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

[nexus]

the fact that i can run on Classic 8xxx/G3/G4/G4+ PPC and kick ass in quake 3 openarena online etc

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by nobody

The possibility to use a card like ACA500 and hook a 060 card to my A500 or use a Vampire and make a quantum leap of like let's say 10 years in speed (1987-1997)

I think I’ll go vampire eventually, when they release the AGA core.
Man that is gonna kick ass. Banshee and Roadkill on an A500.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by kolla

One thing I love with Amiga is the amiga-guide format, which is very nice for making simple GUIs. For example I have a few scripts that gives me a frontend to Aminet, using Multiview. Excellent for day-to-day aminet checkups, and a must for lowmem systems, like the Minimig.

You should try UHC.

[chip]

EaglePlayer

This because it is "simply" the application i used more in my whole life

[kolla]

Originally Posted by idrougge

You should try UHC.

Please elaborate Ultra High Compression?

[DamienD]

... http://uhc.driar.se/
... UHC Tools

[kolla]

Ah, cool, I will have a look.

EDIT: OK, I had a look, and it doesn't really bring anything new or better over what I already have, but reading scripts is always fun
(aget doesn't do http-proxy, which I kinda rely on, as I am migrating away from IPv4.)

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by xanderbeanz

That is so cool.

I have a couple of Q’s

1. Will it work on an ECS machine with a 3.1 Rom?
2. Can it be installed over WB2.1 or does it need a fresh install?

Thanks.

1. OCS/ECS/AGA is not a problem. You may use a 3.1 rom but you will have three setbacks if you dont have a real 3.1.4 rom: a second reboot, also softkicking will eat half a megabyte of ram aproximately, and the bootable partition will have to stay within the first 4GB of the drive.

2. Yes, but better start clean if you can. So that you dont blame us for the problems you already have

3. Also to be on the safe side how much total ram do you have?

[sean_sk]

What blows me away about using an Amiga in 2018 is:

1. That i can push my A600 and A1200 beyond what I ever imagined I could do with it when I stuffed around with Amiga's with my mates in the late 80's early 90's.

2. The fact it's not an Apple, Android, or Windows device forcing me to log into an account in order to use it so that it can target and force feed me ads, track my every move, control me and tell me what I can and cant do with it.

3. As time goes by and upgrades improve, I can use my Amiga for more and more tasks and use my Windows PC less and less.

4. The Amiga games that still capture my imagination even after 30 years.

5. In this modern age of boring technological sameness, the Amiga is still original, fresh and exciting.

[Paulee_Bow]

Originally Posted by gulliver

1. OCS/ECS/AGA is not a problem. You may use a 3.1 rom but you will have three setbacks if you dont have a real 3.1.4 rom: a second reboot, also softkicking will eat half a megabyte of ram aproximately, and the bootable partition will have to stay within the first 4GB of the drive.

2. Yes, but better start clean if you can. So that you dont blame us for the problems you already have

3. Also to be on the safe side how much total ram do you have?

Thanks.

1. Do they make 3.x/3.1.4 roms for the A500 series? I got my 3.1 from Amigakit but they only sell 3.x for A1200.

and

3. I have 2MB Chip, 8MB Fast.

[nogginthenog]

The A500 had official 3.1 ROMs. No idea where you can buy them.

I doubt there will be an official 3.1.4 ROM. There were no 3.5/3.9 official ROMs.

If you know someone with an EPROM burner they can be made easily. I paid about £100 for mine but I use it for other purposes, I'm sure there are cheaper options.

[gulliver]

Originally Posted by xanderbeanz

Thanks.

1. Do they make 3.x/3.1.4 roms for the A500 series? I got my 3.1 from Amigakit but they only sell 3.x for A1200.

and

3. I have 2MB Chip, 8MB Fast.

1.Some resellers/distributors will make 3.1.4 roms for the A500. Patience, we want to squeeze out any remaining bugs first.

2. More than enough.

[alexh]

What blows your mind about using an Amiga in 2018

The smell of burning dust when you first turn the PSU on after years in the attic

[roondar]

To be fair, the two things that "blow my mind" about using the Amiga in 2018 are...

1) that mine still work!
2) that there is still an active community for the platform to this very day

[lucadip]

This is something I have been thinking of quite a lot lately. What attracts me so much to the amiga (and c64) now that I am 44?

1) Feeling close to my teenager years. They were far from being perfect, but it was nice to come back home, (don't) make homeworks and play with my computers.
2) A lot of games aged pretty well and are still fun to play.
3) The impression I have the OS and hardware under control. I'm no guru, yet I know what the machine is doing every moment, I can easily expand it, play with filesystems, network... I also don't mind starting DevPac and SAS/C once in a while.
4) Although I mostly lurk, I love the community, the forums, reading comments and reviews about old games.

Thank you for the nice thread!

[jotd]

Playing on real hardware without any fan noise or controller configuration beats every emulator in the world.

[Paulee_Bow]

I thought I’d answer my own question all over again after having a few days to process it all. I alluded to something in my original post about the Amiga feeling “cool” again, what with nostalgia taking hold. When my A500+ arrived, delivered to work my 24 year old colleague, younger than the machine, thought it was very cool.

I think that the Amiga scene, with YouTube channels full of great videos, new magazines, upgrades “feels” the most optimistic it ever has, and less and less a “shameful” or “uncool” thing.

This might warrant its own thread, but yes, shame. I believe that Amiga users may have felt something called “minority stress” for a long time and as a mental health professional I have been reflecting upon my own past feelings of shame and isolation that came with being an Amiga user at a certain point in time. This point in time was about 18 years ago when I left the Amiga behind for the first time, and last, I hope.

Minority stress is a subtle feeling of being excluded. If you think of any minority within our society, immigrants, gay people, transgender people, disabled people, etc etc, there is a level of stress and tension that goes along with having that status. Perhaps you’d face unkind comments in the street, threats of violence or bullying, etc.

Whilst not as severe or pronounced as the experiences of those groups, I believe that many of us may have felt minority stress at one point in time or another due to our computing preferences.

Using an Amiga as your prime computer between say 1996 and 2000, could have got you some pretty cutting remarks out and about.

“Why don’t you get a PC and do the job properly?”
“Why are you using that old thing?”
“Your computer can’t run XXXX?! What a piece of crap!”

And you’d probably try to defend your choice by explaining, in depth, your reasoning and passion to your detractors, half of which may not even understand what you’re talking about. People are notoriously bad at empathising for some reason, it turns out. Anyhow, you’d probably grow tired of having to explain yourself.

Even if you knew a few other Amiga users, you might still feel quite isolated, like the world had moved on, dwindling software support and so on.

And nowadays there’s none of that. People don’t say cutting things when you talk about your passion because retro nostalgia is cool, we can all chat on the internet so you cant feel alone, there are meetups and exciting things around the corner.

I never owned an Amiga until 1995, so I missed the Commodore years, but I can sense there was a buzz then, and I think that buzz has returned.

I’m rambling!

[grond]

I certainly stressed the majority for a few years telling them how much better the Amiga was...

[roondar]

Originally Posted by xanderbeanz

Using an Amiga as your prime computer between say 1996 and 2000, could have got you some pretty cutting remarks out and about.

“Why don’t you get a PC and do the job properly?”
“Why are you using that old thing?”
“Your computer can’t run XXXX?! What a piece of crap!”

And you’d probably try to defend your choice by explaining, in depth, your reasoning and passion to your detractors, half of which may not even understand what you’re talking about. People are notoriously bad at empathising for some reason, it turns out. Anyhow, you’d probably grow tired of having to explain yourself.

Even if you knew a few other Amiga users, you might still feel quite isolated, like the world had moved on, dwindling software support and so on.

I can't speak for anyone else, obviously, but I actually learned a lot from facing these kinds of comments (my age at the time might have helped ). Mostly about accepting that other people think about the world differently than me and that this is A-OK. The second thing is to not try to be "evangelising" about subjects that I know the rest of the world is not going to care about in the same way I am (which is kind of the same thing, but more in the way to deal with it).

It might sound a bit over the top, but I genuinely believe that this type of 'adversity' allowed me to 'grow up' a lot better than those amongst us who started taking it very personally.

The world is a diverse place, people might not like you, what you do or even what you look like or who or what you believe in (or not as the case may be). The important thing to learn (IMHO) is to accept this and just, well, move on with life.

[RunsilenT]

As a gamer, the Amiga came after the ZX Spectrum for me, no Snes, Megadrive or anything in between. The leap was so impressive, impossible to put into words. The UK and Europe embraced the 500 and pushed it beyond all expectations, I was a proud owner and friends were jealous. They say when we get older we want the things we couldn`t afford or have as younger selves, nostalgia and the same want from 28 years ago drove me to get a 600 and 1200. Its now become a money pit as I try and find a happy medium of upgraded machine with a smooth WHDLOAD and Gotek for ADF`s with cracktros. The games are like 80`s music, I know where I was when I heard them, memories and people, good times. Besides music I know of nothing else I own that can take me back and make me smile, only Amiga makes it possible.