@@TheGuruMeditation coached history that was never asked till I came around giving the facts from Jay himself with proof/// then he "magically" "proves"this by saying so ..srill no proof ,but I gave proof time ,and rime again for the pasr 25 years.. Yet, you claim to honor the Amiga ..let alone Jay. I kmow nor. I honor the Truth which is what . why Jay gave , this title/ Amigaman I DO NOT SEEK VENGEANCE NOR SORROW ONLY VINDICATION To Glorify THE DIVINITY (YHWH/YAHUSHUA/HOLY SPIRIT) Constantine The Meek Constantine Augustus XII
Thanks for this pearl. Being Italian and living in Italy is practically impossible to attend events like this. And yes, this helps to feel part of the incredible family Amiga has always been, is and will always be. They were ahead of their times, pity that some rotten apples devoted to money and only to money buried that masterpiece of tech. Thanks!
Thanks for recording this. Very interesting how CBM was almost panicking to get hold of the Amiga, but then they didnt do much with the marketing. Also great to hear more about Ranger and Hombre.
This was an amazing event. The talks were of the high points for me along with meeting so many cool Amigans in person. We are very lucky as a community to have such a talented videographer as Bill to record these for those who couldn't make it.
Aw, thanks for the kind words 32 Bits. It was so awesome meeting you as well. There is so much value to meeting in person and putting face to names. It was a real pleasure to meet you and I hope we can get together again!
Thanks for the recording Bill! I always thought the.way Andy Finkel was latterly treated at Commodore was such a huge shame. I believe he came back in via the CDTV projects. Always comes across as a fastidious decent bloke, and well done on him actually digging up concrete new information too.
@@TheGuruMeditation No hurry on my part Bill, just do you. Yes long time no see, the time zone difference between Japan and Europe/the Americas means my social media presence went off a cliff overnight and all streams are in the middle of the night for me or just as I am getting ready to go to work. I'm doing really well thanks and hope you are too.
Great to see Dave Haynie still looking so good in 2022. Also kewl that he's wearing a shirt designed ~1992 by my fellow Amiga Atlanta Inc. (AAi) compatriot and Amiga convention companion, Robert Hamilton. The front depicts a stylized vampire hand.with sharpened fingernails (actually Robert's manicured look in those days) breaking through a cracked patch of earth clutching a boing ball. The phrase on the back reads "Death is just the Beginning! -- Amiga" This resurgence of interest in Amiga history and retro computing is encouraging me to finally digitize the hours of "celebrity" interview and event footage we shot during the Amiga 10th anniversary celebrations that AAi hosted in the mid 90's.
Guys, where have you been for the last 10 months? Glad to see you back even if its not a direct video from you guys. Really enjoyed this talk and great to see the community is still going strong. ;o)
I have been traveling for work and so has Anthony. I basically do my Twitch streams every week, because I haven't had time to edit, but I will be focusing on this channel too!
Hey. Thank you so much for recording and sharing this. What a great video. Andy and Dave are legends. How they talk so casually about things that changed the world and impacted so many people. Awesome stuff. Even Anthony is in there. Good question btw. See ya on Twitch.
Great talk, with some new info - yay. :) Thanks a ton Bill for filming it, that was a great decision. Much appreciated! I really enjoyed hearing Andy talking about the early OS. That's not often talked about, and being a software guy that's fascinating to me. I wonder if any of the code has survived. Anybody knows if there are any sources from Commodore? Also reminded me about the complete black magic that is exec.library.. Carl Sassenrath is a magician for sure, that code is incredible.
Oh man I would love to do weekly videos. Honestly that is not possible due to my job, but I do weekly live streams Sundays on my Twitch channel www.twitch.tv/amigabill I will bee uploading more videos here as well!
This is just awesome! @11:15 PC-DOS or MS-DOS, well that is absolutely not impossible. It would just not run any x86 programs and be totally incompatible with x86. So glad this did not happened... and we just got the awful BASIC... Edit... That first question was awesome! Something I also pondered so many times, Workbench/AmigaOS/DOS was so freaking great at so many things but what sort of killed (in my opinion) was the lack of multiuser filesystem. I think it could have lived on and thrived even today with that with just a touch of magic around the time of WB2.04. It could have been filesystem that was considerably slower then FFS but totally compatible with FFS. You could choose to use it sort of... like "install this" if you wanted a multiuser system, or install this if you wanted a multiuser system but client based or just go single user and as fast and compatible (with older WB's) as possible... and some sort of upgrade path... I would easily see in the 1990's BBS go fully with this back then, and Intuition and stuff would be sort of written/rewritten for "slow" modems for GUI terminals and fully remote desktops and stuff... and yes copy sort of UNIX way of thinking, but done a giant leap 1990's because of the "fixed" hardware of the Amiga computers. Would have required an MMU though...
51:41 I asked Joe Decuir about this at VCF SE. I believe he said this was to allow for different Chip RAM configurations. (MY memory isn't what it used to be!) 57:43 The story goes Jay Miner liked flight simulators used by the military at the time, wanted that number of colors to work with, and HAM was a memory efficient want to do it.
I love hearing these guys talk about this, but it would also be awesome to hear from some of the business people and "middle management" from that time as well. Would be awesome to get a wider perspective on everything.
So cool...thanks for sharing! I'm new to the Amiga (I have an A600). Had a QL instead in the late 80's early 90's and moved straight to the Mac after that. Kind of fun to see how Clive's marketing impacted Commodore's decision on the Amiga. In reality, the QL would struggle to compare to the C64 in actual stuff that mattered to consumers at that time: graphics and sound. Just in specs it seemed nicer. Of course back then everyone looked to micros to compete with IBM PC's and business and the QL was better suited for that though again, it didn't succeed. Today we look at these mircors and divide them up into home vs business but the companies back then likely did not. So maybe Commodore was looking at its lineup from that same lens of business like Clive tried to do with the QL. Nice that we (Sinclair camp) could help in getting the Amiga to be part of the Commodore family 🙂 Hey, hope you guys can join #AMayGA2022 this year!
Cool insight. I think Commodore management didn't know what to do with Amiga. It was a multi-media computer before people even knew what multi-media was. What is AMayGA2022 ?
@@TheGuruMeditation One more note...I just realized I had my user account switched to my non-youtube channel on this original comment. Usually I comment on retro viedos as 8-Bit Retro Journal, not as Michael Jonas but it's one and the same.
What really killed Amiga was Richard Branson ..notice he lost his sir status ,because of me..,anyway. He made a over 500millon dollar contract with Amiga ,, Hence the T-mobile air.. him showing off A1200s with akkio chip and 030 .. It did everything with more to grow circa 1991. room for future ports. ah yes we forget so conveniently about that ,because we want others ,and not me to be right pfft. You would use the system in back of anybody's airline chair .. it was an 030 gvp acc.. they went bankrupt at the same time as branson didnt payoff . Intel buys out Amiga the 2 fools embezzles the money .. tells the court what to do, and bingo Amiga ,and gvp are vaporware. I know I was the actual one trying to buy Amiga not commodore for 10,5 million in 1992 in may. In early 92 Intel got Amiga dave, carl, and jay know this remember the NDA.... my guess a lot are jealous ,and are trying to trash me saying I lie ,and dont know shit , well I was there before dave people.. oh yeah ,because of my title which they all know especially YOU DAVE. I can make a new Amiga call it amiga with amiga os if I want . Who cares Jay said the amiga name was dead in 1989 ,and commodore name was dead in 1987 so I came up with Hombre.. there i so much more., AmigaMan I DO NOT SEEK VENGEANCE NOR SORROW ONLY VINDICATION To Glorify THE DIVINITY (YHWH/YAHUSHUA/HOLY SPIRIT) Constantine The Meek Constantine Augustus XI
Awesome Guru Team, we have all missed your videos, very special stuff. Elon Musk you need to buy out all Amiga assets and put your billions into Amiga not Twitter :)
In regards to the fpga bit towards the end- someone please make an asic or two with the Fossi Foundation and Efabless. They'll do a run of chips paid for by Google as long as it's open source and uses the Skywater PDK. I've no experience in fpga stuff, and I'd really like to hear someone's experience in adapting some fpga cores into asics
Still have great, great memories of my good 'ol Amiga 1000 and then later the A500 and A1200. But one thing I've always wondered about when it comes to the amazing custom chips with these machines, is, how come the graphics capabilities were improved with each new chipset release, but the audio capabilities stayed the same from OCS to ECS on through AGA? Even as the competition was catching up, why weren't more voices added (8, 12, etc), or higher resolution (12 or 16 bit)? Seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Yeah, that was my big beef with ECS/AGA as well. From what I've read, there was a Fat Paula in development that could do those things, which included 8 audio channels, high-density floppies, and two DMA serial ports, and there was a suggestion that integrated SCSI was considered. It didn't get done in time for the ECS chipset. The company was banking on AAA to be done in 1990. When it became obvious AAA was too ambitious and resource intensive, AGA was kind of rushed out as a stop-gap measure, and the video hardware just took precedence over the new audio chip. That was pretty sad, as AGA itself wasn't that great and had plenty of limitations, such as the A1200 only being able to drive the 68020 CPU at half speed. I love my A1200, especially with a 4MB fast RAM card, but even when I bought it, I knew AGA was a real disappointment.
@@Waccoon Have you ever read what the next-gen chipset, Hombre, was going to be? Really awesome, but by that time Commodore was in big trouble. You can read about it on wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset For example: - An inhouse designed 100+ MHz 64-bit integer PA-RISC microprocessor with SIMD and additional graphics processing related instructions - An advanced DMA engine and blitter with fixed-point arithmetic 3D texture mapping and gouraud shading using trapezoids as primitives - 64-bit risc-like Copper co-processor - 16-bit resolution sound processor with twelve voices and - Fill rate of 30 million 3D rendered pixels per second (similar to Sony's PlayStation performance) - Special Function Unit (SFU) SIMD extension for rasterizing multiple pixels with a single 64-bit operation - 16-bit chunky graphic modes (to reduce costs, Commodore abandoned 256 color mode with Color LUT registers) - 32-bit chunky with 8-bit alpha channel - 1280 × 1024 pixel progressive resolution with a 24-bit color palette - One sprite with a 24-bit color palette, used for the mouse pointer - Four scalable playfields, each with their own graphics mode (e.g. 16bpp, HAM-8) - 512 25-bit color look up tables (24-bit color + 1 bit for genlock) - 3D texture mapping engine - Gouraud shading - Z-buffering - YUV compatibility with JPEG support - Standard TV and HDTV compatibility - 64-bit internal data bus and registers
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Yeah, I managed to find the original Hombre presentation a few years ago and spent some time reading through the specs, including the proposed register layout. The real shame is that Commodore wanted to use OpenGL as the standard graphics API for this chipset right from the start (as they also intended to let HP use it for their low-end workstations). I can only imagine how much influence it might have had on the PC industry if OpenGL was established as a standard. For years following the demise of Commodore, PC games were still being hard-coded to specific graphics chips (like NV1) or proprietary APIs (like Glide). The late 90's was not a nice time to be a PC gamer! My only quibble is that Hombre did not support 256 color mode with a LUT, which IMO was a bad idea. Also, the Hombre spec was written with support for up to 16 sprites, with 8 sprites proposed for the first version of the chipset. It may have been late in development where they changed their mind to use only one.
@@Waccoon It was largely incompatible with previous Amigas, but we knew that was going to have to be the case at some point simply to give them the freedom to do whatever they needed to do to make it the best system possible (I imagine that Commodore and/or third parties would step up to fill that gap with some extra hardware on a card to allow backwards compatibility. I too think that the 256 color register mode would be missed, but I guess when they're cost-reducing that was one of the things that had to go. On the sprites, I would have loved to see a lot more flexibility, like maybe having 32 sprites with limited colors, or 16 sprites with twice as many colors, etc. It's too bad that Jay Miner had passed away by this time.
@@JustWasted3HoursHere Hombre was indeed a clean break, and the plan was to make a new chipset to replace AGA, called AA+, and then put an AA+ chip on a Hombre system to provide backwards compatibility. AA+ only existed on paper, so it's hard to say what it would have looked like. I experimented with some timing diagrams using 70ns memory, and I guess it would have pretty much been AGA running at 1.5 times the clock speed and quad-CAS support. I'm engineering my own retro computer based on the Amiga, and I spent a lot of time studying the way the Amiga works internally and doing timing diagrams. Commodore was really strange with regards to LUT support, and I don't fully understand the logic of having 512 color registers for bitplane mode but nothing for packed pixel mode. They probably wanted to do some weird post-shift processing, but that introduces delays that causes all kinds of problems, and it's not really something that should be done. Actually, I have no idea why they felt bitplanes should even have been supported at all by 1994. The practical limit for hardware sprites depends on memory bandwidth. If you have 60ns DRAM and want more than 8 sprites in progressive mode, they need to be multiplexed sprites. That is, the hardware stores positions for the sprites on the screen, but only stores the video data for 8 per scanline. The Sega Genesis, for example, supports 40 sprites but can only display 8 at a time per scanline. Hardware sprites are a pain to support and need a lot of hardware. It's best to avoid them if possible, and Hombre didn't really need more than one. My retro computer, circa 1981, only supports two. Hombre was interesting, but it still had issues. The engineers didn't have a crystal ball, after all. 8)
Wish Commodore never made Mehdi Ali CEO of Commodore, because that was the downfall, they should have made the AAA, and put that AAA graphics chip and 16bit 8+ channel sound chip in the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 and later Amiga CD32, and does Amiga computers and console would have been a huge hit in 1992 and 1993, just like Amiga 500 and 2000 was a HUGE hit in the 80s. Still feel sad Commodore went bankrupt in 1994, Amiga was so great, has such a great community, wish they had made the new Amiga OS for x86 hardware, and not Power PC hardware, when we would also maybe still had Amiga OS on many computers.
