Amiga Thread

[zapiy]

I am slightly confused here. I am reading this as you all have an opinion and all made your own cases rather than anyone in particular being on top so to speak.  Best to agree to disagree and move on.

[TL]

[align=center:nxe2pgiy]Do you have an hour to spare?

Commodore Amiga History[/align:nxe2pgiy]

[Greyfox]

yes..every time this is a great and very unique video, dam shame Atari didn't do any?

[retromod]

I have had the A1000 first, then A500 and finally a CDTV which was damaged after a year without reason.
The A1000 was too expensive for the mass and have too many limitations from memory. After upgrade it was my first choice of development machine. But due to the flickering in highres mode most projects failed finally even with a flicker-jitter on top of the monitor.

There was also less demand in porting games to Amiga, most of the projects were in the other direction to the Atari ST or PC. So I finally switched over to the Atari ST using monochrom monitor to edit/write code, compile them for errors and debugging purpose until it was nearly completed and then copied them over to Amiga or PC for recomplation (after converting sound and graphics). Within one day it was most likely running. Sure for graphic editing I used Deluxe Paint and sound was delivered from subcontractors in MOD format.

The A500 was more a gaming machine and for testing purpose.

[Bobinator]

I have had the A1000 first, then A500 and finally a CDTV which was damaged after a year without reason.
The A1000 was too expensive for the mass and have too many limitations from memory. After upgrade it was my first choice of development machine. But due to the flickering in highres mode most projects failed finally even with a flicker-jitter on top of the monitor.

There was also less demand in porting games to Amiga, most of the projects were in the other direction to the Atari ST or PC. So I finally switched over to the Atari ST using monochrom monitor to edit/write code, compile them for errors and debugging purpose until it was nearly completed and then copied them over to Amiga or PC for recomplation (after converting sound and graphics). Within one day it was most likely running. Sure for graphic editing I used Deluxe Paint and sound was delivered from subcontractors in MOD format.

The A500 was more a gaming machine and for testing purpose.

Wait, you were involved in games development? Hold on, now, I want to hear about this.

[retromod]

Wait, you were involved in games development? Hold on, now, I want to hear about this.

Sure I develop software since I was 9. So finally 5 years  No I'm kidding I started with age of 9 to learn basic for the ZX81. Then switched over to Atari Homecomputers, developed several software in small quantities including games. Then switched over to Atari ST, Amiga and 8088 until someone asked me to port games from one system to another (source was most of the time crude 68000, basic, C, pascal from hobbiests). I converted them to C and created a fast hardware optimized library for each platform. So with a simple recompile and gfx/snd convertion the software run within hours on every of this platforms. I've done that for a series of games (the best one was sold 50.000 times) for Atari, Amiga and PC. it was one of the biggest distributors here in europe. In parallel I developed embedded solutions for example control applications for airports and public transport departments in my spare time. After school I hired at a company to develop a realtime OS with GPS and navigation support for x86 and left the company finally for highend unix and openvms systems. In about 30 years I studied each OS and component to the ground. Today I do a lot of education for senior developers in our company.
 
Only music is one of the knowledge I miss.  Sound is not a problem but composing music is quite hard. Graphics is quite easy as well as a bunch of programming languages and (software and hardware) technologies. If I understand how something works, I can repro it in a one man show ;-)

Currently my focus is on hardware... specially modding for 8-bit consoles. I invented some mods and if the business is up and running (today called outsourcing) I will return to the software side writing some games.

[TL]

What games? Colour me intrigued!

[retromod]

What games? Colour me intrigued!

for example "steigenberger Hotelmanager"
Crazy Sue
Mysterious Worlds
System 4 - Mr Tengus Adventure
..
..

as these games are all in C and using a single API for hardware communication there are quite easy to port to consoles or WEB. Only copyright and trademark may be a problem.....

I also remember to have written one of the first graphical GUI's for Atari 8 bit Homecomputers. It was called "Moves" and sold in very limited numbers (may be ahead of time). The last application I wrote for 8 Bit Atari was a database application similar to dbase with 60 characters by altering the normal font and narrow the characters.

[retromod]

I bought an Amiga 1000 very early after release. it was quite expensive and lacks memory all the time. So I bought a memory expansion to 1MB. The development kits were quite costly, too.

In europe the highres mode was quite useless as professional software often used this mode but it flickered. Even a monitor jitter was not able to compensate this serious problem. So Amiga was finally stuck as a game and hobbiest machine.

Developing on the Amiga was not really fun. The editor was awful and zero software used the intuition GUI. The Atari ST was quite fun here as all editors supported dual window editing and the monochrome monitor was the best you can get for homecomputers. The compile and link process was very loud due to the bad floppy disk format and often your disk were broken after some read/writes. That was really a mess - the disk drives of the Amiga. Having two of them was the minimum requirement without swapping disks all the time.
For testing it was required to reboot the system so the time consuming ramdisk fillup eated up my time. That one reason to use the Atari ST only for coding and precompile testings (finding errors) then moving over to Amiga for final compile and testing stage.

I also bought one of the first Amiga 500 available and things got better as compiling and testings was now faster by splitting it over two computers. But as Atari editing was sooo great I kept this workflow by using the Atari ST as coding machine.

From history it was a big fault offering the Amiga with the old Chipset. The limitations was too big and the user experience dropped down, specially as the multitasking was not really used by people. But it was a decision of money - waiting and loosing customers to Atari or be the first on the market with not up-to-date hardware. As the price was fairly high Commodore lost the run on the first round. Atari sold better. Second approach with Amiga 500 and 2000 killed the design and the Amiga spirit. The A2000 was a complete fail as it was not the expected successor using the same old chipset even if the final new chipset was complete and ready for shipping. The Commodore book describes in detail all the faults done leading to the Amiga disaster.

I still guess what have happened if Tramiel have not bought Atari. Remember Atari have had several systems in planning. The developer just finished the first version of the boards and waited for the Amiga chipset to test their design. They started their vacation and never returned due to the takeover in the meantime. Finally the 8-bit line was not expanded with 1400XL, 1450XLD and 1090 expansion box with CP/M as announced. The 68000 project with Silver & Gold chipset (with equal graphics and sound to Amiga) as Atari 1800XL was not completed, and the Atari 1600XL with the Amiga chipset was halted, too. All great developers were layed off and Tramiel completed it's own design started month before: The Atari ST.
 
Amiga was bought by Commodore a big big fault, too. The CBM900 was a quite impressive machine and much cheaper, ready for production. It was dropped in favour of the Amiga which was too expensive to find large quantities. The Amiga 500 and 2000 was too late and not up-to-date, they pissed the original Amiga developers and falls into their old habbitants: price tag optimizations instead of technical revolution.

[TrekMD]

[align=center:w9ld8vlx]320 Amiga Box Art Scans[/align:w9ld8vlx]

[zapiy]

Awesome stuff, cheers fella.

[TrekMD]

These videos are usually cool to watch, particularly to see their music choices for the posted art.

[zapiy]

Very much so. I am having an Amiga revival lol.

[Bashmack]

What is with the weirdness in the Adanac roleplay thread?   Wests entries have now turned into Rklenseth? 

Very strange.

Im hoping this is the place to post about this.  If not..... well... shrugs

[zapiy]

You have lost me pal?