Amiga - It Outlived Them All...

[bloodline]

The Amiga would easily win "Twitchiest Corpse" or perhaps "Most Persistent Zombi" award

[ChaosLord]

The Amiga also gets the award for "hardest to kill", "most resurrected" and "most reincarnated".

[Gryfon]

Just to be REALLY pedantic...

Atari 600XL
Atari 800XL

They were fairly different form factor than the Atari 400/800 and came early/mid 80's, rather than late 70's.

One of the main reasons I bought my first Amiga is because it's a spiritual successor to my beloved Atari 800XL; in my very humble opinion a rather marvellous computer, which for me only had 2 major issues - games were more prevelant for the C64 than the 800XL and the main tape-drive units loaded programs VERY slowly (no 'turbo' load like C64) so games like Gauntlet would take over 20 minutes to load.

Still play "Rescue on Fractalus!" and "Mercenary Escape From Targ" on Atari 800XL emulator every now and then.

[gizz72]

Greetings,

"Still Alive" is what I reckon....

How about the the IBM XT's, with bulky 10MB Hard drives 5 1/4 Floppy diskettes drives, Monochrome b/g displays that shoots gamma rays and leave a posporous burn marks when turn off after hours of use. kinda miss'em too.

Regards,

GiZz72

[Daedalus]

Just to be REALLY pedantic...

Atari 600XL
Atari 800XL

They were fairly different form factor than the Atari 400/800 and came early/mid 80's, rather than late 70's.

One of the main reasons I bought my first Amiga is because it's a spiritual successor to my beloved Atari 800XL; in my very humble opinion a rather marvellous computer, which for me only had 2 major issues - games were more prevelant for the C64 than the 800XL and the main tape-drive units loaded programs VERY slowly (no 'turbo' load like C64) so games like Gauntlet would take over 20 minutes to load.

Still play "Rescue on Fractalus!" and "Mercenary Escape From Targ" on Atari 800XL emulator every now and then.

Yeah, I loved my Atari 800XL - nice machines indeed, though I damaged mine when I was experimenting with the parallel bus. Replaced it with another, and still have tapes and tapes of my programs up in the attic. I always found the C64 a little more powerful programming-wise though...

As for the Amiga, I think it's still thrashing around because it's still a little bit useable in this modern world. You can still use it for your IRC, email, MP3s, some light browsing, games etc., and with a modern screen. While there are some great communities still dedicated to the 8-bits, those machines live on in their own little niche and rarely participate in the modern world the way the Amiga can...

[fishy_fiz]

No mention of Tandy TRS-80 coco range of computers ? My 1st computer so I still have fond memories of it. I only had a coco1, but the coco3's were quite decent bit machines. To this day it has a bit of a user base and lots of hardware upgrades (much like many retro machines). While not the native OS, OS9 sort of became the default OS for the machine. There's even an FPGA based coco3 which Id like to get ahold of one day.

A few screenshots of Coco1 games I played as a child:  (good times

http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/canyonclimber.html
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/cashman.html
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/gantelet.html

Some screenshots of Coco3 games (quite nice for 8bit machine in my opinion) :

http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/ganteletii.html
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/leisuresuitlarry.html

[Duce]

Plenty of life in some of those on the list when it comes to old farts keeping old systems running - Atari scene is quite active.  Not to mention many of the other system "scenes" are a HELL of a lot more pleasant to deal with, lol.  The Amiga scene has always been a volatile trainwreck.


"Outlive" is a pretty twitchy word to use for any hardware that's a good 15-20 years dead and buried.  In the grand scheme of things, I suppose the Amiga is "still alive" in forms like the SAM, MorphOS, and even AROS.  But the true "original" Amiga, well we've been poking that corpse with a sharp stick since 1994 when C= went belly up, and we'll never agree on which one of the machines that came since then was the true successor.

At this point we should all just be thankful there's a following for these old machines and that there's a community left to support them.  Places like A.org are a huge asset to guys like us that dig this old gear, even if said forums often seem as a group of zoo monkeys flinging feces at each other

[Franko]

"Outlive" is a pretty twitchy word to use for any hardware that's a good 15-20 years dead and buried.  In the grand scheme of things, I suppose the Amiga is "still alive" in forms like the SAM, MorphOS, and even AROS.  But the true "original" Amiga, well we've been poking that corpse with a sharp stick since 1994 when C= went belly up, and we'll never agree on which one of the machines that came since then was the true successor.

At this point we should all just be thankful there's a following for these old machines and that there's a community left to support them.  Places like A.org are a huge asset to guys like us that dig this old gear, even if said forums often seem as a group of zoo monkeys flinging feces at each other

While I get the drift of what you're saying once again it's the old "dead & buried" routine...

If the Amiga were "dead and buried" then why do we all spend so much time on these forums talking about what we are currently doing with them...

There's only one forum where you can truly speak your mind about the Amiga and that is of course the best of them all AMIGA.ORG, all the others moderate the hell out of free speech at the merest mention of a simple word like "geezer"... gawd knows what planet some of them moderators on other sites live on...

[Fransexy_]

MSX is also very active with new games, hardware even a fpga reimplementation

see on http://www.msx.org

[ChaosLord]

 But the true "original" Amiga, well we've been poking that corpse with a sharp stick since 1994 when C= went belly up, and we'll never agree on which one of the machines that came since then was the true successor.

We held a meeting and decided that Natami and FPGA arcade were the true successors.

[SysAdmin]

@fisy_fiz
 
 
How could we forget the Trash-80? Thanks for bringing it up.

[ChaosLord]

Don't forget the Coleco Adam, TI-99/4A and that lame Panasonic 8-bit computer and the Spectravideo SV-318, and the VIC-20 and the PET and the B256 were all made extinct by the C64.

[the_leander]

We held a meeting and decided that Natami and FPGA arcade were the true successors.

/thread :lol:

[trekiej]

I think someone mentioned this before.
Riddler: Why won't you just die?
Batman: I don't take requests.

[pan1k]

The amiga wont die bcoz it cant display popups. I fucking hate internet ads.

[Digiman]

It may be dead to you but it sure aint to me and yes it's still going strong for a 25 year old piece of computing hardware...

The point I was making (as you don't seem able to grasp it) is, when compared to the Amiga forums and current Amiga scene all the others I have listed don't seem to have the same amount of still active users posting on them...

The Atari 8bit scene is very active, hardware and software projects and games being produced all the time as well as demos. The 8bit computer section of Atariage sees more posting action than any other forum for any other machine most of the time.

As that is a 1979 machine that technically is the oldest one.

Having said that very few machines don't have a working emulator STILL, classic example is the Memotech MTX 500 or 512 machines. Real shame as I have working ORIC/Aquarius/TRS80/TI99/ZX81 and other emulators.

Also whilst the Archimedes from Acorn has a good emulator, very few games have been cracked properly so can not be put onto ADFs for use with the emulator. The TOSEC is pretty small. But then they have a nice little £100 kit to build a RISC-OS compatible machine too.