What things do you miss from the Amiga?

[TroyWilkins]

Originally Posted by spud

Not as good as assigns on the Amiga as you're limited to drive letters, but have a go with the "subst" command.

D:\profiles\spud>subst  /?
Associates a path with a drive letter.
SUBST [drive1: [drive2:]path]
SUBST drive1: /D
  drive1:        Specifies a virtual drive to which you want to assign a path.
  [drive2:]path  Specifies a physical drive and path you want to assign to
                 a virtual drive.
  /D             Deletes a substituted (virtual) drive.
Type SUBST with no parameters to display a list of current virtual drives.

Thanks, that would probably be quite useful if I didn't have so many drives connected to this poor machine, lol



Which reminds me, I really have to get and setup a NAS here...

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by EugeneNine

In Slackware you have to (get to) partition the drive yourself, format the drive your self, install software yourself, etc.
I found the learning curve was no harder (actually less) than windows. I think it was the similarities to Amiga that helped.

What similarities? The flat filesystem? The two-letter commands? The total disattachment between GUI and command-line? The lack of a unifying GUI styleguide? The package manager?

[Daedalus]

Linux is all well and good when you're sticking to certain main patterns. But as soon as something goes wrong or doesn't work exactly as expected, it comes down to editing config files, messing about with awkward to use (but no doubt supremely powerful) CLI commands, and trawling various Linux forums hoping to find someone with a solution for your exact problem.

But anyway, back on topic, things I really miss from the Amiga:

- Dedicated menu and OS shortcut keys and relative consistency in their use. Mac OS X is the only one that somewhat matches the Amiga in this regard. Windows? Not at all, and Linux is even worse.

- Consistent keyboard editing shortcuts. These aren't 100% on the Amiga, but in most cases they work. I'm thinking of the shift-right to move to the end of the line, shift del to delete to the end of the line, shift-left to move to the start of the line, shift-backspace to delete to the start of the line, and so on. I miss these daily.

- Overlapping windows without popping to the front. The ClickToFront commodity set to double-click is a wonderful thing I find myself missing on all other systems, as is the ability to send windows to the back.

- The lovely, simple file layout. Having well-named components in neatly organised directories is a godsend for troubleshooting and understanding a system. No folders full of thousands of badly named files.

- The general tendency for Amiga programs to inhabit separate drawers is something I miss when trying to work on Linux. I hate trying to find files related to an application, when they end up in a folder with thousands of other, unrelated files.

- Being able to drag a file or folder into a file requester and have it jump to that location, rather than copying the file or folder to the requester's current path. This drives me nuts on most systems, and Haiku is the only other OS I've seen that has this ability as standard. It massively improves productivity by not having to navigate in the requester to a directory or file you already have available on the desktop.

- Assigns. Many systems have a somewhat vague analogue of these, but none have the same simple system, and none use such a system to provide shortcuts to so much of the system files (S:, LIBS:, FONTS: etc.). It makes using the Shell a joy.

- AmigaDOS Shell. Yes, it might not be as powerful as the Linux shells out there, but it's plenty capable for me, and with things like implied CD for drawer names, agnostic trailing slash usage, consistent template usage, well-named commands, decent scripting capability and so on make all other terminals and shells feel clunky and unfriendly to me.

- ARexx. Such wide support and such a simple language make it a joy to use, and very simple to add functionality to Workbench for specific tasks (3.5+ of course...)

- Workbench. I know it has its problems, but I use a Workbench 4.1 and Filer combination, with Filer filling in the few weaknesses Workbench has for my use. Just the feeling of using it as a desktop environment beats any other for me.

- Requesters not locking out the rest of the application controls. If I have a dialog box open in Windows for example, I can't even move the parent window (or even application's windows) to help me solve the problem or look for what I might need, like a file path. It's something that annoys me daily using Windows. Amiga OS lets you move and shuffle windows even if they're locked waiting on a response or something.

- Separately threaded UI elements. Similar to above, the ability of the GUI to react even if the program is busy, so you know the input has at least been queued up for processing instead of wondering if it will respond later when the task is freed up or will ignore the input, given the lack of visual feedback offered by other systems. MUI doesn't allow this, which is a shame, and feels slightly foreign in this regard.

Many of these things can be added via hacks, patches, manual configuration or what not, but that's not ideal, and often not possible using work computers etc.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

- The lovely, simple file layout. Having well-named components in neatly organised directories is a godsend for troubleshooting and understanding a system. No folders full of thousands of badly named files.

This.
Makes me wonder what people who say that Linux is similar to Amiga smoke.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

- AmigaDOS Shell. Yes, it might not be as powerful as the Linux shells out there, but it's plenty capable for me, and with things like implied CD for drawer names, agnostic trailing slash usage, consistent template usage, well-named commands, decent scripting capability and so on make all other terminals and shells feel clunky and unfriendly to me.

Exactly. Not to mention the wonderful command history and line editing of KingCON.

Originally Posted by Daedalus

- ARexx. Such wide support and such a simple language make it a joy to use, and very simple to add functionality to Workbench for specific tasks (3.5+ of course...)

Couldn't agree more. The only thing that comes close is AppleScript on OSX, which I sadly haven't learned.

UNIX has the great concept of pipes, which is totally broken in AmigaDOS, but the pipe system breaks down totally when you're dealing with interactive programs.

[Thorham]

I miss the overall coolness of the hardware.

[Mrs Beanbag]

instant on - or close enough! my Amiga boots up to workbench far quicker than my PC gets into the login screen, and then after logging in i have to wait a bit more. An SSD really helps (on my PC at work - i'll get one at home before too long), but now my Amiga has an SSD as well, so...

and not even having to boot to OS to play a game, just boot the game's disk.

DOS and GUI system in ROM so even if you boot a blank disk you can still do something.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Mrs Beanbag

DOS and GUI system in ROM so even if you boot a blank disk you can still do something.

Yeah lets see Microsoft try that, the universe would be too small for the amount of rage this would cause

[dirkies]

Or during those late night sessions when everything was quiet in the house, hearing the drives click of my trusted A500 in the background is a sweet memory too

[volvo_0ne]

Strange innit?

No matter what system you use, there is ALWAYS something which doesn't quite work (or work how it should/how you think it should)

And doesn't that one little thing just peeve you off?

I know it does me! lol

[XPD]

The camaraderie between Amiga users....... you could ask for help and not get laughed at, yet on PC at the time you'd be insulted and degraded.

[Phantasm]

I miss the demos. They seemed to be pushing the fixed hardware more and more each year without constantly needing faster cpus and more ram.

I also miss the Amiga bbs scene.

[s2325]

- controls similar in almost every game, you don't need manual or tutorial
- crack intros with some brilliant music and effects
- no rate/share/purchase buttons

[losso]

- all files had comments (especially nice: IBrowse and other browsers saving the source URL of downloaded files there)
- expandability of the system (data types, commodities (MagicMenu, MCX), devices providing a "writable" CD file system)
- hackability of the system (transparent file compression à la XPK, MagicLayers)
- universal key sequences: typing alt-k followed by "a" produces "ä" on every Amiga
- having a LED in the caps-lock key
- having a non-braindead caps-lock mode (who wants to change 1234 into !"#$ when typing uppercase?!)
- never asking yourself why the drive is active (and if so, you could fire up SnoopDOS and find out why exactly – granted, in the mid-2000s you could do that with procexp.exe on Windows, too)
- overall responsive feel of everyhing (my million-times-faster work PC often can't provide me with smooth scrolling everywhere and menus opening without delays etc.)
- public domain community: the endless browsing of Fred Fish disks, Meeting Pearls and Aminet CDs…

[RuySan]

For me it's definitely good soundtracks. Although it's been improving, specially with some great indie soundtracks (e.g. Hotline Miami, The Banner Saga), it's still miles from the pure bliss that was the sound of the Amiga.

[cbmeeks]

Like others have said, I miss things not working. I also miss being able to understand the hardware at almost an engineer's level. Simpletons like me could understand an Amiga (C64, Atari, etc.) at a level that you cannot do with modern computers.

I also miss the single-tasking. Sure, the Amiga was a great multi-tasker...but still, back then we usually only did one thing at a time. At least I did. So having one program open for hours and doing nothing else.

Today, I have 20 programs running constantly and I have to bounce back-n-forth between them all day.

[Gordon]

I miss getting magazines every month with demos to try out the latest games and getting some undiscovered PD/shareware titles on disk.
I miss going into a game shop and seeing all the big beautiful boxes and seeing what to get next.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by losso

- having a non-braindead caps-lock mode (who wants to change 1234 into !"#$ when typing uppercase?!)

What peecee software actually does that? I certainly never had that problem.

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by Thorham

What peecee software actually does that? I certainly never had that problem.

Continental Windows locales had that feature as "shift-lock" rather than caps lock, whereas the Amiga uses caps lock even for continental keyboard settings. British and American Windows settings don't have that behaviour though so you'd only normally see it if you were using computers elsewhere. I remember it being a thing on German Windows 98 installations at the time...

[dirkies]

my keyboard says CAPS lock but will also shift the numbers into signs, so it is in effect doing SHIFT lock, not just capitalizing letters, no?

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

I remember it being a thing on German Windows 98 installations at the time...

Originally Posted by dirkies

my keyboard says CAPS lock but will also shift the numbers into signs, so it is in effect doing SHIFT lock, not just capitalizing letters, no?

Just tried a German IDE in Windows, and sure enough: Shift Lock

Absolutely ridiculous. I use a Japanese IDE for direct input, so I never noticed.