[HN Gopher] What made the Amiga so great
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What made the Amiga so great
Author : harel
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-01-16 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (8bitnews.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (8bitnews.io)
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| What made the Amiga great is that this was not just a bit but
| _way_ more advanced than anything out there. When I had to,
| reluctantly, switch to a 386 PC, this was very painful because it
| felt like going backwards in time by several years. A friend of
| mine had an Amiga 1000 (it came out in 1985, before the 500 whic
| surfaced in 1987): going to his home was witnessing the future.
|
| Fun sidenote: I recently found I still have my bootleg 5"1/4
| Amiga floppy drive reader: this was way cheaper than buying 3"1/2
| disks. If you planned to buy more than 30 floppies, it was
| cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive _and_ 30 5 "1/4 floppies than it was
| to buy only 30 3"1/2 floppies. We'd add a switch at the back of
| the Amiga to decide from which drive to boot. I plan to open that
| drive one of these days and see how it was made.
| BrissyCoder wrote:
| My generation had the Amiga. This generation has Crypto and Web
| 3.0. The future is bleak.
| skybrian wrote:
| Imagine if we got a glimpse of Minecraft back then. This and
| probably many future generations have that.
| harel wrote:
| Minecraft would have made a great Amiga game. Probably would
| have been it's killer app that would have made it the
| mainstream computer.
| snarfy wrote:
| As a kid in a computer store in 1987, it was a pretty easy
| choice. The PC was either monochrome or 4 color CGA graphics. The
| amiga had a 3d ray traced animation of juggling spheres.
| aidos wrote:
| Amiga just felt so fun to explore. There was a sort of
| playfulness to it, but actually it was still this amazing
| creative machine.
| harel wrote:
| The site this links to, 8bitnews.io, is a wonderful resource to a
| lot of retro news and projects and they have a mailing list that
| does not suck.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Bitplane graphics was probably a bad decision. It's good for
| games, but terrible for any program where you want to change one
| pixel at a time - If you have a linear frame buffer, lighting up
| a pixel means a read from memory, some OR'ing and a write. When
| you have 5 bit-planes, you need as many reads as bits change in
| the color value, up to 5, and then 5 writes. Good for games, but
| bad for mostly everything else.
|
| Also, the keyboard, it came out a good couple years after the DEC
| LK201, which is very similar to both the Amiga and the STs. The
| IBM enhanced came out at about the same time, but, IIRC, the 122
| key layout dates back to the Model F family.
|
| I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough back
| then to properly place these machines in their historical
| context.
| crazydoggers wrote:
| Bitplane graphics allowed the Amiga to do a lot of graphical
| tricks other machines, given the limited memory of the times,
| just couldn't do. Examples include halfbrite and HAM modes.
| It's part of the reason anyone who saw Amigas in the early days
| felt like it was decades ahead of the competition.
|
| By the time chunky mode graphics and 3D rendering really
| started to have an advantage, computers were moving to seperate
| graphics cards anyway, so I don't see it as a bad choice. Had
| Amiga continued I'm sure we would still be using Nvidia and AMD
| graphics cards in them now. In fact 3rd party graphics cards
| did start appearing for the Amiga.
|
| The bad decisions for Amiga all came down to Commodore sucking
| it dry and not putting any money into the engineering division.
| phire wrote:
| Changing a single pixel at a time wasn't a common operation in
| the 80s when the Amiga was popular.
|
| The main class of application that would have used single-pixel
| modifications would be paint-style programs, and the cpu was
| generally fast enough to keep up with user input.
|
| There are advantages to planar graphics that can help
| applications too. Being able to dynamically change the number
| of bitplanes based on an application's color requirements both
| saves ram and increases cpu performance.
|
| It wasn't really until about 1992 that the lack of chunky
| graphics really became a liability, with the rise of 3D games
| like Doom and various multimedia applications, like streaming
| video off CD-ROM and more advanced productivity apps. If Amiga
| had actually delivered the AAA chipset in 1993 with it's
| various chunky graphics modes, maybe the platform would have
| survived.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Bitplane graphics
|
| Fun fact regarding bitplane: a friend of mine realized that he
| could use only 16 colors instead of 32, have all colors from,
| say, 0 to 15 be black, then clear the whole screen by zero'ing
| only the first bitplane (so effectively only blitting one-fifth
| of what would typically need to be blitted in case you wanted
| to clear the whole screen between two frames).
|
| Problem is: running the Amiga in 16 colors mode (instead of 32)
| was faster than using that trick in 32 colors mode.
|
| _However_... That trick worked on the Atari ST. It was a very
| fast way to clear the whole screen. But as the Atari ST only
| had 4 bitplanes to start with, then you 'd end up with only 8
| usable colors if you used that trick.
|
| We're talking decades ago, but I'm pretty sure I remember this
| correctly (as in: we actually tried and timed all this on both
| the Amiga and the Atari ST back in the days).
|
| > I wonder how hard it is for people who were not old enough
| back then to properly place these machines in their historical
| context.
|
| Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > Yup, what an era. At least I've got my Raspberry Pis today.
|
| Yeah... Computers used to be more exciting. And don't forget
| the M1.
| cassiopeia wrote:
| Way better gfx and sound than the Atari ST;)
| harel wrote:
| Now you're just trying to pick a fight :-)
| zibzab wrote:
| What made Amiga great was all the awesome stuff you could play
| with once you get tired of playing with the best games ever
| written.
|
| The Workbench 3.0 Utility disk included a copy of MicroEmacs.
| Decades later still my favourite editor and top 5 piece of
| software.
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