Things the Amiga didn't get right from Day 1

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

That certainly would have helped, yes!

But:
Did you look a the date? 1997 ?!?

Did you look at the name?
Thor = Thomas Richter

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

That wouldn't work when the game was released years earlier, before Amigas were equipped with an incompatible Kickstart 2.0.
The game was intended for a Kick 1.2 or 1.3 machine, back then.

Frankly, I had an A2000 with Kick 1.2, and it came with 1MB RAM, so please stop the trolling against memory expansions. 1MB machines for testing *were* available back then.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Or do you think game developers would have had some magic glass sphere to look into the future, and see a Kickstart 2.0 coming, which would prevent their game from working any more, later?
How should they have expected that?!

How? Simply by reading the technical manuals of the AmigaOs, the RKRMs. Programs that were written according to the RKRMs still work, guess what. Which is also the reason that the 1.2 workbench still works.


An Amiga is *not* a C64. You don't just hack the hardware and jump into arbitrary ROM locations. You read the specifications and follow them, and *that is really all* to make an application work on all new and future kickstart releases to come.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

But I see you simply ignore the fact that there were commands available at the start, which the Amiga had not, and you cannot bring any other argument than ranting about the Basic....

Once again, the average user *does not need the commands*. The average user uses the workbench. A graphical user interface. And not the poor excuse of a "user interface" the C64 offered. There is no "LOAD"$",8,1" built into the ROM of the machine - simply because it wasn't needed in the expected use case.

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Did you look a the date? 1997 ?!?
I had my Amiga 500 in 1990....

Have you looked at the version? NDos is old, very old. The first version is from around 1991 or so, it was one of the first programs I wrote. It predates Aminet. There was no way to publish a program conveniently back then.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by deimos

To have the computer boot automatically to a minimal Workbench, to at least allow browsing disks and copying files between them, would have been a nice feature. This, to me, seems like something it didn't get right from day 1, particularly since Workbench was there, waiting, in ROM.

That would make it inflexible and static and very limited, like GEM was on the Atari - and without a disk it is not useful ... and if you need to insert a disk anyways, you may as well boot from it.

We talk about 1985 - a graphical user interface and multitasking was still a revolutionary thing for lower/middle end computers.
The original Mac from 84 had only 128KB RAM and was close to unusable - and did not even have multitasking, except for gadgets like the calculator.

Atari 8-bit, Mac, Lisa, PCs, SUN ... all needed to boot the OS from (hard)disk first. And this concept holds to this day. Now even you phone has to boot if you turn it off and on again.

This fact is more hidden now, since we need to reboot our devices not that often anymore. But even on a fast PC with SSD Windows takes around 13 seconds to boot - an Amiga with slimmed down Startup-Sequence is faster even with only 7Mhz and floppy drive.

Around 10 seconds seams to be a sweet spot people a willing to wait for a device to get usable - especially if the better user experience is worth waiting some seconds.

So I really would not say THIS is something the Amiga did wrong.
There are many other flaws and it got worse over the years as commodore continuously messed things up, neglected development, could not read the signs written on the wall etc...

The OS, the Workbench and the boot process worked as indented - it might not be to everyones taste as we see, but the very same concepts the Amiga used are still used today by all surviving platforms.

[Overdoc]

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

Frankly, I had an A2000 with Kick 1.2, and it came with 1MB RAM, so please stop the trolling against memory expansions. 1MB machines for testing *were* available back then.

Please start READING what I wrote instead of telling me to stop trolling.
I did not say they could not test an 1MB ram expansion (yes, it was available from the start), but I was talking about the KICKSTART 2.0 here, which was NOT available to game developers until 1991 or so?! (don't know exactly when Kick 2.0 came out, but certainly not before 1990)

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

How? Simply by reading the technical manuals of the AmigaOs, the RKRMs. Programs that were written according to the RKRMs still work, guess what. Which is also the reason that the 1.2 workbench still works.

Originally Posted by Thomas Richter

An Amiga is *not* a C64. You don't just hack the hardware and jump into arbitrary ROM locations. You read the specifications and follow them, and *that is really all* to make an application work on all new and future kickstart releases to come.

I am not an Amiga programmer and as you can see have no knowledge about it, so I cannot comment on this. But yes, this seems logical to me and would have been bad programming if ignored.

Still, does this also apply to games which did not start on top of the Workbench?
Because all the better, fancy action games never booted any Workbench GUI before, but (in my impression?) directly loaded the game code into memory and did not make use of any Workbench or OS functions, which they probably also did not need, or would have made the game a lot slower, maybe?

[deimos]

Originally Posted by Gorf

That would make it inflexible and static and very limited, like GEM was on the Atari - and without a disk it is not useful ... and if you need to insert a disk anyways, you may as well boot from it.

It would only be inflexible and static if you weren't able to boot from a disk to get a fuller, or more customised environment. But the fact that you were forced to boot from a floppy on day one, led to every application having its own boot floppy, and users creating custom boot floppies, and so on. Custom boot floppies just to run Directory Opus so that they could copy a file for a friend. etc. etc. It was a mess, and of course other systems were just as bad, but the Amiga had a chance to do better, and it didn't.

[Overdoc]

Originally Posted by Gorf

That would make it inflexible and static and very limited, like GEM was on the Atari - and without a disk it is not useful ... and if you need to insert a disk anyways, you may as well boot from it.

But I would not need to swap disks!
ANd I would not need to wait for the dos/workbench disk to load!
I could directly insert the disk where I want to list contents and load an application, or do some file operation.
That's the point.

Originally Posted by Gorf

Atari 8-bit, Mac, Lisa, PCs, SUN ... all needed to boot the OS from (hard)disk first. And this concept holds to this day. Now even you phone has to boot if you turn it off and on again.

Sure, but I guess most of them booted from a (maybe even built in?) harddisk.
I mentioned over and over again that it is a completely different thing when booting from a harddisk, because then it is booting fast, and the disk-swapping is not needed.

Originally Posted by Gorf

This fact is more hidden now, since we need to reboot our devices not that often anymore. But even on a fast PC with SSD Windows takes around 13 seconds to boot - an Amiga with slimmed down Startup-Sequence is faster even with only 7Mhz and floppy drive.

Absolutely true.
But there is a big difference between the Amiga and the smartphone:
You never need to turn off the smartphone, because every application or game returns to the OS.
With the Amiga back in 1990, you almost always had to do the 'monkey grip' A-A-CTRL after you quit a game or application.
And so, you permanently needed to reboot...

Originally Posted by Gorf

Around 10 seconds seams to be a sweet spot people a willing to wait for a device to get usable - especially if the better user experience is worth waiting some seconds.

That's true and I accept that.
A clever, minimal Workbench boot disk helps a lot!

[Gorf]

Of course users would create customized WB or dos disks (or DOpus).
This was intended.
My old disk version of WB was cleaned from all the stuff I would not need, and packed with all the tools I did need - all executables power-packed to save space ;-)

For all WB and CLI purposes I needed to boot just this one disk - some less critical things stored on a second disk that was only needed from time to time...

The files were arranged in the right order on the disk so the floppy drive did not need to jump around while processing the start sequence, where I did "run" commands to fully use the multitasking - booting in less then 10 sec.

"Copying files for a friend" ... on a PC you had to boot DOS first to land in a crappy command line.
On the C64 with one disk this is certainly not easier at all!

[Chucky]

Please start READING what I wrote instead of telling me to stop trolling.
I did not say they could not test an 1MB ram expansion (yes, it was available from the start), but I was talking about the KICKSTART 2.0 here, which was NOT available to game developers until 1991 or so?! (don't know exactly when Kick 2.0 came out, but certainly not before 1990)

guess what. if they did follow the rules that was. they would not need kik 2.0 to test on. as it would work anyway. even with 3.0, 3.1, 3.1.4 and 3.2. it was inmature bad programming. nothing else.
they did program is as if it was a c64. and as we told you several times: it wasn't

they did not do amigacompatible software.

[deimos]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Of course users would create customized WB or dos disks (or DOpus).
This was intended.

I don't think whether it was intentional or not is the point, it's whether or not it was the best decision.

Personally, I don't think an application disk should have had to be a customised boot disk. I think booting to a customised environment for each application was a problem that could have been avoided.

I don't think the developers at Commodore intended for the users to have to become experts at creating custom boot disks just for the machine to become usable. I think they just ran out of time and resources.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Chucky

guess what. if they did follow the rules that was. they would not need kik 2.0 to test on. as it would work anyway. even with 3.0, 3.1, 3.1.4 and 3.2. it was inmature bad programming. nothing else.
they did program is as if it was a c64. and as we told you several times: it wasn't

they did not do amigacompatible software.

We could argue that commodore failed from day one to enforce these standards.

They should have offered a compatibility seal. An official "Amiga compatible software" logo and some auditing process along with it.

Maybe some "gold standard" for fully dos/WB compatible programs and games, some "silver standard" for nodos games, that otherwise follow the rules.

[Overdoc]

@Gorf:

That sounds really great and certainly would have helped me a lot.

But it also sounds like not every basic user could do such a thing easily. You certainly needed quite some knowledge about the Amiga system, and probably also some tools which would help you create such a cool boot disk.
I also used powerpacker a bit on the Amiga, since I was used to packers from the C64, where one of my 'hobby projects' was to make one-file versions whereever it was possible

So, ok, sure, if I had had more knowledge or taken big efforts in learning about the system, then that probably would have solved some of my Amiga issues.

One thing I learn from this is that the Amiga needed much more patience to get around with the system than it was needed on the C64 at least for basic operations.
And my (wrong) expectation was that the Amiga was the much more easy and convenient machine, because it had this GUI, just clicking icons, no keyboard needed, etc. But I did not know that you had to tweak it to your needs before it becomes comfortable or suited to your needs.

@Chucky:
Ok point taken, I can follow this thaught at least to some extent.
But only if following the programing rules did not mean any restrictions, which maybe would have made it impossible to develop some really good games which pushed the Amiga to the limits?

Being a C64 guy I know that almost none of the really great C64 games would have been possible without programmers using special 'tricks' on the VIC chip, down to even using non documented CPU opcodes to save CPU cycles in their code, etc.

[deimos]

Originally Posted by Chucky

guess what. if they did follow the rules that was. they would not need kik 2.0 to test on. as it would work anyway. even with 3.0, 3.1, 3.1.4 and 3.2. it was inmature bad programming. nothing else.
they did program is as if it was a c64. and as we told you several times: it wasn't

they did not do amigacompatible software.

The problem is, even some of the big name developers screwed up. Maybe one of the things the Amiga didn't get right from Day 1 was educating the developers about, for instance, the difference between chip and non-chip memory, and making sure they AllocMem'ed the right stuff.

[Overdoc]

Originally Posted by Gorf

We could argue that commodore failed from day one to enforce these standards.

They should have offered a compatibility seal. An official "Amiga compatible software" logo and some auditing process along with it.

Maybe some "gold standard" for fully dos/WB compatible programs and games, some "silver standard" for nodos games, that otherwise follow the rules.

For gods sake they did NOT do such a thing.
We would have ended up like on modern systems, where software needs to be certified by the machine's hardware or OS developers, while they are taking good money for this 'certifications'.

We never would have seen any hobby programmer's tools, no PD stuff, and such things as Aminet probably would not exist today?

Instead, we would only have applications and games by big software companies who could afford these 'Commodorifications'

[Chucky]

Ok point taken, I can follow this thaught at least to some extent.
But only if following the programing rules did not mean any restrictions, which maybe would have made it impossible to develop some really good games which pushed the Amiga to the limits?

there would not be any real "restrictions" just follow the simple rules laid out
but no. they still belived it was a C64 with a static memorymap.. technically the amiga have ONE memoryaddress that is static.. $4 nothing more..
well the chipset maybe. technically it could also move.. but that's it.
no instead they took memoryaddresses for granted. never allocated ram. and poked the chipset in undocumented ways.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by deimos

I don't think whether it was intentional or not is the point, it's whether or not it was the best decision.

Personally, I don't think an application disk should have had to be a customised boot disk. I think booting to a customised environment for each application was a problem that could have been avoided.

I don't think the developers at Commodore intended for the users to have to become experts at creating custom boot disks just for the machine to become usable. I think they just ran out of time and resources.

Come on! It is really usable without.
The Workbench is a fine litte UI, especially for that time.
The OS with its libraries and multitasking kernel is quite advanced and the hardware capabilities are impressive.

You can make that user experience even better by customizing things - the flexibility of the OS concept allows you to do that.

Sure:
there are shortcomings all over the place - but compared to "MS Windows 1.0" or "GEM for DOS" it is really a masterpiece.

The problem was, Commodore did not keep on developing (at first)
It took the management a couple of years to realize what an operating system and a platform really means ... OS 2.0 was a step in the right direction but it took Commodore almost 5 years - the update cycle should have been every year with smaller steps but continuously.

This also would have mitigated many compatibility problems of 2.0:
With a new ROM every year, programmers would have realized sooner, that they need to follow the rules.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Instead, we would only have applications and games by big software companies who could afford these 'Commodorifications'

What a terrible thing!
Software for the Amiga from big software companies!
Clearly commodore did everything to avoid such a horror scenario ....

[Chucky]

no certification was "needed" what was needed was more mature programmers.
anyway. if I as a softwaredeveloper for commerical stuff. I would "certify" my software. buut there would not be a need. but it would be a qualitysign.

however.. it wasn't done as I guess the world was not used to bad programming that actualy affected systems yet. so "not needed". now with experience we would say different. but not by then.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Chucky

no certification was "needed" what was needed was more mature programmers.
anyway. if I as a softwaredeveloper for commerical stuff. I would "certify" my software. buut there would not be a need. but it would be a qualitysign.
.

Exactly.
Commodore would not have had the power to stop anyone from releasing software without certification, but it would not get the quality logo without it....

Having such enforced guidelines and such an official process in place would have helped, I guess.
Most PD programmers would have probably tried to follow these standards even without certification, as they would have been more present in the public mind.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by Overdoc

Still, does this also apply to games which did not start on top of the Workbench?

Of course it applies. The RKRMs document how the Os works, and also how the hardware works. Problem is that some authors simply followed the principles they learned on the C64: "Trial and error". This might work on a fixed machine that does not receive updates, but it does not work on a flexible architecture. However, you cannot just keep the architecture fixed on a fast moving market.