Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: blanning on May 05, 2009, 09:22:31 PM
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For me it was when a friend of mine played a mod through a sound blaster board.
brian
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When I first save Vegas demonstrated...
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When I saw a friend play Wing Commander on his 486 PC and it looked so cool. I knew I would have to branch out to that platform. I finally gave up the Amiga vs. PC fight then and yielded to the dark side.:-(
-Tim
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When the PC could emulate the Amiga at "full" speed. :-(
Robert
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For me it was when Windows 95 was released.
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For me, it was when my friend showed me Quake. Seeing Doom II had got me worried, but Quake finally made me realise that the Amiga had lost.
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Windows OS did not catch up to the AOS until XP. Win 95 was a crashy bloated bit of junk. 98 and 98SE were improvements but still couldn't reliably run professional multi-media apps with out trashing or loosing data. Only by constantly backing up data and rebooting or recovering from crashes could you proceed. Even Mac was far superior than win. When XP arrived, it finally had enough guts to do the job. That's when windows "caught up".
Now, when did I know Amiga "had lost"? That was in 1993 when windows 3.11 for workgroups was released. The writting was on the wall. Amiga had a short time to respond and couldn't. Instead, by the time win 95 was released they were well on their way to bankruptcy.
Plaz
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486/Pentium I, Win95/98, cheap cost of HD's, modems and the various graphics/sound cards made my 020/4mb A1200 seem pretty outdated. Didn't help at all that the few stores left that carried Amiga stuff did not have the software support the IBM had. That was around the time all the Amiga mags were spelling certain doom for Commodore and I went to the dark side. A few years after that, I was totally sick of the headache that is the IBM/Micro$oft platform and went back to the Amiga. Perfect timing really, because by then, we had awesome graphics cards, (expensive as always) CPU cards, etc. that now made and continue to make a PeeCee seem like the overly out_of_date platform that it is (to me anyway).
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Yeah, probably XP SP1 era. PC hardware had passed it much earlier, but Windows up to 98ME was a nightmare.
I must say, Hyperion's AmigaOS 4.X (and MOS1.5) is starting to look pretty good, but it is still in the hobby arena due to lack of 3rd party software support.
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Eh, I'd say it was the release of Windows 95, too.
I was one of the early users to get an early upgrade from Win 3.11 to 95 at work, mostly because I was quite animated about how terrible Win 3.11 was to work with... I was begging for a Mac, old SUN box, or anything else they had available. I was fortunate that I could sometimes use an older SGI Indigo (original) the engineering guys kept as a demo system, or else I think I'd have gone insane... I was due for an upgrade, and actually tried to requisition an SGI Indigo2 like the engineers were using, but my management wasn't real happy with someone who was basically an intern at the time asking for a big $$$ engineering workstation... Go figure. So Windows 95 was thrown at me, instead. And I was told I would use that. :P
Well, anyhow, after about a week of using 95, I started realizing Amiga was in SERIOUS trouble. Windows 95 was really the first Microsoft OS that really could be called a complete OS, and was good enough to use on a regular basis. Sure, it still had it's share of quirks and problems, but that was the turning point, where a Microsoft OS was "good enough" to get your work done with a minimum of hassle.
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Actually I have used DOS since Version 1.0. I think PC DOS 1.0 was a complete OS. The Graphical User interface later helped but IBM compatibles had taken over well before that happened. I think when the IBM in the late 80's came out with VGA, soundcards, etc. it was down hill for the Amiga ever since.
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1997. I was going off to college, and didn't think my A2000 was up to the task even with a 68040/40. My parents were willing to buy me what I needed.
I was still devoted to the Amiga, I started pricing upgrades for my favorite system. A 68060 card for starters... $1200. RTG graphics... New SCSI HD... more RAM... Ethernet...
Or I could pick up a complete PC with a 200MHz Pentium-MMX, 64MB RAM, PermediaNT 24-bit 1600x1284 graphics, AWE64 sound, and a 5GB HD, dual-booting Win95 and NT4, for about $1500. And it could play X-Wing vs Tie Fighter, Quake, and every other modern game that was worth playing.
I fretted over it for a month, but that was when I realized it was over. Sadly, I have not spent more than $25 on my Amigas since then... While prices eventually go down, the comparative value has gone down faster. I can't justify spending, for example, $169 for a brand new 15 year old EGS Spectrum. Used '060s go for $300 or more, while a complete PC that can run UAE faster than a 68060 costs less. So I continue to get by with what I can find as a freebie or trade spare parts for, which isn't very much.
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Hello All,
I knew the Amiga was doomed when I first saw VGA display back in 1991, When AGA came out year later I knew the Amiga has lost the fight.
Thanks in advance,
Merv Stent :-?
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I have to say about 1996, When their CPU/GPU combo of brute force could finally run the games that the elegant hardware design of the Amiga made possible in 1985.
Of course for me the way that AmigaOS feels has never been duplicated for me. I'm not just talking about warm sentimental feelings but something about the way that it responds to the user vs. other OSs be it Windows, Linux or BSD-Mac.
for one wish so BADLY that the OS will be Open Sourced. I wish some rich old Amiga user would buy the rights to the classic OS and Open Source it. I'd love to see what we could do if we had the source code and could do it as a Open Source project.
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Wolfenstein 3D caught my attention, Doom and Strike Commander sealed Amiga's fate for me.
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Around the time I first tried BeOS on a PC.
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I remember sitting in an Amiga user group meeting the day WIndows 95 was released, the presenter was making all sorts of false statements about Windows 95 and I realised that yes the Amiga was still better but that it didn't matter, the end was nigh, why would people buy Amiga now I thought. That's the day the Amiga market died. It would be several years before the PC out did the Amiga, but it was at this point that the perception had changed and with perception came the sales.
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I think a couple of different things on this:
1. There are still some ways in which Amiga OS remains superior--I think, mostly, in terms of the type of kernel arrangement (Amiga OS's kernel is closest to an exokernel, compared to Windows, MAC or Linux). The potential remains the greatest with Amiga OS, so long as Windows, MAC or Linux does not move further away from the Monolithic or Microkernel arrangement.
2. I think I realized the general PC had caught up, when I saw the game MYST years ago. But, given serious consideration, and the fact the computer industry specialized MORE since the 1980s--resulting in companies doing only video graphics cards, for example--it may be something of a misnomer to say the "PC" or Windows caught up. The result is the same, though: the Amiga OS was surpassed, because it was no longer capitalizing upon what was available. (to reverse this, the Amiga OS and Amiga programs would have to address industry standard video and sound cards).
3. Maybe the proliferation of GAMES on PC, too. :lol:
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I think it was somewhen in 1995 when I sat in some unversity cip-pool in front of some PentiumPC using Netscape Navigator and discovered the www (had mailbox access with my Amiga and a 14.4 modem b4).
Now, with OWB for Amiga/MorphOS this gap has been narrowed again (there's still quite a gap, but it became narrower).
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1993, when C= imploded and I realized that there would be no developers of the software I enjoyed left.
I got a 486/100 with a 170mb drive, 8mb RAM, a 2mb VLB video card, Win3.11 and never looked back.
Still tinker with emulation from time to time - I configured a system and played the original Quake beginning to end on it (p96/uae) and it ran at a consistent 30+ FPS, which has way more to do with the emulation than with Amiga's OS...
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Have they? OK, yes. However, I find Wintel machines to be very powerful, but very bloated and inefficient too -- the GM Hummers of the computer world.
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PC hardware had a long story of miserably performance:
* 80386 / 80486
* ISA (Jumper hell)
* EGA
* Beep-beep
So why did manages decide to buy the crap. Well IBM has a history since WWII in big iron computing. And the PC was from IBM so it must be good.. doh! It's a good example of evaluating the PR rather than what's actually involved.
Key is also that workplaces as a consequence got it. And then workers had access to it "on the job". And wanted one hope to continue work at home etc.. Which platforms developers like and use also have big say because they actually make new applications happen!
Only this hardware made it possible overthrow Amiga:
* Pentium
* PCI
* VGA
* Soundblaster
And ofcourse low prices on Ethernet and DRAM. This especially became obvious when it became chepaer with an 80286 doing ISA-Ethernet + RS232 than buying an ZII Ethernet.
Nlandas, At this point I'm not so sure the source would be benfitial. The API is known. And there's clever people around ;)
We don't even have the chipmasks for A500. Still we have Minimig.
Win3.11 was a PAIN. But then Linux came to rescue. And FreeBSD was even smoother ;) The darkside is kept inside sandboxes where it belongs.
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For me, in part, it was when XP got to service pack 2.
For the rest of it, though, I'm still waiting, and I don't really believe it will ever happen. Amiga had something Windoze will never have - it gave priority to user input. Windows doesn't value user input highly, which is why, no matter how fast the hardware gets, it'll always seem slow ...
If I could actually get hardware that runs Amiga OS (at a price I could afford without mortgaging the house), I'd jump right back on it in a second.
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Not a good comparison actually, an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine. Add to that the downright piggishness of the 1084 or any other crt and your Hummer analogy falls apart.
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Quake or Doom
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persia wrote:
Not a good comparison actually, an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine. Add to that the downright piggishness of the 1084 or any other crt and your Hummer analogy falls apart.
Persia, you've missed the analogy -- or more likely, you have chosen to. I was not using the "energy" term as in Watts(E/s) or horsepower literally. I (obviously?) meant the enormous "horsepower" of the Wintel machines that seems to go to waste -- Re: such incredible "under the hood" memory, CPU, hard drive size, etc. of the modern Wintels.
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Yep, Win95 for me...
Plus 1024x768x24bit screens...
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My first thought was Win95/Pentium.
Even before that ,Wolfenstein and Doom on the PC running Dos/Win3 meant Amiga needed bigger improvements than it got.
Amiga has been playing catch-up ever since;without Newtek, Amiga would have died sooner.
But really,once Commodore failed to get the CD32 into the stores for Christmas sales it was downhill....
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1993. I was thinking about replacing my aging A500-system back then and had a good amount of money to spend. The choice was between a new Amiga (1200 or 4000) or a new pc. The amount of 486s to be found was overwhelming, the amount of Amiga shops was, well, not.
I bought a 486dx2/66 with 8 MB ram, 245 MB harddrive, 2 MB VLB card, Soundblaster 16asp with a 17" CRT and an internal 14k4 modem.
It was running Windows 3.1 and was damn powerfull with great software. True, Windows 3.1 wasn't as good as Amiga OS 3.0, but the software it was running (Lotus Amipro, some graphics software, other stuff I can't remember) was absolutely great.
The pc definitely won. It was easy to expand and tinker around with, you could use several different operating systems if you wanted to, hardware was easy to get and cheap, as was software.
Amiga hardware was expensive and hard to get, as was software for it. Productivity software on the Amiga was lousy compared to software for the pc. There was nothing back then on the Amiga which compared well to, for example, Lotus Amipro 3. Support for the Amiga in computermagazines was in heavy decline.
Since then, I have used a pc for my normal computing needs and other computers such as the Amiga just for fun, whether it be nostalgia, gameplaying, fooling around with a different OS or whatever.
So, all in all, for me, the Amiga lost in 1993. I have been very satisfied with the 486 I bought back then, which I have been using and upgrading as my maincomputer until 1998. The Soundblaster 16ASP was a very good soundcard for its time and the Diamond Viper (2 MB VLB videocard) combined with an Iiyama 17" CRT gave me fast, crisp and stable videoperformance.
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Duke Nuke'Em 3D was what swung it for me! Running that on a friend's Pentium-based PC with 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard finally made me move on from my A1200 (which I still have and still use now occasionally).
The A1200 had done a fair job until that point (1996), and I'd had a work '486 laptop in the couple of years prior, which ran Win95 well enough once it was released, beginning the end of really bad Microsoft OSs that finally stopped with the release of Win2K.
Running those early releases of UAE used to make me chuckle but the writing was already on the wall, especially after the bankruptcy of Commodore. On an early Linux release running on a 486DX2/66, UAE used to be very slow - but it already pointed towards the future.
-Ali
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In about 1999. i needed to download and fill in some PDF/Word documents that I couldn't open in Shapeshifter/Fusion running MacOS 8.
Other than that, i could do everything else I needed to, even web browse on my A4000.
Never thought much of Win 95 and win 98. In fact MS didn't offer a decent OS until Win 2000
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For me it was around 1995 .
I saw a pc running VESA games like Little Big Adventure , then of course it was all the CD-ROM based games with speech like indiana jones & fate of Atlantis , plus the FPS's .
I realised my old standard A500 plus was over the hill and i bought a 486DX2/66Mhz with 4mb Ram , 420mb HD and SB16 .
2 Years later i regretted selling my Amiga and bought 2 broken A500's and used them to make 1 working one :-)
Luckily i still had nearly all my Amiga games & software and even my Action Replay III
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For me it was when 386+VGA was selling like hot cakes but finally when Windows 95 was released.
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i havnt realized it up till now. :-o
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When these games came out, I realised the writing was on the wall. We either had inferior versions, or no version at all.
TFX (1993)
magic carpet (1994)
terror from the deep (1995)
subwar (1993) -amiga untextured
frontier (1993) -Amiga untextured
Doom (1993)
If the 1200 had been given akiko, fast ram (which would also have doubled the processor speed) and a high density floppy, maybe things would have been different. And Paula not being upgraded in 8 years? criminal.
When I bought the A1200 I was really excited, but it did not have the power or memory to make use of it's colour palette.
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It was the summer of 1994. My Amiga 500 had died due to a misplaced glass of tea. I started looking at my options to replace my A500.
Also, at this time I was preparing to go off to college. All the schools I was interested in were used DOS/Windows 3.11 and taught PC Pascal and/or C.
(Odd thought, was at college I actually came across more Amiga users than Mac users back then).
So I bought a 486-DX2 66 Packard Bell at Circuit City. I had VESA Graphics, 8 MB of RAM, 120 MB HD, Soundblaster 16, 16" Color Monitor and could easily do 800x600x16bit.
It got me into DOS/Windows 3.11 Programming and I haven't looked back ever since. As for stability of an OS, it wasn't until Windows 2000 I really liked Windows.
I still love my Amiga - recently getting me an A2000 to play some of my favorite games - but in 94, for what you got in a clone, an Amiga was too expensive!
Late,
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When I saw a friend play Wing Commander on his 486 PC and it looked so cool...
Was'nt the Amiga version of Wing Commander from Origin delayed for some reason?
When it finally came out the colors where reduced to make it fit (an playable)on floppys for the A500 users. The Amiga 256 color version came later but if the original release was written for a A3000 (90's equiv of 486) instead of a A500 would have looked way better.
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I knew it had caught up games-wise when I saw the PC version of Elite Frontier and X-Wing. Interface-wise it took Windows 95 for me to say "neary there" and Win98 to say "OK, close enough". The reason I bought my first PC was because they had Civilization 2 and we didn't.
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What, when did this happen? Why was I not informed?
:lol:
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blanning wrote:
For me it was when a friend of mine played a mod through a sound blaster board.
brian
For me, it was when I was able to boot a non-HD machine from a floppy and use a pre-emptive real time operating system with a full GUI to do everything I needed to do.
Uh, wait, come to think of it, that was an Amiga.
Damn.
brian
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Surprised so many of you say Win95.
For me it was Doom.
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I'll let you know when it happens.
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Racetrack announcer: "..and it's Amiga, still in the lead--all of its arms tied behind its back. Boy, they don't make 'em like this anymore. It's been through a lot, edged to bankruptcy, died more times than Jason Voorhees and--wait, PC is gaining, this is gonna be close, folks... Whoah, Amiga has died again, and is lurching like a zombie, but it's still out in front by a rotted nose..." :lol:
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RMK305 wrote:
I'll let you know when it happens.
What, your Micro$hit Shista run floppy is bad ???
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by orb85750 on 2009/5/5 21:00:38
>Have they? OK, yes. However, I find Wintel machines to be very powerful, but very bloated and inefficient too -- the GM Hummers of the computer world.
The way you put it, it looks like you just decided.
They haven't caught up ALL the way. For most things they have. They still use inferior joystick interface and programming techniques (non-cycle exact). Wave the hand and hope it will finish within that time frame. And given the nonstandard hardware being driven at driver level, it looks like the Amiga style of writing directly to hardware registers and taking over the machine is a retro-machine monopoly.
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Model T
16 KW engine
Weight 550 Kg
Mileage 9.4 l/100 km
Top Speed 70 Km/hr
Hummer H3
160 KW engine
Weight 2100 Kg
Mileage 14.7 l/100 km
Top Speed 160 Km/hr
Comparing Apples and Oranges pretty much. the Model T doesn't have anti-pollution, air conditioning or a place to plug your iPod into... The model T can't run at highway speeds and can't pull anything more than itself.
At least the Model T gets better gas mileage, something the Amiga can't claim to do since it uses far more power than a modern Mac or PC...
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You just proved a point for many of us. I'd surely rather drive around in a Model T for a multitude of reasons over a Hummer. Status and cool factor being only two of 'em. Hey... those two attributes are not unlike why we're into the Amiga :-)
Hummers are for {bleep}s w/ tiny peckers as the Model T is for hobbyists with a greater sensibility of class and awareness. :-D
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absolutely NOT Windows 95... I had Amiga OS 2.0 at home, using Mac SE/30 with OS 7.5 at work for 'real' work .. and Windows 95 for 'testing' at work.... guess which was the most stable. Easy one,really ... my Ami :-)
At work we had such a laugh with how W95 worked - to bad some of our customers wanted to use it :/
I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !
What really did it was - I left that company and was bereft of my Mac so got my first Intel system :/
- Pentium at 120Mhz
- VGA at 1024x768 in umpteen colours
speed and colours... the A4000 was nowhere near this... and an 060 was insanely expensive ( got one now :p )
Tom UK
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I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !
I got Windows 95 running on my Amiga 2000, once; within Amiga OS. It was SO slowwwwwww, it was totally unusuable. :lol:
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EyeAm wrote:
I also emulated the Mac on my Amiga faster then my 'work' machine. I had absolutely no use for a windows bleep at home.
Later (at work) I got one of the 1st PowerMacs... fast !
I got Windows 95 running on my Amiga 2000, once; within Amiga OS. It was SO slowwwwwww, it was totally unusuable. :lol:
All that means is that amiga emulation* of a PC was never worth a flip. :-)
*=bridgeboards are SBCs with a custom bridge to the Amiga half of the computer, not emulators...
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heheh hasn`t happened to me yet, maybe im too simple but i still find my lovely amiga useful to me ... sure i have my mac for some other things but it always feels like the amiga was made to do things the way i wanted them done. :)
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an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.
What world are you living in? High end CPUs like Core 2 quad will eat over 100W just for the CPU! Likewise for video cards. An A2000 PSU's output would only be considered reasonable for low-end or small-footprint PCs today.
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DamageX wrote:
an Amiga 2000 will consume far more power than you everyday quadcore intel machine.
What world are you living in? High end CPUs like Core 2 quad will eat over 100W just for the CPU! Likewise for video cards. An A2000 PSU's output would only be considered reasonable for low-end or small-footprint PCs today.
Actually, my Q6600 based server that's running at 100% 24/7 consumes around 90W.
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Overnight I had a think about this... I bought my A500 because of it's gaming potential, and it'dfantastic hardware.
One of the reasons I was loath to part with Amiga, was no longer the chipset, but the OS. I guess I became an apps user as well as a gamer.
I too thought PC's unusable until windows '95. And over here in Britain, I could'nt afford a PC until they dropped to about £700 (about '96 '97 I think). Even then I still thought windows slow, and a bit of a mess. Although to upgrade the Amiga A1200 cost me more than that, what with CD-rom, HDD accelerator and ram - but I spanned that over seveal years.
And as I was doing a graphic design course, I had a fully fledged Mac (emulated) for a lot less than other people on my course payed for one! :)
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When did you realize that the wintel machines had caught up to the amiga?
It was in mid 1994 or so. A friend of mine showed me some sort of voxel environment with texturized mountains scrolling in a fake 3D view, at speeds my Amiga 1200 woudln't ever reach, at 640x480 pixel full screen, on his 486dx2/66 machine. Then he opened in a fraction of second some JPEG images. I realized that PC were the place processor grunt was, and that their nature of modular and customizable machines would be overkill for the average Amiga user.
I bought my first PC then, a 486sx/25 notebook with DOS and Windows 3.1. It wasn't smart as AmigaOS 3.1, but with the help of Sparta (a very cool file manager for Windows), I could immediately recreate the one folder == one directory paradigm, which Windows <95 tried to hide with program groups. That was: I could act on Win31+Sparta as like as I did on AmigaOS when opening drawers. Dozens of little share/free-ware tools I found on the Cica CD-ROMs helped me customizing the GUI with toolbars and other improvements, and with my surprise they didn't affect overall speed. In a nutshell: I needed only a few days to get a better desktop environment than my beloved AmigaOS+MagicWB, and without hassles.
That was a huge hit for my amigism.
Then Commodore went bankruptcy, and Intel launched its Pentium processors. Sorry, it was Game Over for the Amiga, and I bought a Pentium 90 system (yes, the bugged one =)): it was amazingly fast and it could run smoothly all the PC applications I learned to love in the meantime. When I installed Windows 95 I felt immediately at home.
However, I still missed something. Windows (and then Linux) became more bloated, huge and heavy at every release. That's why I enjoyed the AROS project as soon as I saw it: it was aiming to do exactly what I was dreaming about at the time, a cute Operating System on the most powerful and cheapest hardware available... "Mine!". And here I am...
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by B00tDisk:
All that means is that amiga emulation* of a PC was never worth a flip.
*=bridgeboards are SBCs with a custom bridge to the Amiga half of the computer, not emulators...
Oh, it was just software-only. :-D
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When I needed a PC to make a Director Animation file before it called Flash animation. That was in 2000.
All my homework I made it on an Amiga. Like learning MS-DOS 6.2, Lotus 1-2-3, Dbase IV. Pascal and C. I use an Amiga 1200 with Blizzard 1230 IV and 48 MB RAM. To emulate a PC I use PCtask 4.4.
In 2001 I bought a PC P3 600 MHz and played very much games. After that I bought a P4 2.53 GHz. In 2007 I bought a Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 Ghz with a Nvidia 8800 GTX graphics card to play games on it.
I still use an Amiga to play games or try some old applications. In 2008 I spent almost 400 Euros in Amiga stuff. :-)
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Y'know, I would point out that it's still fun to try things (witness my running Quake on Win-UAE) from time to time, other things not so much, on the Amiga much in the same way its fun to tinker with just about any old hardware. I'd LOVE to have a Xerox STAR, or an Apple Lisa (or IIgs) to mess around with. Some computer here recently (a line of MSX machines?) actually got a Win95 like GUI based OS written for it - and it was most assuredly an 8 bit rig or 16/8 bit. I'm sure someone will correct me there.
But the point is, for my day to day computing, the Amiga's no substitute for what I need out of a computer. When I made the jump I was using Netscape 3.0 before the Amiga had a browser (other than ALynx), Microsoft Office, playing games in a window on the desktop, etc. It hurt me to see all of that - for years I'd assumed a PC was some DOS prompt only, four color "thing" that went BEEP BEEP BEEP.
But in 1994, my expectations were totally blown away, and I had a machine that was entirely usable, and, I daresay, none too shabby at "doing" multimedia.
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For me it was in 1995, and i have never looked back... now days i wait for a proper amiga os that hopefully will mature enough to a stage that it is worth looking into... and faster more mordern hardware that will tun this new amiga os and can compete with pc prices of today. if this will not happen i will never buy the new amiga os or its hw...
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For those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga, just letting you know you are dead wrong. In order to come up to that conclusion, you would have to take into account every aspect of computing on Amiga and show that it's doable on PC. Experimentally, that would take a very long time to prove. Logically, I already pointed out a few things undoable on modern PC that are doable on Amiga. So I suggest those who agreed wintel machines caught up to Amiga to retract their remarks unless they were just expressing their opinion or just basing their remarks on "looks" and not anything substantial from the engineering/useage perspective.
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Somebody buy this man a drink, quick! Okay... I will :pint:
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Don't you think he's already had enough :lol:
TAXI!!!
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1993
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Hmmm, harware wise... Probably in 1996... When I was playing a real time strategy game (either knights and merchents or command and conqure or something) on my friend's PC... Actually one that had been thrown away by a local college... And I was wondering how I would program something similar on my A1200 and realizing that the Amiga harware offered no advantage at all... In fact it would cause more problems than help me...
I think Win2000 was when the Wintel OS started to piss all over AmigaOS...
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ami_junki wrote:
heheh hasn`t happened to me yet, maybe im too simple but i still find my lovely amiga useful to me ... sure i have my mac for some other things but it always feels like the amiga was made to do things the way i wanted them done. :)
I'm not saying I don't find it usefull. I think if it had survived to go onto for one more generation with commodore, web browsing/3D/MP3/AVI/RTG sound and graphics etc - which it just missed out on, it would be comparable to what my vista machine can do now (obviously not HD films etc, but you know what I mean, basic functionality for the future would have been in place).
But with much lower processor and memory needs -and probably better.
I still love the OS, it's works well, is fast and frugal, and I understand whats it's doing. It isn't just a monolithic registry, and mess of exe and DLL's. Which every PC iv'e owned is, straight from boot up for the first time.
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Unlike most Amiga users I had a PC before I bought an Amiga.
I had a 286 before I picked up a 500. The 500 was better than the 286 at most things but it had no hard drive (HD). The 286 recieved many OS upgrades of MS DOS until MS Windows 3, while I never upgraded the 500's OS. Both got RAM upgrades.
As my interests increased (programming, art and video) the 500 became restrictive, so I moved to a 2000HD (great for games with HD support) and a better experience overall. I did upgrade the 2000 with more RAM,SCSI CD ROM, ethernet, Scan Doubler,Amiga OS 3 and a video card (GVP Spectrum). By 1990 even Commodore had included a standard Graphics card in the Amiga 3000UX model. If the Software publishers had taken advantage of the features my expanded 2000 the games would be similar to the Dell 486 I had at that time. In fact the 2000 setup might even play Doom since better it had more RAM than the 486 and equivalent video cards. Of course when simm memory prices dropped I maxed out the memory on the 486 and installed windows 95.
I bought a 4000 (for AGA and IDE) and moved some of the 2000's Zorro expansions to it, so it was never stock. The 486 got replaced by a Pentium,then a PII, P3 an P4. By now the Amiga software market had dried up but the few new releases were finally taking advantage of the Amiga 4000's video card, HD and RAM. A4000 upgraded to Cyberstorm 060, 146 MB RAM (w. chip mem) up to 154MB with GVP scsi card installed. Algor USB, 40 GB HD, DVD ROM, OS 3.9, Mediator Di, and PCI Voodoo 3000 GFx.
The PC hardware might have passed my 4000 in about the late 90's with the intel/AMD Mhz war and AGP, but until XP came out in 2001 it was'nt as nice to use.
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bloodline wrote:
Hmmm, harware wise... Probably in 1996... When I was playing a real time strategy game (either knights and merchents or command and conqure or something) on my friend's PC... Actually one that had been thrown away by a local college... And I was wondering how I would program something similar on my A1200 and realizing that the Amiga harware offered no advantage at all... In fact it would cause more problems than help me...
There were other Amiga's not just the A500 and A1200. Any game from 1995/95 would be playable on an Amiga 3000/4000 with the same specs (RAM/HD) as the PC you were playing it on, or even an expanded 1200.
It wasn't as expensive to upgrade the larger Amiga models since you could just use PC parts (RAM, IDE or SCSI HD or CD ROMS).
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I would not use games to determine when PC's passed the Amiga. The quality of games rely on many things including the abilities of the coders. The PC passed the Amiga much later than the quality of games indicate.
The Games on PC started to look better in the early 90's for many reasons including...
1. Amiga users that stuck with Amiga 500's/1200's and never upgraded, PC users had to get a GFX card ,sound blaster (to run anything)
2. Game developers that wrote software for the lowest spec Amiga, while the PC version of the same title required the highest spec PC.(in the 1990's of course). This encouraged PC users to upgrade to run the latest games properly while the Amiga 500/1200 users did n't catch on. You can't compare a game written for a average 486 spec to a conversion to a Amiga 500/1200 spec. A proper conversion would need a Amiga 3000/4000 030 spec machine.
3. Bad Game conversions. eg. The PC version and Amiga conversion of Dune 2 were great. The orginal Amiga conversion of Wing Commander was bad compared to the original. They reduced graphic quality to fit on floppys, for those Amiga users that still did n't have a Hard Drive in the 1992. (Sounds funny now doesn't it.) The requirements for Wing Commander should have been "Amiga 14mhz 1mB RAM and HD required!, Video card optional" and it would have been better. The PC requirements where "IBM PC or compat., 12+ MHz x86 CPU, 640 KB RAM, dual FDD or HDD, 256-color VGA/MCGA or EGA/Tandy, optional sound card (opt. General MIDI)".
The later Amiga conversions we got from ClickBoom, Hyperion and others of popular games Quake, QII,QIII,Doom, and Myst, shows how conversions could have been done years earlier when you support Amiga's with the right specs.