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Who went from A8 to Amiga?


kheller2

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Guest LiqMat

 

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

 

It was a closeup of her head and part of her arm holding the torch. It's a bit fuzzy and I spent about an hour looking through online magazines trying to find it with no luck. It would be more of a side article rather than a main feature so I do not even know if it would be on the front cover. I'm thinking very late 1984 or early 1985 before the launch because I know for a fact it was talking about the Amiga in future tense and I was insanely impressed at 14 years old.

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While Atari & Commodore owners debated which platform was superior, the Japanese were enjoying perfect ports of arcade games on their x68000s. It cost a hell of a lot more but the hardware was miles ahead of anything the Amiga or ST had to offer.

Kind of a mixed-bag there.

 

I've been playing around with the x68000 quite a bit lately.

 

It's got a nice color palette and fantastic tile graphics support.

 

However, it has no blitter or copper, isn't designed for pre-emptive multitasking, and I'm not a big fan of the 5.25" disk drives or the FM sound.

 

Kind of like the inverse twin of the Amiga. The strengths of the one platform are the weaknesses of the other.

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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

The STe was really new at the time and it had all sorts of problems with compatibility IIRC, that also needed ways to disable the new blitter to get older software to work a bit like the 8-bit translator!

 

Also a friend of mine had just picked up an Amiga, and side by side it was pretty obvious which was the better machine (mostly for games at that point!). The custom hardware in the Amiga just felt like the right choice.

 

Nowadays it's common knowledge that the Amiga was actually the next Atari!

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Nowadays it's common knowledge that the Amiga was actually the next Atari!

 

Maybe in some parallel Universe.

 

Commodore fanboys would also point out that the Atari ST was the result of a molested Commodore 900.

 

The Amiga became what it was because of the direction Commodore pushed it in. Atari or any other company with the Amiga chipset

would have steered the machine in a totally different direction.

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The Amiga became what it was because of the direction Commodore pushed it in. Atari or any other company with the Amiga chipset

would have steered the machine in a totally different direction.

Correction: "Slightly different direction." As the Amiga had stood more as "Hi Toro" intended. And, if you have a look at the handling of both: It's basically the same.

Remember : It was a kind of fraud that the Amiga went to Commodore. The good part is, they sold a lot of those Machines, while Atari would have destroyed the line at the starting point. Look, what "gold" they had in their hands with the A800 line and made one false decision after the other...

Edited by emkay
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Atari probably wouldn't have handled the Amiga much differently. They might have cheaped out on the OS so it could have ended up with GEM instead of a proper multitasking OS as it did. To claim GEM/TOS as multitasking just because it can have accessories resident is bordering on fraudulent.

 

Where C= blew it with the Amiga is that they were slow with the chipset updates and in fact did nothing to improve the sound. So in the end the PC left it eating dust. In fact even Atari practically overtook it with the Falcon.

 

But given both machines came out around 1985 and the PC and Mac were complying to Moore's Law with their architectual improvements, both ST and Amiga were somewhat glacial in their movement forward so it was probably good luck as much as anything that they even lasted into the 1990s.

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Atari probably wouldn't have handled the Amiga much differently. They might have cheaped out on the OS so it could have ended up with GEM instead of a proper multitasking OS as it did.

 

Carl Sassenrath (developer of Amiga's Exec) has claimed that a multitasking kernel was pretty much a necessity, due to the nature of the custom chip set and the fact that multiple events associated with the chipset needed to be serviced in real-time. (I don't have an online reference for this, but I think I remember him saying this during a talk at the Amiga 30th Anniversary event last year).

 

Perhaps they could have cheaped out with something like GEM, in which case the most powerful chipset features would be accessible only to bare-metal programmers.

Edited by FifthPlayer
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Blitter would be a prime example of something that is very much a deferred action (as well as some copper list operations).

But ST got blitter as well later on.

 

C= outsourced the OS to a university so it makes sense that they probably wanted to try every extravogence possible. And in reality a base model 68000 with no MMU, mechanism for paging or virtual memory and running on hardware with little in the way of storage protection was pushing things a bit.

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Correction: "Slightly different direction." As the Amiga had stood more as "Hi Toro" intended. And, if you have a look at the handling of both: It's basically the same.

Remember : It was a kind of fraud that the Amiga went to Commodore. The good part is, they sold a lot of those Machines, while Atari would have destroyed the line at the starting point. Look, what "gold" they had in their hands with the A800 line and made one false decision after the other...

Pretty sure Atari would have done well with it had they released it as a console as intended. That Commodore treatment the hardware got kept alot of my buyers away from it.Not to mention, most customers thought of the ST as the next Atari not the brand X Amiga.

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C= outsourced the OS to a university so it makes sense that they probably wanted to try every extravogence possible.

 

I think that was the case only with the DOS. The OS kernel (Carl Sassenrath), graphics subsystem (Dale Luck) and graphical interface (RJ Mical) were all done in-house. They outsourced the DOS/filesystem to Metacomco, who integrated their TRIPOS on top of Amiga's exec. Amiga wanted to do the DOS portion in-house as well, but could not because of time constraints.

 

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

Edited by FifthPlayer
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Kind of a mixed-bag there.

 

I've been playing around with the x68000 quite a bit lately.

 

It's got a nice color palette and fantastic tile graphics support.

 

However, it has no blitter or copper, isn't designed for pre-emptive multitasking, and I'm not a big fan of the 5.25" disk drives or the FM sound.

 

Kind of like the inverse twin of the Amiga. The strengths of the one platform are the weaknesses of the other.

 

Someone already pointed out ( i think in this thread ) that computer systems were starting to move away from tile based character displays even though it was still very much in use in 16bit game consoles. The blitter was essential for an efficient window system, SX-Windows ( on the x68000 ) pales in comparison, it was very slow due to the lack of blitter & hardware acceleration support. It still would have been nice if the Amiga had a tilemap mode as well but with a specific budget in mind during design, they probably made the right decision to leave that out.

 

 

i went from atari 8 bit to amiga... the st just didnt take my breath way like the 8 bit had, the amiga blew my mind!!

 

I saw the Amiga 1000 for the first time in 1985, it was being demoed in a store with the monitor facing the shop front. It was displaying a digitized image of a red sports car. I was so memorized by that image that I stared at it for a good 5 minutes before my parents pulled me away.

Edited by shoestring
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Someone already pointed out ( i think in this thread ) that computer systems were starting to move away from tile based character displays even though it was still very much in use in 16bit game consoles. The blitter was essential for an efficient window system, SX-Windows ( on the x68000 ) pales in comparison, it was very slow due to the lack of blitter & hardware acceleration support. It still would have been nice if the Amiga had a tilemap mode as well but with a specific budget in mind during design, they probably made the right decision to leave that out.

 

 

 

I saw the Amiga 1000 for the first time in 1985, it was being demoed in a store with the monitor facing the shop front. It was displaying a digitized image of a red sports car. I was so memorized by that image that I stared at it for a good 5 minutes before my parents pulled me away.

We sold those early ones and the GURU was a frequent visitor and the screens were fuzzy, had a high rate of return on A1000 models, to be fair later WB fixed most

 

alot was user error, though we had a fair number of just bad ones. It was fortunteST came out 1st and were were selling ST 2-1 for a few years.

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Blitter would be a prime example of something that is very much a deferred action (as well as some copper list operations).

But ST got blitter as well later on.

 

C= outsourced the OS to a university so it makes sense that they probably wanted to try every extravogence possible. And in reality a base model 68000 with no MMU, mechanism for paging or virtual memory and running on hardware with little in the way of storage protection was pushing things a bit.

Actually, blitter operations are not multitasked at the Amiga, or not multitasked by the exec system. Instead, whenever you want to start a new blitter job, you first have to WaitBlt(), which is a busy-wait on the hardware registers, then fire off the blitter. This sounds like it decouples the blitter operation from the CPU, but remember that you need one blitter job per bitplane. IoWs, before starting the blit on the second bitplane, the CPU busy-waits on the completion of the blit on the first bitplane.

 

The actual disk-part (the "dos.library") was first internally called "chaos", but did not get ready in time. Tripos was not exactly "outsourced", it was mostly bought as it was, with some minor adaptions that were outsourced. Unfortunately, this created a rather unorthogonal system component in the heart of the system. A big bunch of this mess was then cleaned up later, first by the third-party "arp" project, and then "arp" got integrated into the system in the Os version 2.0, replacing all the BCPL legacy that came originally with Tripos.

 

Actually, would "Chaos" have been any better than "Tripos"? Probably not. If I look at the shape of the graphics.library today, I have to shudder. It's really a lousy design, not separating internal and external structures and without a clear interface design.

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It was definitely interlaced, the 1081 was flickering like mad.

 

I had to wait a few years before we got our first Amiga and I felt guilty for packing the c64 away.

 

Pretty sure now it IS the Newtek demo slide show...

 

I felt the same when I packed my 64 away but hey, that's small rooms for you :)

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i went from atari 8 bit to amiga... the st just didnt take my breath way like the 8 bit had, the amiga blew my mind!!

 

 

 

I saw the Amiga 1000 for the first time in 1985, it was being demoed in a store with the monitor facing the shop front. It was displaying a digitized image of a red sports car. I was so memorized by that image that I stared at it for a good 5 minutes before my parents pulled me away.

 

Reminds me of when I first saw the NewTek Demo Reels on an Amiga 1000, then later an A2000 in store:

 

 

 

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  • 5 years later...
On 6/16/2016 at 3:41 AM, Keatah said:

 

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

After SIX years of on and off searching I finally found the magazine article. It was sitting under my nose the entire time. There is even a PDF download of the scans.

 

https://bytecellar.com/2012/01/02/a-look-at-the-sauciest-magazine-i-ever-owned/

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Original question did I go from Atari 8 to Amiga?  

 

No I didn't immediately.

 

Went from Atari 400 (upgraded) to my Mac 128K (Upgraded).   We tended to use what was slightly older, cheaper, and readily available and just build on them.   Atari ST and Amiga were not as readily around, found a Mac in a shop I went to, so I went that way.

 

Later I would use for a while an Amiga 500, 2000, 3000, and 1200.   And still part of a Amiga group in Dallas.

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5 minutes ago, doctorclu said:

Original question did I go from Atari 8 to Amiga?  

 

No I didn't immediately.

 

Went from Atari 400 (upgraded) to my Mac 128K (Upgraded).   We tended to use what was slightly older, cheaper, and readily available and just build on them.   Atari ST and Amiga were not as readily around, found a Mac in a shop I went to, so I went that way.

 

Later I would use for a while an Amiga 500, 2000, 3000, and 1200.   And still part of a Amiga group in Dallas.

Hopefully I haven't already answered this question.

 

But I also had an Atari 400 and an Amiga in my computer history - just not a direct upgrade.

 

I went from Atari 400 - Atari 800XL - Atari 130XE.  In the last few months of my 8-bit experience, I bought a Commodore 64, convinced by my friends this was a better platform, however I was horrified at the disk speeds, so I switched to a color computer 3, but the plan for amdek 3" disks never materialized, so  I then got an Atari 520ST, but as I moved into college, I no longer tinkered with computers.  The 520ST became almost entirely a terminal that I hooked up to the university vax system.

 

I then didn't own a computer at all for about 5 years.  Somehow I still felt that was an option.   I came back, actually briefly with an IBM PC clone, but then swapped it out for an Amiga 1200.  So I was an Amiga fan for several years.

 

It was my daily driver, I even owned a 68060 upgrade.  The CPU speed was fine.  The issue was the web browsing experience had fallen so far behind the market, I finally bought a PowerMac 6100.   I've been on the Mac train ever since, ever variant of PowerPc, Intel, and now M1.

 

I still find the Mac to be a creative outlet, and as far as I'm concerned today's generation has the same opportunity for awesome creativity as my generation did.

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It was a goal that I never achieved.  By the time the Amiga came around, I was fully aware of Jay Miner and team, and their considerable accomplishments, and wanted one badly.  I was also very into recording music, so the MIDI ports on the competitor Atari STs made it also desirable to me.  My budget was right around $0.00, so neither one happened.

 

I still pine for one (or both) of these machines.

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