Amazing things you've done with your Amiga

Back in the 90's I worked at an Amiga dealer. I made a commercial for the store - with Videoscape no less - on a 3000. It only ran on tv a couple of times, but we did get some results from it... One kid from a neighboring town told us that his mom was driving him down the street looking for the place, and he yells out "there it is!"... He recognized the old house from the animation!

Coolest thing I did with my own Amiga was run MacOS, MS-DOS and Amiga DOS simultaneously.... but then I'm easily amused. ;-)

[mr_a500]

@JimS

An Amiga-made commercial that was actually shown on TV is pretty impressive. Nice work.

Coolest thing I did with my own Amiga was run MacOS, MS-DOS and Amiga DOS simultaneously.... but then I'm easily amused. ;-)

Yeah, I did that too on my A500, but I definitely don't recommend it. Another thing I did was run an emulation inside an emulation. I emulated MS-DOS, then inside that ran the XF25 Atari 800 emulator and attempted to play "Montezuma's Revenge". It was unbelievably slow, but the game actually ran. I also tried some Atari BASIC. At the time I was desperate to emulate Atari 800 on my A500. Later, I found the great ACE Atari 800 emulator and then had no need to "multi-emulate".

__________________________________________________________

I thought I'd post my list of "Amiga Advantages" here - even though it's a bit off topic and could possibly make this the longest post ever. This is my list of design/philosophy advantages of Amiga Workbench over most "modern" OSes ...in 2007. (a couple of these are not practical in a modern OS, and a couple are available on Mac or Linux, but most of these are things modern OSes don't have and I wish they did):

1. Microkernel OS (preemptive multitasking): the entire OS with GUI can be trimmed to fit on a single DD 880K floppy (and still have space for harddrive recovery and diagnostic tools). Copy and use whatever parts of the OS you need - simple directory structure with no hidden files or stupid convoluted registry. Any problem can be easily diagnosed.

2. Every application, every viewed image can open on its own screen (even larger than viewable with fast, smooth omnidirectional scrolling) - each with different size/resolution/colour depth. These screens can be dragged down over each other or flipped through extremely quickly (microsecond) with none of that stupid slow monitor readjustment

3. Window depth: windows don't move to the front automatically when you click on them and they have depth gadgets to move to front or back - or set to double-click to move to front. (this is extremely useful for cut & paste between windows that overlap)

4. Use or Save any settings: unlike other operating systems, you can use current settings without saving them permanently or save them instantly and permanently - without waiting for "shutdown" for it to actually save. (ever have Windows crash after "saving" settings changes and notice all your changes are lost? Oh and forget the Windows "Apply" & "OK" - they do exactly the same thing! Try "Apply" then "Cancel", reboot and see that it's saved, not cancelled!)

5 Settings/Preferences are stored in very small individual files which can be easily backed up and restored. You can even save multiple versions of the same settings and store it for later use. Settings NEVER mysteriously revert back to default. (...like they do regularly in Windows. Have you ever tried to migrate ALL your program & OS settings from one Windows computer to another? It's impossible! On Amiga it can be done easily with a single floppy.)

6. Icon/Window Snapshot: unlike other operating systems, you can move icons and change window sizes/positions without the change being permanent unless you specifically want to by snapshotting. If you accidentally changed it, it's not permanent if you didn't save. (snapshot stored in very small icon file which can be easily backed up and recovered)

7. All icons can be changed: separate icon files meaning every single icon can be changed (other OSes have hacks to change OS icons and shortcuts, but on Amiga you can easily change every single icon - including all executables - without any hack)

8. Any icon can be any size: there is no fixed icon size or ratio. If you want, important applications can have huge icons, less important program icons can be smaller and unimportant files can be tiny. Files don't even need icons - so if you have a folder with tons of files you don't need to see, you just don't give them icons. (why see hundreds of files that you don't have to? still viewable by name if you need to see them)

9. No "Shut down": just turn off. Complete startup (where OS is completely responsive - unlike Windows with start-menu delays, busy pointers and grinding harddrive) takes less than 15 seconds. A startup-reboot-startup will take 30 seconds. (on Windows this takes about 5 minutes!)

10. Assigns: assign to shorten long paths or move folders without having to change paths

11. No keyboard/mouse buffering: actions are not stored when system busy - avoids actions happening later when you don't want them (ever click "Cancel" when something is not responding, then when it starts doing what you want, the buffered click cancels it?)

12. Windows can't be moved off screen: you don't have to carefully move windows to avoid parts of it being off screen (I hate in other OSes seeing partial windows I have to recentre to view)

13. Standard installer with readable text: you can read exactly what the install will do, edit it if you want or install manually. (with other OSes, you don't know and have to trust it not to trash your system)

14. Installed programs can easily be backed up: most programs are completely contained in their own folder so you can just copy that folder to a backup folder. (even if the program is currently open)

15. Open files can be copied: you can back up or copy any file on any partition without annoying "file in use" errors. (this includes all OS files - something which is impossible in Windows)

16. Popup dialog boxes do not block windows underneath or freeze the system until you respond: you can still view and move windows, flip through screens

17. Buttons, toolbars, dividers can only be moved when you specifically want to, not at all times - and when you do move them, changes are not permanent unless you save them (this prevents screwups caused by accidentally clicking & dragging when moving the mouse). Also, when dragging anything (drag & drop) right mousebutton always cancels the drag preventing you from having to carefully replace it

18. Clicking twice on an icon's name does not prompt you to rename it: other OSes are extremely "touchy" and you can easily screw things up by accident (or start a program or open a file when you're just trying to rename it). Also, switching focus doesn't stupidly cancel the rename like it does in Windows.

19. There is no "jump off point" for scrollbars: when scrolling scrollbars with mouse button down, you don't need to keep the pointer on or near the scrollbar (obviously if you've got mouse button down, you still want to scroll - so why does it matter if you went too far off the scrollbar??)

20. Files don't need extensions to be recognized and you can change extensions to whatever you want or have no extension at all with no problems. You can use question mark & ellipses in filename and filenames can even be extension only (I think also in Mac & Linux, but certainly not Windows)

Other misc. advantages:
- No spyware or adware, no browser/email vulnerabilities
- Help key instead of stupid F1 (and no "reserved" function keys, all programmable)
- Better cursor movement: shift back for begin of line, shift forward for end of line, shift backspace for delete to begin of line, shift up for page up, shift down for page down (faster & more efficient than using Home/End/PgUp/PgDN)
- Menu on top of screen to save space (like Mac but hidden until right mouse button click so takes no space at all)
- "Spacebar" is not equivalent to "Enter" on popup window buttons so you don't accidentally close a popup when typing (this has happened to me many times in Windows!)
- Huge centralized internet repository of free software (Aminet) - not really an OS advantage, but extremely important. Try finding a Windows or Mac software site that has hundreds of thousands of spyware-free virus-free free software programs.


(...the whole point of this monstrously huge post is to tell people who may not know - or remind people who have forgotten - what's great about Amiga Workbench )

[BinoX]

Most impressive thing...

I wrote a CSS capable web browser... (seriously... although it was extremely unstable and also took the best part of the day to render a large page... One day I'll dig it out again and fix the memory allocation so it doesn't take quite a long and then optimise the code)

It had plenty of missing features too..
No text selection,
No javascript,
No file input type,
Nothing apart from base rendering in fact.. although that wasn't 100% accurate either... But it DID render the sourceforge main page after 2 days.. lol

[pbareges]

Originally Posted by killergorilla

Most "shocking" thing I did with an Amiga... (not really amazing but hey )

Managed to electricute myself plugging the PSU in to the back of my A1200. Frightened the shit out of me, and my arm nearly broke when it was thrown in the opposite direction.

lier!! there's only 12v out there! how the hell did you manage to get shocked with 12v?

Originally Posted by mr_a500

@JimS

An Amiga-made commercial that was actually shown on TV is pretty impressive. Nice work.

Thanks... we thought it was pretty cool at the time, but it looks very lame today. ;-) I still have all the files, so now and then I think about rerendering it in Lightwave.

Yeah, I did that too on my A500, but I definitely don't recommend it. Another thing I did was run an emulation inside an emulation.

No, that sort of thing is pushing it a bit. ;-) I had a bridgeboard in my 2000 for a while, with a ISA extender I had room for enough cards to run VGA, IDE and serial/LP ports. I loaded up windows 3.1 on the thing a few times... what a kludge. ;-)

One other cool thing - one of our customers ran a small weekly newspaper with Amigas (and Apple ][s. ) I wrote them a CanDo deck to manage their classified adverts.

[boing_1000]

The most amazing thing I've done with my Amiga is use it. I like to enjoy it for what it is.

[Graham Humphrey]

Me too

People have achieved some incredible things with Amigas but I just thoroughly enjoy using it, regardless what I choose to use it for.

[ancalimon]

I've amazed many of my friends showing of capabilities of my Amiga. I remember a friend looking at the screen with an opened mouth while my A1200 was displaying a demo. He had a rather advanced pc at the time with huge 16mb memory and 486dx266 and sounblaster16 We used to play adventure games with him a lot.

Another friend was so upset that the Soundblaster pro did not output sound as good as my a500+

One day the balcony door broke and fell on my A1200 breaking the table under it and breaking the ground a bit also. The A1200 had a smashed floppy. Other than that it was perfect

Showing a friend my A4000T playing VCD to a huge TV via Peggy+, showing a chroma keyed realtime video via my Vlabmotion to a small tv, playing colonization on an amiga monitor, playing an mp3 via delfina lite, and browsing the net via IBrowse without any speed hit all at the same time. He was like "I thought Amiga was a game computer" He really was surprised. He said he didn't think a computer could do this. Actualy I was surprised too because it was the first time I was trying it