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Who went from A8 to Amiga?


kheller2

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RAMbo and Wizztronics are both commercial implementations of my DIY upgrade linked below.

Yeah, I'd like to know if he's sending a C&D because of the use of the name Wizztronics or because it's compatible.

 

No one on either side is going to be able to pay a lawyer to fight for Atari add-ons. It's insane and would cost more than you could ever make. As long as you don't call it a Wizztronics board, there's nothing anyone can do and no lawyer would take the case.

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Not sure what you mean here?

 

3D rendering for the masses was an Amiga thing via Sculpt 3D Autodesk 3D Studio wouldn't do ray-tracing for many years.

If you refer to 3D games, Elite was developed on your beloved Apple II, and Amiga/ST had the likes of Carrier Command way before Wolf 3D ever was written (on a NexT computer to be precise).

Dungeon Master was first developed for Atari ST in 1987!!!

 

So I am not sure what you mean by 3D, if you mean FPS 3D (Wolf 3D/Doom/Unreal/Quake) then by that time the PC was pretty much the only game in town anyway but nothing started there per se, or single-handedly.

 

The catch up reference was wrt usage of windows managers (Windows 3.1, 95 etc...) as Mac had it since 1984, ST and Amiga since 85, and applications took advantage of it, especially gfx tools (like you mention) but also system apps, Amiga Workbench shipped with Notepad and that could use resizeable fonts already (yes bitmap fonts rather than vector but still).

 

I was thinking of 3D hardware acceleration for games and low-end consumer stuff. Just after Doom.

 

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The Amiga 500 was affordable and people found ways to do significant upgrades on it. You could get a color monitor, 2nd disk, and 1MB ram for less than $900 upon introduction.

 

and the unfortunate fact that as a dealer I could not get many st units at the time a500 came out,was told it was a ram shortage but it was really a refocus on Europe. At that time we were 3 or 4 to one st vs Amiga. Atari really messed it up for us, we sold Amiga as we could get them with the 500 but the change in sales was not immediate. I was reduced to augmenting ST supply by getting and repairing distributor ST returns. With this change software dev started in time to switch back to Amiga for games anyway,ST still had great productivity. On topic most buys had no idea about Jay's chipset, c64 people bought the next commodore and a8 on to the st, with a lot of new users who never had either.
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I was thinking of 3D hardware acceleration for games and low-end consumer stuff. Just after Doom.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_ViRGE

It seems the PS1 was the key to force PC card makers to bring HW 3D acceleration to the masses.

No doubt Sony saw how the 3D accelerated games of SNES (SuperFX) and Sega (Arcade but also Virtua Racing via Sega Virtua Processor) were really appealing.

 

So not sure who did what, I credit the PS1 (and to a lesser extent Saturn and earlier 32X) to make it cheap to have HW accelerated 3D.

But I can see your point too.

 

My first foray into PC 3D was a 3dfx Voodoo1 :) but at that point even the N64 already shipped.

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Everyone seems to be forgetting the video toaster. Amiga was huge in video production, years ahead of anything else out there. Babylon 5?

 

No not at all. I so wanted one back in the day. But being a grease monkey changing oil didn't pay enough for me to get one. Best I could afford was a Digi-View. And I loved Babylon-5. We even had B5 parties and at the end of the night we would scream BABYLON - 5 as fast and as loud as we could while slobbering and throwing shot glasses at the brick wall and generally acting stupid. Not wholly unlike a drunk Londo.

 

Then women came on the scene and any hopes for savings for a toaster were further quashed. $500 weekends on the town. It got crazy!

 

I would have liked to have gotten into 3D rendering, but I didn't have the patience for a 7MHz stock machine with 1MB to do anything. It was painfully slow. So I took to painting and graphics and working with static hi-res images. 4,096 HAM in 640x400 was essentially free and huge step up from Apple II graphics. In that way I liked the Amiga. For everything else Pfffttt!

 

To be fair, my first 486 could do far better 1280x1024 and 16.7 million colors, with way more than 4,096 onscreen at once. But loading and saving and doing anything with those images brought the machine to a crawl and consumed a lot of disk space. My incredibly huge 200MB drive (300 with doublespace) could only hold less than 60 or 70 images. Then I got a ZipDrive and like taking a long piss, I was relieved.

 

Anyway, let us celebrate Digi-View and NewTek with their first demo disk!

post-4806-0-20003400-1465952309_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-08281100-1465952310_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-80687200-1465952310_thumb.png

post-4806-0-52269400-1465952311_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-31884300-1465952312_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-10093900-1465952313_thumb.png

post-4806-0-81656900-1465952313_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-51291800-1465952314_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-13529600-1465952315_thumb.png

post-4806-0-45401400-1465952308_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-39955300-1465952330_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-89719200-1465955001_thumb.png

post-4806-0-56401900-1465955325_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-42831900-1465955453_thumb.pngpost-4806-0-42750600-1465956084_thumb.png

 

..the baboon thing might not be a digiview pic..

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All of the design decisions Miner, Decuir, et. al made for the Amiga were sensible at the time (early 1980s), given their original target - a video game system with cartoon-quality graphics that would be upgradeable to a computer.

 

They correctly anticipated that computer systems were moving away from character-based displays to graphical interfaces based on a bitmap display, and provided hardware - the blitter - that would accelerate software for 2D windowing operations, including rendering text. Its 68K-based competitors of the time (Mac, Atari ST) were also based on bitmapped displays rather than character graphics. Those systems similarly anticipated the future, but they didn't provide a hardware assist.

 

The real problem with Amiga is that Commodore was a poor steward of the architecture. They didn't bump the performance of the blitter (which they could have done while retaining API compatibility). Also, they didn't evolve the system architecture to support retargetable graphics - i.e. a graphics API that supported plugin boards, rather than being tightly coupled to the Amiga chipset.

 

Keetah is right that the machine's architecture eventually caught up with it. The bitplane oriented graphics - which at the time they were designed in 1984 made sense because they allowed you to make a tradeoff between RAM usage and color depth - became a handicap when 3D games became a thing.

 

But that happened in the early 90s. It took the rest of the industry a good 5 years to catch up to where the Amiga was, and at that point the initial decisions made in the machine's architecture became a handicap rather than an asset. Commodore gets the blame for not evolving the system fast enough, but it's really not fair to judge a set of designers by 1991 standards for decisions they made in 1983-1984.

Edited by FifthPlayer
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Just wanted to chime and and say I started with the Atari 400 and used that from 1982 to 1989.

Got a Mac, still use Macs to this day.

 

However, after a long meandering path of trying various machines, I do still enjoy my Atari 800 and Amiga 1200. And currently Vice President of the Dallas Amiga users group. :D

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Guest LiqMat

 

No not at all. I so wanted one back in the day. But being a grease monkey changing oil didn't pay enough for me to get one. Best I could afford was a Digi-View. And I loved Babylon-5. We even had B5 parties and at the end of the night we would scream BABYLON - 5 as fast and as loud as we could while slobbering and throwing shot glasses at the brick wall and generally acting stupid. Not wholly unlike a drunk Londo.

 

Then women came on the scene and any hopes for savings for a toaster were further quashed. $500 weekends on the town. It got crazy!

 

I would have liked to have gotten into 3D rendering, but I didn't have the patience for a 7MHz stock machine with 1MB to do anything. It was painfully slow. So I took to painting and graphics and working with static hi-res images. 4,096 HAM in 640x400 was essentially free and huge step up from Apple II graphics. In that way I liked the Amiga. For everything else Pfffttt!

 

To be fair, my first 486 could do far better 1280x1024 and 16.7 million colors, with way more than 4,096 onscreen at once. But loading and saving and doing anything with those images brought the machine to a crawl and consumed a lot of disk space. My incredibly huge 200MB drive (300 with doublespace) could only hold less than 60 or 70 images. Then I got a ZipDrive and like taking a long piss, I was relieved.

 

Anyway, let us celebrate Digi-View and NewTek with their first demo disk!

attachicon.gifpictureA.pngattachicon.gifpictureB.pngattachicon.gifpictureC.png

attachicon.gifpictureE.pngattachicon.gifpictureF.pngattachicon.gifpictureG.png

attachicon.gifpictureH.pngattachicon.gifpictureI.pngattachicon.gifpictureJ.png

attachicon.gifpictureK.pngattachicon.gifpictureL.pngattachicon.gifFashion.png

attachicon.gifamiga2 (baboon).pngattachicon.gifLauren.pngattachicon.gifDozer.png

 

..the baboon thing might not be a digiview pic..

 

Oh man, that robot on a bulldozer made my eyes pop out back in the day. That was HD as far as I was concerned back then. lol

 

I remember back in 1984 or maybe early 1985 there was an article about this new Amiga wonder machine and being a C64 user at the time the screenshots blew my mind and I immediately started saving for this incredible graphics machine. They had a hand drawn graphic of the Statue of Liberty on the Amiga and I never saw that graphic again in any of the demo disks that came out. That one graphic impressed me so much and I can't remember what magazine article it was. It was pre Amiga World for sure.

Edited by LiqMat
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All of the design decisions Miner, Decuir, et. al made for the Amiga were sensible at the time (early 1980s), given their original target - a video game system with cartoon-quality graphics that would be upgradeable to a computer.

 

Yep. There's always an ideal balance between hardware assist and computing power. When you have a slow processor, complex custom chips can make the machine feel powerful. For example, the C64 is a much better gaming machine than the Apple II which has very little sound capability and rarely achieves much of a frame rate. Less specialized hardware makes more sense when you have ample processing power so applications aren't forced to bend to the machine's architecture. In today's world, specialized hardware has made a bit of a return in the form of 3D processing, though.

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For me....

 

Coco

Atari 800

800XL

130XE

STe (for 3 days!!!) Then returned and paid the extra for an A500!

A2000

A1200 - 68030 / 68882 10mb and 160mb hdd

 

The Amiga was a favourite of mine for years, and still have the 1200. Such a capable machine and years ahead of anything else.... but so badly marketed!

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In today's world, specialized hardware has made a bit of a return in the form of 3D processing, though.

 

Interestingly, in the Joe Decuir/Ron Nicholson talk on the Amiga architecture, Nicholson made note (with a bit of pride) that modern SoC architectures found in mobile devices today are very similar in concept to the Amiga design - dedicated processors for graphics, media, and broadband processing teamed up with a general purpose CPU. The big difference is that today, all those components fit on a single chip.

 

And nobody thinks about upgrading the graphics in their phone or tablet with a plugin board.

Edited by FifthPlayer
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But being a grease monkey changing oil didn't pay enough for me to get one.

 

…I cry BS here! I part-timed an oil change place in Wheeling (was my 3rd job) in order to be able to afford all the toys I wanted in my early 20's. :lol:

 

When the Amiga 1200 came out, sprung for the base model as the ones with internal 2.5" HD's were too damned expensive. Around the same time, Dataflyer came out with an "affordable" external solution where you stuffed a regular sized HD inside their case and ran the ribbon cable out the back. So ghetto, but it worked and got more storage space bang for the buck! :rolling:

 

The one peripheral I really "couldn't" afford BITD and didn't have a real reason to own (other than the cool factor) was this thing of beauty:

(course I own it today, absolutely gorgeous images out of an OCS/ECS machine - true or better than NTSC picture quality, can't tell you're looking at a computer generated image)

 

post-13896-0-50155900-1466032138_thumb.jpg

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Phones are disposable. And plugin slots are impractical. You are expected to upgrade to each new model.

 

Yes, plugin slots are impractical. Which is why they're nonexistent in the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold today, even in PCs. Another technical decision that eventually became a handicap.

 

The Amiga approach eventually made a comeback and won, even if the Amiga itself didn't.

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I'll add my ditto. Started with Atari 800, added an 800XL later with 256K. Could not afford an Amiga when it came out, could only lust for it from a distance for what seemed like an eternity. Once I got some steady employment (Thank you USAF) I got an A500. I happened to meet a US dealer while I was in stationed in Germany (weird story) and got their very first A3000 delivery shipped to me, so I may have been the first A3000 owner in Europe. Before I even turned it on I upgraded it with 16M of 32-bit RAM. It was an awesome machine. (Still is. I have a 2000, and another 3000).

 

Regret selling the original 800 and the A500. But I eventually got two other 800s to make up for it.

 

I was using that 2000 with a 68040 and 128M RAM for USGS DTED visualization with World Construction Set (government contract project.)

 

In 1996 my neighbor had a garage sale and I saw they had a 1040ST. They sold it and the color monitor to me for $20. Once I used it as a serial terminal. Couldn't find another use for it.

Edited by kenjennings
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For me....

 

Coco

Atari 800

800XL

130XE

STe (for 3 days!!!) Then returned and paid the extra for an A500!

A2000

A1200 - 68030 / 68882 10mb and 160mb hdd

 

The Amiga was a favourite of mine for years, and still have the 1200. Such a capable machine and years ahead of anything else.... but so badly marketed!

 

Wow, had an STe for 3 days eh? What did you notice in that short amount of time?

 

For me I had a similar experience with the 800XL. I had a 400/800, got the 800XL at Federated and learned I had to use conversion disks for the software I used before. Hated that part, took the 800 XL back. :D

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..the baboon thing might not be a digiview pic..

The baboon ("Mandrill") was shown in the first reviews of the Amiga in magazines. Digiview came later. I think the picture was included in a demo disk for dealers. I recall it testing the crashability of DeluxePaint on a minimal memory spec 1000 in a store. (Can you believe they sold Amigas at Boston Store?)

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They had a hand drawn graphic of the Statue of Liberty on the Amiga and I never saw that graphic again in any of the demo disks that came out. That one graphic impressed me so much and I can't remember what magazine article it was. It was pre Amiga World for sure.

 

Was there anything in the background or to the side of it?

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Yes, plugin slots are impractical. Which is why they're nonexistent in the overwhelming majority of computing devices sold today, even in PCs. Another technical decision that eventually became a handicap.

 

The Amiga approach eventually made a comeback and won, even if the Amiga itself didn't.

 

Apparently the Amiga was a machine mis-placed in its own time. Engineers mis-judged early on and provided no slots. And that held it back. Eventually when the PC style A2000, 3000, 4000 came out the engineers cam to their senses and added slots.

 

Slots enabled extended life and provided for piecemeal upgrades. Not to mention customization. Need 8 serial ports? You could have that. Need a 2nd parallel port for Snappy and Zip? You could have that.

 

Now that PC's have reached a plateau and have more power then necessary, there is no need for that style of upgrading. And the # of slots can be reduced.

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And nobody thinks about upgrading the graphics in their phone or tablet with a plugin board.

 

No need for upgrades. They come with all the power they need, and more. By the time you'd be ready to update the hardware, phones get ratty and long in the tooth. Battery gets weak, display gets scratched, case de-laminates. And don't forget keeping up with the Jonses.

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The one peripheral I really "couldn't" afford BITD and didn't have a real reason to own (other than the cool factor) was this thing of beauty:

(course I own it today, absolutely gorgeous images out of an OCS/ECS machine - true or better than NTSC picture quality, can't tell you're looking at a computer generated image)

 

attachicon.gifdctv.jpg

 

I tend to prefer a little computery look to all my graphics, minus what comes out of a DSLR. I suppose that's real old-school.

 

Though when I render fractals 8,000 x 8,000 through 16,000 x 16,000 is good setting especially when you blow them up for wall prints.

 

BTW.. Anyone remember Snappy?

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