Atari vs Amiga article

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I got started on a C=64 in '84 and moved up to an Amiga 500 in '88, an A3000 in 1990 and then an A4000 in 1993.  All those years, nearly a decade, the mantra of PC users everywhere was, "those Commodore computers are game machines."  How ironic then is it that in 1994, almost perfectly coinciding with the death of Commodore, it's largely due to one game on the PC platform that suddenly the PC becomes the premiere computer for gaming, gaming performance becomes the yardstick computers are measured against and you have folks spending thousands upon thousands of dollars to gain FPS beyond the Human Visual System's ability to comprehend.

I remember being stopped in my tracks in the halls of Digital Domain when a fellow Amigan gave me the news that Commodore was no more that day in 1994.  Besides the feeling of loss and betrayal I was also a little worried because myself and a few other fellow Amigans had convinced the company to invest a lot of money in Amiga-based playback and review stations (A4000 + DPS PAR) used by every digital artist and supervisor at DD for our first projects like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Strange Days.   The Amiga-PAR also replaced tape-based single frame recording and preview playback of motion control work on the stages for films up through the late 1990s until there were simply no more components to piece together to keep the last A4000 running (massive heat problems eventually killed them all).

Yeah, it really is messed up when you think about it.  It really is a big part of why the 'PC' kept getting bigger and faster hardware, all for those extra frames in games.  Granted now it also helps with streaming video, and ripping, etc.  

Well, I think in the early to mid-90s the only computer hardware around that could really do CGI well were Amigas and SGI.  SGIs were way expensive.  

Reminds me of the Mega STe and TT030 line of computers.  Atari were 'getting serious' and trying to make a dent in the DTP market.  What happened with that?  Well Pagestream got it's start on the Atari ST, but then stopped supporting it around 2.0-2.2 or something, yet Pagestream still make an Amiga Classic version, along with OS4.  

Same thing with the big box Amigas, I think they were trying to market them toward being professional systems.  It's a shame that computers went the way they did.  The fact that something that should be fairly simple (browsing the Internet to get some information) has become this bloated mess that requires gigabytes of memory.  Just sad.

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[slaapliedje]

Which oddly enough, according to most people who have worked on the various architectures, the Intel x86 architecture was the designed the worse.  

I find myself looking at PPC macs so that I can get a MorphOS machine, if they had something like the Sam boards in a laptop, that would be better, since I would rather not own anything ever made by Apple...  But most of it is just so I can say that I own a PPC... Now if they ported MorphOS to something like the Raspberry Pi....

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[slaapliedje]

Ha ha, that last bit about Linux is is so true.  Supports all the architectures out there, and it really gets to the point where you just pick and chose some hardware based on how well it works under Linux, slap it together then it's all about the software stack.

I thought about putting Linux on my Amiga, but then thought "why bother, I already have an 8 core system that flies, and really I wanted my Amiga for... well Amiga stuff.

I'm still kind of curious about putting System V on my TT030, but since I don't have any graphics card in it, it'd basically just be another terminal, not to mention no network connectivity.

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