I wrote this essay this morning:
I'm having fun -- still rocking with Amiga after all these years. Frankly, I'm amazed -- have to pinch myself -- that it is 2011 and I can still do this. After all, I gave it up for dead around the turn of the century. But there's more living to do.
Retrocomputing? Heh. I have a Commodore 128, an Apple //c, a Mac SE/30 and a Tandy Model 100 for that hobby. Amiga is part of my modern-day pursuits.
OK, OK. I have a lot of vintage Amiga gear -- from the bombshell 1000 that started it all on up to an overly stuffed A4000 Desktop whose second motherboard has had an expensive trip to France and back to the States for surgery.
But these days my pursuits have moved on to the next generation. 2011 and I'm having fun with AmigaOS 4.1, update 2. You may complain: No memory protection, non-standard hardware that's costly for the power, the thing won't play Blu-ray movies or rotate your tires.
But it's 2011, and my old pal the AmigaOS is alive. Familiar, but updated. The OS is in active development and runs on currently available hardware. Jar half full, folks. Improvements are coming. More hardware is coming. There's new software, and most of the old Amiga software I care about works better than ever. I'm composing this with Final Writer, and I can scroll the page up and down and move the cursor left and right faster than I ever could on a Commodore-era machine. You should see the exquisite output it makes on my networked PostScript printer.
Pinch myself. It's 2011 and I still get to use the Amiga operating system, my friend since 1.2 was the new number. This is a continuation traceable from the days when blue and orange and white and black were the Workbench four colors of the day.
The right button is still for the menu bar, still up top where it belongs. The Workbench still has its projects, its tools, its drawers. Maybe that's just a metaphor change from a desktop with folders and documents, but it's all reassuringly familiar. Hidden yet accessible are c and s and libs, all serving their sensible purposes. There's no Windows registry. No Linux repositories to confound getting the exact new program you want.
I've dabbled with MorphOS, registering the current version that's on my aging eMac. Very nice, very polished. It runs LightWave v5 so very well, and Titler and ShowGirls are quite worthwhile. I could make a home there, but the butterfly is a little too different for me. No screen dragging? Really? DH0: seems to be something I shouldn't touch, with the stuff I'm looking for to be found on DH1: where Work: should be. Show all files? Not where I expect it -- have to right-click somewhere else. The drawers? They are folders! And the hardware is getting old, with a CRT going soft and capacitors showing slight bulges to worry me.
I'm giving AROS a solid go. I know it to be the "Amiga" Research Operating System, even if they tell me it's now the AROS Reseach Operating System. The hardware is cheap, and it's fast. I'm only working on a single core, but three gigahertz, baby. Zoom! Look at MPlayer go. My heart's with AmigaOS, but my brain says get behind AROS. We can never lose it, never have it taken away from us. Things have been taking away from us before, we remember, and it hurt us badly.
AROS is not ready for me yet, however. It's still a playground for the developers, and I'm not smart enough in that way. Hold my head sideways, it seems like, and I can crash AROS by will of thought. But I can't will it to work without the too-frequent lockups. At least it boots fast and turns off quick, like an Amiga. The Workbench, or Wanderer or whatever, is not as polished as either the real Workbench or the still-slicker Ambient. But now there's screen dragging! That's big. That's what I like. The USB stack is way better, like it is on my three classic Amigas with Deneb cards. And the native applications are coming, slowly. I bought Audio Evolution 4 to encourage its development. The man only wants 25 orders to port Hollywood Designer, I hear. I'll almost bet money there is a Blender port coming, but that's just speculation. Whatever, AROS is on the move.
Still, AmigaOS fits me like a good glove. It's as comfortable as an old shoe, actually, but as stylish as something new with those millions of colors, high-quality audio that dear Paula could never give and sensibly deployed bits of eye candy. Just look at the use of transparency on the Workbench graphics, for all love. It makes sense -- not something dumb like the translucent menu bar OS X has now!
The brothers say they haven't had time yet to overhaul the Workench, but I'm OK with that. Good, old, reliable Workbench. Please don't change it too much. Snapshotting is the way. And KingCON running the Shell. And the king of all desktop computer utilities, Directory Opus, around for all the major moving. That's all I need for file manipulation. Docks and task bars? I've banished all that stuff. Why should we try to look like the other guys? I was always more a ToolsDaemon sort of a guy anyway, so a little thing called AddMenu serves the purpose and puts the programs where I can get at 'em.
Hobby OS? Hobby computer? You bet your a$$ they are.
I never ran a production studio or a tax preparation service during the Amiga heydays. Spreadsheets weren't my thing, and my databases kept track of my comic books and my laserdiscs, not customers or inventory. As a newspaper reporter, I did more work than you can know on a Model 100, using the itty-bitty OS that was the last actual coding by Mr. Gates. When I saw a Microsoft Word window, I knew I was at the office. I came home to my hobby computer, my home computer. My Amiga.
Oh, these days I have a PC and Macs, and there are smart phones in the house. Who doesn't have these things? Heavy lifting is done by an i7 machine that edits 18-megapixel photos and chews on codecs for 1920x1080 video montages. Got LightWave 9 on it, but it's a massive complication the old one is not.
My Sam440 is my fun computer. You don't have to call it an Amiga, but I will. It's an Amiga compatible you can't argue, running the AmigaOS natively. ACube can say what they want about their industrial customers and Debian, but I'll believe it was purpose-built to do just that. My little girl is Samantha. The dog is Samuel. This was meant to be.
The Sam plays games, sure, but I'm no gamer. I have my fun with other kinds of software. Old LightWave, I keep mentioning, is a pleasure, even if the animation preview is severed from the custom chips it craves and won't work. TVPaint is amazing, and Personal Paint has animation even if it lacks the brilliant "move" requester of DPaint. No go on Deluxe Paint, alas. But, hey, I just got distracted by VistaPro and MakePath. ImageFX and Art Departnent Professional are galloping on all cylinders as well. They're a joy with all this comparative (to 68K) power. OctaMED SoundStudio, MilkyTracker, Hively Tracker? All working.
These old tools, for the most part, are working better than ever. Great for diversion, good for serious creative work. The 68K stuff that doesn't want to bang Commodore hardware fits seamlessly into the OS4 environment. What do I care if it's 68K or PPC code if it's fast and doesn't force me into a tiny window or an emulator screen?
I have some new friends too. I'm working through Blender tutorials. Next to me is Blender for Dummies on my Sony Reader. Hey, there's a NLE in there! Who knew that? Hollywood and Hollywood Designer are the creams of our crop. There's nothing from Adobe, from Apple or from Microsoft that's quite like this duo. YAM is the best e-mailer ever, and WookieChat has put me in touch with new friends. I go back to the days of bulletin boards and FidoNet, so why did I never jump on IRC before? HDRec and Audio Evolution are very capable, and there's a new OWB coming on fast. Haven't mentioned TimberWolf/Firefox, but don't really have to. OWB will do the job sooner. I hear MPlayer is going to get better real soon, too, and iBatch and PictureAlbum are cool new tools.
TuneNet is usually playing, even if sometimes I have to rejigger something to get the station list back. Same story with ClipDown, which needs an occasional adjustment, but worth the trouble so I can watch and download YouTube videos of Elwood looking inside his computer case. Hey, listen to that! That's a catchy electronic tune playing on the dual SID chips plugged into my CatWeasel. And look: The slight flash from the floppy activity light every sixth-minute or so is such a great nostalgia trip. Hehe. I can plug in a Shadow of the Beast diskette and RunInUAE knows just what to do with it. Sooner or later, I expect, those joystick ports are going to be good for something.
On back is an honest-to-goodness RS232 port. I don't have one of those on my i7 power tower. Plug in my Wacom tablet and, look-see, it's working great again with TVPaint and LightWave Modeler. Now I've downloaded a newly written program to control X10 devices from the serial port. Just have to order the little X10 box to plug in.
Does it cost too much to run OS4.1 in 2011? Some say yes, and I can't argue with them. Other people have other priorities. They have other desires they want to fulfll more, or maybe they just don't have the money. OK, I understand either way. But do I regret spending the money? No way. I'm going to do it again soon, because there's a big upgrade to be had. More fun to have. The Sam460 and an HD graphics card will give me just about what I need. Trevor's dream machine? Maybe when it comes out I'll sell some stuff to get one. We'll see. Priorities, needs, and desires will be assessed then.
For now, I don't want to be left out of the fun. AmigaOS -- the Amiga Operating System -- is up and running in 2011. Not dead. I have to be running it, have to be having the fun.
