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Whuffle · Aug 10, 2005, 11:51 AM

Anyone out there still use an amiga?

Someone recently told me that the amiga (the ones I used as a kid, were the 500 and the 1200) is still unsurpassed for certain music and graphics applications.

Can anyone confirm and explain, or deny this?

Cheers

wzartv · Aug 10, 2005, 01:19 PM

I just recently used one for overlaying text on video not too long ago... I was so impressed with its capabilities. Unfortunately I got newer equipment and no longer needed it. So it is now sold to someone in Philadelphia. I really enjoyed using it.

CroCivic91 · Aug 10, 2005, 02:16 PM

Oh, it's so good to remember these machines!

It's the machine my brother owned (Amiga 500) when I was just a little, little kid... I used to watch him play games with his friends... he learned how to code programs on that machine. I was so impressed with it as a kid that I took his ZX Spectrum and started learning Basic as a kid of 9 years. He then got Amiga 1200 and I remember it had half a megabyte of RAM and was able to run some GREAT games with only half a megabyte of RAM!

Unfortunately, he sold it long ago... he was hoping that Power Amiga (I think that was the name) would actually be made available to people, and I remember his plans on buying it, but it just never lived.

Anyway, I still remember the talks he and his friends had about Amigas... and I could hear nothing but the words of glory... mostly to it's capabilities to do huge things with so little RAM.

wzartv · Aug 10, 2005, 02:32 PM

Oh yes, good times... the Amiga was truly amazing... I started learning BASIC at about the same age, I was so fascinated with it... I used an old Apple IIe, and still have it (its a professional syle with the extra keypad) and an Apple IIc which one of my teachers gave me in 7th grade (she was very nice indeed) but I still remember being so amazed with the capability of the Amiga and the operating system.

Whuffle · Aug 10, 2005, 03:11 PM

Heheh,

OK, looks like there's some serious nostalgia in the air! Who remembers the other beast of that era... the Atari ST ?

Press2Esc · Aug 11, 2005, 11:14 AM

Yep, an truly amazing system - even to today's standards... they were big in europe, but never really took off in the US. For example, I ran with a 3000 that had a Mac board AND a Window board AND ran AmigaOS. I also ran UNIX on another Amiga. They were the 1st PC certified to run System V Unix. Get thsis, Amiga was doing major, CONCURRENT multi-tasking 10 years before Windows 95 (Billies 1st multitask OS) ever hit the street. Windows OS nor the Intel could handle the complexity of multi-tasking.

For the most part the Amiga's video & sound ran DMA (directly from memory) to custom (ASIC) chips, so the computer was a screamer for multimedia. And even more amazing, the early OS fit on a single 256K (ROM) chip incomparison to today's 1.5GB "recommended" for WinXP...

After several generations of bankruptcys, Gateway bought the "technology" & patents in 2000. I think it is safe to say, they were helplessly (hopelessly?) lost with such technoloy and innovation.

Ah yes, I do remember the good old days - before the Gates of Seattle locked up the PC market and started chopping away at Apple trees in Silicon Valley.

P2E