[HN Gopher] Amiga 2000 EATX PCB
___________________________________________________________________
Amiga 2000 EATX PCB
Author : doener
Score : 122 points
Date : 2021-07-24 09:48 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| rbanffy wrote:
| A lot of the retro experience is in the physical form. A matching
| keyboard would be an important addition.
|
| I'm not really sure about going for the Amiga 2000 though... The
| 3000 and 4000 were much friendlier towards modern hardware, as
| well as much more capable out of the box. I could probably work
| from a 3000 running Amiga Unix (thanks, X11).
| LIV2 wrote:
| I know the keyboard is being worked on by someone else, not
| sure when that will be done though.
|
| Someone's done the A4000 in an ATX form factor too
| https://www.retrosummit.com/2018/08/21/a4000tx-atx-amiga-mot...
| braum wrote:
| sincere questions. what is it about the Amiga, in 2021, that
| still has such interest to warrant a project like this? Does it
| do something a modern Mac or PC can't? Does it have a unique
| ability that does something better?
| gbin wrote:
| I think it is the fact that the Amiga platform was in advance
| on its time. A lot of amiga owners clinged to their Amiga
| waiting for the next revisions to eat the world. When the PC
| platform took over it was a step backward. All those projects
| are a way to rewrite history for the fans: see we could have
| had an amiga in pc form factor, see we could use the web, see
| we could have had graphic accelerators...
|
| And the fact that today it is possible to do is a fun in
| itself.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Many Amigans stuck with their aging hardware several years into
| the early 00's, and I don't think the last of the real die-
| hards gave upon Amiga Inc. until fairly recently.
|
| It took dedication and many now use it for creating the
| ultimate retro computer.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Lots of nostalgia of course, but the Amiga was a glimpse into
| an alternative future where the computer was a productivity and
| creativity device, not primarily a media consumption device,
| while at the same time being friendly to beginners and
| intuitive to use. For instance the way GUI and command line
| worked together, and (starting with AmigaOS 2.0) applications
| could be wired up to exchange data and provide services to
| other applications in a consistent way across the whole system
| is something that went way beyond the UNIX command line and
| still is unmatched.
|
| Switching from my beloved Amiga 3000 to Windows 95 was like
| being thrown back into the dark ages for a few years (apart
| from the games of course, Doom FTW!), until the rest of the
| world finally caught up (but not completely) with WinXP and
| OSX.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > For instance the way GUI and command line worked together,
| and (starting with AmigaOS 2.0) applications could be wired
| up to exchange data and provide services to other
| applications in a consistent way across the whole system is
| something that went way beyond the UNIX command line and
| still is unmatched.
|
| Dbus actually took quite a bit of inspiration from Amiga REXX
| ports (via KDE DCOP), so we've actually gotten that back in
| recent years. But so many Amiga features are still lacking in
| modern OS's.
| vidarh wrote:
| The problem for me with dbus is perceived complexity, and
| lack of community expectations.
|
| Dbus tends to be treated as something developers might use,
| while AREXX was something regular users used, and expected
| applications to support.
|
| The technical capability is there, but something is
| lacking. And that is the case for a lot of things I miss
| from the Amiga - it's technically easy to replicate
| datatypes for example.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| What the Amiga has which more modern systems lack is:
|
| * a stable - as in non-changing - platform from which to
| extract as much performance as possible by way of programming
| prowess instead of throwing a few more gigahertz/bytes at the
| problem
|
| * a compact and rather elegant operating system which' state
| can be kept in the head of a single person, this makes it
| possible to reason your way through most problems
|
| * the combination of the above created a thriving demo scene
| which, if they want to keep active, need access to compatible
| hardware so they can be sure their exploits can be demonstrated
| on "real" Amiga hardware
|
| The same is true for e.g. the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX-
| Spectrum and a host of other popular systems. The Amiga was
| revolutionary at its time and as such attracted those who were
| looking for a machine to explore hence it gained a large
| following. While the absolute performance parameters fall in
| the dust compared to modern hardware [1] it still remains an
| impressive demonstration of what can be done with a relatively
| slow CPU combined with the custom circuitry and the OS which
| made the Amiga different from e.g. the Atari ST.
|
| [1] pulling down from the top of the screen running some
| program to reveal the workbench (desktop) on an Amiga 500
| (512K, 7MHz 68K CPU) preceded the Android notification shade
| (which Apple later copied into iOS) by a few decades, using
| hardware less powerful than what is integrated into the SIM
| card in that same device. On earlier versions of Android (1.x
| without hardware compositing, tested on a Qtek S200 which
| originally ran Windows Mobile) this was quite laggy...
| spamizbad wrote:
| It was before my time, but based on what I can read and see
| on YouTube, it strikes me what made the Amiga special in its
| day was its pile of custom chips that aided graphics, audio
| and kept assembly costs down by integrating tons of IO and
| glue logic into a chipset. Everything else seems to built
| down to cost keeping the overall system price from going into
| the stratosphere.
|
| And while those custom chips are fine, they seemed almost
| targeted at sprite-based gaming and cost reduction. Again,
| I'm just looking at it through other peoples nostalgia, but
| it seems like it just wasn't that remarkable of a machine for
| general purpose usage.
| vidarh wrote:
| At the tine it was _the only_ game in town for "general
| purpose" use in a sense in that everything else lacked
| applications for entire large subsections of use that could
| compete with what an Amiga could do out of the box.
|
| E.g you could draw higher quality art on an Amiga than
| machines with far fewer colours or no bitmap graphics at
| all. You could compose music on an Amiga that was not
| achievable on any other computer in it's price class
| without extra peripherals.
|
| And so on.
|
| It's simply false to suggest the primary function of the
| custom chips was cost cutting - there was nothing that
| provided what they did when they were introduced. Making it
| cheap enough was certainly also critical, but making it
| cheap enough is irrelevant without making it possible
| first.
|
| I think the problem with looking back at this without a
| very clear timeline is that things did move very fast. In
| '85 it was astounding and revolutionary. By '87 it started
| seeing some competition, and without considering that most
| of the competition was too expensive it starts looking less
| impressive. Then prices for PC cards kept dropping. By '91
| it was getting dated, and Commodore was desperate to
| survive and get AGA and AA chipsets completed. By '93 it
| was all over.
|
| In '88 the custom chips would have looked like just cost
| cutting if introduced then, but when they were introduced
| they were expensive and extravagant compared to what was on
| the market.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And by 2000, sound cards and 3D accelerators on the PC
| removed all the advantage, with BeOS looking like a
| possible replacement for the Amiga generation, oh well.
|
| I guess those ideas now live on macOS and Windows
| platforms, to some extent.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I feel like we hit this point way before 2000. By 1994
| you could buy a Pentium machine with CD-quality audio and
| SVGA graphics on a fast PCI bus. You could browse the
| web! Just 2 years later in 1996 you have 3D acceleration
| and sophisticated graphics APIs mainstreamed on PCs: not
| to mention the arrival of the Pentium Pro and MMX
| extensions.
| perl4ever wrote:
| It was when the A3000 came out that Macs started looking
| more attractive to me. Originally, it was like "4096
| colors, cool!" but once high resolution screens became
| more common, flickering interlace mode and 16 colors was
| underwhelming.
|
| 16 _bit_ color made HAM irrelevant and was more exciting
| than pre-emptive multitasking and graphic acceleration.
|
| BeOS was almost acquired by Apple to replace the Mac OS,
| but it wasn't, and it makes you wonder how history would
| have been different.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, it would have been mostly C++ based, and not
| offer the scenario of buying Apple systems as pretty
| UNIX, as big alternative universe.
|
| Ironically there was a group of engineers at Commodore
| that was big into trying to merge Amiga OS and UNIX.
|
| "VCFMW 11 - Bil Herd: Tales From Inside Commodore"
|
| https://youtu.be/-Zpv6u5vCJ4
| mrweasel wrote:
| For people interested in building/fixing computers these old
| systems are wonderful. Even without training you can teach
| youself enough about electronics to reason about how they
| work, well enough to fix them.
|
| Sure much of it is nostalgia and those who owned Amigas in
| the 80' and 90' now have the time and funds to tinker.
|
| I still wonder about the custom chip. Could you just send a
| handfuld to China and have them reversed engineer? Sure an
| FPGA is easier and cheaper, but many want real hardware. The
| custom chips are almost the only thing you can't get as a new
| part.
| hughrr wrote:
| It's called Amiga Denial Syndrome which is an infectious
| disease amongst computer enthusiasts. The sufferers of this
| terrible condition genuinely believe that the Amiga still is
| the pinnacle of computing achievement and that enlightenment
| can be obtained by ramming the remains of an A1200 corpse with
| various accelerators and hack boards hanging off it into a PC
| case, squinting and pretending it's the A4000 they couldn't
| afford in the 90s. This has an elite subcultural element which
| provides completely new hardware like this A2000 and even new
| software. None of these people actually have a working Amiga
| for more than 5 minutes a month however so have to use a PC
| running Linux or a Mac (but never evil windows) to support
| their normal computer usage.
|
| Note this is in jest; as a vintage computing enthusiast I have
| nothing but respect for this and may be speaking from
| experience :)
| perl4ever wrote:
| Well, I'm not sure I see the point of anything beyond an
| emulator, (is it even slower than the hardware?) but the
| thing that sticks in my memory about the Amiga is how the
| Roguelike games tended to have graphical tiles when most
| ports on contemporary machines didn't. Specifically Hack and
| Moria, back in the day.
| amelius wrote:
| > It's called Amiga Denial Syndrome which is an infectious
| disease amongst computer enthusiasts.
|
| Is this related to the Reality Distortion Field?
| dm319 wrote:
| We were the original fanboys (A1200 here).
|
| Joking aside, they were amazing machines that people,
| somehow, became emotionally involved with.
| blippage wrote:
| I sold my Amiga 600 in late 90's. I bought it in 1993. My
| previous computer was an Acorn Electron, which had, like 32k
| of usable RAM. I didn't get much use out of it. A friend said
| he has an Amiga, and it had 1M of RAM. I was astonished as to
| how much RAM that was.
|
| I saw a new vid on YouTube recently with a guy showing how to
| use the Octamed tracker. By coincidence, the guy that bought
| my Amiga all those years ago bought it primarily for the
| tracker.
|
| The Amiga is a surprisingly capable machine. I saw a demo
| where they booted up Debian on the Amiga. It was slow! It
| just goes to show how compact the AmigaOS is. The whole OS
| came on 3 single-sided (?) floppies, and one of them was for
| fonts. Amazing, a whole OS on less than 2 HD floppies.
|
| It appears that AmigaOS is STILL being released commercially
| . The latest release was 6 months ago. Amazing, considering
| that Commodore died in 1994. There is AROS, a free version of
| AmigaOS, which is still actively development. Development
| seems to be slow, though.
|
| AmigaOS is available for the MK68K and PowerPC. I saw a
| PowerPC version awhile ago. They're not cheap, though, which
| is a pity.
|
| I really thought that an AmigaOS is combo with a Raspberry Pi
| would be an awesome hit. OS development on Pis has been a
| disappointment, actually. I was expecting more. Everyone just
| runs Linux.
|
| Kids these days need 8G just to run Firefox, of course.
| Symbiote wrote:
| The Acorn Election was a budget computer from 1983, that's
| not really a fair comparison.
|
| If you'd bought a typical Acorn in 1993, it would have come
| with either 1, 2 or 4 MiB RAM.
|
| You can run the Acorn OS (RISC OS) on a Raspberry Pi.
| boboche wrote:
| Advances for its time is an understatement. In marketing,
| people are trying to sell you an experience, i.e. iOS is the
| experience of power and simplicity, Toyota is the experience of
| affordable reliability, etc. Well Amiga had almost no
| marketing, but anyone who used one seriously still have a fresh
| memory of that powerful experience of being in the future,
| making graphics only accessible (at the time) using 6 digits
| computer equipment, audio sampling and playback so easy a 12
| year old could compose his own tunes, watching babylon 5 and
| trying to recreate space scenes in lightwave or other 3d
| software using only a few megs (few MB, as under 10!).
| Emulating a Quadra in software, faster than the actual Quadra
| using the same 68040 cpu, playing back video in real time when
| PCs were starting displaying colors, etc.
|
| For some others, the demo scene, copy parties, gaming, BBSes,
| first coding, electronics projects, name it.
|
| For me it was all of it, so yeah, powerful experiences that I
| don't think I will ever see or live again because of the nature
| of where and how technology is heading. Last time I got excited
| with something with the same experience potential was when
| Oculus launched their kickstarter, received my DK1. Wow. New
| paradigm shift... but Facebook bought them and that was it for
| me after the CV1.
|
| So we're going back to our first love, nostalgic, stable
| environment and comforting :)
|
| It doesn't do stuff better than today's machine, but the fact
| that its still usable in 2021 and that there's still a lot of
| development being done to keep it fast and geeky shows you how
| powerful the experience was for all of us.
|
| I'm happy I was alive and a kid at that specific timeframe,
| because being a kid today I would probably not have 80% of the
| tech skills I got now if it wasn't for the Amiga, forcing me
| (as in fun) to understand everything low level and make me a
| better problem solver and expand from graphics, coding,
| electronics and creativity to cross-link disciplines.
|
| Now the only last thing exciting I can see before dying is
| going to space, when prices are down by a notch. Kids today
| won't live an Amiga experience, but will probably be able to go
| to Mars.
|
| I'm glad I won't be nostalgic over angry bird, an xbox or an
| iphone!
|
| Now I feel the urge to play that video toaster vhs
| demo...again. lol.
| the_af wrote:
| I think the Amiga was way ahead of its time and inspired a
| fierce loyalty in its fans. Also, retrocomputing is a thing:
| working within the constraints of retro hardware has an
| artistic/hobbyist appeal of its own. This is what compelled me
| to buy a C64 again (actually a TheC64 retro clone with an ARM
| board inside. I've no patience for the actual difficulties of
| plugging ancient hardware into modern peripherals).
|
| There's even an enthusiast's market for new games and software
| for retro computers. The target seems to be either people who
| remember them fondly from their youth, like me, or even people
| who were actually part of the scene back then! It's something
| like a club for old automobile collectors I guess.
|
| As for uniqueness: everything about the Amiga was unique,
| especially when compared with PC and Macs (or the Apple II).
| The Amiga was built out of custom chipset purposefully designed
| for the vision its creators had; these were not off the shelf
| chips like with PCs.
|
| For a pretty detailed history of the Amiga, complete with hope,
| betrayal and tragedy, I recommend you google the Ars Technica
| series titled "A History of the Amiga". It will provide a
| glimpse into what was so unique about the system.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| Retrocomputing is the programmer's version of cringe. The very
| border of benign.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Games of that era were better to play then and better to play
| now. Amiga is such an integral part of computing history even
| though the Mac/PC duopology tries to write it out of history.
|
| When you consider in the early 90s that the Amiga emulated the
| fastest Mac FASTER than the fastest Mac, you get an idea of the
| power. Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic
| today's technology landscape is.
| perl4ever wrote:
| >the Amiga emulated the fastest Mac FASTER than the fastest
| Mac
|
| I remember when people would post this sort of thing on
| Usenet, for years after most people had given up on the
| platform.
|
| By the time the A4000 came out (late 1992), there were Macs
| that also had 68040s and ran at higher clock speeds, so I
| don't think it was remotely possible to do what you say. How
| could a 25 MHz CPU emulate a 33MHz CPU _faster_ than native
| under any circumstances?
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic
| today's technology landscape is.
|
| Okay, I'm a fan of the Amiga, but this is just too far.
| Today's computers are "pathetic"? I remember playing with an
| A500 when I was really young and didn't really know anything
| other than a few games. I really got into Amiga with the
| A2000 solely based the Newtek's Video Toaster. Then,
| computers became all about video for me since. The things we
| can do now in real-time with video blows an Amiga out of the
| water. Toaster was all about SD video. We now do more things
| in real-time with 4K videos.
|
| Your comments act like the rest of the computing world is at
| a stand still compared to the Amiga of yore.
| MegaDeKay wrote:
| > Maybe you need to live that time to realize how pathetic
| today's technology landscape is.
|
| I think that is going a little far. There are some incredible
| technologies out there right now. What GPUs can do these days
| is amazing. For another, the phenomenally fast SSDs in
| current gen consoles like the PS5 will trickle down to PCs.
| On the flip side of the coin, you have very capable
| microcontroller platforms based on chips like the ESP32 for a
| few dollars, not to mention the latest offerings from the
| Raspberry Pi foundation. Really low cost boards like these
| put the technology into the hands of anybody that might be
| interested in learning something with next to no investment
| required. Even the Amiga couldn't make that claim back then.
| icedchai wrote:
| It felt like things advanced faster back then. The Amiga was
| a huge leap over other 16-bit platforms when it was released.
| Time doesn't stand still, and hardware wise the platform
| barely evolved between 1985 and 1994. AGA was the only major
| change to the platform, other than faster processors, which
| every other platform was also getting. Example: An Amiga in
| 1994 had the same sound chip ("Paula") as one released in
| 1985.
|
| The slow, incremental improvements weren't enough to keep up
| with x86 and SVGA. Commodore really dropped the ball. If the
| 1200/4000 was released in 1990 instead of late '92 it
| might've been a different story. The 1200's performance was
| hobbled by lack of fast memory out of the box and a previous
| generation processor (68020, which as 5+ years old at the
| time.)
|
| Early versions of the OS were also primitive and unstable.
| That didn't change until 2.0 which wasn't generally available
| until late 1990.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| No one else has mentioned this but it's a growing use case for
| a few in the retro scene:
|
| These older computers are still auditable from a security
| standpoint. A pre-486 machine doesn't have binary blobs or
| sketchy hypervisors that run in ring -1 that are under the
| control of a third party.
|
| If manufacturers ever cease to provide general purpose
| machines, one way for the community to bootstrap itself would
| be from old hardware or FPGAs (if they can be trusted).
| someguyorother wrote:
| Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
| vidarh wrote:
| Mostly it's nostalgia. It was such massive leaps ahead at the
| time.
|
| But there's a lot of quirks that still stand out.
|
| Some of my favorites include datatypes - closed source Amiga
| programs released 30+ years ago can load things like webp
| images if they support datatypes, as long as you drop a
| datatype into your system.
|
| And AREXX. The language is pretty awful, but the pervasiveness
| of AREXX ports in Amiga applications and how normal users took
| advantage of it is something I haven't seen since.
|
| The openness (despite the os being closed source) of the
| platform is another one. Hardware schematics. A composable,
| modular well documented OS where _everything_ could be patched
| and replaced. Where people kept experimenting with new file
| systems because you could just drop a file in and it 'd be
| accessible. Or new device drivers, including virtual ones. Or
| plugged in new system wide file requesters, because they could.
|
| A lot of it has more to do with the community around it than
| the machines themselves.
| icedchai wrote:
| It's definitely nostalgia for me. I still remember the day I
| got Shadow of the Beast for my Amiga 500, back in 1989. I was
| blown away by the graphics, especially parallax scrolling,
| and sound. I taught myself C on that machine (Lattice 5.x?)
| Some of the things I learned still are with me to this day.
| Before that I had only used BASIC.
|
| I later upgraded to an Amiga 3000. That was my favorite
| machine of the early 90's era. Eventually, Linux started
| taking off and around 1994 I moved on from the Amiga.
|
| I play around with the Amiga occasionally on various
| emulators. I also got a MIST box some years ago (which is an
| FPGA-based emulator.) IMO the FPGA stuff isn't worth it given
| the speed of emulation you can obtain even on a Raspberry Pi.
| LIV2 wrote:
| For me it's fun being able to play around/make hardware for a
| system that is still simple enough for one to understand
| broadly how the whole thing works.
|
| The schematics are available for them & they're documented
| really well
|
| People still make software & games for it for presumably the
| same reason, then there's people who are into it for the
| nostalgia and the games.
| myself248 wrote:
| This is huge. Even the Raspberry Pi doesn't have open
| schematics or firmware.
|
| The Amiga era was the last good overlap of "you can know
| everything about the machine" and "the machine can do useful
| things".
| squarefoot wrote:
| Nostalgia for those of us that were there back then of course
| plays a big role, but knowledge is also important. Had Amiga
| won the race against the PC back then, today's personal
| computers would be the equivalent of flying cars. Not many
| people for example recalls that in the mid-80s we already
| AmigaOS software for creating GUIs (PowerWindows), that was
| years before the first Visual Basic was created.
|
| Edit: I forgot that although the OS was fully multitasking, it
| lacked memory protection and management, so a rogue process
| could easily crash other processes or the entire system by
| writing parts of the memory that it shouldn't have touched.
| Also, there was no such thing as resource tracking, so if I
| malloc'ed say one kb, I had to remember to free it before
| exiting, or it would remain allocated until the next reboot.
| Those were limitations that I found immensely useful when
| learning to optimize things.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Hoping this could push the costs of getting into Amiga hardware
| lower. I never got to use an Amiga in "the day", and seeing the
| prices continually creep and creep higher really discourages me.
| unixhero wrote:
| Just buy a Vampire v4, done.
| renaudg wrote:
| He's complaining about cost, so a Vampire is not necessarily
| the best option (euphemism)
|
| A Raspberry Pi 4 with PiMiga is a great way to get your feet
| wet (and might be all you need eventually)
| kotaKat wrote:
| I kinda wanted to play with a Video Toaster at some point.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Seeing as this needs the original chips taken from an Amiga
| 2000, I doubt it'll lower much in the way of costs.
| hestefisk wrote:
| I would buy this if it were commercially available. Is anyone
| looking to manufacture and sell this board? If yes how much would
| it cost?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| All the info is in that link.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Unlikely. This board isn't suitable for mass production -- many
| of the parts required can only be obtained from another Amiga
| system.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-24 23:00 UTC)