Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: macto on May 08, 2004, 08:21:12 PM
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I'm giving a public talk tonight and was thinking about how I was going to be strutting into the room with my PowerBook rather than an Amiga. (You don't expect me to lug an A2000 on the subway, do you? ;-) ) This is an implicit form of advertising and laptop manufactuers know this as well as anyone else. That is why manufacturers put so much effort into designing unique and aesthetic cases for their laptops and couldn't care less about the appearance of their desktops. Apple is no different with their glowing logo.
So here I am stuck advertising for a product that I do not like (a PowerPC based Macintosh), rather than one I do like (a 680x0 based Macintosh or Amiga).
It's just a thought, and it's not as though presentation software would burden a 68k. (I'm using an ancient Macintosh application to present the visuals.)
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This is a situation where WinUAE becomes a very useful tool indeed.
I use a real Amiga for normal every day stuff, but I've done some very good presentations to a group of Electronics Engineers on my laptop running Amiga Forever. I developed and tested the presentation on my A1200, and then simply compiled a playable version which I copied over to the laptop. This allows you the best of both worlds - you're still using AmigaOS and you're still able to use a laptop.
My presentations were announced as the best in the class. Everyone else used PowerPoint, I think people were interested to see someone doing something a little bit different, besdies the fact that my Hollywood presentation kicked PowerPoint ass of course ;-)
The laptop is also fantasic for doing work away from home. I was finding it a problem that I used to do all my assignments on my Amiga because it meant that I was only able to do work at home. It was difficult to get any work done during actual college time, because any work done on the Windows machines there would have to be repeated in my favourite apps on the Amiga when I got home.
The laptop solved these issues, I just did all my work in the same applications under AmigaForever when I was away from home, and then I was able to take that work home to my real Amiga and continue with it.
Try Amiga Forever for the laptop - you wont regret it. I'm not sure what the MAC version is like though...
Brian
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Why use Amiga Forever when I have real Amigas? Yeah, I know, so that I can have a laptop. For some reason, I've never had much luck with emulators. When I do, they seem to run slow and just don't feel the same (I know that is subjective). But I'm happy to hear that you have had some luck.
As for PowerPoint, I wonder how many people realise how unnecessary it is. My talk is being given on a prehistoric word processor. I use a full screen preview mode for the presentation proper. Sure, I loose transition effects but I don't care about those seeming as I view it as style over substance (yeah, I know opinions will differ). From the looks of it, I can even embed audio and video so multimedia content is okay. :-D Some people use Adobe Acrobat (or Preview on the Mac) to the same end. But most people are convinced PowerPoint is the only way to go ...
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You're right that it doesn't quite feel the same (although it gets close), but you're wrong about the speed. Amiga Forever on my 1.8Ghz Laptop is faster than my real Amiga, which runs on a top of the range BlizzardPPC 68060@64, 603e@256!
As I say, I use a real Amiga when I'm at home, Amiga Forever is merely a tool to allow me to do work in Amiga applications when I'm away from home. Otherwise, the only option would be to do them in PC applications all the way, and since I feel much less creative when sitting at a Windows environment, Amiga Forever comes in handy.
As for presentations, PowerPoint IS good - it allows you to mix a whole host of multimedia into one presentation, allowing you to demonstrate and present whatever you wish. Hollywood is based around the same thing. In some ways the version I used to do my presentation was nowhere near as advanced as PowerPoint. In other ways it was far more advanced than PowerPoint, it's hard to explain. At the time, Hollywood had a text only interface - you literally had to program your own presentation.
At first I saw this as a major downfall and almost gave up on Hollywood completely before I'd even given it a chance. Then I saw a tutorial in "Total Amiga Magazine" and decided to give it a go. The disadvantages of a text based interface are clear but what is not so clear are it's advantages - which I only found out afterwards.
With a text based interface the possibilities are seemingly endless. You're not limited or tied to anything, your presentation can be whatever you make it. With PowerPoint, if you've seen a few presentations you've seen them all. Everything looks the same, nobody is able to do anything new and as such, it all begins to look a little bland. That gave me an advantage, because with Hollywood I was able to deliver a whole new presentation experience! A completely new look, new effects and transitions, and the presentation ran exactly as I intended it to, it wasn't binded to PowerPoint's same old interface.
The downside is time. A PowerPoint presentation can be knocked up in minutes, but since I had to literally program mine, it took hours of work. But when your presentation is regarded as the best of the whole bunch, that extra work is all worthwhile I think. Especially when the Windows machine being used for the PowerPoint presentations crashed and refused to reboot properly! The whole presentation was cancelled but I was able to go on because mine was done under AmigaOS!
These days Hollywood has a graphical interface for the creation of presentations - I'm still very eager to try that out.
So yeah, Amiga Forever can be an excellent tool. You don't have to desert the Amiga platform to appreciate it's use as a tool. I use my version as a tool, but I still come back to my real Amiga when I'm at home!
Brian
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What a good thread!
Tell me, Win stands for Windows, but what means the letters UAE?
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@macto
You know, you could just use an A600 with a Playstation LCD to make it portable and run SCALA or Elan Performer for your presentations, or even an A1200 wich will make your SCALA presentaions excellent.
I don't know how many times I need to say this but SCALA MM300 and MM400 are THEE #1 applications on the Amiga! period! You have no idea how great SCALA is......and just when you think you know.......you discover a whole new host of things you can do with it.
Also for those who arent aware.......... MediaPoint is now free and downloadable at computercity website. I have not had much time to test it, but it claims to rival SCALA.
so far I find it confusing.
ahhh and last but not least. Macto........you can also use Broadcast Titler 2.0 on an A600 which runs just excellent on 3mb............its a great Character generator that can be used for presentations........if you want music though........you have to run a mod first in Workbench before starting Broadcast Titler....but with SCALA, you can add it all and even use a joystick to flip to the next page or next item on a page.
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but what means the letters UAE
Universal Amiga Emulation is what i recall.
when I first saw amithlon i realized amiga could really be portable. i was too late to get or make one, but it set me on the idea and eventually i got my laptop and installed WinUAE on it. it's great!!!
one of these days i'll hopefully be able to afford hollywood.
portable amiga is a good thing!
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but what means the letters UAE?
One of the really big questions, that not even the UAE gurus knows the answer to.
It seems to me that it has only had one official meaning: "The Unusable Amiga Emulator" which the first versions were called.
This was simply because the first release couldn't even boot. When it later booted, some creative soul named it "The Usable
Amiga Emulator".
Meanings I've found searching the web (excluding "The United Arab Emirates"):
The Useless Amiga Emulator (11 google hits)
The Usable Amiga Emulator (26 google hits)
The Unusable Amiga Emulator (103 google hits)
The Universal Amiga Emulator (114 google hits)
The Ultimate Amiga Emulator (351 google hits)
The Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator (435 google hits)
The UNIX Amiga Emulator (strongest, 714 hits)
Looks like "The UNIX Amiga Emulator" is the winner. FDict and Wikipedia support this meaning too. WinUAE would then be
"The Windows UNIX Amiga Emulator" which is pretty cool.
UAE might however be a recursive acronym. Asking what UAE stands for might be the same as asking what GNU stands for.
GNU means "GNU's Not Unix", UAE might just stand for "UAE Amiga Emulator". I think this might be the case, because the title
on the UAE website is simply "UAE - The UAE Amiga Emulator". "UAE Amiga Emulator" gives 2660 google hits, "The UAE
Amiga Emulator" gives 642 hits.
On my lips, it will always be "The UNIX Amiga Emulator". Linux, linux, linux! :-)
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BTTT, you could always get a generic off-white PC laptop, remove any logos and spray on a boing ball on the lid ... then have it boot into UAE on startup :-?
Work won't let me do that with my laptop :-(
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LOL! Given that my PowerBook is a 12" job, I think an A600 with an external display would be a step backwards in portability. Granted, I would probably have a better keyboard.
On emulator performance, the processor is only a GHz, the machine is in need of RAM, and I doubt that UAE has been optimised for PowerPC processors. But I'll give it another try and see what happens.
I'm beginning to think that the only way I'll get my ideal computer is to emulate it, because modern stuff is way too bloated for my tastes but modern hardware is nicer in many respects.
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I'm pretty sure the 'u' is for 'ultimate'. Wikipedia is written by anyone who has the initiative to click "edit this page", so unless someone corrects an error (or vandalism) it remains there. If it's important, wikipedia may not be the best source because I find things wrong there often. (Especially grammar'n'junk. :-))
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I've tried amithlon on a few laptops but the video driver (given that laptops have their own unique schemes vs. desktops) usually prevents it from working. AmigaForever (the commercial version of WinUAE) has worked great for me in the past, though.
I guess the key is finding the applications you always use that don't depend on the actual amiga hardware. For instance, Scala, great as it is, doesn't work on AF, UAE, etc. because it REQUIRES the custom hardware. I've tried even MM300 from a CU Amiga version that doesn't have a dongle and this is still the case.
On the other hand, Cinema4D, TVPaint, etc. all work pretty good. DPaint = no, but PPaint = yes, etc.
The other thing I've noticed in using Paint programs generally however, is that sometimes there's an issue with mouse speed or 'delay' in painting the lines vs. your movement of the mouse, which effectively prevents you from using it - so you have to tweak the Input settings sometimes.....
kevin orme
amiga university
www.amigau.com
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I'm pretty sure the 'u' is for 'ultimate'. Wikipedia is written by anyone who has the initiative to click "edit this page", so unless someone corrects an error (or vandalism) it remains there. If it's important, wikipedia may not be the best source because I find things wrong there often. (Especially grammar'n'junk. )
Well, BBC has narrowed the Amiga down in this page - The Commodore Amiga (http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A622540).
This is what they write about UAE:
9 There is no general concensus as to what UAE stands for, except that we know it's an Amiga Emulator. Linux users claim it to be the Unix Amiga Emulator. The author says that during most of the program's development it didn't work, so he christened it the Unusable Amiga Emulator. Anyone who uses it for MS-DOS or Workbench systems says that it's the Universal Amiga Emulator.
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Ive been running MacUAE on my Laptop, and Its like an Amiga.. well sorta. :-)
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I'm trying to get the Unix version running under Mac OS X, seeming as MacUAE seems to have been abandoned in 1998. It is working with my A2000 ROM and disk images of Workbench 2.04, but I have been unable to mount a local directory (ie. so I can use my OS 3.9 CD, to see what it looks like in something more than 16 colours ;-) ). It would also be nice to have more disk space in 2.04.
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I've been following UAE for a long time, even prior to the WinUAE version. The original UAE page at one time (a very long time ago) stated that UAE stood for Unix Amiga Emulator. When the application started getting ported to other platforms, the original UAE site had a comment that due to the number of platforms it had been ported to, it should probably be changed to Universal Amiga Emulator. This was back when the original Unix version of UAE was still in development, and when WinUAE was not THE primary port.
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Maybe we could get someone (Black Troll?) to put out a glowing BOING! replacement for Apple Laptops. Just pop out the Apple logo and get your BOING! on. :elvis:
Apple is no different with their glowing logo.
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This isn't meant to slight the developers, but I think the bus errors I was running into was due to sloppy coding. The problem deals with threading, which isn't the sort of thing I know how to work around, so I'm just going to set UAE aside.
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Hello
There are LCD + Mini ITX "all in one" case and there are Opus DC-DC converter that enable Mini-ITX to use +12V battery. For Input device, the notebook can use ordinary / foldable keyboard or Touchscreen LCD.
I hope it is possible to put MicroA1 inside the case in the future. Is there any Touch Screen LCD driver + software support for MicroA1 + AmigaOS 4?
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You'll have to wait... But a cheap laptop with AROS native installed after this bounty (http://thenostromo.com/teamaros/bounty_details_7.html) is complete should work. It's about as close as we are going to get to an Amiga laptop for the forseeable future.
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Cool. The bounties are are great idea and Bounty #15 looks awfully tempting. Now if only I had enough patience for programming. I know that those bounties aren't much given the amount of work, but it is a heck of a lot more appealing than looking for a job. :roll:
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That's what I don't like. People looking at these bounty programs and thinking it's like getting paid to do the work. They complain, not that you are, that it's not enought. That they would be paid more on an actual programming job.
It's not like that. Yeah, it's an incendive to get someone to do the work. It's just that these bounty programs have more in common with the X-Prize and a paid programming job.
I mean 10 Million dollars to build a vehicle what will reach orbit not once but twice in two weeks. Most if not all of the teams have spent more than that. So, why? Well, being part of the project that put the first non-goverment manned craft in to orbit is one, not to mention it looks dead cool on a resume or CV for the non-americans.
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hey this is what Im going to do
sometime ago I got the idea of making a amiga laptop
I thought that I would use a A600 because of the size and that I now have 2, but I bought a used A600 2 weeks ago and its so much whiter than my old one
so I cant rip it out,
and my old one isnt my really mine, its my big brother's and you can see that its been used(really yellow,brown)
so I guess I must buy one more
but theres a problem, if I want it to be more than a 7mhz A600 I must get hold of a A600 accelerator and I have read that they are rare and dont work good
I already have a minit-itx with a dc-dc power card(dont like thoes huge PCUs plus this makes it COMPLETE silent)
which I indended to make a laptop off
I have bought a battery which I have succesfully been using to power my mini-itx
so I would be able to power a a600 with that to if I wire it right
Like one of you above have written I would then proberly used some type of lcd like the ones you can buy ps2(btw have one)
but it would in the end not be as thin as my brothers powerbook g4 17"
latetly I been thinking of using a A1200 but Im not sure how much longer it becomes with a accelerator(still havent recieved my viper :-( )
please give some comments on this :-)
EDIT: I just saw the tread with the A600 with accelerator
wow maybe they arent that rare then :-D
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@kvasarnomad
Somebody has already modified their A600 into a proper laptop called the Suzzane. However the Suzzane does not run on batteries like you want to do. Is it a typical laptop battery you are using?
http://amiga.emugaming.com/suzanne.html
What I don't understand, is that given the purported power savings in the microA1, why it can't be turned into a laptop, albeit a bulky one. Surely battery parts could be borrowed from other manufacturers to make this happen. Alan Redhouse seemed dead against the idea of creating a laptop in his AMIGB speech(over the phone). Oh well, he has too much on his plate as it is. I think it will be up to the community to create them and maybe even sell them. In fact I think his concern might also be that they wouldn't be cutting edge and thus wouldn't be attractive in the mass market.
If you can turn an A600 into a laptop, you most certainly can do that to any other PPC piece of kit. However, I would settle for it being portable, as I never use my laptop unless its plugged in anyway. In fact I am working on a similar project, which I hope to have ready for Amiwest, but its more a gimmick then a feasable solution. A desktop/set-top solution you will be able to pick up by a handle and take with you, which includes a basic screen which would only be used on the road. Sort of like a portable Commodore SX64 but not as bulky or heavy as it consists of laptop parts. Thing is, I really don't want to buy a mini-ITX board until the microA1 comes out so I don't know yet, if I'll go through with the project. I've been told the EPIA motherboards don't run Amiga Forever very well, so I was going to opt for the P4 mini-itx board, but all this is starting to get rather expensive.
Commodore SX64 History
http://computermuseum.50megs.com/brands/sx64.htm
A modded mini-ITX SX64 project
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/sx64/
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macto wrote:
I'm trying to get the Unix version running under Mac OS X, seeming as MacUAE seems to have been abandoned in 1998. It is working with my A2000 ROM and disk images of Workbench 2.04, but I have been unable to mount a local directory (ie. so I can use my OS 3.9 CD, to see what it looks like in something more than 16 colours ;-) ). It would also be nice to have more disk space in 2.04.
I assume that you used the drummond versionhttp://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/ (http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/)
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Yeap. It's weird. I compile it, and it's broken. The precompiled stuff works, but is slower.
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Anyone remember PAWS?
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Hum,
yea,
Bit too bulky at the time i thought (though i wouldn`t have complained if i had one...)
[Did anybody actually buy one of them?]
[WinUAE = Winchester 1876 UniversAl Ejection-mechanism]
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Argo wrote:
Anyone remember PAWS?
yes! it was the 1st time I saw amiga as portable and while it was clumsy, it was a cool idea. plus, their mouse was cute.
somewhere i may still have their cat button.... :-P
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Argo wrote:
Anyone remember PAWS?
Yes, but it was a bit big...
When the Access came out I wanted to make a laptop around that!
Would have been a bit smaller...