What do you really love about the amiga?

[The Rom Alien]

In the sense of the workbench and kickstart

For me:

1. Elegence from the moment you turn it on!
With a PC if there is no bootup disk you will get a heap of white text on a black background. In the case of WB3.1 to which I am comparing you get a nice smooth animation of a disk going into a drive. And when you get to workbench everything glides so smoothly its like a dream!

2. Eye candy but not demanding
Even before you add all the lovely stuff like Magic Workbench and NewIcons, you get a clean, tidy interface. And even once you add all of the chocolate boxes into it (MWB, Scalos etc.) you have a interface to give Vista a freight but still uses up little memory

3. Performance and Power
Even if operating off a floppy disk it is very responsive! The cursor glides to a disk icon, the window appears almost immedietly and the icons then appear into that shortly afterwards. Its lovely. Plus you can make it do amazing stuff. Remember the Boinc demo back on 1.x? That was amazing for its time. Nowerdays, you can browse the internet, edit graphics, play your MP3's and watch a DVD in a feather of a OS (best done on UAE or another emulator)

Its hard to say what else. Its just brilliant. Tell us what you really like!

[Ironclaw]

Best machine of its time and it was way ahead of the PC when both of them were... new (for lack of a better word)
.

[keropi]

I like all the strange expansions plus the fact it has a nice OS and some great games but I really like all this hack-ish hardware that works too!

[gimbal]

Best machine of its time and it was way ahead of the PC when both of them were... new

Perhaps you are looking for "current".

I loved the Amiga because I loved the games, plain and simple The Amiga had many games that were never released on the PC, or were technically lacking (cga/ega graphics, pc speaker sound...). Also the single button Arcade joystick has never been beaten IMO.

[mr_a500]

I made a thread about this here.

But a picture says a thousand words, so this A500 screenshot below should tell it all. What other 20 year-old computer can do this??

[Ironclaw]

Well, isn't those programs much newer than 20 years?.... like that browsing prog?. I bet if PC were to be stuck at a simple 386, 66mhz 2mb memory or something like that and people were developing software for it for use in the future, I guess that old PC too could do that stuff.....

But what do I know .

But still, my all time fav computer is the Amiga and always will, it has the greatest games and stuff too.... it's about playability and not super 3D graphics which the PC is all about today.. I like it simple . That's why I keep my little GBA and not buying that fancy new Nintendo DS or PS thingy..... 2D and simple is the way to go.....

[mr_a500]

Well, isn't those programs much newer than 20 years?.... like that browsing prog?. I bet if PC were to be stuck at a simple 386, 66mhz 2mb memory or something like that and people were developing software for it for use in the future, I guess that old PC too could do that stuff.....

Of course you're right. I'm not deluded, you know. (but a 16 colour PC can never look like that because of its fixed palette)

Still, there are many things I like about Amiga that Windows still hasn't got. This is not because it isn't possible, but because they have their own (annoying) ways of doing things... or more accurately, their own way of forcing the user to do things. (for details, see my link)

[gimbal]

Yeah well, either accept that MS does not want to recreate Windows from the ground up and will endlessly improve existing ones (and thus keeps the limitations of the ancient design they are using), or switch to OS/X or Linux.

[Zetr0]

Prefer OS3.5 if i had a choice my dear Java Fiend *ahem* Friend

to be honest. yeah you can hack together hardware for the PC, you can almost enjoy some of the newer and older games...

Wintel PC's are like sugary treats.. you get more than a few handfulls and your sick to the back teeth of them. Its gotten so bad i dont bother playing games unless its at a LAN.

this is not true for the Amiga!

And I believe cloanto had it kinda right and after a little mod....its like this...

An amiga is forever.

There are virtually no reasons why i dont like it.

even the fact I had to write 8 pages of code to get serious graphics going and only 8 lines for the PC (in its day BGUI baby!) I still wrote graphics code for the amiga multiple numbers of times.

Just to look at and to understand in ones being of all the inspiration of all those that have engineered hardware and software. it still inspires me today.

I suppose its like having a dodge viper* or other tasty sports car, although not very practical in everyday use, its whole lot of fun at weekends.



*please note that it would have to be a dodge viper of circa 1995 - 1999, limmited edition hardtop with grafted V10 engine *

[blade002]

What is there to not love about the Amiga ?

Whatever happened to the Computer world though? .. Its now a stale unexciting dead feeling today, yet back then it felt alive with creativity and spirit.

That spirit lives on in the Amiga.

[gimbal]

Whatever happened to the Computer world though

The computer has become an accepted and necessary part of society, it is no longer a toy that you can rave about to your friends. Even consoles have become bog standard compared to the old NES and Sega consoles. The magic is gone, it is now only a piece of machinery that is built for the consumer market (IE work a year and then break down so a new one has to be bought).

Prefer OS3.5 if i had a choice my dear Java Fiend [IMG]images/smilies/smile.gif[/IMG] *ahem* Friend [IMG]images/smilies/smile.gif[/IMG]

It's a given fact that most people here are still using an Amiga OS, my C/C++ adoring brother in arms, there is no need to replace it. The subject was Windoze and that CAN be replaced with a similar modern OS.

[musashi5150]

For me it's the demo/cracking communities that grew from the machine. With each release just pushing the chipset that little bit further than the last. I love the classic Amiga chipset, it shows how even the 'impossible' can be possible with a good coding trick and a little precalculation

[The Rom Alien]

Today I found a C= 1942 Monitor. No computer for it though.

[jabsy]

Originally Posted by blade002

Whatever happened to the Computer world though? .. Its now a stale unexciting dead feeling today, yet back then it felt alive with creativity and spirit.

It became mainstream. Back in the old days you knew more people without computers than those with them. Now it's the other way round.

2400B modems were all the rage. Now it's cable and DSL, and most folks have that too.

I guess we need an updated version of Buggles - Video Killed The Radio Star - to make it all complete.

[Unknown_K]

I love the games I can play on the Amiga, thats what I purchased mine for and that is mostly what I do with them.

Mr. A500 exactly who do you have under the hood of that A500, because it sure is not a stock system (and the upgrades are not 20 years old).

[mr_a500]

Mr. A500 exactly who do you have under the hood of that A500, because it sure is not a stock system (and the upgrades are not 20 years old).

The graphics are certainly 20 years old and that's the whole point. If you load that screenshot on a 1985 A1000 (or 1987 A500) it looks EXACTLY as you see it here. (I tried on my A1000)

The software is newer and you need a 68020 (when did the 020 come out?) and more RAM to actually run this GUI as shown, but still: can you take a 16 colour 1987 PC, with newer processor, extra RAM and newer software and do something like in this screenshot (and all the neat stuff not in the screenshot, like screen flipping, super-smooth scrolling, etc.) and the answer is definitely NO. Try even loading the screenshot on a 2006 PC in 16 colour mode and see what happens.

[Chuckles]

Maybe I'm just a crusty old fart (ok, we can probably drop the "maybe"), but the thing I always found the most outstanding about the Amiga was the fact that it elegantly handles multitasking, right out of the box. So long as your system has enough memory for all the tasks you're running at any given time, they all can run happily at once. When the A1000 first came out, Windows hadn't even begun to dream about multitasking, and their first attempts later simply allowed you to switch from one task to another, with the task that was switched out sitting idle until you switched back to it. Long before that, I'd gotten used to playing a game on my Amiga while waiting for it to finish downloading a file, which no other home machine would allow you to do. Bill Gates famously informed the public at one point that in order to multitask, you'd have to have a minimum of 4MB of memory (when memory was expensive), long after the A1000 had been multitasking with as little as 256K (for very small tasks). It's a shame that the general public never really understood how far ahead of its time the Amiga was technically. If they had, even Commodore's poor management might have had a hard time really screwing up a good thing.

[Unknown_K]

Originally Posted by mr_a500

The graphics are certainly 20 years old and that's the whole point. If you load that screenshot on a 1985 A1000 (or 1987 A500) it looks EXACTLY as you see it here. (I tried on my A1000)

The software is newer and you need a 68020 (when did the 020 come out?) and more RAM to actually run this GUI as shown, but still: can you take a 16 colour 1987 PC, with newer processor, extra RAM and newer software and do something like in this screenshot (and all the neat stuff not in the screenshot, like screen flipping, super-smooth scrolling, etc.) and the answer is definitely NO. Try even loading the screenshot on a 2006 PC in 16 colour mode and see what happens.

The A1200 has an 020 in it and that came out in what 1993? So an 020 upgrade for the A500 must have come out around then or later (depending who made it). Adding a VGA card to the 1987 PC would have been easy to do in the 1990's.

My point is that to upgrade the A500 you needed to spend a decent amount of money at a later date for the screenshot you had shown. My A2000 has a GVP 030/40 with 16MB RAM, my A1200 has a 030/50 with CPU and 16MB RAM. Both the previous upgrades would have cost a mint back when they were sold new.

I like how you can expand the Amiga models (2000 and 1200 specifically), but some models were a pain to upgrade (1000, 500 specifically). My A500 just has the 512K trapdoor RAM expansion. While I could have a fancy desktop on my machine I choose the plain looking defaults of 2.0x on the 2000 and 3.0 on the 1200, the addons suck up chip RAM and tend to slow the system down a little (I don't like eye candy on my 68K Macs and PCs either).

Anyway nice screenshot!

[mihcael]

Amiga!
was always fun to use!

and Easy, I never had an OS problem i couldn't find a solution for!!

(unlike the PC's format and reinstall option)

[thor]

Originally Posted by Unknown_K

The A1200 has an 020 in it and that came out in what 1993? So an 020 upgrade for the A500 must have come out around then or later (depending who made it).

The 68020 came out in 1984 so why it has to be around with the A1200 release? There are A500 accelerators made before that like http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/hurricane500