Top 3 best ideas in amiga history?

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

I'm probably being thick.  What's a SSD?

Solid State Drive.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

That's, ahem, HELLA RAD!

Works though

[Karlos]

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

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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.