Amiga scene vs. c64 scene?

[Lucidphreak]

For those of you who were in the warez/underground scene (not demos/music) during both the c64 glory days as well as the amiga glory days (there was some overlap I guess..), which period did you enjoy the best.. Why?

I think I know the answer to this question - but I am interested in finding out from those that were there - and hearing the reasons they feel that way..

[dirkies]

C64 for me as it was less modem and more meet&greet based to swap plus with C64 you could trade many games on a single audio cassette
And personally i think the Amiga scene was also a bit more aggressive/rude vs C64 scene (at least of all those i knew from those times)

[UberFreak]

I'm biased towards the C64 since I grew up with it, but I agree with dirkies.

I've met lifelong friends through the C64 scene, be it from groups I was in or from swapping & trading software with others during meets.
I was only mildly interested in cracking and didn't do that for long, switched to demos after a few years.

[Ratteler]

Having been part of both at the same time, I have to say I enjoyed the Amiga Era better because I could challenge Mac Users on real world, understandable, productivity levels.
The "What can you do with it?" Question was easier to provide evidence for.

Today, the homebrew market is much more rewarding on the Commodore end. The lower bar of technology and greater need to interface to modern standards seems to drive more innovation. The Amiga's evolutionary misstep to PPC seems to have damned it permanent mediocrity with the more "advanced" Amiga lines, and the myriad of legal nonsense for what is basically abondoneware, serve as the greatest roadblock to the classic Amiga from moving forward.

[Kremlar]

The Amiga's evolutionary misstep to PPC seems to have damned it permanent mediocrity with the more "advanced" Amiga lines, and the myriad of legal nonsense for what is basically abondoneware, serve as the greatest roadblock to the classic Amiga from moving forward.

Exactly.

[Jope]

The Amiga's problem is that it wasn't allowed to become honestly obsolete like the C-64 became.

However to answer the original question, I loved the Amiga's heyday more. So around 1989-1993 were golden times in Amiga land and we could genuinely say we had the best home computer. :-)

[gilgamesh]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

The Amiga's evolutionary misstep to PPC seems to have damned it permanent mediocrity with the more "advanced" Amiga lines

That step didn't hurt Apple. You can't seriously blame it for Amiga's failure to evolve during the last twenty years. There is nothing mediocre about POWER8. On topic: C64 users were already few and far between when I started. Naturally I liked the vibrant Amiga "scene" better.

[Lucidphreak]

Great replies.. Thanks!

[OlafSch]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

That step didn't hurt Apple. You can't seriously blame it for Amiga's failure to evolve during the last twenty years. There is nothing mediocre about POWER8. On topic: C64 users were already few and far between when I started. Naturally I liked the vibrant Amiga "scene" better.

C64-scene has some advantages today. There was never a split in the community, the hardware was and is the same, no NG models so everything (including lots of tricks) are knowsn, there were also some good developments tools like SEUCK who make good use of it. Graphics and sound is of course much worse than on amiga so the expectations of users are much lower than on amiga (who always compare new games with old commercial juwels). And there is not a split in a variety of different incompatible successor OSs (besides the old original one) which make supporting difficult (besides that all except one are closed and still "protected"). The same is true for most thirdparty developments like P96 who either belong to one of the new NG platforms or are in abyss from a legal sense with the danger somoeone popping up from nirvana as soon as you would use it.

At the moment I would say C64-community is in a much better situation

[Ratteler]

Originally Posted by gilgamesh

That step didn't hurt Apple. You can't seriously blame it for Amiga's failure to evolve during the last twenty years. There is nothing mediocre about POWER8. On topic: C64 users were already few and far between when I started. Naturally I liked the vibrant Amiga "scene" better.

Sure I can. Even Jobs had NeXTstep running on X86 hardware, and the FreeBSD base of OS X was secretly kept current with the PPC versions.

Wile it seems Apple has scrubbed the net to prevent embarrassment, I remember the snorting and giggles when Jeff Goldblum was exclaiming that they "shrank the supercomputer" for the G4 Cube.

Or the one where the G4 was declared a weapon by the Pentagon, but Pentiums were "harmless".

A Photoshop filter would show you the real story. A Pentium at the same clock speed was half again as fast for half the Price.

They always sold the "untapped" potential of the Power PC, but NO ONE ever produced it.Not even Apple.

That's why there are no more G(x) Mac's, and even less support for the old ones.

What kept Mac alive was the move to Intel.

When the "Amiga"esqe movement was trying to create post Commodore/post AGA Machine, the writing was CLEARLY on the wall.

Even though Apple was still sinking with PPC line, EVERYONE knew the Intel Mac's were coming.

Some how the litany of companies passing Amiga around like Tralala from "Last Exit to Brooklyn" failed to get the message

I'm the wrong decisions for Amiga in the post Commodore age are almost as legendary as the debacle that ended the company in the first place.

ATI Graphic cards when nVidia was, and IS STILL the clear king of graphic hardware, Power PC, and not even a G5! Not even in the Ghz range when PC's pushing 2Ghz.
Wasn't there something funcky with the RAM too, like requiring the more expensive ECC parity kind?

What made the Amiga great for it's time was that is was the best bang for the buck. Thanks to it's custom chips is smoked any competing system.

Hell I would love to see shootout with an 060 Amiga running Shapeshifter and Photoshop, Vs. any Pre "G" PPC Mac. I bet the 060 would crush them if you could match the clock speeds.

Yes. I blame PPC and the other stupid decisions to be different for differents sake. The PPC Gen of Amiga's were LITERALLY the WORST money per dollar for computing power, and had absolutely no real world functionality.

What kept the Amiga 680x0 alive was that it was designed for NTSC and PAL. It's the only computer in history that became MORE VALUABLE after the company went Bankrupt because SO MANY turnkey systems needed them as their core.

I remember well into the 20000's still seeing the occasional TV somewhere with Guru Meditation Error.

Amithalon was the closest we got to resurrecting the Amiga. It could have been the bridge to TODAY'S best bang for the buck. That was more of an Amiga that anything that came out Hyperion or Eyetech. IMHO.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by OlafSch

C64-scene has some advantages today. There was never a split in the community, the hardware was and is the same, no NG models so everything (including lots of tricks) are knowsn [...]

At the moment I would say C64-community is in a much better situation

Yup, yup, yup.

Which is why I think new FPGA accelerators (despite nice) are overall very harmful because they split the development and user scenes in two populations which are further and further apart with each new accelerator/upgrade/lets-catch-up-to-the-pc-30-years-too-late development.

Half of the scene stays rightfully faithful to the stock-or-close-to machines because these are what the Amiga was. And the other half chases the illusory dream of an alternate reality where the Amiga did not become obsolete.
Developers code for machines with less standards, less users, eventually more fragmentation (which Vampire do you have? Wait until there are several models!), making the Amiga scene a complete mess for any newcomer.

An Amiga, like a C64, like a MegaDrive, like a SNES, is an obsolete machine.
That does not prevent any of them from being absolutely marvellous but for some reason half of the Amiga scene seems to be incapable of loving these machines as they are and want them to be something else.

[Lucidphreak]

Excellent reply - and I agree..

[Ratteler]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Yup, yup, yup.

Which is why I think new FPGA accelerators (despite nice) are overall very harmful because they split the development and user scenes in two populations which are further and further apart with each new accelerator/upgrade/lets-catch-up-to-the-pc-30-years-too-late development.

Half of the scene stays rightfully faithful to the stock-or-close-to machines because these are what the Amiga was. And the other half chases the illusory dream of an alternate reality where the Amiga did not become obsolete.
Developers code for machines with less standards, less users, eventually more fragmentation (which Vampire do you have? Wait until there are several models!), making the Amiga scene a complete mess for any newcomer.

An Amiga, like a C64, like a MegaDrive, like a SNES, is an obsolete machine.
That does not prevent any of them from being absolutely marvellous but for some reason half of the Amiga scene seems to be incapable of loving these machines as they are and want them to be something else.

The ONLY reason I have a Real Amiga 500 is for the Vampire.
For that matter why add a hardrive or more than 1MB of RAM to an Amiga 500? It didn't come with them. Most of them that were made were third party. The fact is the the Commodore line was designed to be expanded and interface with other things, and the Amiga carried on that lineage.

I remember reading about home brew ATA controllers for the Amiga, and within a month of getting my original 500 I had an 68020 with FPU in there so I could run Animation Journeyman, Caligari, and stuff I can't remember that required better than a 68000. Eventually I had an 030 and then a 1200 with an 030 accelerator, 8MB RAM. and a 200MB HD.

Does anyone make NEW 720/800k floppy disks? If you don't find them, or a way around them then it's the end of your machine "as it is". Because every floppy disk you own is about 10 years past it's life expectancy. Ferrous Oxide falls off tapes and disks after about 20 years.

So the question is not if you can keep machine running, but HOW!
On the commodore 8 bit side, nothing has held the machine back worse than it's entanglement with the 1541! That damn floppy drive is road block to most software improvements on the platform.

Hey. We're all in this for different reasons. The point is to enjoy your platform. For me, that means regaining access to original tools I created content with. Dpaint and Brilliance.
For all the bells and whistles, the modern age has failed to keep up with those apps for simple animation.

I'm taking a stroll down memory lane with my replacement 500, and I'm hoping to see many cores for the Vampire FPGA that will give me a sweet nostalgia machine.

I'm also waiting for the FPGA Arcade to be become available.

I want to see how far I can push that old Amiga Magic into the 21st Century.

But maybe that's not your thing. That's cool.

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

For that matter why add a hardrive or more than 1MB of RAM to an Amiga 500?
[...]
So the question is not if you can keep machine running, but HOW!

Removing the friction between the Amiga and the real world is perfectly fine. This is not the same as replacing its core chipset with more powerful hardware.

And there was nothing wrong either with having accelerators on a supported, living machine, where software was regularly updated and a there was a single constructor which would provide standards, guidelines and (theoretically) new models with clear paths to upgrade. But now this context does not exist, whatever new comes is by definition an isolated initiative and thus a fragmenting one.

PPC? Vampire? OS3? OS4? Aros? Morphos? Vampire V1? V2? V3? Which card should new developer support? Which OS? Every new card makes the market more fragmented and a headache for a developer.

Stock machines will forever stay a stable, predictable and available market.

Originally Posted by Ratteler

On the commodore 8 bit side, nothing has held the machine back worse than it's entanglement with the 1541! That damn floppy drive is road block to most software improvements on the platform.

If I am not mistaken there are now plenty of boards which allow you to use modern storage media and remove this unnecessary friction.

Originally Posted by Ratteler

For all the bells and whistles, the modern age has failed to keep up with those apps for simple animation.

I think that this is a myth which deserves to die.
The artists and animators I see every day at work (I work in the video games industry) tell me otherwise. There are plenty of easy to use modern tools which totally put anything that existed on the Amiga to shame. And painting with a tablet rather than a mouse is 10 times more productive, even, and especially for pixel art.

Originally Posted by Ratteler

I'm taking a stroll down memory lane with my replacement 500, and I'm hoping to see many cores for the Vampire FPGA that will give me a sweet nostalgia machine.
[...]
I want to see how far I can push that old Amiga Magic into the 21st Century.

But maybe that's not your thing. That's cool.

Indeed, running AmigaOS on a new computer is not my thing.
You are really only accelerating AmigaOS into the 21st century. The rest of your Amiga is completely unused except keyboard and mouse.

The Vampire can do incredible things. No doubt: it was created in 2015. But the Amiga is responsible for none of it.

Stock Amiga-s on the other hand still have a large margin of incredible things to run that nobody has ever written yet.
And the credit for these things will forever be due to the original Amiga team and hardware they created.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

On the commodore 8 bit side, nothing has held the machine back worse than it's entanglement with the 1541! That damn floppy drive is road block to most software improvements on the platform.

What would you like to do on the C64 that is limited by the 1541?

[Ratteler]

Originally Posted by ReadOnlyCat

Removing the friction between the Amiga and the real world is perfectly fine. This is not the same as replacing its core chipset with more powerful hardware.

And there was nothing wrong either with having accelerators on a supported, living machine, where software was regularly updated and a there was a single constructor which would provide standards, guidelines and (theoretically) new models with clear paths to upgrade. But now this context does not exist, whatever new comes is by definition an isolated initiative and thus a fragmenting one.

PPC? Vampire? OS3? OS4? Aros? Morphos?

I agree with you there for the most part.

Vampire V1? V2? V3? Which card should new developer support? Which OS? Every new card makes the market more fragmented and a headache for a developer.

That's where you wrong with the Vampire. If anything, it's closer to a stock Amiga. It's still running the Classic Amiga OS. FPGA's don't emulate the real hardware as much as re-implement it. To the Amiga, it really just a 680x0 with lots of RAM. Pretty much like any 68000 socket accelerator.
I'm not sure Majesta is even putting in FPU support. The feature creep is supporting features already mostly implemented on classic Amigas. I'm hoping USB 2.0 ends up on the 500 board because 500's don't have clockports to add it like 1200's and maybe 600's. (Hated the 600!) But the Poseidon USB drivers are as much a Part of OS3 as IDE support.
The enhanced graphics mode are not that much different than a Cybervision, or Picasso II, and IDE support under the 68000 has been around forever.

Stock machines will forever stay a stable, predictable and available market.

The Vampires will be as stable and predictable as say a 68060 expansion board, and the other features are just consolidated so they can fit in the machine. It could probably all be done on the sidecar slot instead of the 68000 slot, but then you would have awkward uncased accelerator sticking out the side.

If I am not mistaken there are now plenty of boards which allow you to use modern storage media and remove this unnecessary friction.

Smooth yes, but they are far from removed.
All the implementations are either obsessed with some kind of hard core 1541 compatibility, or have issues with the obscure and ancient copy protection, or things like the Chameleon and 1541 Ulitmate II go to the same lengths you deride in the Amiga community. It's the the 880K limit on the Amiga, but 1000% worse.
And more annoying to me, very few of them work on the Commodore 128!

I think that this is a myth which deserves to die.
The artists and animators I see every day at work (I work in the video games industry) tell me otherwise. There are plenty of easy to use modern tools which totally put anything that existed on the Amiga to shame. And painting with a tablet rather than a mouse is 10 times more productive, even, and especially for pixel art.

There are great new tools, but there was a simplicity to those programs that is still hard to match. I'm actually looking to reference them for mobile apps. Simple things like Zooming in out where handled better. The limitation of the mouse would actually transfer better to the mobile metaphor.

Indeed, running AmigaOS on a new computer is not my thing.
You are really only accelerating AmigaOS into the 21st century. The rest of your Amiga is completely unused except keyboard and mouse.

The Vampire can do incredible things. No doubt: it was created in 2015. But the Amiga is responsible for none of it.

Stock Amiga-s on the other hand still have a large margin of incredible things to run that nobody has ever written yet.
And the credit for these things will forever be due to the original Amiga team and hardware they created.

Commodore's Engineering Debt was no joke!

[Ratteler]

Originally Posted by Jope

What would you like to do on the C64 that is limited by the 1541?

I would really like the SD2IEC to support all file formats and VLIR GEOS format in Native Fat32 folders and files, instead of relying on D64, D71, and D81 images as partitions. At least most of the Amiga software I used could be installed on HD.

You may not believe this, but I was actually doing 3D animation on my 8 bit Commodore's back in the day. I had this program that let me do models with 256 vertex. I would use a Super Snapshot 5 to screen grab them, then convert them to multi-color mode where I would hand render the color and shading. I had a CMD HD-40MB HD, and 16MB RAMlink on my C64 and 128, along with 1750 REU for the DMA.

Commodore should have abandoned whatever custom file system format nonsense they were doing and moved to FAT12 support at some point. 8 bits, Amiga, and of course the Commodore PC's.

You can still find 1.44 3.5" disks. If the 1581 and Amiga just went with FAT12 support as a native file system for both platforms, and went with standard PC 1.44 disks, think how much easier the floppy situation would be today.

My Amiga wish list would be CROSSDOS 7 in ROM with the ability to boot from PC Formated disks, and my Ideal 3.5 inch IEC drive would just make FAT12 or FAT16 the standard and toss the old compatibility completely.

It's kind of what happened anyway. Our SD cards are all Fat32 or NTFS formatted.

It's a shame Intimation's LS-120 is a thing of the past. If the firmware could be hacked to read 81, Amiga 880 ans 1.76MB it would be the perfect drive for the old floppy dilemma.

Ah well. No point crying over unpaid licenses by dead company's.

I'm doing DIY retrobright on my Amiga500 case, trying to teach my self FreeCAD, in preparation for setting up my first 3D printer, and exploring hooking up actual PC drive mechanism to RPi style devices, and trying to figure out how to interface a 8237 DMA-chip to an OLD Commodore 8 bit for a DIY REU replacement with DMA speed.

I'm blathering a bit because it's 5:00am where I'm at, and I haven't slept yet. LOL!!!

[Jope]

Get an IDE64 if you want a modern mass storage device? Much nicer than sd2iec.

But you seem to be aware of the various expansions and since you had them back then, you are aware of the limitations they pose.

The C-64 has an immense software library, of which a substantial chunk makes use of the 1541's quirks and features. Thus projects like the 1541 ultimate exist, to cater for people who want to run the back catalogue.

Any present day stuff should definitely have a kernal load fallback so that modern expansions such as the ide64, but also vintage uncompatible expansions such as the CMD HD, Lt Kernal etc. would work.

However I will never understand why you would want to take the C-64 very far from its comfort zone for any productivity software. No matter what kind of mass storage you plug into it, the CPU and RAM will either limit what you can do, or make the "impossible" just very cumbersome.

Ok, you did it on a C-64 with a bunch of manual steps, that's nice in 1994-1995, but now the contemporary stuff has gone so much further that doing productivity stuff on a C64 seems like a niche of a niche thing.

Let's face it, the majority of the end users these days are 40-somethings reliving their youth. They want to run the back catalogue of games, the back catalogue needs 1541 compatibility, thus they will either buy the not 1541 compatible budget option (sd2iec) and wonder why not everything works, or they will splurge on the 1541u and have everything work. They will perhaps boot up GEOS (which they never used as a kid) and click around a bit, then forget all about that and go back for a round of Commando.

Who will make software + expansions for the niche of a niche c-64 pro user? Even CMD couldn't stay afloat back in its day.

[Ratteler]

Originally Posted by Jope

Get an IDE64 if you want a modern mass storage device? Much nicer than sd2iec.

Does it work on the 128? I have a couple of 64's. One is in C16 Case with white keyboard, and the other is C64C.

But my pride an joys are my C-128's!

However I will never understand why you would want to take the C-64 very far from its comfort zone for any productivity software. No matter what kind of mass storage you plug into it, the CPU and RAM will either limit what you can do, or make the "impossible" just very cumbersome.

... doing productivity stuff on a C64 seems like a niche of a niche thing.

You're right. I was a weird guy who lived in GEOS.
A lot of what became GEOS 2.0 was actally from my feedback.

Let's face it, the majority of the end users these days are 40-somethings reliving their youth.

You pretty much nailed it. Only I was never that much of a gamer. My three favorite Commodore Games we're Elite, Alter Ego, and Mail Order Monsters. I enjoyed tinkering inside my machines more than on them, unless I was creating digital art.

When I went Amiga, my tinkering gave way to more professional art and animation. Then I went PC and Mac.

This is why I'm drooling for the Vampire 500. I'm FPGA fluent enough to know that I could possibly get other Cores to run, and my retro emulator will be a REAL Amiga 500.

My other stuff is just mental masturbation nostalgia for MY unique days with Commodores.

All my 8 bits are destined for E-Bay in the not to far distant future. I'm just dusting them off and making sure they work. before I have my last big Hurrah!

[Jope]

Originally Posted by Ratteler

Does it work on the 128? I have a couple of 64's. One is in C16 Case with white keyboard, and the other is C64C.

But my pride an joys are my C-128's!

Ah, but naturally it doesn't.. C-64 mode only. :-/

You're right. I was a weird guy who lived in GEOS.
A lot of what became GEOS 2.0 was actally from my feedback.

Cool that they listened to feedback.. As you know, GEOS sort of never really happened here in Euroland even though it was bundled with the later E motherboard C-64Cs. Judging by comp.sys.cbm discussions back then, it was always used much more on that side of the atlantic.

You pretty much nailed it. Only I was never that much of a gamer. My three favorite Commodore Games we're Elite, Alter Ego, and Mail Order Monsters. I enjoyed tinkering inside my machines more than on them, unless I was creating digital art.

Yeah.. Over here people still used a C64 + 1541 even if they were doing productivity stuff. Some guys had a C-128 + 1571. Then they went Amiga/Mac/PC once the outgrew the C-64 + 1541. Probably much to do with heavy shipping + customs costs for all the nice gear you had available in the USA. :-)