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Author Topic: Calling all long time Amiga users!!!  (Read 6804 times)

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Offline MuLTiViEW

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Re: Calling all long time Amiga users!!!
« on: August 20, 2005, 05:19:13 PM »
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1) Name 5 all time favorite games (can be Amiga specifically or multiformat.


- Arctic Fox ....  one of the first games I ever saw for Amiga
- Archeon II.....   unique chess-like game
- Ports of Call.....   incredibly this game still exists in newer forms today.
- Bloodwych.....     I wish this one was still supported today.  There is a modern version like PoC that tried to get off the ground.  Great work and many hours wasted playing this one!
- Shadow of the Beast....     I'd like to add a 3 way tie with this entire series.      1.2.. and 3.    All were epic


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2) Name 5 all time favorite companies (companies which produced games, of course, but also companies that produced hard, and i dont mean Commodore itself, but third parties).


 - Psygnosis   (game makers)
 - DKB  (Dean K Brown software (and hardware!)) Maker of the DKB 3128, Wildfire 060 (first ever 060 card) , MEGACHIP! (need I say more?)
 - GVP  (makers of great hardware, particularly SCSI controllers.  Also many other devices too numerous to list.
 - Phase 5   ... although I never owned any of their products, I believe if it weren't for this company's existance,  Amiga could have falled to the scrap heap a lot damn sooner.
 - Pheonix Technologies....   I have to list this very rare and little known company here.  They made one board really,  the A1000 replacement board.  The insight to do this has yet to be realized by the Amiga community at large.  Big balls to even try it!  

 
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3) Things you CAN do with Amiga that CANT with most modern PC´s (of course you can also explain why you prefer to surf internet using amiga browsers rather than pc´s ones)


 -  Y.A.M.  !!!!!!!     I have yet to see one single mailer on the microsoft, linux, or mac side of life that dares compare.  I had three different versions of this software running so good,  I swear I could view web pages better than Ibrowse with it!  I miss it terribly.    (yet another mailer)

 - The ability to INSTALL something on my computer without having to reset the @#$! machine!  The power of the "REFRESH" line when adding libraries or new devices is something Bill Gate has yet to even dream.

 - For some reason, PC paint programs that I got stuck with (OEM versions)  still can't hold brushes like DPaint or other paint programs on the Amiga can.  I used to be able to modify pictures quick.   PC, it's such a drag I dont even bother anymore.
 
 - Mouse has always seemed more native and natural than a PC mouse.  While I do love the Logitech scroll mouse, the Amiga mouse didn't require a sissy mouse driver.  :P

 - The ability to easily and quickly modify system settings and know what and where to edit something without having to worry about 400,000 DLL's that could throw the entire system out of whack with one mistake.  
 
 - The feeling I get when I get a new Amiga is like welcoming a new friend rather than getting something I may be throwing away in a few years.
  I can remember the day I first plugged in my A500....  and also the day my A3000 arrived.  I can't properly describe it.
  My PC on the other hand,  I can remember nothing about the day I got it except how disgusted I was that it wasn't an Amiga.

 - I could go on and on here....  I better stop with the above.. ;)

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4) Famous QUOTES about 8 and 16 bit machines.


  "You really don't need more than 640k of RAM..."  - Bill Gates  

"The sixty-four bit upgrade to the thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition."   - unknown disgruntled Microsoft user

"We are not even close to finishing the basic dream of what the PC can be."  - Bill Gates

 Oh here......

 

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5) 5 all time favorite people (for example Jay Miner, or some programmer like Archer McLean , Geoff Crammond, David Braben, Sir Clive Sinclair... Things like that)


 Jay Miner,  Dean K. Brown, Dave Haynie, Urban Müller (AmiNet!!) , and of course..... WAYNE HUNT BABY!!  :-D

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6) Amiga estimated sales figures. I already have an idea about how many Amigas were sold in UK, Germany & USA. Would love to have feedback from italian users, spanish users, french users, polish users, czech users, aussie users, turkish users, greek users, belgium users (sorry Effy, dont know how to say that.. :)), new zealand users, you get my idea.


  Not sure what you want here, but I WILL mention the fact that I learned from this forum that the "Pheonix A1000 remake board" that drop in replacement board, sold another 40 units this year (2005) in fact.
 Pretty incredible after the last run was 13 years before that.  A sign of things to come?

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7) Same as 6) but guessing how many ACTIVE Amiga users are left.


 I'm willing to bet there is a good million or two.  Seems in Eastern Europe Amiga still reigns.  Germany is much larger than I thought and Australia is still strong.   Hell there may be close to 3 million or more,  and that's probably the number who don't use anything other than Amiga.

 The stat takes on a different meaning if you consider that...

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8) If the Amiga wasnt your first home computer, name which one it was.


 An Atari 600... then an Atari 130XE.  Amazingly, I learned that Jay Miner had some design on the Atari I used !!  Neat eh?

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9) Quick opinion about EMULATION of Amiga on other systems


  A nice peek at the good ole days if you dont have the hardware.  Otherwise, it's not exactly the same.  An 87mhz 040  emulated is pretty neat.  But at the same time sad,  makes you want to go back to the real McCoy.

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10) Quick opinion about ABANDONWARE


 Abandonware has it's place.  It's retarded to try and sell 15 year old games today.  No kid is going to go and pay money for an ancient copy of Arctic Fox,  but that same kid might step back in time and pick it up by accident and witness the ancestor of the 3d games he/she takes for granted today.

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11) Quick opinion about if computing in the 8/16 era was funnier than now


 It's funny now because back then they were trying to be serious.  Arctic Fox was funny, because in 1985 it was less than 512k in total size... if the same game was "conceived today, it would be close to 2 gigs in size and require 128mb of video RAM.
 Hysterical!

12) Quick opinion about the demo scene  

 I think that's one thing I never got into.  

coming soon from Morrowind DVD
a movie starring:  dONKeY
 \\"Shadow of Corky the Guar\\"
 

Offline MuLTiViEW

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Re: Calling all long time Amiga users!!!
« Reply #1 on: August 21, 2005, 10:25:34 AM »
Lemmink gave me that info....   it's on my thread "Anyone interested..."

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   Re: Anyone interested....
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    I wonder what ever happened to those people who designed that?

That is something I can tell you exactly A user from the amiga-news.de forum dug Andrew up in Australia and he made a last productionrun of about 40 Boards or so from leftover Parts. The whole thing fuels one of the longes running threads in the forum:

http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php3?id=14356&BoardID=1

I got my Phönix (made in 2005 ) a few months ago.
As a springoff some other user from this forum created a turboboard just for the Phönix, about 20 or so were made till now. This is the Thread:

http://www.amiga-news.de/forum/thread.php3?id=15097&BoardID=1

that resulted in this board:

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/showhardware.cgi?HARDID=1593

And it was this board I was talking about that costed about 150 EUR each with absolute no profit

The Phönixcreator set up a HP too:

http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/sirius/phoenix.htm



 As for cade's rant :

 Are you serious??

 Amiga could do as much as playstation with the right graphics card.
 It's true that most of the older Amiga's were on the 32 bit / 16 bit side.  
 Particularly in the "output" bits at a time operation.  

 I was going to do a long post on this, but rather I stuck to the topic's general request and provided some answers for someone who quite possibly will be putting the Amiga name into the news somewhere.
 The A1000, A500, A2000, A2500, A600, and CDTV   were all pretty much     32 bits input / 16 bits output devices.
 This meant most of the internal processing could handle 32 bit programs and had a 16 bit data address.

 Most of your 40 pin DIP chips could only work at 16 bit addresses.
 
 The secret or ultimate failing could be put on the shoulders of the Denise chip.   After all, some lower Fat Agnus chips were really 24 bit chips stuck on a 16 or 24 bit BUS and had to fight the 68000 for bus rights. (causing the bottleneck)
 The higher Agnus chips were full blown 32 bit, but truth is, they didn't thrive as well either, since some still had to use those same bandwidths.  
 Only the A3000 had a better bus since it was the first Amiga done on the 68030's bus.
 This means the motherboard was purely designed to function on a 32 bit capable bus.
 However.......  Denise was still a 40 pin DIP chip!

 Enter AGA.....    (you can figure out what the improvements here are thru proper research)

 RTG was also another "fix"

 Truth be know, and without getting into some full blown boring and technical debate.  

 I personally feel that the software was and is still not there to truly show off the Amiga's power.

 And to stay true to this thread's theme,  I will like to state that one of the good reasons I love the Amiga is the knowing that at anytime, the right software done the right way, (with a lot of elbow grease!)   can turn things around.

 Aminet is full of games that were "half baked"  unfinished, or all conceived from Workbench.   Not to say that workbench is bad, but a lot of people do their coding from there.  The old timers did it from an interface which did not even load Workbench.
 This is important on many levels because some of the libraries and things you can have running in the background, might affect how the game runs.
 There are some brilliant ideas floating around on Aminet made by single Amiga users, and not a well organized team or company.  
 When one person does something by himself, he can sometimes be devoid of ideas that a team of people would clearly be able to mix in.
 A very good example of a buggy game, yet was a decent idea is a game called:  Ultimatum  
  It's a 3-D tank game that will crash the Amiga after a while of playing, but it was a pretty good 3-d game for someone who was only starting out.
 It was severely lacking in textures and detail in my opinion on top of apparently being extremely buggy.
 A team of people could have taken that game to the level of Playstation quality.
 
 Stop and think about that a moment, because the target machine it was designed to run on was a 14.3 mhz A1200.  A 24-bit data wide output stock A1200 !

 All it needed was a thorough debugging, and some dressing for the blocky looking graphics.  i.e textures.

 My overall point being,  that there are some Amiga games out there that were simply underdeveloped.  Some of those games were quite capable of being "Playstation quality" but without the organization some PSx game developers had behind them, the games appear kinda lame.

 As soon as I get back from out of town, I'm going to start some hardware projects, then hopefully some software ones!
 I have playstation also, and know full well that the good ole Amiga "can do" some of the types of games you'd be interested in, but for possibly reasons of "time to do them" and organization" and team work,  they haven't appeared.

 
 Then again,   some do crack through......

 Genetic Species was ever as good as any of the Alien PSx games.   In fact, I think it looked better.

 Lastly,  you should really be ashamed of yourself for all the spelling mistakes and typos in your post.
 As well as the attempts at swearing.  It really isn't necessary to lose your cool in the face of a simple request.  This clutters up the forums and stampedes what little progress we can get going in here.
 If you want to "troll" and such, be sure to check out my interesting game link at the bottom.   We have developed at least 15 million unique ways to appy the word "f*ck" to someone ...  ;)

 By the way......   Playstation and Playstation II  were both developed way after the Classic line of Amigas  and these computers had the advantage of some extreme graphics chipsets.
 These machines were different "animals" compared to the Amiga with a solely different goal in mind.
 i.e they weren't meant for personal computer usage.

 A friend of mine in Germany thought it was funny to try and do a "Lara Croft" reverse engineered game port on the Amiga 4000.

 I ran this interesting single-user-made attempt on my poor helpless 25mhz A3000 with EGS-Spectrum 24 bit gfx board.
 18mb total.  
 You know it wasn't half bad?
 Of course I had some speed problems due to the processor being so slow.....
  He also designed the thing to run on a 68060 and actually did it in 020 code without having a way to test it.
 
 I was actually impressed with the very short single leveled reverse engineered port.  If I only had a bit more speed.....

 Ending this post with the final thought of......    "Anything is possible on this machine if you put your mind to it"
   
 With that said, I have to say bye for about a week.  But I'll be back.

 Now wake up after reading this extremely long post   !!!   :-D

coming soon from Morrowind DVD
a movie starring:  dONKeY
 \\"Shadow of Corky the Guar\\"