What does it mean that the Amiga 500 is plug and play?...

[ataridave]

I read up on the Amiga 500 on Wikipedia and that's how the article described it-but does it mean that you just insert a game disk and the game loads, without having to do type anything in? Because the article also mentioned that there are start-up discs for the A500.

[kool kitty89]

AFIK most/all single disk (and many multi-disk) games will directly start up if you put them in the drive before turning the machine one, same for the ST. (self booting games, a few early PC games were like that too)

 

Few amiga games require actual set-up/installation AFIK. (similarly few support improved performance modes with better systems . . . either a game requires a better system -like added fastRAM and/or chipRAM- or will tend to work with a plain 512k A500 and play the same way on vastly upgraded machines)

 

I believe most ST games are similar, with a huge portion catering to 512k and the base ST hardware, with some requiring 1 MB and even fewer using more hardware.

[Feralstorm]

"plug and play" refers to the Amiga's ability to recognize and use add-on hardware (extra drives, memory expansion, and more) without a lot of messing around with settings and stuff, which Commodore called "Autoconfig". (not a big deal nowadays, but not too common in the late eighties). It doesn't have to do with booting from a floppy disk. That's just ... booting from a floppy disk.

[Dave Farquhar]

Autoconfig was a HUGE deal in the 1980s. The first time I ever configured a multi-I/O card for an IBM PC/XT clone, I realized how big of a deal. I had to set jumpers or DIP switches to set interrupts, I/O addresses, and DMA channels for every stupid port on the card. The board must have had a dozen settings, and of course you needed a thick manual to sort it all out. I think it took me 45 minutes, at least. Partly because I wasn't born knowing what the difference between 0x278, 0x378, and 0x3bc was. The fact that I remember that means I went on to configure way, way too many of those things.....

 

With an Amiga, it was just like a modern PC. Plug in the card, boot the system up, and load a driver. Except with an Amiga, you didn't necessarily have to load the driver.

 

To my knowledge, Commodore never mentioned this in the advertising. They should have.

[kool kitty89]

Autoconfig was a HUGE deal in the 1980s. The first time I ever configured a multi-I/O card for an IBM PC/XT clone, I realized how big of a deal. I had to set jumpers or DIP switches to set interrupts, I/O addresses, and DMA channels for every stupid port on the card. The board must have had a dozen settings, and of course you needed a thick manual to sort it all out. I think it took me 45 minutes, at least. Partly because I wasn't born knowing what the difference between 0x278, 0x378, and 0x3bc was. The fact that I remember that means I went on to configure way, way too many of those things.....

 

With an Amiga, it was just like a modern PC. Plug in the card, boot the system up, and load a driver. Except with an Amiga, you didn't necessarily have to load the driver.

What (or how much) you could actually plug into an Amiga without an Zorro board (if you had a model supporting that) was another matter too though, or how available expansions were in your area.

 

PC hardware was highly dependent on the specific card and computer among other things. (and ISA cards eventually went P&P too, or became far less cumbersome to install -I think win9x made that a lot more straightforward too)

 

 

 

 

To my knowledge, Commodore never mentioned this in the advertising. They should have.

Probably in part because many of those expansion devices were against CBM's own wishes (and the internal CPU piggyback ones obviously going around limitations CBM wanted left alone).

I think Commodore wanted to be the sole suppliers of peripherals and expansions, and such 3rd parties were cutting in on their bottom line . . . or maybe they just didn't care much either way. (if they'd been smart, and payed attention to the market, they'd certainly have realized that flexible open-box expansion was a critical feature for computers to have -something Apple revolutionized and then tried to burry, IBM pushed even harder and again tried to pull back to proprietary standards, and Atari Inc engineers had wanted in 1979 and management had finally woken up to in 1983 with PBI and planned 1090XL, but Atari Corp seemed not to understand either -it's not like an expansion bus interface would have compromised the ST's low cost nature either, especially if they extended the existing cart slot for that purpose)

 

Then again, the Amiga 2000 specifically included the Zorro slots and PC-compatible ISA slots . . . but perhaps they wanted to promote that specifically on the high-end and not into the low-end.

Edited June 14, 2011 by kool kitty89

[Chilly Willy]

In case anyone was curious, PCI was "inspired" by (cough - stolen from - cough) AutoConfig. You can't look at the two from a hardware standpoint without coming to that conclusion.

[Dave Farquhar]

PC hardware was highly dependent on the specific card and computer among other things. (and ISA cards eventually went P&P too, or became far less cumbersome to install -I think win9x made that a lot more straightforward too)

 

Indeed it did, but that was 10 years after the A1000 came out. But Plug & Play definitely wasn't perfect in Win95. It wasn't until Windows 2000 that I recall Plug & Play working as effortlessly as Autoconfig on an Amiga did.

 

 

 

I think Commodore wanted to be the sole suppliers of peripherals and expansions, and such 3rd parties were cutting in on their bottom line . . . or maybe they just didn't care much either way. (if they'd been smart, and payed attention to the market, they'd certainly have realized that flexible open-box expansion was a critical feature for computers to have -something Apple revolutionized and then tried to burry, IBM pushed even harder and again tried to pull back to proprietary standards, and Atari Inc engineers had wanted in 1979 and management had finally woken up to in 1983 with PBI and planned 1090XL, but Atari Corp seemed not to understand either -it's not like an expansion bus interface would have compromised the ST's low cost nature either, especially if they extended the existing cart slot for that purpose)

 

Then again, the Amiga 2000 specifically included the Zorro slots and PC-compatible ISA slots . . . but perhaps they wanted to promote that specifically on the high-end and not into the low-end.

 

I think you're right about that. It took a very long time for the industry as a whole to realize the benefits of an open architecture with lots of third-party development. But I think if Commodore had harped on expansion for those "other" computers being a weekend-long project (or an expensive project requiring a technician), as opposed to being a DIY operation that takes minutes at most on an Amiga, it would have done better.

 

The big-box Amigas were definitely better in regards to expansion, but you wouldn't know it from Commodore's advertising. They barely acknowledged the Video Toaster and the like, which was a shame.

[+save2600]

The big-box Amigas were definitely better in regards to expansion, but you wouldn't know it from Commodore's advertising. They barely acknowledged the Video Toaster and the like, which was a shame.

Well... Newtek went so far as to cover up the Amiga and Commodore badge on the A2000 and keyboard! Reading through some of my old magazines, there was even an article from a consumer show that acknowledged Newtek wasn't exactly telling people what they were marketing was an Amiga computer and Toaster video switch. Pretty much had people believing the whole system was a new custom proprietary job. lol Perhaps that was some kind of an arrangement at first between C= and Newtek? I don't know.

 

Re: high or low end IBM compatibility, the Amiga was designed with it in mind since its inception. Through software first on the A1000 and then hardware via its 1060 sidecar. C= own branded 2088, 2286 and 2386 Bridgeboards, etc. It is my opinion that Commodore wasn't trying to be sole supplier for peripherals at all. I remember feeling they were super cooperative about sharing things like Zorro specs, etc. In fact, I've got a kit sent from C= to a company that was thinking about getting into peripheral manufacturing. Has specs, plans, schematics and a friendly letter explaining certain rules and standards that were to be followed.

 

I do know that Commodore did not have an interest in producing peripherals that sat in the socket of their chips though. Any scenario that had the consumer opening up say, an A500 to install something that wasn't designed to reside on the expansion ports such as some RAM expansions (in the trapdoor, over 512k has you jumpering Gary for instance), the MegaCHIP, flicker fixers, some accelerators, etc. which would make sense from a warranty standpoint I guess if/when something went wrong. In most cases though, warranty would be intact if you had your dealer perform the install.

[akator]

I discovered "plug and play" with the Mac. For its time, SCSI made it pretty easy to add peripherals like scanners and hard drives. The bigger Macs had NuBus expansion slots, and many of the NuBus cards I installed didn't even require drivers.

[ataridave]

So, the A500 only supports RF out, in terms of hooking one up to your TV, is that correct? That's what the A500 Wiki article indicated. I just want an Amiga for games, and I don't care about CD ROM games, so I've been told that the A500 would be fine.

[OldSchoolRetroGamer]

So, the A500 only supports RF out, in terms of hooking one up to your TV, is that correct? That's what the A500 Wiki article indicated. I just want an Amiga for games, and I don't care about CD ROM games, so I've been told that the A500 would be fine.

 

For TV use you just need to add a Commodore A520 modulator which provides RF and composite video out http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=725

Often they are even bundled with A500 packages you may find on Ebay etc.

[Dave Farquhar]

Well... Newtek went so far as to cover up the Amiga and Commodore badge on the A2000 and keyboard! Reading through some of my old magazines, there was even an article from a consumer show that acknowledged Newtek wasn't exactly telling people what they were marketing was an Amiga computer and Toaster video switch. Pretty much had people believing the whole system was a new custom proprietary job. lol Perhaps that was some kind of an arrangement at first between C= and Newtek? I don't know.

 

Part of that was so Newtek could market a "Mac" version of the Toaster, which really was an A2000 in disguise. The two companies had an arrangement, and it probably benefited both of them, since shops that had an anti-Commodore prejudice didn't have to know they were buying a Commodore computer with a Toaster in it. Then you could run it standalone or plug it into a Mac or whatever it was that made you feel comfortable.

 

I wish I had $5 for every time someone told me in the early 1990s "they have a Video Toaster for the Macintosh now, you know." It never even dawned on them that this "Video Toaster for the Mac" was exactly the same size and shape as an Amiga 2000...

 

I discovered "plug and play" with the Mac. For its time, SCSI made it pretty easy to add peripherals like scanners and hard drives. The bigger Macs had NuBus expansion slots, and many of the NuBus cards I installed didn't even require drivers.

 

True enough, but it always annoyed me when Apple claimed they invented Plug and Play. The A2000 came out almost a year before the Mac II did.

[dendawg]

The A2000 came out almost a year before the Mac II did.

 

And the TI-99/4 9 years before the A2K.

[Chilly Willy]

I discovered "plug and play" with the Mac. For its time, SCSI made it pretty easy to add peripherals like scanners and hard drives. The bigger Macs had NuBus expansion slots, and many of the NuBus cards I installed didn't even require drivers.

 

NuBus required the driver be embedded in a rom on the board. The OS could override the built in driver with an updated one, but most just used the driver on the card. Amiga cards usually had the driver on the card as well. AutoConfig was more flexible about allocating space for the card - NuBus hardcodes the address of the card based on the slot the card was plugged into; also, the size of the space for the card was fixed, which is why NuBus had a limit on the number of cards you could use. Two different size spaces were reserved for the card: a 1MB space in the 24-bit addressing range, and a 256MB space (IIRC) in the 32-bit addressing range. The card control registers and rom (for info and possible driver) had to be in the 1MB space. The 32-bit space was mainly used by video cards for more vram for larger resolutions. While you COULD have a NuBus ram card that added a bunch of ram to 32-bit space, MacOS never supported it - it was mainly only used by that old Mac UNIX.

[Keatah]

I don't believe the idea of plug'n'play was really practical until recently with USB 2.0, actually several years after that came on the market.

 

Now, there are several Apple II cards that could be plugged into the system and nothing else needed to be done. No drivers, no jumpers, no lengthy configurations. hahahah!

 

The worst were those combo-cards and multi-function cards with memory expansion on them; for the PC that is. I have an old ISA card with like a bank of 20 jumpers that needs to be set. What a mess..

[epobirs]

In case anyone was curious, PCI was "inspired" by (cough - stolen from - cough) AutoConfig. You can't look at the two from a hardware standpoint without coming to that conclusion.

 

That is nonsense you'd have to live in a very small world to believe. There were numerous examples of autoconfiguring expansion systems before and after the Amiga. The Amiga was far from the most prominent pioneer in EE circles. The only thing that was especially notable about the Amiga slots was their appearnce in a relatively low-priced system accessible to consumers. They owed a certain heritage to things that came before , like S-100.

 

Any time a project has a chance to do something from scratch without backward compatiblity concerns, there is always the question, how would you implement X if you were using today's tech. The Amiga Bus slots were a perfect example of that. Transistor budgets were a bit higher, RAM a bit available, etc.

 

Think about the size of Atari VCS cartidge ROMs and think about how the same cost of ROM affected things like how much could go on an expansion card. Then move ahead a few years and consider how the changes affect design decisins. This was stuff that had been worked out on paper many years earlier but had to wait until they were economically feasible.

 

The far more interesting aspect of PCI is the serial operations that were previously done as parallel as a matter of course. As performance level climbed this was starting to cause problems but using serial communications would have seemed like a huge performance sacrifice in the process. Things just got so fast that it no longer mattered.

[epobirs]

I don't believe the idea of plug'n'play was really practical until recently with USB 2.0, actually several years after that came on the market.

 

Now, there are several Apple II cards that could be plugged into the system and nothing else needed to be done. No drivers, no jumpers, no lengthy configurations. hahahah!

 

The worst were those combo-cards and multi-function cards with memory expansion on them; for the PC that is. I have an old ISA card with like a bank of 20 jumpers that needs to be set. What a mess..

 

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You mention how painful the ISA days were but seem to forget how much better things had gotten well before USB 2.0 was launched. Just USB itself saved a vast amount of IRQ allocation problems. And much of that was already alleviated by PCI's greatly improved handling of IRQs. In fact, PCI made such a difference that the big push to get rid of resource hogging legacy ports collapsed. There are still newly deployed machines in the corporate sector with PS/2 ports. The machines come with USB mice and keyobards but the bank considers it too risky to be unable to use older gear in a pinch.

 

Around the time of Windows 95, it was getting pretty worrisome trying to get everything you wanted into a PC. Just a few years later, before even USB 1.1 had displaced any legacy ports, this had largely stopped being problem. So many of the old troubleshooting procedures fell by the wayside as the problems ceased to appear on newer systems.

[Keatah]

I don't believe the idea of plug'n'play was really practical until recently with USB 2.0, actually several years after that came on the market.

 

Now, there are several Apple II cards that could be plugged into the system and nothing else needed to be done. No drivers, no jumpers, no lengthy configurations. hahahah!

 

The worst were those combo-cards and multi-function cards with memory expansion on them; for the PC that is. I have an old ISA card with like a bank of 20 jumpers that needs to be set. What a mess..

 

Aren't you contradicting yourself here? You mention how painful the ISA days were but seem to forget how much better things had gotten well before USB 2.0 was launched. Just USB itself saved a vast amount of IRQ allocation problems. And much of that was already alleviated by PCI's greatly improved handling of IRQs. In fact, PCI made such a difference that the big push to get rid of resource hogging legacy ports collapsed. There are still newly deployed machines in the corporate sector with PS/2 ports. The machines come with USB mice and keyobards but the bank considers it too risky to be unable to use older gear in a pinch.

 

Around the time of Windows 95, it was getting pretty worrisome trying to get everything you wanted into a PC. Just a few years later, before even USB 1.1 had displaced any legacy ports, this had largely stopped being problem. So many of the old troubleshooting procedures fell by the wayside as the problems ceased to appear on newer systems.

 

No not really. Consider my definition of plug-n-play.

 

There have been times when I had to reposition PCI cards to make them work. And PCI still required you open the machine, remove a slot-cover and screw, and insert a card, and screw it back together - more or less.

 

Sure it did improve irq & dma, things like that. But you still had to play with the bios a little. Sometimes. Much of my experience is with the old ISA systems, Apple II+, IIe, some amiga garbage (I hate amiga), and a lot of ISA/PCI 'combo' motherboards. Then right into systems where USB is the only option. I didn't play too much with all-PCI-only boards.

 

True plug-n-play, true to its word, means just that! You plug the device in and it begins working. Loading drivers should be done by o/s, or from a firmware chip on the device itself. Using a CD to load drivers violates plug-n-play. You are NOT "plugging something in" and then "using it". You are configuring software. Software that can be embedded in the device itself, or native to the o/s. You shouldn't need to do anything beyond connecting the two devices.

 

I really have a "thing" against the industry that uses words to describe something, and then "buying into it", and then finding out there are a hundred little exceptions and rules that all add-up to nix the concept instilled by the original words.

 

You plug something in, it works, you use it. If those things don't happen, then the plug-n-play moniker is invalid. What a concept!

 

I remember the tediousness of setting up a 2nd parallel port card on my old ISA system, and connecting a zip-drive to it. Getting the IRQ's, Addresses, DMA, and that shit all right. A far cry from the salesman saying you just plug the card in, and connect-up the drive. I must have spent 2 hours that evening making sure stuff worked. Then the drivers, getting them just so. And probably another 2 hours making sure I didn't "break" anything. This was in the DOS 6.22 days, immediately prior to the transfer to Windows95.

 

And when you got a "Multi-Media Kit" you could have a tun-o-fun without even buying games! You could spend an entire weekend setting up a SoundBlaster card with CD-ROM, joysticks, WaveBlaster daughter-card, Advanced Signal Processing upgrade chip. Configuring the MPU-401 interface, midi, the FM synthesizer. The .WAV playback stuff. HAHA!! The whole kit'n'kaboodle was the un-advertised game that came with every 'upgrade' back then.

 

It was fun stuffing that into a system that already had an IDE card that had 2 channels, 2 floppy connectors, 1 parallel, 2 serial ports. And in the same system sat a memory expansion card, a 2nd parallel port for zip drive and SNAPPY digitizer (amiga digiview-like device for the pc), another card that had 2 more game ports. 14.4 internal modem (hot shit babycakes!) IEEE data acquisition and Oscilloscope card. And let us not forget the serial mouse! The keyboard was on the motherboard, with a 1-inch DIN connector, the big one, you know.. But the mouse had its own serial port going. And then a 3com (or IBM) network card to add to the complexity. To top it off I built a Morse code decoder and my own "expansion" chassis that had this honk'n huge ribbon cable come out the back and give me 3 more ISA slots at the cost of "losing" one inside the computer. So it really was 2 additional external ISA slots. Eventually I got an A/D D/A card with other prototyping features and access to the ISA bus and started working on a ham radio controller. Today, I have one free ISA slot. Someday I plan on putting SCSI into that very same 80486 machine. When I get around to it.

 

That's just the hardware, you had drivers for each of these! And not only IRQ's & ADDRESSES you had to worry about, you had to fuck with with memory allocation too! And at no time is it more important to get enough EMS and XMS memory than it is when you are playing games. Sure you could get more than 619K bytes by using boot disks for memory hogging games. But I was a stubborn brat that wanted ONE configuration to work for everything! And immediately putting myself at a dis-advantage was my ABSOLUTE INSISTENCE on using DriveSpace. And this is a typical hobbyists set-up, perhaps more complete than others, but still pretty typical. Getting it all to work harmoniously, today, would be a pain in the ass! But back then, sometimes, it was barrel-O-fun!

 

Now, Today, my idea of plug-n-play is best demonstrated by USB hard disks and flash drives. The ones that don't load software and utilities. You plug the drive in, and you can immediately store stuff on it. Having to do anything more, IMHO, is not plug-n-play.

Edited June 21, 2011 by Keatah

[Chilly Willy]

In case anyone was curious, PCI was "inspired" by (cough - stolen from - cough) AutoConfig. You can't look at the two from a hardware standpoint without coming to that conclusion.

 

That is nonsense you'd have to live in a very small world to believe. There were numerous examples of autoconfiguring expansion systems before and after the Amiga. The Amiga was far from the most prominent pioneer in EE circles. The only thing that was especially notable about the Amiga slots was their appearnce in a relatively low-priced system accessible to consumers. They owed a certain heritage to things that came before , like S-100.

 

Any time a project has a chance to do something from scratch without backward compatiblity concerns, there is always the question, how would you implement X if you were using today's tech. The Amiga Bus slots were a perfect example of that. Transistor budgets were a bit higher, RAM a bit available, etc.

 

You clearly aren't familiar with the S-100, Zorro (I or II), or PCI specs.

 

 

The far more interesting aspect of PCI is the serial operations that were previously done as parallel as a matter of course. As performance level climbed this was starting to cause problems but using serial communications would have seemed like a huge performance sacrifice in the process. Things just got so fast that it no longer mattered.

 

(cough - ripped off Zorro II - cough)

 

The PCI folks were just lucky CBM was out of business by then and that whomever held the Amiga IP didn't deem it worth a lawsuit for violating the patents on the Zorro technology. If it would have happened today (as litigious as companies are over patents), PCI would still be tied up in court.

[FastRobPlus]

In case anyone was curious, PCI was "inspired" by (cough - stolen from - cough) AutoConfig. You can't look at the two from a hardware standpoint without coming to that conclusion.

 

That is nonsense you'd have to live in a very small world to believe. There were numerous examples of autoconfiguring expansion systems before and after the Amiga. The Amiga was far from the most prominent pioneer in EE circles. The only thing that was especially notable about the Amiga slots was their appearnce in a relatively low-priced system accessible to consumers. They owed a certain heritage to things that came before , like S-100.

 

Any time a project has a chance to do something from scratch without backward compatiblity concerns, there is always the question, how would you implement X if you were using today's tech. The Amiga Bus slots were a perfect example of that. Transistor budgets were a bit higher, RAM a bit available, etc.

 

You clearly aren't familiar with the S-100, Zorro (I or II), or PCI specs.

 

 

The far more interesting aspect of PCI is the serial operations that were previously done as parallel as a matter of course. As performance level climbed this was starting to cause problems but using serial communications would have seemed like a huge performance sacrifice in the process. Things just got so fast that it no longer mattered.

 

(cough - ripped off Zorro II - cough)

 

The PCI folks were just lucky CBM was out of business by then and that whomever held the Amiga IP didn't deem it worth a lawsuit for violating the patents on the Zorro technology. If it would have happened today (as litigious as companies are over patents), PCI would still be tied up in court.

 

Gateway computers held the patents. There is little doubt if there was anything they could monetize by licensing they would have. So that would seem to put to rest the idea that Commodore-Amiga was recognized as the creator of this tech.

[Chilly Willy]

The PCI folks were just lucky CBM was out of business by then and that whomever held the Amiga IP didn't deem it worth a lawsuit for violating the patents on the Zorro technology. If it would have happened today (as litigious as companies are over patents), PCI would still be tied up in court.

 

Gateway computers held the patents. There is little doubt if there was anything they could monetize by licensing they would have. So that would seem to put to rest the idea that Commodore-Amiga was recognized as the creator of this tech.

 

Except that Gateway was a prime distributor of PCI based systems. My guess now is they bought the Amiga IP to AVOID a lawsuit over patents covering PCI. Remember that unless the company is a NPE (Non Practicing Entity - cough - parasitic lawyers - cough), most patents are used DEFENSIVELY. That's only now in the last year starting to change as we se certain companies (Apple, MS) going after competitors using patents offensively.

[ataridave]

Can you use an Amiga competition pro controller (the one that looks like a Genesis controller) on the Amiga 500? How many games would support it?

[Cammy]

You can use it but it will only work as a 2-button controller in most Amiga games. There are only a few that support the extra buttons, such as Fightin' Spirit, but since the A500 only has Kickstart 1.3 in the ROM it may not be able to recognize the extra buttons at all, unless a game is hard-coded to read the pad, because most games that support it use lowlevel.library which wasn't included until Kickstart 3.x, which is an OS component for reading and interpreting the signals from a CD32 pad. Really, you are better off just using a Genesis pad, preferably the 3-button one since only B and C will work anyway, and a 6-button pad doesn't feel as good and has more useless buttons. Any controller designed for the Sega Master System, Genesis/Mega Drive, Atari or commodore 64 will work on the Amiga. 90% of games only use a single button, of the remaining ones probably only 1% use the extra buttons on a CD32/Competition Pro pad, and Sega made the best feeling control pad ever anyway.

[ataridave]

You can use it but it will only work as a 2-button controller in most Amiga games. There are only a few that support the extra buttons, such as Fightin' Spirit, but since the A500 only has Kickstart 1.3 in the ROM it may not be able to recognize the extra buttons at all, unless a game is hard-coded to read the pad, because most games that support it use lowlevel.library which wasn't included until Kickstart 3.x, which is an OS component for reading and interpreting the signals from a CD32 pad. Really, you are better off just using a Genesis pad, preferably the 3-button one since only B and C will work anyway, and a 6-button pad doesn't feel as good and has more useless buttons. Any controller designed for the Sega Master System, Genesis/Mega Drive, Atari or commodore 64 will work on the Amiga. 90% of games only use a single button, of the remaining ones probably only 1% use the extra buttons on a CD32/Competition Pro pad, and Sega made the best feeling control pad ever anyway.

 

Good to know; thanks!

[Keatah]

What does it mean that the Amiga 500 is plug and play? I'll tell you.. plug it in, play games!

Can't do anything useful with it.