General Amiga retro chat

[Weasel Fierce]

It doesn't seem like we have a thread that is just general chat: You know, whatever you happen to be working on today, what game you checked out, what you are thinking of buying and so on.

So let's have that here.

What are you up to on your Amigas?

[Bruce Abbott]

What am I doing on my Amiga right now? posting this message...

[TCD]

Does comparing scanned Amiga magazines count?

I'll fire up Black Dawn - TechnoMage in a bit to grab some screenshots and maybe create a HOL entry later.

[Weasel Fierce]

I keep eyeing 3.2 though it irritates me that there does not seem to be a digital download version as none of the computers in our house has a CD ROM drive. I know a few places offer a preinstalled CF card.

But then... Classic WB is also pretty good and I have gotten SCALOS configured exactly how I want it. So I also wonder if I shouldn't just leave things when I know they work perfectly the way I want them to.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

I keep eyeing 3.2 though it irritates me that there does not seem to be a digital download version as none of the computers in our house has a CD ROM drive. I know a few places offer a preinstalled CF card.

That's how retro AmigaOS really is Jokes aside, it's a bit sad that there isn't one over 18 months after release. I might also at one point want to have a look and no digital option means I won't.

[EAUniW]

..

[Weasel Fierce]

I suppose its also kind of the nerd thing: Often with computers and other things I will have a setup that works perfectly well, but I can't resist messing with it

I almost had a heart attack last year because I decided to try to replace my IDE CF adapter with one of those "disk on module" IDE devices. Unfortunately the device didnt fit in the case and when I was putting things back together, I bent a bunch of the IDE pins. I was able to get things sorted back out but I was terrified I'd break a pin just because I was messing with it.

[Weasel Fierce]

Also I got one of the remade tank mice for the Mini 500 and..its really quite nice. Its a little bit lighter but its fun. Now I need to get a USB adapter for the miggy.

[Weasel Fierce]

Amiga forum post generator.
Roll a six sided die (D&)

1 Amiga died because it can't play Doom
2 A1200 was shit
3 A600 was shit
4 CD32 was shit
5 Why does this game someone made over a weekend not have 200 layers of parallax scrolling?
6 Commodore was shit

This will accurately predict 78% of all forum posts

[TCD]

No love for the 'A500+ was shit' faction?

[Weasel Fierce]

Originally Posted by TCD

No love for the 'A500+ was shit' faction?

I was going to do it with every amiga model but itd get too long

[arcanist]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

I almost had a heart attack last year because I decided to try to replace my IDE CF adapter with one of those "disk on module" IDE devices. Unfortunately the device didnt fit in the case and when I was putting things back together, I bent a bunch of the IDE pins. I was able to get things sorted back out but I was terrified I'd break a pin just because I was messing with it.

The last upgrade I attempted on my original A1200, a few decades ago, was an EIDE 4-way adapter so that I could shoehorn in an extra hard disk. Utterly devastated when I bent some of the pins trying to install it. So much so that I canned the whole thing and built a (Linux) PC instead. Hilarious thinking back on it.

Nowadays I'd just desolder and put in a new header without a second thought.

On that note my current Amiga project is an analog audio synthesizer, self-designed and hand-built. 4 stereo channels (3 done so far), oscillators, filters, modulators, all driven over the parallel port by a custom tracker. My end goal is to build some live A500 demos around it.

[Weasel Fierce]

Oh man, that is really cool. How long have you been working on that?

[arcanist]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

Oh man, that is really cool. How long have you been working on that?

Thanks! There's about a year of work in the design and build. I started two years ago, but moved house along the way and DIY consumed a lot of my free time. It's going much faster now.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

I was going to do it with every amiga model but itd get too long

And there is your answer why Commodore went tits up lol. Why limit it to A500+, A600 when the reality is ECS WAS SHIT!

[oscar_ates]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

And there is your answer why Commodore went tits up lol. Why limit it to A500+, A600 when the reality is ECS WAS SHIT!

AGA was shit too, it could not play Doom

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

AGA was shit too, it could not play Doom

I see what you did there

The fact that ECS was an utterly useless 'upgrade' after half a decade (the same period as VIC-20 to Amiga 1000 technological advancement) is a fact but

"AGA is shit" is a myth not a fact, it was still more powerful at photomontage in a £400 A1200 in 1992 than ALL Macintosh or PC compatibles at any price due to it's pseudo 24bit* HAM8 1280x512 minimum display capability, which is ultimately £20,000 Unix graphics workstation level.

*you can't see HAM8 fringing on a CRT at that resolution and in 1992 no broadcast quality equipment could remotely achieve 1280 pixels per scanline resolution

[fxgogo]

Originally Posted by Weasel Fierce

I keep eyeing 3.2 though it irritates me that there does not seem to be a digital download version as none of the computers in our house has a CD ROM drive. I know a few places offer a preinstalled CF card….

If running an Amiga has taught me anything, your old tech should be kept. You definitely need to get yourself a CD ROM. They are very useful for so much in our retro hobby. I mean CF cards are essentially dead tech as well, but you have those.

I really like 3.2 myself. It runs a few of my different emulated systems.

[Megalomaniac]

ECS, Workbench 2 and the 1Mb Chip RAM as standard were a good improvement for more technical serious stuff, especially as they added nothing to the cost. We got new high-resolution screen modes, AREXX and much easier PAL/NTSC crossover. The problem is, it offered little for games - only a handful of games ever made use of them, and they were far outweighed by the ones that didn't run on it (although Relokick more or less offset the issue later) - and by 1991 that was by far the biggest market, especially in Europe.

[TCD]

Eh, not sure if 1 MB Chip RAM and ECS after 6 or 4 years (depending what you compare it to) was a good improvement. If we 'use' Moore's law and say it was 4 years it should have been 2 MB Chip and a better CPU at least.