Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: runequester on February 10, 2010, 08:55:10 AM
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And to have a positive counterpoint to the other thread.. what do you think were the 3 best ideas in the history of the amiga?
Again, focus on hardware / software during the commodore era
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Datatypes were a very cool idea. The only issue has really been with their implementation. Ideally, they should have been fully bidirectional and support streamed decoding for video/audio.
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Draggable screens.... Oh man, how I miss them
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I fell in love with MUI since the beginning.
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1. Right mouse button menus
2. Draggable screens
3. HAM modes
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1. best idea: Mouse pointer didn't move sluggishly on the screen. It was like the pointer belonged there. It was fun just to see the pointer moving on the screen smoothly.
2. best idea: Workbench. It was not what it should have been. AmigaOS3.9 or AmigaOS4 look with Dopus Magellan functionality should have been standard on AmigaOS3.1. Still it was so good that even today, it's fun and productive to use Workbench3.1 with several utilities to make it better.
3. best idea: Video Toaster and Flyer. It's a shame they sold it for too much money (as if an A4000 was cheap)(I know VT+Flyer was still much cheaper than professinal equipment but still, Amiga WAS a home computer.) and there was no PAL version.
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1. The Icon Editor
2. Startup-sequence
3. Crossdos/Crossmac
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Other good ideas:
BOOPSI: Implementing a runtime extensible OOP user interface system in C/Asm was not a trivial task. Although the system looks somewhat unusual and dispatch is less efficient than, say, a C call through a function pointer, method call in C++ or Objective C, it was still an elegant solution to the problem.
Commodities Broker System. Always liked this idea, a "chain of responsibility" (to use design pattern parlance) mechanism for dealing with input events and allowing applications to monitor them without having to have focus.
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Best hardware? Probably the A500 itself. It was still revolutionary, compact and most importantly had a lower price. Software? Draggable screens in multiple resolutions. I still don't know any video card that can do it.
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I still don't know any video card that can do it.
In theory, any compositing system can do it. Different resolution resolution screens as texture surfaces can be scaled directly in hardware to match the current display resolution.
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Yup, it can be done with compositing, but strictly speaking it's not quite the same thing. The video chip actually ran at a different pixel clock on different scanlines on the old way, whereas the compositing way means the whole screen is one resolution, with the second resolution scaled up or down. In fairness, the compositing is more suited to modern monitors - not sure too many LCDs will like having different frequencies introduced halfway down the screen...
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Booting with no s-s.
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Yup, it can be done with compositing, but strictly speaking it's not quite the same thing. The video chip actually ran at a different pixel clock on different scanlines on the old way, whereas the compositing way means the whole screen is one resolution, with the second resolution scaled up or down. In fairness, the compositing is more suited to modern monitors - not sure too many LCDs will like having different frequencies introduced halfway down the screen...
Actually, that's not entirely true. The screen behind was "mode promoted" to whatever the front screen was running at. If you partially revealed a 31kHz mode behind a 15kHz one, the rear screen would appear stretched on the display until it was brought to the front. Only one scanrate was used for the entire display at any one time. Trying to change rate mid-frame would not do a CRT any good at all.
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Actually, that's not entirely true. The screen behind was "mode promoted" to whatever the front screen was running at. If you partially revealed a 31kHz mode behind a 15kHz one, the rear screen would appear stretched on the display until it was brought to the front. Only one scanrate was used for the entire display at any one time. Trying to change rate mid-frame would not do a CRT any good at all.
That´s true only in 31kHz. If you are using a 1084 for example, and you have a hires and a lores mode they are running at different pixel clocks. As long as you keep the sync signal at the same rate, you can change resolution without promoting modes
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Two I can't believe aren't mentioned yet;
ReTargettable Graphics/Audio : Sure, in most OS now you can pick a full screen resolution for a game. Of course, the Amiga did it first, and took it further, also allowing you to pick which video card you use, and which rendering mode, and also being able to choose differing sound cards.
ARexx : A single scripting language that allows you to create interactions between any major software packages you happen to have. If only modern PC, Mac or Linux applications got along this well, think of what we could do.......
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1. MultiTasking
2. Custom Chips
3. DataTypes / Libraries
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The built in switch on the a3000 that let you change the video...
using SCSI (at least for a while)
AREXX
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That´s true only in 31kHz. If you are using a 1084 for example, and you have a hires and a lores mode they are running at different pixel clocks. As long as you keep the sync signal at the same rate, you can change resolution without promoting modes
Yup, should've said that, seems only to be the case in native 15kHz modes. I'm pretty sure mode promotion was an option which had the effect described, and could be enabled or disabled using IControl prefs...
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1: The A500
2: The A1200
3: Custom Chips
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Couldn't go with just three... lol
1) 2-button mouse (the original Amiga mouse is still my favorite)
2) DMA for the already fast SCSI
3) Kickstart in WCS or promoted to 32-bit via MMU and protected
4) Amiga RGB monitors having amplified speakers built in (especially stereo) and composite video input
5) classy case designs (especially A1000 & A3000)
6) "plug and play" architecture for the most part (until you start asking a lot out of your machine anyway)
7) Keyboard garage of A1000 :)
8) Innovative software from both Commodore and 3rd parties
9) Hardware and software support for the emulation of several other platforms
10) AmigaOS! any flavor, take your pic :)
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Well most of the killer features / ideas have already been mentioned, but still...
1.) Turning the Amiga into a full computer (and not a games console as planned in the beginning)
2.) The invention of multimedia
3.) The icon system
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Two I can't believe aren't mentioned yet;
ReTargettable Graphics/Audio : Sure, in most OS now you can pick a full screen resolution for a game. Of course, the Amiga did it first, and took it further, also allowing you to pick which video card you use, and which rendering mode, and also being able to choose differing sound cards.
These were certainly good but they were basically third party extensions that have come to be a part of most serious user's OS installs. Their very existence, however, exposes a weakness in the OS in that the concept should really have been thought of by the OS designers rather than hardware vendors and the like.
ARexx : A single scripting language that allows you to create interactions between any major software packages you happen to have. If only modern PC, Mac or Linux applications got along this well, think of what we could do.......
Definitely a +1 for this, too.
Regarding linux, scripting is well served by shell script, Perl and more recently Python. Of course, what none of these have is the basic notion of "application hosts" which is what made (A)Rexx special on the Amiga, rather than the language itself.
I actually always thought Javascript (with importable application interfaces) would make a nice scripting system, but I am a curly brace whore.
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1 Ram Disk: and RAD:
2 Small, extensible, near real-time, multitasking OS
3 The integration of the whole OS and it's very logical organization
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Actually, on my 256MB A1200, I use RAD as a SSD for the OS. On cold boot, a RAD is created of sufficient size and an image (basically just an archive file) is extracted into it, the Install command invoked to make the RAD bootable then the machine resets. The bootable HD partitions are set pretty low priority so that the machine (re)boots from RAD preferrentially.
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I'm probably being thick. What's a SSD?
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I'm probably being thick. What's a SSD?
Solid State Drive.
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OH!
That's clever.
I wish I could send a note back to myself in 1989 and alter the path I tokk upgrading my A500. I was years without a HDD. Getting 4 to 8 Megs of fastram early-on would have allowed a virtual HDD (RAD:) and a much improved experience.
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OH!
That's clever.
I wish I could send a note back to myself in 1989 and alter the path I tokk upgrading my A500. I was years without a HDD. Getting 4 to 8 Megs of fastram early-on would have allowed a virtual HDD (RAD:) and a much improved experience.
The main reason I did this was that it speeds up reboots and perhaps reduces some wear on the hard disk. With the best will in the world, there aren't many amiga 3.x apps that will need the 256MB of memory (though my coding experiments have managed to do it), so sacrificing ~32MB (in my case) to create a RAD for a full OS3.9 install with all the various essential additional libraries/drivers etc seemed a reasonable idea. I make a few minor modifications to the RAD bases startup sequence, removing things like Resident and LoadResource since they are pretty pointless for items that are already in RAM and are just going to be copied to another area of RAM.
It also means I can create versioned snapshots of my OS, since at any time I wish I can simply archive RAD to a file on the HD and use that snapshot at any time in the future.
Also, at cold start up I can choose from one of a number of such OS images to be extracted into the RAD, though I rarely use a different version.
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That's, ahem, HELLA RAD!
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It also means I can create versioned snapshots of my OS, since at any time I wish I can simply archive RAD to a file on the HD and use that snapshot at any time in the future.
Also, at cold start up I can choose from one of a number of such OS images to be extracted into the RAD, though I rarely use a different version.
Nice! Similar in principle to suspend-to-disk, but with a lot more potential (and of course, no need to do messy things like mount/unmount journalling filesystems etc).
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Hate to say this the OS, the hardware, the software were not what made the Amiga so popular initially. Having games on floppy disk as opposed to cartridge is what sold more A500's than anything else and made the Amiga the games platform of choice. Cartridge-based consoles were very difficult to pirate at the time, and that meant lots of school boys ended up getting an Amiga 500 where they could get lots of games for free, and swap with their mates at school.
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In Hardware:
-Buit in Monitor Speakers
-RCA Audio outputs
-DB9 Mouse and Joystick Conectors
-RGB - And Video Composer Outputs
-Plug & Play Hardware expansions
I cant put only 3!
Software:
-RAM: (the use like other storage unit!) ( -- Its Amazing!!!
-Real Multitasking
-Drags Windows
-Librarys
-Estable OS
-MUI
-uses of resources without spending more
-And many more .
I cant put only 3
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Hate to say this the OS, the hardware, the software were not what made the Amiga so popular initially. Having games on floppy disk as opposed to cartridge is what sold more A500's than anything else and made the Amiga the games platform of choice. Cartridge-based consoles were very difficult to pirate at the time, and that meant lots of school boys ended up getting an Amiga 500 where they could get lots of games for free, and swap with their mates at school.
X-copy 2 (bonggggg!)
Hey, I was 14 and earned £4 a week on my paper round, and It's not like I had rich parents who could afford £50-a-game...
My top 3 would be:
1) ARexx (already said, but what a powerful tool.)
2) Unlike the PC of that era, which would become unbootable if you even thought about playing with the boot configuration files, the Amiga almost invited you to.
3) For me, back in ~1990, showing it to my Dad for the first time doing graphics, audio and Word Processing (Kindwords) and seeing him realise that it kicked the pants off the £2000+ PC he'd got for work - although that did have Aldus Pagemaker, which was pretty cool.
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Datatypes. Didn't design it for streams though...
Library version handling. You gotta hate unix version xxx.yyy.zzz forced exact version matches to use this or that program. Too bad the implementation of the libraries interface wasn't all that good.
Copper. So simple and yet so perfect. And then they omit making blitterlists... (the copper should never had access to the blitter - that should have been the job of a blitterlist processor)
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That's, ahem, HELLA RAD!
Works though :)
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Hate to say this the OS, the hardware, the software were not what made the Amiga so popular initially. Having games on floppy disk as opposed to cartridge is what sold more A500's than anything else and made the Amiga the games platform of choice. Cartridge-based consoles were very difficult to pirate at the time, and that meant lots of school boys ended up getting an Amiga 500 where they could get lots of games for free, and swap with their mates at school.
It`s a fact that piracy drove Amiga sales. Some people have trouble admitting it though.
Everyone I knew that had an Amiga, also bought their games through an infamous man in Belfast who sold every Amiga game known to man for £2 plus 50p per extra disk. I used to spend 10 quid a month on Amiga games from him when I was a kid.
Plus everyone used to copy games for each other.
It may have been bad for software publishers, but it was good for hardware sales.
Without piracy, there definitely would not have been as many Amiga users.
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It`s a fact that piracy drove Amiga sales. Some people have trouble admitting it though.
Everyone I knew that had an Amiga, also bought their games through an infamous man in Belfast who sold every Amiga game known to man for £2 plus 50p per extra disk. I used to spend 10 quid a month on Amiga games from him when I was a kid.
Plus everyone used to copy games for each other.
It may have been bad for software publishers, but it was good for hardware sales.
Without piracy, there definitely would not have been as many Amiga users.
At least in the 80's piracy was very common and casual. Did it help hardware sales? Depends how you look at it. Piracy alone won't push sales, I'd suspect even the Tandy Coco had piracy.
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most all have been listed, but the one that STILL can't be touched by windoze.....wait for it....shut down procedure!
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most all have been listed, but the one that STILL can't be touched by windoze.....wait for it....shut down procedure!
Windows shutdown procedure is actually safer than Amiga's. If your Amiga happens to be writing to disk when you hit the power (stupid, yes, but possible,) bye bye data. Windows PC (or any other modern system) just hit the power button and walk away, the OS will clean up and shut down the system. To the end user, it's the same, press a button.
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I've known a lot of Mac's and PC's that do NOT shut down after they're done doing 'whatever' with themselves for all those seconds or minutes. lol In fact, my iMac has a bug wherein, *sometimes* if I leave an SD Card in my card reader, the machine will act as if it is going to turn itself off, but never does. Just sits there with the background up (all icons gone though). Can't tell you how many times that's happened after I've gone to bed, only to find in the next room over I can still hear and see the computer!! :(
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Yep, I left some out.
No user, resource, icon, application, history (registry or desktop file) tracking super file required! If it doesn't exist, it can't be corrupted or used as a tool to spy on the user.
Also, no swap file required. I view this as a great advantage, but it appears not everyone agrees.
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1. Jay Miner's
2. Hardware: Separate Video Processing for a personal computer. Stereo Digital Sound.
3. Bringing it out at the right time for me and making it affordable (just)
Gertsy
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Windows shutdown procedure is actually safer than Amiga's. If your Amiga happens to be writing to disk when you hit the power (stupid, yes, but possible,) bye bye data. Windows PC (or any other modern system) just hit the power button and walk away, the OS will clean up and shut down the system. To the end user, it's the same, press a button.
And then you come home 10 hours later and you see a dialog box telling you some stupid little task is running, do you wanna nuke it...
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funny how this thread died, but the negative one just keeps running......
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cont:
4. Multitasking... You got that modern OS feeling loong before the competition.
5. 32 bit
6. intuition. A super lean gui.
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Not sure if this has already been mentioned, but there's one in particuluar that I find extremely convenient.
The way Amiga mounts devices and filesystems.
I say that, because I recently purchased a netbook pre-installed with windows 7. This wasn't going to fly well with me, though I do need a modern Windows OS to run stuff for school, but I downloaded Ubuntu and installed that instead. Ubuntu instists on EXT filesystems for the root partition (doensn't care what anything else is), as Amiga prefers FFS/SFS/whatever (though I probably could get a os3.1> on a fat32 if I really wanted). This is all fine and good, but I can't access the partition via windows, which insists on ONLY using fat/ntfs stuff. On the Amiga, I had little to no trouble mounting whatever filesystem I wanted with whatever device I wanted it on, because of the mountlist and dosdriver system, which I also find extremely more intuitive than the way Linux does things. (That could just be because I'm not used to it yet)
As for 2 other ideas, I'd have to run with the ability to boot w/o startup-sequence, and the multitasking. (Both mentioned already)
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1. Interesting approach to a tight-knit microkernel
2. Very good use of C language
3. Hardware-software harmony
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ilwrath View Post
Two I can't believe aren't mentioned yet;
ReTargettable Graphics/Audio : Sure, in most OS now you can pick a full screen resolution for a game. Of course, the Amiga did it first, and took it further, also allowing you to pick which video card you use, and which rendering mode, and also being able to choose differing sound cards.
These were certainly good but they were basically third party extensions that have come to be a part of most serious user's OS installs. Their very existence, however, exposes a weakness in the OS in that the concept should really have been thought of by the OS designers rather than hardware vendors and the like.
The basis for ReTargettable graphics was already in Amiga OS 3.0. According to some of the Amiga developer docs from devcon it was going to be fully implemented in later OS versions. Dont' forget that the Amiga 3000UX was already available with a C= Zorro Graphics card so the OS designers did see the need for it. The PCI bus was also going to replace Zorro in newer Commodore amiga hardware (Lou Eg. VP C= speech Toronto 1993) so the OS was going support a lot of new Graphic card options.
They still were behind the third party Hardware developers because EGS for GVP and other graphics cards was already available then CyberGraphX and Picasso96.
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RTG was only neccisary because AGA was so horribly, horribly bad for the time, and doubly bad for an amiga.
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1) Video Toaster/Flyer
2) custom chipset
3) Andy Warhol
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RTG was only neccisary because AGA was so horribly, horribly bad for the time, and doubly bad for an amiga.
Still way ahead of the old mac classic though ;)
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Personally, I was a huge fan of "intuition".
It made programming Windows/Screen based apps a breeze compared to Windows stuff of the era (3.1 and before).
desiv
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Still way ahead of the old mac classic though
No kidding. Amiga took it as common sense that a computer released in 1993 would have color. Mac used it as a marketing item. Color Classic, anybody? What a steal at only $1,400 or so! ROFL!
Anyhow, back on topic, I'd agree that Intuition was pretty awesome. I'd go a step further and say that having Intuition in the ROM was a good idea, as well. That way, as a power user/administrator/poor programmer you'd never have to worry about something you did failing before an Intuition screen would be available to present that information in a standard way.
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Still way ahead of the old mac classic though ;)
I suppose for the 1-bit screen models. But the colour machines made more sense for running a gui than the amiga. 640x512 epilepsy mode in super slow 256 colour (amiga AGA, 1992ish) vs 24 bit colour 640x480 minimum (mac colour quickdraw 1987). The fact of the matter is that commodore were dicks who pretty much ran themselves into the ground out of greed. AGA should have happened in 1990 and roughly had playstation levels of 3D power, just as OCS happened in 1985 and was roughly Megadrive levels of 2D. I feel super bad for commodore's engineers.
Truthfully, AGA was both late, and crap.
EDIT: I just remembered the windows 3.1 RM nimbus' that we had at school. 1024x768, 256 colours. non interlaced.
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So your saying the Amiga's technology fell behind while Commodore as a company was failing? Wow, what a revelation!
Seriously, though, it's old news.
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So your saying the Amiga's technology fell behind while Commodore as a company was failing? Wow, what a revelation!
Seriously, though, it's old news.
Commodore failed because the amiga's technology fell behind. Amiga technology fell behind because commodore forced it too. I'd guess that it was on purpose, somehow. Let's just say the management didn't get too wet when the ship sank.
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* multiselect in menus
* assigns
* no-nonsense requesters
* save, use, cancel
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Commodore failed because the amiga's technology fell behind. Amiga technology fell behind because commodore forced it too. I'd guess that it was on purpose, somehow. Let's just say the management didn't get too wet when the ship sank.
Don't agree. They weren't as aggressive with the chipsets because management was cutting back on R&D. With the right support, I think they techs could have released AGA sooner, and AAA as well after that. With management as it was, they were lucky to get AGA out.
So, the technology was lagging behind because management was terrible.
To top that off, we all know that you don't have to have the absolute best technology to win in this game.
They wanted to market the Amiga as they had the C64. Bad marketing and bad management meant that the only way they would succeed would be technology, and management dropped the ball there as well.
IMHO
desiv
p.s. multi-select in menus?? I hated that!! Mostly because I wrote my first program not knowing you could do it and had my selection code all wrong. So, on testing, you could multi-select, but only the last one worked, even tho the others would have the checkmark... Ooopps.. :-) I fixed that eventually.. :-)
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One that hasn't been mentioned is teh "Leave out" feature in Workbench. Really handy.
And creating a "Shortcut" on Windows isn't the same ting. :)
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Don't agree. They weren't as aggressive with the chipsets because management was cutting back on R&D. With the right support, I think they techs could have released AGA sooner, and AAA as well after that. With management as it was, they were lucky to get AGA out.
So, the technology was lagging behind because management was terrible.
To top that off, we all know that you don't have to have the absolute best technology to win in this game.
They wanted to market the Amiga as they had the C64. Bad marketing and bad management meant that the only way they would succeed would be technology, and management dropped the ball there as well.
IMHO
desiv
p.s. multi-select in menus?? I hated that!! Mostly because I wrote my first program not knowing you could do it and had my selection code all wrong. So, on testing, you could multi-select, but only the last one worked, even tho the others would have the checkmark... Ooopps.. :-) I fixed that eventually.. :-)
You just accidentally agreed with me.
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One that hasn't been mentioned is teh "Leave out" feature in Workbench. Really handy.
And creating a "Shortcut" on Windows isn't the same ting. :)
Both OS4 and MorphOS boneheads want it to be like on Windows now, it's supposedly more user friendly or something.
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How about a bit of controversy...
I vote for:
A500
A1200
CD32
As far as software goes, yes WB was very advanced when it was first released but fell further and further behind the times.
:)
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Truthfully, AGA was both late, and crap.
AGA was 'ok' for the budget home user/gamer hooked-up to a TV type machines (eg A1200, CD32). The real problem was using the same old planar based chipset on their premium machines (A3000 and upwards).
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AGA was 'ok' for the budget home user/gamer hooked-up to a TV type machines (eg A1200, CD32). The real problem was using the same old planar based chipset on their premium machines (A3000 and upwards).
I think the real problem was that most games didn't take advantage of the AGA chipset, to maintain compatability with the A500 to generate bigger sales.
Consider the CD32: Most of the games were just crap A500 conversions.
Microcosm was the only game on the CD32 that made me think WOW! (and even then, the gameplay wasnt the best)
What a bloody shame!
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I think the real problem was that most games didn't take advantage of the AGA chipset, to maintain compatability with the A500 to generate bigger sales.
Consider the CD32: Most of the games were just crap A500 conversions.
Microcosm was the only game on the CD32 that made me think WOW! (and even then, the gameplay wasnt the best)
What a bloody shame!
Most CD32 games were actually A1200 games that didn't make use of the extra storage space (and most A1200 were just lame updates of OCS/ECS games but that's another story).
Imagine what might have happend if the A1200 also used CDROM's as its storage media ;)
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Most CD32 games were actually A1200 games that didn't make use of the extra storage space (and most A1200 were just lame updates of OCS/ECS games but that's another story).
Exactly my point.
No GFX upgrades.
No CD sound
No full use of CD32 Controller.
Crap.
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You just accidentally agreed with me.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension to get the most out of these online forums.
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In todays hardware times i like the idea of morphos style operating system
1)Speed.You don't have to wait ages,if it is properly setup you can load morphos in 2-3 seconds fire up the browser and do what you want
2)Assembly means faster,with a 1,3 ghz processor you can decode 720 hd multimedia content with a 32mbyte ati card(try that with a "normal" operating system like xp with a 32mbyte video card)
3)In our lifestyle we all have the need of doing as much as possible in as little time as possible.Windows xp,vista,and many linux distributions are bloatware,they are full of extra stuff that take tons of time to load up and you wait.Sorry not for me!I need every precious second i can get,so the fast boot time of morphos is for me gold.I dont have time to waste,i want the operating system to start as soon as possible.
So amiga style operating systems are more productive in the sense that you dont waste time waiting for useless stuff to load up and take your memory.
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You just accidentally agreed with me.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension to get the most out of these online forums.
I agree with Tone.
I didn't, and it wasn't accidental. :-)
Not only did I say that any technology issues were more related to bad management then the techs, but I also said that it didn't matter as I don't believe technology is the decision maker.
This is why we have MS and Apple left. ;-)
desiv
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I think we can all agree that AGA was too little too late. If it had been released as part of the A3000+, it might have been a different story.
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I'd suggest that UAE was one of the best ideas in Amiga history. What started as the "unusable amiga emulator" has evolved into something quite remarkable.
Not everybody will agree, but I think it's done more to keep the classic m68k alive than many would care to admit.
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I agree with Tone.
I didn't, and it wasn't accidental. :-)
Not only did I say that any technology issues were more related to bad management then the techs, but I also said that it didn't matter as I don't believe technology is the decision maker.
This is why we have MS and Apple left. ;-)
desiv
That is what I said. You have agreed with me.
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Commodore failed because the amiga's technology fell behind. Amiga technology fell behind because commodore forced it too.
Actually, it looks like you said both. Make up your mind, buddy! Was it the chicken or the egg?!