What do you use your accelerated Amiga(s) for?

[mcgeezer]

I was having a think earlier on today about my next game and had the thought about making additional improvements if the game is running on accelerated Amigas.

I then got on to the thought of asking myself what Amiga sceners actually use accelerated Amiga's for and I could only come up with a few ideas... so maybe it's me that I'm missing something.

I can understand making use of more memory and a harddrive, but I don't get the acceleration reason.

Do people really use an Amiga for Web Browsing, playing MP3's and the like? Is that not a bit mad?

[DanScott]

I have heard of many Amiga users that do all the above...

I see it similar to using a quill and rough parchment, instead of carving a clay tablet (even though ball-point pens and quality writing paper are available)

[Krashan]

Programming and hardware tests.

[jotd]

22 years ago I converted wav to mp3 and burned music CDs with the miggy. Also browsed the web. And of course C/C++/asm coding.

Now it's only the pleasure of gaming on the real A1200/060/50 machine (and testing stuff that only crashes on real machines too )

[d4rk3lf]

Not sure what to vote here, because I have Aca 500+ accelerator in my A500, and It's really awesome for WHDLoad stuff, and some apps I am using.
If I (somehow) connected just HD on my A500, I couldn't use WHDLoad, because of minimum requirements.

So... in 90% of the cases, I am using my accelerator only to be able to play games from HD, that I can play, anyway from floppies.

Not sure if your next game is port, or completely new game (or demo), but my personal opinion is that is always interesting to see how ports works on stock Amiga's, and for the unique Amiga stuff, if I was coder, I'd definitely try something crazy for 030/040, or even 060 exclusive...

[jdb78]

The main reason for having a 060 CPU is to watch the demos at the Revision Demo Party on the "real thing". I love to watch and listen to the art on the real hardware through the real amp circuits with the real Paula. And I love 060 demos.

[alpine9000]

Testing my games to make sure they work on accelerated Amigas

One thing I really enjoy is how fast a big lha file extracts on a 50mhz 030 compared to a stock Amiga - speeds up the test cycle.

[Predseda]

Option 1 and 2 for me, equally. And also option 3, unpacking large archives into RAMdisk quickier. Voted for no1.

[mr.spiv]

Similarly what Dan said.. for pretty much everything. All my genuine Amigas are >68000.. some are switchable back to 68000 for testing purposes. Since I dev using real hw it is just more convenient to have a slick environment.

[malko]

For faster math (3D, landscapes, lha, etc.)
Had GFX & Network cards as well.

[roondar]

These days, I mostly use the 68030 in my A1200 for WHDLoad and verifying my code runs on that configuration as well. Admittedly, I also like having it to play Frontier as it does run a lot better that way.

[lmimmfn]

Gaming, but lots of time with Brilliance and DPaint, the Amigas creative tools place me back in my teens when i used them more than gaming, i still prefer to be productive on the Amiga than gaming(if only i got enough time )
I have a blizzard 68030/50 for my 1200, i bought a vampire mainly for improving Amiga productivity software.

[XPD]

I don't have a real Amiga anymore, but I had a GVPA530+ taking my little 7MHz A500+ to a screaming 40MHz back in the day

Had a few reasons for it, primarily because I was running a 24/7 BBS on the Amiga and wanted to be able to use it for other things without taking the BBS down or slowing things.

Made hell of a difference in some games as well but was more productivity stuff you'd notice. Scala MM400 ran quite happily with it

[Jope]

None of these really fit 100%.

The closest would be day to day productivity, but I read that as "modern things" like using web based apps with a web browser. The Amiga sucks for modern day to day productivity so I use a PC or Mac for that. I mainly do early 90s Amiga things with my Amiga, but I want to do them at a higher resolution, without waiting around, without running out of storage space.

So think text editors, image viewers, compilers, archivers.. All of these are nicer when things happen quickly.

Many people tend to offload stuff like unpacking archives to a PC and shuffle around their CF cards, my CF cards stay put inside the Amigas and I mainly use ethernet to transfer data to/from the Amiga. I prefer to pack/unpack my archives directly on the Amiga, as I don't want too many steps between getting the file and having it unpacked.

I also tend to send data out with SMBFS or an FTP client (I do disk archiving and send to Kestra Bitworld etc), I want all of this to happen rather quickly as well and why not directly upload that stuff from the Amiga.

Games.. These options are the worst use of a powerful Amiga. Of course I play games too, but just about any '030 Amiga is fast enough to play the majority of WHDLoad slaves worth playing, so going for the highest speed CPU is not really worth anyone's money for that use case.

[Daedalus]

Yeah, this need multiple selection. I sometimes do some development and testing, sometimes run games that require a beefy machine, sometimes run 3D games, sometimes run non-3D games that also benefit from a faster processor. And, even if a game has no benefit from acceleration due to being frame locked, for games nights and the like I still use a machine with an 030 in it, purely because it makes navigating to and loading the game that bit more pleasant. As said above, unpacking archives, reading guides and readmes, opening images and so on all benefit greatly from a faster CPU, and they're the kind of things that happen regularly enough to be noticeable.

Web browsing is limited to Aminet & WHDLoad downloads, but it does happen and is perfectly useful for those tasks. Sharing files also happens sometimes by network, which benefits from acceleration. MP3s get played sometimes, but only on machines with an 060 or hardware decoding like a MAS player.

[fxgogo]

Currently it is all about rendering 3D graphics quicker than normal. The 030 also just speeds up the system generally.

[phx]

For me it was all about getting the original Amiga experience in the most comfortable way. It should be obvious that working with a hard disk, network card, graphics card, a fast CPU and lots of memory is more fun. Especially development.

This changed when I moved my development environment to MorphOS, about 15 years ago. Today, I would say that I still use my expanded A3000 and A4000 for the comfort of testing and compiling, but I have no intentions to run any demos or 3D games there.

Originally Posted by mcgeezer

Do people really use an Amiga for Web Browsing, playing MP3's and the like? Is that not a bit mad?

That's a heretical question on an Amiga forum!
Browsing has become nearly impossible, of course. But there is no reason you couldn't do a lot of other things. Like MP3s, emails or software development.

[viddi]

Voted for 3D games but I also use it for emulating games, Scumm, and more...but.always games-related...
(Vampire)

[DamienD]

For all you guys that selected "to be able to run any game above stock Amiga configs".

Yes you use you accelerators for WHDLoad and games that are written to use them.

...but seriously, without WHDLoad then how many native games actually require an accelerator?

Probably much less than 100.

[E-Penguin]

For awesome sysinfo scores!

I have a stock-ish A500plus and woah is it slow in comparison to my accelerated Amigas. I realise it makes no difference to games but anything involving Workbench benefits from more RAM, a harddisk and an accelerator.