AROS turns any PC into an Amiga with USB-bootable distro

The FOSS recreation of AmigaOS is making progress. A new edition runs entirely from a USB key, so you can temporarily turn your PC into an Amiga – without any tricky installation process. The AROS Research OS – AROS for short – has been around for 30 years, but it keeps a relatively low profile compared to more visible FOSS …

[elsergiovolador]

Dave

Everyone at work thinks Dave’s just one of those Linux guys. You know the type - keyboard with no markings, thinks mice are for the weak, answers tickets in vim. Uses i3 because “tiling is efficient,” drinks instant coffee with the same dead eyes he’s had since ‘96.

But Dave’s not running Linux. That’s just the cover.

Underneath, it’s AROS. An Amiga. In a full-screen QEMU session, booted from a USB stick taped to the inside of his ThinkPad. Ubuntu’s just the launchpad. The real OS is a fossil he’s lovingly resurrected with duct tape, hex editors, and pure spite.

Everyone assumes his terminal obsession is just hardcore DevOps swagger. No - it’s AmigaShell. The commands are weird, half of them don’t work, and the help system is a bad joke. But Dave doesn’t care. Dave doesn’t need help. He wrote intros in 68000 assembler on paper.

Sometimes someone walks by and asks, “What’s that editor?”

“Cinnamon Writer,” he mumbles.

“Oh cool, never heard of it - must be some minimalist fork.”

“Yeah,” Dave says, and smiles like a man who’s buried comrades.

He’s got a whole setup for pretending. A fake GNOME screenshot he Alt-Tabs to. A bash alias called teams that launches a screenshot of a Teams window in feh. He “can’t share his screen” because of “Wayland issues.” IT gave up years ago.

You don’t understand how deep it goes. He formats USB sticks in Amiga FFS. He keeps a second mouse in his bag - one with two buttons - “for emergencies.” His browser? Odyssey. It last updated when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister.

And yet... everything somehow works. Slowly. Painfully. Like dragging a corpse uphill. But it works.

Dave says he likes the “workflow.” What he means is: he never moved on. He’s running shell scripts older than some of the interns, on an OS no one can patch, on hardware that actively resists reality.

And Dave never really came back from Assembly ‘94.

[Blackjack]

Re: Dave

Do you know how many people try to run everything in Dosbox forks that allow stuff like printing?

[Liam Proven]

Re: Dave

> But Dave’s not running Linux. That’s just the cover.

https://hipsterthanever.tumblr.com/post/95356895665/it-hipster

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Dave

Cygnus Ed, surely?

[Alistair]

Re: Dave

And yet... everything somehow works. Slowly. Painfully. Like dragging a corpse uphill. But it works.

One tweak " "Yeah" Dave *growls*, and smiles ......"

Insufficient upvotes available Sir!

This post deserves an icon change, Have one of these Sir! =====>

[graeme leggett]

Tears of nostalgia

If I try it, will it just remind me of "better" (different) times.

Or will trying to recall how to use a GUI I was once competent if not actually fluent in (and some scripting too) hit a barrier of 25 years of PC overwriting skills?

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Tears of nostalgia

Nope, it comes flooding back.

[graeme leggett]

Re: Tears of nostalgia

Will I become a left handed mouse user again too?

[robinsonb5]

Re: Tears of nostalgia

What I find astonishing is that current PCs are literally thousands of times faster, and yet feel less responsive than machines from the late 80s.

(Then you do something like generate a fractal which takes minutes - if not hours - on a retro machine, and which can be done in realtime on a modern machine, and the difference is thrown in sharp relief.)

[NoneSuch]

Re: Tears of nostalgia

The PC performance is down to the programming languages. In the 80's, you could program a game taken from five pages of machine code from a computer magazine.

Today, you need 6.5GB of support files installed to run a 12K program and an active Internet connection.

[Evil Auditor]

Re: Tears of nostalgia

I'm under the sweet illusionconvinced that Solaris (Sun, not Orc Cackle) has been the pinnacle of OS GUIs. And dread firing up my trusty, old SparcStation 4 to indulge in nostalgia, fearing it might be just that: dated.

@robinsonb5, indeed, with my beloved Sun OS there was never a moment when I wondered "did I actually click this or miss it?" and clicked again and waited - repeatedly. Build for processing performance and yet it's responsiveness beat any OS built for GUI performance.

[Paul Herber]

A of AROS

So, if the A of AROS is the initial of AROS ...

[Liam Proven]

Re: A of AROS

> So, if the A of AROS is the initial of AROS ...

It is now.

This is an industry tradition:

GNU = GNU's Not Unix.

HURD = Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons.

HIRD = Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth.

WINE = WINE Is Not an Emulator

ATI = ATI Technologies, Inc.

ST MINT: MINT Is Not TOS. Then as of TOS 4 it _was_ so it was redefined as MINT Is Now TOS. :-)

It used to be Amiga Replacement OS or Amiga Research OS but Amiga is an active and contested trademark.

[m4r35n357]

Re: A of AROS

If I knew back then what I know now, i could have made good use of MiNT/Bash/Sozobon C . . .

[m4r35n357]

Well hidden downloads!

Didn't find anything at first look, I'll try again after lunch!

[Liam Proven]

Re: Well hidden downloads!

Um. The download links are hidden in this paragraph:

«

Download links:

https://arosnews.github.io/aros-portable

»

[m4r35n357]

Re: Well hidden downloads!

Don't panic! - I meant on _their_ page: https://aros.sourceforge.io/

[Liam Proven]

Re: Well hidden downloads!

> I meant on _their_ page: https://aros.sourceforge.io/

I think you've missed the point here.

You won't find downloads of ready-to-use .DEB or .RPM packages of the latest Linux kernel on kernel.org either.

The way to try AROS is to pick a distribution, and go to the distro's page, just like with Linux.

That is why I specifically mentioned and linked to AROS Live, AROS One, TinyAROS and Icaros.

[Chris Gray 1]

Mouse?

I am NOT going to get sidetracked trying this. At least not this year. But,

does it support a USB mouse? Trackpads and me don't get along.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Mouse?

Trackpads on laptops often show up in device driver lists as "PS/2 Mouse", so yeah, I'd imagine anything using the trackpad, at it's core, is basically a mouse driver, probably with some added logic to make trackpaddy stuff work. As an aside, the trackpad possibly does a lot of the trackpaddy stuff internally. Have you ever noticed when doing updates on some laptops that one of the things that happens is the trackpad firmware sometimes gets updates? There's lot more going on in the trackpad unit than may first appear, especially compared to a basic, generic mouse :-) One recent example was a Lenovo I swapped out the trackpad. There'd recently been a trackpad "driver" update and the factory new replacement trackpad didn't have it so on rebooting and running Lenovos System Updater, it did the trackpad update again, demonstrating that there's a CPU and ROM of sorts in the trackpad itself.

[IamAProton]

I have a LOT of Amiga games

Still on floppy disks, hundreds, unused give or take since 25 years

Does anybody know a straightforward) way to image these floppies into usable games for this emulator?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

I would hope there was a physical USB 3.5" floppy drive and some sort of mapping in the emulator?

[Dan 55]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

Re-download the WHD Load versions, here (bit.ly links in description). As odd as it may seem, this is the official place to find Pimiga 4.

[IamAProton]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

can't watch video now, Do you mean that the Pimiga 'package' has many games images already included so i can just run those in winuae/aros?

My goal is to save/play those games on emulator (if still readable). ll keep the amiga hardware for the time being, is not gonna be trashed but will not be used either.

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

"ll keep the amiga hardware for the time being, is not gonna be trashed but will not be used either."

Depending on the Amiga model and condition, there may be some value in selling it in the retro community, especially if you are never planning to use it again.

[Dan 55]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

Do you mean that the Pimiga 'package' has many games images already included so i can just run those in winuae/aros?

Yep, exactly.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

If I understand correctly, AROS seems first and foremost to be intended as a workalike/clone and updated version of the Amiga OS, rather than a carbon-copy emulation of the original hardware.

In this sense, it's probably closer to later versions of the "official" AmigaOS- aimed at the niche enthusiast market and designed to run on proprietary PowerPC-based systems that aren't binary/hardware compatible with the classic Amigas- than nostalgia-focused emulator systems like "The A500 Mini".

Anyway, according to Wikipedia, AROS *is* directly binary compatible with AmigaOS binaries, but only when run on m68k-based hardware. It also, apparently, supports built-in emulation to allow AmigaOS binaries (still, presumably, those compiled for m68k) to be run under different architectures.

However, the vast majority of classic Amiga games boot and "hit the hardware" directly, bypassing the OS, so I'm not sure how well they'd work with this.

I'm also not sure that ever was the intention. I suspect that if you simply want to load up and play Lotus 2 or whatever, there are probably more suitable options, like the aforementioned A500 Mini or PC-based alternatives.

(I also suspect that the vast majority of games you would like to run will already have been transferred to emulator-compatible formats and available online via, er, unofficial means!)

[Dan 55]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

For classic games which hit the hardware, you run the AROS version of WinUAE.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

I had an Amiga back in the day, but I never got much into Amiga emulation, so apologies for my lack of familiarity with this, but...

Do you mean running them under the (optional) integrated support for m68k-based AmigaOS programs I was referring to above, which apparently uses a version of UAE called Janus-UAE?

Or do you mean simply running the regular version of "WinUAE" under AROS in a similar manner to how one would run it under Windows, i.e. running a separate but "full" Classic 68K Amiga emulator *within* AROS? (And isn't "WinUAE" the Windows port anyway?)

And if the latter, is there any benefit to running *that* emulator under AROS rather than another OS if you simply want to play Lotus 2 and you aren't interested in AROS for its own sake?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

Yes :-)

Yeah, if all you want to do is run some games, a UAE variant suitable for your OS of choice is the bast way to play Amiga games and mostly works extremely well for all the other stuff like productivity s/w[*]. AROS, in my view, is even more niche than emulation since it's much more "just" the Amiga OS experience brought up to date for those who really want that type of OS to use and work with.

* UAE with Picasso drivers/emulation will give you modern colour depths and resolutions and using directory based virtual HDDs makes it simple to move stuff between the native OS and emulator. In my own case, I dragged out my old A1200, imaged the HDD, booted that under FS-UAE, sorted the video drivers, removed the now-irrelevant stuff from the start-up scripts for hardware now not connected (ext. CD and Zip drives) and added another directory based virtual HDD and ended up with my "original" A1200 running very nicely on modern hardware with fantastically more RAM than I could afford back then and, when required, whichever CPU "accelerator" is most useful for the task at hand. Mostly it's "stock" A1200 though, because gaming is the main reason for using it. Most "productivity" apps I may want to use are pretty much superseded by modern apps these days.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

> "AROS, in my view, is even more niche than emulation since it's much more "just" the Amiga OS experience brought up to date for those who really want that type of OS to use and work with."

Thanks- that confirms my original impression that it's (broadly) aimed at the same niche market of diehard AmigaOS enthusiasts as the "official" PowerPC-based AmigaOS 4.

That being the case, it raises the question as to how much benefit forking out for the latter brings you over that beyond its lineage and being the "officially"-endorsed/licensed "Amiga" from whoever owns the IP and trademark?

That and the fact you're restricted to running it on their proprietary, nonstandard architecture Power-PC-based hardware which- from what I've heard- is both massively underpowered and overpriced by modern standards. I understand that the main motivation for this is less technical- since it's still not compatible with the classic Amiga hardware- so much as a contrivance to fund the development of AmigaOS.

However, it all sounds annoyingly restrictive in the face of a rival that doesn't have that lock-in and lets you take advantage of x86 hardware that's cheap yet orders of magnitude more powerful than it was in the Amiga's heyday.

(And yes, like the PC itself, like DOS and Windows, the x86 architecture was considered unwieldy and kludgey by Amiga owners back then. And arguably it still is even if it's just a wrapper around a sort-of-RISC core nowadays, but it gets you a lot of bang for your buck.)

[IamAProton]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

I will definitely try to download a working image for those games i can find, I'm not going to waste time trying to read 30 years old floppies and perhaps end up with partially working games.

This is one of the games that i have to get: https://www.myabandonware.com/game/p-p-hammer-and-his-pneumatic-weapon-67c

I remember I got stuck in a certain level (perhaps 18?), so that's a 30+ years old open issue that needs to be addressed :)

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

Greaseweezle works well and there's even a way to use it with Winuae to run the emulator direct off floppy

[blcollier]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

WHDLoad. Honestly, it’s a lot easier.

I can’t say for AROS… But it is possible to image from real floppy drives and/or hook them up to UAE (and its derivatives such as Amiga Forever). The catch is that you need additional hardware between the floppy drive and the computer. The leading contenders are the Greaseweazle (which also allows for imaging disks at the magnetic flux level) and the Drawbridge.

There are people who will still argue that the real hardware is always better, but ask yourself what’s more valuable or important to you: keeping the old hardware running and preserving/archiving old data, or just playing the games. The latter is easy - WHDLoad - but the former is a very deep rabbit hole.

[IamAProton]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

In the past I used some software ( can't remember what) and connected the amiga with a null modem cable and i remember i managed to make a working image of 1 floppy, but I think i did't keep going with the rest because it was taking way too much time /the process was too complicated to repeat it for hundreds of floppies.

I'm ok to buy some hardware if reasonably priced. will look into this Greaseweazle and see if the process is streamlined enough that my lack of time/patience does not become a show-stopper :)

[Liam Proven]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

> Still on floppy disks, hundreds, unused give or take since 25 years

Sad to say, the easy way is to flip through the diskettes, and with you memory jogged, go download a fresh copy.

1st Google hit:

https://www.lemonamiga.com/

There are many, e.g.

https://archive.org/details/amiga-500-Collection

I discovered this when I re-ripped my ~400 disk CD collection to higher quality about 18 years ago: it was quicker and easier to download fresh copies than rip it myself.

Secondly, PC disk controllers can't read Amiga media. The Amiga did not use a standard floppy disk controller; it used its fancy chipset to control the drive directly.

Compare with the Mac, which span diskettes at different speeds for the inner and outer tracks, to use the greater length of outer tracks more efficiently. This seemed sensible as Apple designed its own controller chips anyway, because Steve Wozniak didn't have a choice of of cheap off-the-shelf controller chips when he designed the original 6502 Apple models. Floppy controllers didn't exist yet.

When they did, PC ones are stupid things: they drive the disk at a constant speed and lay down a constant number of sectors on all the tracks. It's inefficient, but it's cheap and it's easy. That is the PC way. The sad fact is that doing it the smart way is much harder and does not give great returns. Example:

Given an 80 track double sided disk:

* dumb PC double-density disk controller (also in the Atari ST) = 720 kB

* Mac fancy variable-speed controller = 800 kB

* Amiga fancy chipset = 880 kB

You get 80-160 kB more space. It's easier to just buy more media. Also, the more data you cram on, the more fragile the media over time.

Anyway. To read Amiga disks you need special hardware, such as a Greaseweazle:

https://amigastore.eu/894-greaseweazle-v4.html

https://decromancer.ca/greaseweazle/

[ChrisC]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

"It's easier to just buy more media"

That rather depends on how much spare cash you had to splurge on media, and also whether the limiting factor was merely how much data you were trying to store in total, or how much you wanted to get onto each individual disc (e.g. to reduce disc swapping whilst playing a multi-disc game).

Easy to forget just how different things were back then storage-wise, but my mid-teen Amiga owning self was *very* happy at being able to essentially get 20% more out of a box of discs than my PC/ST owning counterparts, and that was before you then got into things like PowerPacker, LhA etc. to *really* help make the most of every last available byte...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

"Floppy controllers didn't exist yet.

When they did, PC ones are stupid things: they drive the disk at a constant speed and lay down a constant number of sectors on all the tracks. It's inefficient, but it's cheap and it's easy. That is the PC way. The sad fact is that doing it the smart way is much harder and does not give great returns."

I'm not too sure if you aren't old enough to remember or are writing in terms aimed at a younger audience :-)

There were other systems that went the "Apple" way with variable speed disk drives. But blaming the "PC" for using dumb, inefficient but cheap disk controllers is a bit of a stretch. Those of us old enough to remember, probably remember the Intel 8271, WD 1771 and later WD1791 (double density!!) and similar 8-bit disk controllers used in many of the earlier 8-bit systems, long before the PC was conceived. And let's not forget the IBM PC was an "almost black project" at IBM designed with off the shelf components so simply carried on the tradition of dumb disk controllers :-) (So "dumb" that even switching up to double sided drives in the early days required a "hack" by using one of the drive select pins as a side select, reducing the number of physical disks from 4 to 3 in the early days, WD1770 maybe?) - I wonder why later devices like the PC only supported two floppies by default?

[Liam Proven]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

> I'm not too sure if you aren't old enough to remember or are writing in terms aimed at a younger audience :-)

Bit of both? :-)

I was not doing this stuff in the 1970s. My family was not rich enough for 1970s home computers.

(My earliest memory of a computer at all was in Lagos, Nigeria in about 1973 or so. My dad was giving a tour of the Pilkington glassworks. The computer room had big whirring cabinets and spools threading paper punched tape across the room. It collected in a big hopper. My dad lifted me into the hopper and I happily tore up the tape.

Looking back now, this [a] sounds like the death of a thousand paper cuts, [b] probably ruined someone's day, and [c] _damn_ I wish I knew what those computers were or had pictures, but no.)

Anyway: yes, your point is taken.

I was thinking of the early 1980s, TBH, and you are right, it isn't solely the fault of the PC industry.

Unless, as I do, you consider it a sort of outgrowth from the CP/M industry...

[ZX8301]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

Yep, it’s called Greaseweazle - widely-available Open-Source hardware and software, with lots of users and support. It reads or writes raw flux transitions via USB from or to any physically-compatible floppy drive (like Amiga’s Paula chip, but clocked faster to also support higher capacities e.g. the A3000/4000 1760K discs). Then there are loads of UI and shell utilities to convert that ‘sample’ of the disc into ADF, DSK or whatever you choose. Newer hardware variants are more consistent as they have plenty of internal RAM so the lack of isochronous transfers on USB can’t mess things up. https://github.com/keirf/greaseweazle

[phuzz]

Re: I have a LOT of Amiga games

To add a bit more information to the above comments: Because the Amiga drove it's floppy drive with one of it's custom chips, it could (and did) do things with floppy discs that can't be read on a PC floppy drive.

So your two choices are to either: use an Amiga to read the discs and find a way of getting that data off the Amiga and onto your modern system (maybe a CompactFlash <> IDE board?)

Or, use something like a Greaseweazle V4 and a PC floppy drive to image the discs straight to a PC.

Whether you regard either of those options as 'straight forward' is up to you.

[IanTP]

Memories

I had an Amiga 500+ with an extra floppy drive which made life much easier, apart from game playing I also created documents. flyers and rotas for work, I had a HP inkjet printer connected, happy days, wish I still had it.

It's Friday, have one on me -->

[Michael Strorm]

NiCd battery leakage will fsck up your A500/A500+ if it hasn't already done so...

If you- or anyone else- still have an A500 Plus, which has the onboard clock's NiCd battery backup soldered onto the main board, I'd recommend you that have that removed ASAP.

I found out that mine had leaked the better part of a decade ago and had damaged the main board to the point it doesn't boot.

Apparently they're repairable because it's only a single-layer board, but that's certainly beyond my skills- I removed the battery and cleaned the residue and corrosion off the board to reduce the chance of further damage and left it like that.

The original A500 didn't have an RTC backup battery built in like that, but it was a common inclusion on many "trapdoor" RAM expansions. There's a better chance of surviving that if the leakage doesn't get onto the main board, but I'd still remove the battery and/or RAM expansion to be on the safe side.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Re: Memories

inkjet.... luxury. I had a dot matrix connected to my A4000.

[Steve Graham]

Virtual

The Aros One X86 64-bit boots under qemu, and runs very snappily. Something went wrong though when I tried to run the installer on a qemu virtual disk. I'll have to play with it a bit more.

I had an A500 with a hard disk, but I can't say (yet) that it's all come flooding back to me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Virtual

I also had an a500 with a hard disk. 50MB, I think? Many a night was wasted tinkering with the virtual guts of that thing and I suspect it's the real reason I eventually got into graphic design and then software dev. Unfortunately, my parents, in an intensely "charitable" moment, gave it away in the mid 90s (including all my games and a huge collection of mods and demos), to someone who "needed a computer". He promptly binned the lot and bought a pc. Gutted.

[Steve Graham]

It was my own stupidity that prevented the install from working. It's running now.

[Burgha2]

If we want simple

I'll take OS/9 on a 6809. 16 bits? Bah!

[Pracedru]

Incredible

When Commodore went under I didn't really understand it. It was a normal spring day in 1994 and I was guesting my friend Christian who also had an Amiga. His father was employed in the IT industry as a Unix admin and was paying attention to industry news from USA. He came in the door and said to us. "Did you hear? Commodore just went bankrupt!!"

Being from Europe this came very unexpected. Everyone and their dog still wanted to buy Amigas and the community around the Amiga was very healthy. How could a company with products that was coveted by so many people go bankrupt?

We all thought that the Amiga product would be sold to someone that could carry on the legacy. But as history shows, that just turned into one big letdown after another.

Eventually we all needed to move on but I personally bought several new "Amiga" products after the bankruptcy. It wasn't until the late 90'ies that i caved in and had to get a PC.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Incredible

"How could a company with products that was coveted by so many people go bankrupt?"

While the Amiga was already in noticeable decline by mid-1994, I think that Commodore's bankruptcy was significantly hastened both by dubious financial practices and by mismanagement.

"Everyone [in Europe] still wanted to buy Amigas and the community around the Amiga was very healthy."

That would definitely have been true circa the late 80s and early 90s when the Amiga was at its most popular. (*) But I don't think it was quite so true by mid-1994.

I bought my A500+ in late 1991. With hindsight, I always got the impression that I'd bought it *just* when the Amiga's popularity had reached its peak- something that sales figures broadly confirm- and was about to go into decline.

And honestly, once that decline- due to ever cheaper and more powerful PCs and consoles (Mega Drive and later SNES) happened, it seemed to happen fast. By late 1992, interest at my school had already shifted towards the PC. (**) Then Doom came out in late 1993 and definitively moved gaming towards the PC.

The CD32 was selling okay as a short-term cash cow (even if it would have been decimated by the PlayStation regardless). But while the Amiga wasn't completely dead by mid-1994, it was rapidly becoming yesterday's news, and...

"We all thought that the Amiga product would be sold to someone that could carry on the legacy."

I thought that too. With hindsight, I suspect that the Amiga was already fatally doomed by Commodore's bankruptcy, if not the long delay that followed it.

But at the time there still seemed to be a chance.

So, ironically, I held out hope *until* we got the news we'd been waiting for over a year later- Escom had acquired the rights and were explaining their plans. They were going to restart manufacture of the A1200... with virtually the same, out-of-date, almost-three-year-old spec.

And they were going to charge £100 *more* for it than it had been selling for before Commodore's bankruptcy over a year prior. (***)

And *that's* when I knew the Amiga was over.

---

(*) Most likely due to the price reduction of the A500 from £499 to £399- or equivalent- in late 1988.

(**) IMHO the fiasco of the A600 launch in mid-1992 didn't help and was arguably the "jump the shark" point where the Amiga was toppled from its throne.

(***) To be fair, Escom argued that they *had* to charge this much to cover the costs of acquisition and restarting manufacturing. That may have been true, but in a market that had already lost interest in the Amiga, *no-one* except diehard fans was going to pay that much for yesterday's computer.

[werdsmith]

Re: Incredible

When PCs and Windows 3 and onwards were adopted as the de facto in businesses everywhere *that's* when I knew it was over for any contenders . Even PS/2 with OS/2 Warp eventually wilted and died, Apple went into decline to its 1997 nadir.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Incredible

I put it that way to emphasise the point that it was at pretty much that *exact* moment- i.e. when I read the article- that I *knew* they'd blown any final chance the Amiga had of recovery and that it was over.

It wasn't even a rival to the PC/DOS/Windows, OS/2 or the Mac by then and- in reality- it never was.

Of course, it should have been and it *could* have been. The Amiga was miles ahead in terms of hardware and OS compared to the PC (which even when new was dragged down by its already-dated 1970s roots in both respects and got worse as they had to kludgeily work their way round the limitations of that original design).

But the Amiga was never well-marketed and never got the respect or use it should have been due for its innnovations. I don't think it ever saw much professional adoption outside the video/graphics production niche.

Even in its heyday it was more popular with enthusiasts and mainly- sorry to say it, but it's true- with games players. And when the latter moved on to the PC and their younger siblings bought Mega Drives and SNESs instead, that's what killed it.

[Pracedru]

Re: Incredible

>> While the Amiga was already in noticeable decline by mid-1994, I think that Commodore's bankruptcy was significantly hastened both by dubious financial practices and by mismanagement.

How is that any argument? By mid-1994 Commodore had gone bankrupt.

>> I bought my A500+ in late 1991. With hindsight, I always got the impression that I'd bought it *just* when the Amiga's popularity had reached its peak- something that sales figures broadly confirm- and was about to go into decline.

Did you get a hard drive for it?

Did you ever use workbench?

Did you make anything on your Amiga or did you just play games on it?

I am asking because you seem to be unaware of the community around the brand, and the A500+ was a version of the Amiga that gamers bought.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Incredible

"Did you ever use workbench? Did you make anything on your Amiga or did you just play games on it?"

I *wrote* games on it, albeit not very good ones. I used it for chip music and MIDI. I used it for graphics. I wrote my sixth-year English dissertation and other things on it. Yes, I played games on it too.

I was still using it up until I got a boring PC in 1998 and I'm well aware of the Amiga's serious uses and the hobbyist community.

You can shoot the messenger because you didn't like what I said, but it doesn't change the fact that by mid-1994 the Amiga was already in slow commercial decline as far as the mainstream went.

"How is that any argument? By mid-1994 Commodore had gone bankrupt."

Stop being a fucking pedant. I was referring to the point at which Commodore went bankrupt, which Wikipedia states was May 1994.

"Did you get a hard drive for it? [..] I am asking because you seem to be unaware of the community around the brand, and the A500+ was a version of the Amiga that gamers bought."

I'd just turned sixteen, and I'm not from a rich family. The A500+ was the only model I could remotely afford and I sure as hell wouldn't have had the money for a hard drive *or* a higher end system at that point. (Commodore went bankrupt not long after I was considering upgrading to an A1200 with built-in HDD).

Anyway, what I'm saying is... f*** you, you patronising, elitist, would-be-gatekeeping asshole.

[Michael Strorm]

Re: Incredible

Can't edit my post any more, but here's a link to a comment I made where I mention the hobbyist/enthusiast community and complain about the fact that the Amiga was never given the credit or use it deserved as a serious machine.

But yeah, I'm an ignorant gamer who didn't know any of that. Sure.

[Chris Gray 1]

Re: Incredible

I'm with you on that! I was in the middle of software development when they went under - working on an A3000. I thought about it a bit and then went and bought an A4000T. Worked with that for several years before getting a PC and Red Hat Linux - I *really* didn't want to have to change at that point, and I was employed, so could sort of afford it.

[Sam Shore]

“The next best thing is something like TheA500 mini from Retro Games Ltd. “

Retro Games is planning to release a full size keyboarded A1200 this year, and it’s all legal.

Plans to release a full sized A500 were scupperred and bogged down by the legal issues surrounding it so they have side stepped it by going for the A1200.

[Liam Proven]

> Retro Games is planning to release a full size keyboarded A1200 this year, and it’s all legal.

If they _answered their bally email_ I would be writing about it already.

If anyone from RGL is reading, this is a hint.

[Dan 55]

and it’s all legal

That is what they claim, yes.

[Grunchy]

When the Amiga came out I had upgraded from c64 to c128, which I regretted, because I could never afford the 80-col monitor and therefore could never get out of c64 compatibility mode.

Also could not afford Amiga, which all my friends had upgraded to.

One friend got an XT clone so he could join FidoNet. It was cool but I was just flat broke all through until 1993. I spent that entire time considering each Atari ST variant that came available, but I could never afford anything.

Then in 1993 I was gifted an old Toshiba T1200 in perfect shape, and I enjoyed that one immensely.

When 1995 came and I had a little bit of scratch, you know what I got?

I got Sony PlayStation!

Then at work we had Win95 and AutoCAD R13, and that was all I needed.

Eventually internet became available with Windows XP, and I finally splurged on a home computer again.

I never got to monkey with Amiga or Lemmings, but lemme tell you, Doom on PlayStation, with a controller, was WAY better than on the 486 mega machines of the era.

[Michael Strorm]

> "I was just flat broke all through until 1993. I spent that entire time considering each Atari ST variant that came available, but I could never afford anything."

You probably didn't miss much. I'd bought an ST in early 1991 because I hadn't quite enough money for an Amiga at that point.

I soon regretted that because, aside from not being as good, the ST was already in noticeable decline by 1991. (The ST had been the machine of choice a few years prior, but was quickly eclipsed after the Amiga 500's price fell to £399).

I sold it within the year and got the machine I'd *really* wanted in the first place- i.e. an Amiga- anyway.

> "Doom on PlayStation, with a controller, was WAY better than on the 486 mega machines of the era."

Well, it probably should have. The PlayStation was designed from scratch as a console with hardware capable of "proper" 3D, so it should have been able to render Doom's restricted/pseudo-3D environment without any problem. (And, to be fair, Doom would already have been a couple of years old by that point).

[Dan 55]

Obligatory "how would the computing industry have completely changed if Doom had appeared on the A500 programmed like this?" post.

Yes, at 7Mhz it would have chugged along, but then so did Doom on 386s/low end 486s.

[Michael Strorm]

I knew that there were Doom clones on the Amiga. Circa 1995-6 I had a coverdisk demo of a Doom clone that ran on the A500. (I checked a bit and I'm almost certain it was Citadel).

I remember it ran in a window in the middle of the screen at a barely-playable frame rate (something the video confirms). It was still kind of impressive that they got anything resembling Doom to run on the A500, but only in the "dancing bear" sense (i.e. it's not that it does it well, it's that it does it at all).

Anyway, when I clicked on your link I was initially extremely impressed but wondering how- even with the benefit of 30 years to have developed countless optimised coding tricks- they got it running *quite* so fast on a stock A500.

Then I came back here, noticed the noticed the second paragraph in your comment, checked the video and noticed it was running with a 28 MHz accelerator. Nice and all that, but not how it would have appeared to most people with a stock A500 or A500+ back in the day (even with the Fast RAM expansion it requires, which most people didn't have).

I suspect it would have played faster than Citadel even at the stock 7 MHz (which ironically would have impressed me more).

[Anonymous Coward]

The A600GS system has added an arm library to the Amiga OS that it is running so you have emulated68k which is also passing certain functions to bare metal ARM

[r-tea]

The Amiga's MUI (Magic User Interface) is, in terms of configurability, flexibility, consistency, and clarity, the best and most thoughtfully designed GUI for applications in the world.

I'm saying this after over 30 years of using AmigaOS and its clones (including AROS), as well as countless Linux distributions and a few other niche, non-Linux operating systems (not to mention the so-called mainstream ones).

So far, none of the systems I've used has offered a GUI with such powerful customization capabilities.

Btw. It's not AROS Research Operating System but Amiga Research Operating System :-)

[Michael Strorm]

> "Btw. It's not AROS Research Operating System but Amiga Research Operating System :-)"

It was "Amiga Research Operating System" originally, and they changed it because they didn't have the rights to the Amiga trademark.