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

[ross]

To the topic.

Using "Amiga" (even in his virtual incarnations) makes me feel young and free

[jotd]

The fact that you can boot a game CF card in seconds, plug the old joysticks and play, without fan noise, without emulation setup/controller/sound issues...

The fact of running the real hardware and not emulation

The fun adapting games to add new features, like fixing bugs, cool levelskips & trainers, cd32 controls, enhancing the games for an almost new experience.

The dynamism of the community

The hardware that mostly amateurs create, like Vampire, KTRLCD32, CD32 riser boards & Terrible Fire...

The fact that nothing moves too quickly, all resources are available and quick to download

The 680x0 processor

The Bitmap Brothers

I could go on for hours.

[graffias79]

What blows my mind is with how much technology has progressed I can still fire up one of my Amigas and experience that exact same euphoric feeling I always had. Computing truly is fun on this platform.

Also the dedication of a lot of people to persist this long in what some could call a sometimes disgruntled userbase to bring forth new hardware and software for the majority of us to enjoy.

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by jotd

The fact that you can boot a game CF card in seconds, plug the old joysticks and play, without fan noise, without emulation setup/controller/sound issues...

The fact of running the real hardware and not emulation

The fun adapting games to add new features, like fixing bugs, cool levelskips & trainers, cd32 controls, enhancing the games for an almost new experience.

The dynamism of the community

The hardware that mostly amateurs create, like Vampire, KTRLCD32, CD32 riser boards & Terrible Fire...

The fact that nothing moves too quickly, all resources are available and quick to download

The 680x0 processor

The Bitmap Brothers

I could go on for hours.

I love running the real hardware, the sights and sounds, the clack of the keys.

In fact I refuse to use modern PC keyboards now, I have my Amiga and then for my PC I have an old IBM 122 Key Terminal Keyboard.

CLACK!

[eXeler0]

For 20 years i've been swearing every time Windows decided it time to dosomething in the background that I have no idea about.. (Less apparent now, but wildly annoying in the win XP era..you like open a requester and 9 out of 10 times its fast but the tenth time, for some reason, its dead slow..)
*Amiga was never like that, it unless you got a Guru and the software was stable it behaved very predictably and stuff would happen just the way you expected it to.
*Also... RAM disk, always loved it, such a simple but great idea.
*Dragging screens in different resolutions or swithcing between programs running at various resolutions is still cool to this day.
*Bloatware-free (and this is actually why I prefer 3.1 over 3.9)
*The hardware.. Looking at my A1200 makes me smile, looking at my $2500 PC makes me go "meeeh"..
*All the stories from the old engineers and the community.. Its like a mythical place..

[klx300r]

@ xanderbeanz

that I'm STILL using my favourite OS today

that the Amiga community is STILL here and as helpful as ever :

that I can sync & transfer files between my A4000 running OS3.9, A1-X1000 running OS4.1FE, and Winblows machine using the amazing AmiCloud

[fatboy]

They way it chucks graphics around the screen and pumps out sound...... that still impresses me in 2018

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by klx300r

@ xanderbeanz

that I'm STILL using my favourite OS today

that the Amiga community is STILL here and as helpful as ever :

that I can sync & transfer files between my A4000 running OS3.9, A1-X1000 running OS4.1FE, and Winblows machine using the amazing AmiCloud

Transferring files literally blows my mind too. I forgot to put that in my opening statement.

I have a CF card, and I can put it into WinUAE on my PC, OR into my A500+, and it’s exactly the same workbench and files! It’s so easy to mount a windows folder as a hard drive in WinUAE and then copy everything over!

Exactly the same system and OS on two pieces of hardware 25+ years apart.

I can’t believe how you can format a CF card, in a modern USB card reader, into something that an Amiga can read! WHAT? How does that work???

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by fatboy

They way it chucks graphics around the screen and pumps out sound...... that still impresses me in 2018

I think it’s more impressive, seeing an A500 being pushed to it’s limits, than a modern PC doing a similar demo.

It’s kind of like how stop motion animation/animatronics and model work looks more impressive than CGI cause you know they had to put a hell of a lot of work and imagination in...CGI feels kind of easy - although in reality it is not.

[MikeyG]

What amazes me about Amiga in 2018?
1. The Community.
How there are so many people still using a system dated for the 80's-90's. The Amiga was definately ahead of its time.
2. Simplicity in a now over complicated world.
Working in IT its nice to go back to the Amiga a system that I started out on so its familiar and not waiting for a windows update or game patch to download.
3. Games
Some awesome games that you can quickly pickup and play and great creative mix.
4. Development
I think its a better entry point for beginner developers as apposed to modern systems, with AMOS, Blitz Basic (what I'm personally learning at the moment as I missed out first time round). And there are still people out there developing games and software now and helping each other.
I could go on more but I'll stop there

[chip]

The fun in scanning stuff

I mean, the search of "new" demos and games is cool

Also searching for "new" tunes from both demos and games is part of the fun

I contributed a lot to Janeway and Modland, so i know what i'm talking about

There's so lot of things to discover

[jPV]

That I'm still using Amiga compatible OS and even my old classic Amiga software favourites as my daily primary setup, and how polished it actually is and how cool it has became since the 68k days! Still getting new updates and running it on faster hw that I could have never imagined. I was losing my hope 15 years ago, but now it's better than ever for me.

[jotd]

Also, all the CPU-intensive & tedious scripting stuff can be done by emulators or windows using python on the shared disk, then the final product is copied back to the amiga (using amazing CF cards), then plug and play.

(if someone doesn't blow my mind on the amiga, it's the scripting abilities, but what the hell, in 2018 we can have the best of both worlds)

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by hth313

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).

Yes I hope they release the new 3.1 on floppy lol.

[Hiddenevil]

*Points at the Amiga* it's a home computer masquerading as a keyboard! Back in the 90s I could pick up my Amiga and take it with me without any fuss. I'd break by arm off if I tried that with my PC.

The amount of new hardware still being made still surprises me, it's just brill!

[chip]

The speed of cracktros !

I mean, just few moments of loading and you will get graphics and sound on screen

I guess it's all question of Assembly programming, but only with a great Hardware this can happen

[grond]

What still blows my mind is how good the operating system was and how little the Amiga was recognised for this. It could easily have evolved into an OS still usable today for today's tasks.

[kolla]

Originally Posted by grond

It could easily have evolved into an OS still usable today for today's tasks.

Why do you say that? I thought this was clear and obvious by now...

Brilliant minds have thought about this concept for soon 3 decades, and all have reached the same conclusion - no, there is no way for AmigaOS to evolve into an OS still usable today, for today's tasks. If there was to be an evolution, it would have been the same as that of classic MacOS being replaced with UNIX. And before rather than after.

In many ways, Internet killed the Amiga, and all the operating systems of that caliber.

[kolla]

Oh, and nothing really blows my mind about using Amiga in 2018, it's just same old, same old. What blows my mind is how many of us are still here, doing the same old, same old

[grond]

@kolla: in a economically functional ecosystem, AmigaOS could have evolved easily. E.g. they could have added a new type of executable that would have run in a memory protected chunk of RAM where the old exec.library would merely have become another task running old executables in its own memory space. They could have added chunky modes overlaid over classic bitplane modes which could not be accessed directly by programs. Some low-level library functions could have become privileged, others deprecated and non-functional. In an economically healthy software ecosystem, existing programs would have got new releases abiding by new coding rules. I don't see any problem in AmigaOS that could not have been solved while keeping most of the API the same.