What “blows your mind” about using an Amiga in 2018?
 

Hi forum, I thought this would make a cool discussion topic.

What excites you about the current developments in the Amiga scene? I have 1 or 2 things I’ve noticed, freshly back to the Amiga, to start the discussion.

1. Firstly it BLOWS MY MIND how all the software is available online now, and very quick to find and download. In the late 90’s I still very much relied on CD-ROMs, collections which were exciting enough, but now with things like TOSEC the whole world of Amiga software is available to explore, and you can write a lot of these ADFs to floppy! You can take a virtual disk from the internet and make it something REAL, write a nice little label, hear the floppy clicks.

2. The upgrades available now are so cool, great storage solutions available for every Amiga, including IDE for the A500. My HC533 has made me so happy, but of course there’s insane stuff like the 68080 Vampire boards, they’re a whole other level, the dedication and love for the architecture is very apparent.

3. It’s all kind of COOL now, back when I owned my A1200in 1996-9 it was really uncool to have an Amiga, everyone at school told me it was sh*t and to buy a PC. The kids were pretty nasty anyway, I think I was maybe 3 or 4 years late to the party. But now, nostalgia, retro, it’s all in and people don’t look at you odd when you tell them you make music on a Computer from the 80’s, they go “COOL!” whilst they are maybe ironically wearing shellsuit bottoms.

4. Musicians pay a lot now for old 8 bit and 12 bit samplers, they like the grit and crunch. Paula still sounds AMAZING after all these years, especially when samples are pitched down an octave and the grit gets in. Run it through a big reverb and it’s a very cool, expensive sound. But it’s not expensive, it’s cheap as chips!

5. The people are so helpful, guys giving me free assembly code, DamienD going the extra mile and being helpful all the time. It’s a friendly family and so familiar like I never left.

Ok that’s 5 things. What blows your mind?

I find it amazing that so many people are still interested in the Amiga after all these years. Not just older folks like me who had them in the eighties and nineties, but some younger people find out about them and get excited about collecting and using them.
We had something special with the Amiga for sure, or it never would have lasted this long.

1. How relatively "modern" an Amiga with upgrades can be and feel today considering the age of the architecture and OS, which hasn't really been "officially" developed since 1993. You can play MP3's, check emails and browse the modern Internet, create graphics, animations and video, make music... All of course fully multitasking and in HD resolution. At its core, it's not "that" different from using modern systems.

2. The amount of hardware that's still being developed for the system to improve the performance and capabilities (RAM, CPU, graphics, sound etc.) or make it easier to interface with modern standards (USB, Indivison etc.), or replace failing parts (cases, new PCB's etc.)

3. The wide variety of hardware available, both new and old. You can buy a fully kitted out A4000 for €2000+, an X5000 for around the same, or an old A500 for a fraction of that, or why not an FPGA re-implementation for €100 - €400? Or you could emulate the Amiga on a $35 Raspberry Pi, or just download the free WinUAE to your PC. No one is really left out, there's always some way to enjoy an "Amiga" in some shape or form.

THE MUSIC ! :agree

Without no doubt what always impressed me, before (when i had the real machine) and now (with the emulation) is the sound aspect of the machine

Inside nearly ALL games / demos that i can find there's a module that i can hear

And things are more interesting now because i can hear to this piece of music also out of the box

So, i have fun in ripping these modules, creating a WAV file with WinUAE and then as last step a modern MP3 ready to use :p

Sure, there's also the fun in vieving the demos / games, but i don't play games at all nowadays

Instead with the demos, i also started a personal collection, like Break's, but i hope it could be bigger, but i need still a lot of time

In other words for me Amiga in 2018 = A LOT OF FUN :)

ARexx and KingCON.

I have no idea what those are, never did, hoping to learn though.

I think ARexx is something that lets programs talk to one another, or something like that?

That the hardware still works after all this time.

The simple fact that there are still Amigas we can use.

I still get excited about booting up Deluxe Paint and Rainbow Islands getting on for 30 years after my first time doing both, and I can do that on a machine I've had with me for 25 of them!

Just 2 items from me and its really about how the Amiga is still supported.

1. The availability of modern hardware. I remember drooling over advertisements in magazines of the day looking at hardware and the price of it I as a high school teenager could never afford. Nowadays modern hardware is readily available and well priced.

2. The new games and in particular the CD32 ports. I never ceased to fail me just how much flack the CD32 got (and still gets). Its one of the best Amigas and thats becoming more and more obvious not with the community releases and ports. The day Road Avenger was released I think I watched the intro 10 times in a row and sitting with a giddy smile that the CD-R spinning in my CD32 was feeding this to my machine and to my TV and its all because of the community.

Almost everything but with ARexx on the top. It's just lightyears ahead any todays application.

I know many people will say its the presentation such as graphics and music but for me it really boils down to quality and game play mechanics.

Games like Lotus Trilogy, Eye of the Beholder, and much more just oozes quality like a finely crafted art piece. It makes the experience so much more enjoyable than the avalanche of quick ports...

In many ways, many really good studios nowadays have ex-Amiga developers doing their crafts is what makes their games so special instead of another me-too copy cat game.

What blows my mind is that you have full control over hardware in Amiga; change interrupts, access custom chip registers, edit RAM as you please (no ASLR or DEP gets in the way, and no hypervisor crap or process isolation), just pedal to the metal!

Also, Amiga software is generally lean and mean, making some tasks faster on a machine from the 90s compared to modern computers. The software bloat on modern computers is staggering these days, optimization seems to be a lost art (with a few exceptions).

https://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/pre...om_1993-01.jpg

1993: £359 for an 85MB Hard Drive! That's over £500 in today's money.
Another £255 for an 8MB Ram Expansion.

Whereas my 2018 HC533 card was £115, has the same amount of Ram, a faster processor and a 4GB CF Card.

1) The games are more enjoyable (than modern ones)
2) Workbench is quicker and far more intuitive than Windows 10
3) Amiga demoscene is the bestest
4) Putty Squad
5) RCK still puts up with us all after many years.

That is all.

That it's still such a fun system!

In no particular order : ram disk always available, Arexx, Snoopdos, the keyboard layout, intuition's multi-screen, overall system is lean-and-mean, we have full control of the machine, it's fun to code on...

Datatypes. They might not support streaming and other dynamics, but it is a divine idea that possible only Be picked up on.

Bootable filesystems. You can just plop any filesystem (that is complete enough) onto your hd and hit the ground running.

The filesystem interface. You have FTP: and HTTP: that gives you a filesystem interface to the service. One editor lets you mount and thereby export its in-memory file, and so cutting the need to save it to a temp area.

And one "grey" area one: All programs are CLI based by default (i.e. can not only be started by the GUI). IMO it was a big error that they gave different API calls to CLI and WB apps - they should have found a way to to blend them.
Also, A6 should have been documented to hold ExecBase when a program is started.

Look at the coincidences.

Just today I was talking with a senior IT manager from a related company of B*W (yes, the Bavarian brand..)
He was cursing Windoze Powershell and the Un*x shell and saying:
"If could i've ARexx and KingCON!"

:great

That it still runs and how good it actually is. And that I can still hope to get parts for it to keep it running.

I hope to blown away with that we have new developments on the 3.1 OS and that we one day may buy a new Amiga with compatible custom chips (I hope).