to use. C= Germany also developed the Bridgeboard expansion for it, which actually turned your A2000 into an XT-compatible PC as well as an Amiga. This expandability made the A2000 the number one choice for professional use. Even when the more powerful A3000 came, companies still preferred the A2000. Hence - ugly though it may be - the A2000 was in production longer than any other Amiga, and also was sold in more varieties (A1500, A2000HD, A2500).
The 3000 had the nicest form factor of all the desktop Amigas - such a sweet machine, with a hardware flicker-flixer and 32-bit SCSI to boot. Only downside was the hard-to-find ZIP memory chips; I enjoyed my 4000, but only the 3000 was free of the ugly IBM-PC aesthetics that plagued the rest.
I had an Amiga 3000 with Phase 5 68060/50MHz accel with 128MB of RAM, and a Cybervision64 graphics card. Directory Opus 5 as a Workbench replacement. My wife and I used it with ImageFX to do high resolution (at the time) 2400x3000 pixel graphics with up to 18 layers at a time, with multiple programs loaded and working at the same time. We'd take it to sci fi conventions to take digital photos of people in their costumes and composite them into different scenes. Google for Polymorph Digital Photography, the website is still up. I would have Shapeshifter running the tethered digital camera, and be working on a composite in ImageFX while the inkjet or dye sub printer was working. Sometimes also rendering a 3D element for a picture at the same time. 17 inch monitor and a 12x12 Wacom tablet as large as the screen. It was a thing of beauty...
What is ironic is that your past dream machine could literally take you to Pluto. Owning a 3000, to me, in the early 90s would have been like owning a Ferrari...it was simply a fantasy...cheers.
I owned numerous Amigas and loved them all. My favourite was the CDTV. Way ahead of its time and I wish I kept it. Games were what I mainly used it for but its great to see others still using Amigas for day to day tasks
I collect the retro unix machines. But my computer adventure started with c64 and later Amiga - back in the golden 90s. Always dreamed about A3000 for me its the most beautiful Comodore machine ever - keep it alive I wish you all the best and might it serve you long.
Ah! The 3000. I went from a 1000 straight to a 3000. Unfortunately, a few months after we bought it, the 1200 and 4000 came out with AGA graphics and suddenly it felt obsolete. Argh! At any rate, great review and background on the system.
Funny, I also had (still have) the A-1000 and was going to buy the A-3000 because ut was beautiful but I was slower thab you and the A-4000/040 came out. Well... It is still standing on my desk now... Love it! With an Apollo 060 board...
The Amiga 3000 has been one of my favorite computers for years. I got my first one in 1992 but got rid of it for an A4000. I now have another A3000 with a Cyberstorm 060 board, X-surf, EGS Spectrum graphics board and a Multiface III I/O board. It's a very quick system and my only complaint about Amiga's has always been how fragile the file system is. Who knows what would've happened if Mehdi Ali hadn't siphoned off so much money into his own pockets and actually put it towards the product?
I bought in the first month it was available in Germany and used it for over 10 Years (1990-2000) as my main computer! It came with a 50MB SCSI-Harddrive. Later I added HDs, RAM, SCSI-CDROM, SCSI-Scanner, GFX Card + 21" Eizo Monitor, ... I can confirm all of your feelings to this incredible machine.
I am genuinely blown away and speechless! I never thought these programs were that powerfull and yet that old... Thank you for sharing, keep that gem and take care of it. ;)
i had amigas in use from 1988 to 1997 and you can work with multitasking like we are used to today on pcs. But PCs had started that kind of multitasking with Win95 in 1995. So thats 8 years prior to PC.
in my opinion, the amiga 2000 is the greatest computer, because it is so expansionable. also look at it with its two floppy drives, and the thick case. it looks fucking cool
it might be a old video and a old computer but it was just nice to look at an old screen again. after all those years amiga desktop still makes me feel at home. a computer thats doing what i tell him to do... i kinda miss that
Wow, this was a very nostalgic trip. My first computer was an Amiga 500. I then saved up for an Amiga 3000 tower. I was going to film school at the time and so I was looking for a system to edit video and output animation. I played around with D paint and I had a copy of lightwave 3-D. And eventually, nonlinear video editing showed up. I bought a piece of hardware and software called V Lab motion. It was a little finicky but it was one of the first nonlinear video editing systems. I've long since moved away from Amiga's I went to SGI and then to Windows. Watching this video brought back some fond memories. I'll my whole start in the world of visual effects to my Commodore Amiga 3000 tower. I wish I had never sold it.
Stephen Jones, I agree about the old computers and how they still have great usefulness! I grew up on "electronic gadgets" before they went mainstream! My first was a Fairchild Channel F game system(1977). Then an Intellivision(1980). I got my first computer with the Tandy Color Computer back in 1982. A WHOPPING 4k of RAM, analog joysticks, 320 x 200/8 color display, tape drive, and hooked to a small Sony TV. Then I got an Atari 800xl. That led me to the Atari 520ST, and THAT is the computer I miss most today! The Atari 520ST was an amazing computer for the day, and while I have ST emulation on my bad boy PC (STeem), it's nothing compared to having the real thing! One day I may splurge and get a complete ST system because like you, I still have a warm place in my heart for that old computer!
I never owned an Amiga 3000, but it was the Amiga of my dreams back in 1990. Still today I think it was the most beautiful and elegant Amiga! I still remember how futuristic and modern the look of the Workbench 2.0 was. Today it looks awfully antique - even with your pimped MagicWB add-on... notable how the visual habits change by time...
Steve, a question about Lightwave: Did it by default use Workbench standard resolution or did you have to tweak some tooltypes in order for it to "fit" on the screen ? And if so, what kind of changes can you make ? Because my Lightwave is too large for my resolution, 640x512 and I've tried to change resolution before starting the program but it still doesn't work
Whoaaah! Thank you very much for this journey back in time Stephen! :-D I've been using Real3D & Reflections on my Amigas and I almost forgot how slow everything was! ^^
God, this makes me nostalgic. My dad used to work at Commodore in its final years, and we had an A3000 and an A500 that was my gaming machine. The A3000 started not working properly after a while (in hindsight I think i filled up the HD with all my games) but I still have great childhood memories of those old computers. :)
nice job you've done with your short yet comprehensible demonstration of the great abilities of an A3K machine and the Amiga in general ... a system way ahead of its time! and still a good one to use even today after so many years! a suggestion here: you could have used the Amiga's own video out capabilities to record video directly to tape or other media instead of using a camera that can't do justice to the true image quality of the Amiga ... that way, you could also avoid those annoying flickers! (or you could use a higher resolution camera at least ... believe it or not, there are still 'super advanced PC nerds' out there who do not simply understand about such technical details and they may think this was how an Amiga display worked by default back in the day!) ;-)
Beautiful machine - it was my dream for many many years. Today all of those are cheep - I have all computers I ever wanted SGIs,NeXT etc - If I only could move in time. PS - I love to see you keep it in great shape, and still in use .
I went A500, then upgraded the RAM and CPU via the daughter board. Then sold it and got a A1200, put in an IDE hard drive and upgrade the RAM and again added a new CPU via the daughter board. The fact you could essentially go from 68020E to 68060 always impressed me.
This brings back memories! I had an Amiga 500, 2000 and 1200. The 500 was my first Amiga, and I sold it when I got my 1200 and regretted selling it. Later on I grabbed an A2000HD which I owned until Commodore went bankrupt. I loved my A500, I had a really nice hard drive for it at the time that went on the side and matched the look of the A500 case. I also owned a GSS digitizer and used to run a BBS at the time using TransAmiga software which was nice. Good times, I miss those days.
It's hard to imagine how long it took to render a full quality tv frame from light wave. I spent days waiting for a sequence of animation to render... Those who are younger than probably 30+ or so, they have never experienced working on a system that took long minutes to produce a single TV (PAL or NTSC format) quality frame while today's typical gaming computer can do this in HD resolution in real time - 30+ frames/s.
Amiga made kids smarter as they had to figure stuff out the hard way through trial and error talking to other kids about how to do stuff in school playgrounds.. Amiga was a magic box to a kid .. It could do magical things by typing in magic spells learning those spells and finding them was like exploring a space ship ...it was a magical time to be a kid ...Much of that time was spent typing in swear words to see what it would do into every game you could and pretty much any where it let you type :P
Hey man what version of Winamp do you use, and whats the exact skin layout and configuration you have? I v 5.63 as of now, let me know if they're are any better versions.
When the A3000 came out I was much younger and poorer, it was a dream never to be realized for me in those days not to mention in CANADA even more rare and pricey but I knew ONE STORE in my city that carried Amiga products and the manager was pretty cool so he let me "hang out" and explore the A3000. To me as a non-AGA machine it was awesome in every other way.
My feeling in retrospect, is that the 3000 was the pinnacle of the Amiga stable. To me the 4000 was a step back, though having said that, I realise that by the time of the 4000 the company was beset by financial problems (and Mehdi Ali) and they were no doubt constrained by those severe problems. Given the problems, it is a wonder the designers and engineers felt able to continue their research and development. Having read Brian Bagnall's triology, I am convinced any of us enthusiasts could have run that company better than those who were running it. I would love to find another 3000 now but the prices when you see them are well out of my pocket. As to this video, Steve's enthusiasm is really infectious and makes you want to get hold of the machine again.
The Amiga got me started in 3D way back in 1987. I started on the 500, then 2000 with the GVP 68040 Card with 8 megs of RAM plus the Video Toaster. I made so many Videos back in the 90's with the Video Toaster. I also had the PC bridgeboard with the 5 1/4" floppy. It was an amazing computer for 1987 base price 1,400$ US. Then I got a 3000 and the Video Toaster didn't fit it. I sold my A2000 with the 040 card and Video Toaster for $5,000 in 1994.
When I was 17 or 18, I worked in a computer shop that sold the original Amiga and also the Atari ST. It's sad to see that neither became the huge success, like the Mac did. The Amiga in particular with its advanced multitasking operating system.
25 Mhz was pretty damn speedy for the day especially since it was RISC. I wish the Amiga had persisted as a platform. So much better than the bog standard Macs and PC's of the day. Our computing today would have been the equivalent of the Dark Ages never happening. We would be so much further ahead.
No its not a RISC cpu, that was the English Acorn Archimedes, Amiga was all about its multiple chips that togheter made something special, and made it survive without much updates so long. But in the end everything catches up.
It is funny how you can see the interlaced versus progressive with the flickering on the old CRT Monitor. Now a days even a 1080-interlaced would not show a flicker.
ungratefulmetalpansy I know this but the video camera allows one to see that it is interlaced in a CRT fashion, not some other effect so it is what I am able to see because of the camera. Think of it like Night Vision goggles, you see what you usually can't - does it make it any less real.
So many occasions have I been looking at Phase 5 Blizzard 68060 accelerators on eBay, looking at credit card, looking, at screen, looking at credit card...no matter the price they always get sold!
I also have a A3000 along some other old machines from PC's to macs) Today installed a new HDD and workbench on my A3000 and going to use it for gaming and to see all that amazing amiga artistic software)
Fair point she is a machine I use for fun, my interest is in working on old computers much like old cars. I was trying to show that she can still be used for all kinds of work, however, in my case I hope to buy her an 060 so that I can play around again properly. However, it will be to compare with my existing project Aros and so we can see areas we need to work on. Not sure that answers the comment but maybe.
sold mine 2015 to a happy guy in romania.... A3000 was a lovely machine. The sheet metal of the case was thick! thicker than on A2000. To me the A3000 is the best made computer in term of hardware and of course, there is amigaOS. And it would run linux aswell.
As 3D hobbiest using amatuer software like DAZ Studio and DAZ Hexagon, it was great seeing the Amiga's renders as some of the old salts in my hobbey community talk about 'the old days' and Amiga's. I grew up with an AtariST that my brothers had, and a whole range of BBC's, Apple Macintosh and then into 486's etc thanks to my old man working in computer networking. I still remember sitting on my Dads knee at 2 in the morning watching him play Elite instead of being in bed like a 6 year old should
I got an A3000 as a gift from Peter Cherna himself (his personal machine) in 2008. Tried to use it as my main machine but it just couldn't cut it. I ended up auctioning it along my whole Amiga lot (an A2000, an A4000 and a A4000T) in 2011.
A 7.14 MHZ 3 MEG A500 with those upgrades would destroy a 25mhz 8 meg 486 system in the multitasking department. Several Dpaint IV, a terminal program and running a MOD player didn't even phase it.
Did you see it nearly cry when he started mui.. magic user interface. Lol When i ran the very first mui program on my 1200 it was that exact moment i knew my 1200 wasnt ever gonna keep up with the 486 pcs and it was time to cry, say goodbye and buy a pc.. Weak ass resolution pc hmmp. Lol. They got better... :)
I did mostly yes, from the PS1 days onward. i started coding on the ZX81,bbc micro (instead of C64), but the amiga holds a special place for me, thats where I started 3D programming... I'd say the amiga is where i developped my skills mostly.
I had an Amiga 500. I also had a c64, I also had a Sharp mz 721, I had an Atari 2600, I had one of the first IBM computers. I grew up with commodore, I loved them, I even loved the smell of these computers. But you need to realize that all these machines, only live in your head these days, it is all memories,everything an Amiga can do can be done with an IBM pc. If you really wanted an Amiga back, I mean REALLY, you would have had one by now, they are easy to get.
This was a pure joy to watch. Amiga was almost like a religion to me and it would not surprise med if it was for many others as well. It is sad that the Amiga was not by many considered a professional machine even if it was more professional than most / all? computers at the time. Amiga was then what we now take for granted. A true milestone in computing!
I still use mine for MIDI sequencing using Dr.T's KCS Level II v3.5. Still all original parts (including the hard drive)... Built to last! Boots and runs in 1 minute... 1992 Commodore Amiga 3000 Startup & Running In 1 Minute
So do you use amiga's daily then? I've always loved them but I never got to have one as a kid. The library had A1200's till 2004 and then they just threw them out! Can you believe that! I use linux for the most part, but I'm an AROS enthusiast. :3 Also have you looked at PPC Processor expansion boards?
Interesting! I would like to try and use one, or at least an amiga-like OS, for a week. I mentioned Aros, I'm toying with Icaros at the moment. Its not very far in development, at least as far as the devs wished it was, but its an interesting thing to toy with. I imagine that with some work put into it Icaros could very easily be a daily driver for an amiga user like yourself :3
I discovered the best use of a Pentium 200MHz computer: Install Amiga Forever (WinUAE with a commercial front end, and includes licensed ROM images and Workbench installations). Ironically, after my Amiga 3000 died, I started using Amiga Forever on a Pentium 200 that had exactly the same chipset on the graphics card. Windows 95 doesn't multitask as well as the Amiga WB, but to W95, UAE is a single task. So the Amiga multitasks great on it! I still have the Pentium 200! I do also have Amiga Forever installed on my Toshiba stinking fast laptop.
WOW!!! ...I can remember it all like yesterday! - just too many of the people that were connected to my life were wrong-uns - in the end, I remember simply giving up and VANISHING back to Crete;
The Amiga OS has some (hidden) features which even modern OSes don't support (e.g. window/multitasking control over TCP/IP network - like cloud computing) - quite amazing for an OS with less than 3MB. ^^ If programmers would program modern computers as efficient then we would have 10-20x times faster and shorter programs today.
Your so right...Puppy OS is so fast compared to windows because it's designed to run with out the code bloat that makes new windows run such a fast machine at almost exactly the same speed as my olllllldddddd old old machines ....coders used to have to keep waste code to a minimum but they got lazy wih windows
There are no programmers anymore, they are now called "Software Engineers" and they re-use ACTUAL programmers routines (called methods) in programs known as "Rad tools". The best comparison I could give is that todays "programmers" in the Amiga era would be the equivalent of someone "coding" on "Can Do" or maybe "Amos", but even amos was a basic language.
Good video. I always loved AMIGA. I would have loved an A3000 when they came out. I went through a few A500s, eventually got an A1200 but was forced to go Windows shortly after that. I was fully into AMIGA though, My A500, I personally upgraded it to ECS chipset, Fat Agnus, Amiga OS 2.04, 120 MEG HD and 3 MEGs of RAM (Fat Agnus allowed 1 Meg of Chip RAM I believe.) 3 MEGS was an insane amount of RAM back then.
The ability to hook up directly to a VGA monitor, faster CPU then the previous models etc I was into art, animation and video work so the A3000 lent itself well to those tasks right out of the box though of course many great games could also be enjoyed.
I had an Amiga 500 back in those days, they were way ahead of their time. But, as a graphic designer, Apple came out with the Mac Plus, which had POSTSCRIPT. Suddenly we could do our own typesetting and have it output at the typesetter's business. It saved us a bunch of money. But it was black and white. Then Illustrator came out and we could do technical illustrations in postscript vector format and have that output instead of spending hours with a Rapidograph pen and drafting table. That little machine single handedly destroyed typesetting companies. It pretty much killed the Amiga as well. They changed into "service bureaus" and eventually those died out too. The Mac IIci came out in COLOR, with color postscript and the primitive ability to do color seperations. That machine put out of business million dollar photo editing machines at color seperation houses. It made our lives easier, but it destroyed much of our business income, because kids would buy them and claim they were instant graphic designers, so we lost small jobs and horrible artwork began appearing print and the quality of the design field dropped dramatically, due to the influx of "desktop publishers," who were untrained "artists" working for cheap. Its amazing the history of these computers, I went thru most of them, the Commodore C64, the Amiga 500, the Mac Plus, and virtually every other Mac that came out year after year.
SDPickups I did all my adverts with pro page on AmigaKit and outputted postscript files which just needed sending to print machine and worked perfectly. however it was the idiots in print shops that did not know this and it was colour
AMIGA was Just light years ahead of its time ! living proof is what it can still do nowdays ! Yea it will take more time etc to do certain functions but that is just cause we have become so used to SSD Drives and such,this still can be used for a Lot of things and is very functional,i doubt any damn expensive PC from 20 years ago could run half the things this does as well as it does ! i have yet to see anything nowdays resembeling the revolution and steps ahead in Home computer or games technology that The Amiga brought in comparison to what was out there before it,best i can remember is the C64 that also was a great piece of hardware for its time but u really can see the leaps ahead in Graphics sound and architechture that the Amiga brought to the world.
Have you thought about getting a triple or quad core PowerPC installed to speed up your AMIGA 3000 you might have to get a version of AmigaOS that would support the triple or quad core PowerPC, I do have a PowerPC powered unit which is the XBOX360 which is not working as I think that something is rattling around inside and I don't have the necessary tools to actually open it up to try and clear the problem.
A3000 was the last competitive Amiga model issued. The A4000 became priced way too high compared to new 486DX2-66 systems that were out and you could get 24bit graphic cards that completely blew AGA away out of the water beyond its wildest imagination. Not to mention, enhanced sound cards as well and they were inexpensive. A4000 certified the death of the Amiga.
I agree the Amiga was an incredible slow computer. However the Amiga OS was more fun to use than any PC OS ever. The Amiga games while not as flash as today's photo realistic games, but were in a lot of ways more fun to play that the current games. I still enjoy some of today's games. but occasionally i still go back and play my old favorite amiga games.
It's a nice overview of the machine and a good reasoning of why it was such a good machine at the time, but I don't hear anything that explains why it is still in use today?
The A3000 had just come out by the time I was selling my A500, as my parents banned me from using the modem, and a disasterous attempt at learning assembler with DevPac 2 (after success with ARexx and Amiga Basic). I only got back into computers once I found the internet at university in 1994.
I wonder if Wolfenstein3D had big part in the process of turning crowds of Amigakids into PCkids, as that's quite exactly how it went with me. I kinda regret it even if it was inevitable and I was the only kid having Amiga... I still remember the day I got A500 and loaded one of the Capcom Collection games that came with it, Dynasty wars it was I think. Simply awesome graphics and sound and made C64 feel so ancient. I wish I could go back after I die, lol.
love ur vids, sad to hear the upgrade messed things up, its happened to me many times too.. there was a company in france who fixed my amiga stuff for a while, now im awaiting the netbook :D
