is a A2000 internet capable?

[justthatgood]

Flash, I'm just putting it out there. Just like I tell all the "Fast and the Furious" kiddies that have their little four cylinder soda can cars that think they can push them to the limit and go REALLY REALLY fast. There are limits.

Your Amiga and those cars you have to spend a LOT of money into them to get back any favorable return. Err, I remember trying to surf the web on my PowerMac Quadra 650. I remember trying to use the Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh. That was very, very scary. I just can't imagine trying to use the Amiga "browsers".

[Flashlab]

On my machine (see sig) surfing isn't that bad with IBrowse and AWeb. I guess those browsers are highly optimized because when I surf using ShapeShifter and IE or ICab that is really slow!

As for compatibility; IBrowse can even use my university webmail; I think that's great!

[KThunder]

justthatgood wrote:
... I just can't imagine trying to use the Amiga "browsers".

there are a bunch of guys here telling him first hand experience that it isnt too bad. just know the limitations. get a video card and acelerator, and lots of ram. i have a 3000 with full ram and a video card and it works quite well.

ive seen a few threads like this where people who have actually done this say it works and to try it, and a bunch of people who havent, saying all kinds of negative stuff and i was just wondering why? if you have never run an amiga on the net of course you cant imagine it. you have several amigas, try it, actually try it. then give us an informed realistic opinion.
btw this wasnt meant to be a personal attack it just seems that you arent as poor as you say: you have two heavily upgraded 4000s and a heavily upgraded 2000. you just havent tried.

[sandpiper]

An A2000 certainly is internet capable. I have an A2000 with a 2060 Blizzard, PicassoIV, X-Surf and 100 MB Ram. It works quite well speedwise although it is sluggish compared to my microA1. The only limitation is Amiga browsers in general - and this applies to all Amigas.

I have also used '040 and '030 cards in my A2000. The '040 would be usable but I think the '030 would be too slow in my opinion.

[LoadWB]

My systems,

Amiga 2000, Blizzard 2060, GVP Spectrum 24/28, Ariadne II:
Browsing is slow, but fairly usable

Amiga 1200, Blizzard 1260, Netgear MA401 or LinkSys 10Mb:
Browsing is slow, low colors, some-what usable

Amiga 4000, CyberStorm MKIII '060, Picasso IV, XSurf 3cc:
Browsing is peppy, comfortably usable for casual browsing


As someone else has noted, the largest limitation is the browser available.  Also, I think the graphics datatypes play quite a bit into usability, especially in decoding speed and ability.  A lot of sites just simply don't work, and with CSS becoming more prevalent in development, I expect to see most sites become unusable for Amiga until our browsers catch up.  Whatever happened to AmiMozilla?  I'd love to see Firefox on my Amiga (even if it meant I had to upgrade to PPC, which is in my near dreams.)

[Olecranon]

Wow. I'm not even willing to even try to surf anything on the net with my Amiga's. I'm realistic and I'm poor.

I agree with you.  Just because something CAN be done, doesn't mean it SHOULD be done  :-D  I could buy myself a heck of a PC with the amount of money it would take to upgrade my Amiga systems to the point where I could surf.  

For those who are doing it, more power to you.  It goes to show you how far ahead of it's time the Amiga was..  15-20 years ago.

[Blinx123]

Hi guys,
I m surfing with an emulated AMIGA 6840 and IBrowse at the moment and I must say it s not bad but also not as fast as under windows.

[justthatgood]

@KThunder

I got all those Amigas back before when I had a really good job. The last Amiga I got was my Amiga 2000. That was about 3 years ago. I haven't gotten any new Amiga stuff since then. I've actually played with an Amiga 4000T that was networked and used InfoChannel (remember my rants about our city having an underground TV broadcasting Amiga following)

That was to do some FTPing and that was about it. Remember a while back when I mentioned selling my Amigas to make money so I could survive and actually pay some bills. Most of you basically said I had issues and the money that I would make wouldn't be worth the "trauma". Yes I'm still poor, and I have all those Amigas, and tons and tons of bills..

[LoadWB]

For those who are doing it, more power to you.  It goes to show you how far ahead of it's time the Amiga was..  15-20 years ago.

Yes, the hardware and software is outdated, but not the philosophy.  What this does is show how such a simplistic platform could still be viable if it were still developed for.

As much as I hate to compare the two, the Mac actually shows what a modernized Amiga could do.  Playing the "what if" game like we do so often, had Commodore not gone bankrupt and had they actually listened to their gurus years before, the Amiga could have gone head-to-head with Apple.  Had they accepted Sun's offer to license the Amiga 3000UX... so on and so forth.

I will probably get flamed by the nay-sayers, disillusioned, and trolls for saying this.  I've often imagined winning a lottery and investing several million dollars into Amiga development.  Or even investing other wealth into such a project.  But it can't be a small amount.

A full revival of the Amiga requires a massive strike in software and supporting hardware.  Sun long ago realized the power of commodity off-the-shell x86 hardware when it ported Solaris, and then realized the demand when it discontinued x86 support, only to bring support back after the user back-lash.  Apple did the same more recently.

Saying what I am about to say will probably get me flamed even more.  For Amiga to make a true come-back, it would have to run on whatever crap can be bought at Wal-Mart, WorstBuy, CompUSEless, Radio Shanty, et al.  Apple did it with OSX, and I believe that given an infusion of enough money and talent (management and development,) Amiga could do it, too.  Again, it would have to be swift, silent, and powerful.

Productivity software would have to exist immediately, functionality and compatibility with existing Windows systems would have to be working immediately, games would need to be there right away, and none of it can be vaporware.  History shows that vaporware and poor management has brought down many an advanced product.

Amiga would have to succeed where Linux is failing, and with the quickness.  A secure version of AmigaOS with a security-enhanced filesystem (Reiser, EXT2/3, whatever,) strong networking, Windows networking compatibility (Samba,) secure memory architecture, a useful web browser (Firefox,) modernized email client (I believe YAM could fill this role,) productivity software (StarOffice/OpenOffice,) legacy game compatibility (give us nostalgia, dammit,) new games, standard hardware compatibility (maybe custom hardware to start with.)

Oh yeah, and use AMD64

[KThunder]

justthatgood wrote:
... Remember a while back when I mentioned selling my Amigas to make money so I could survive and actually pay some bills. Most of you basically said I had issues and the money that I would make wouldn't be worth the "trauma". Yes I'm still poor, and I have all those Amigas, and tons and tons of bills..

yeah i remeber that. i think my advice was along the lines of go ahead and sell one or more of your machines. what internet do you have now?  

[mr_a500]

I've been using an A500 to surf for the last 3 years (...surf the internet, not the waves... although the A500 might make a good surfboard :-D) - so yes, it is possible on an A2000.

It can be a bit slow when there are hundreds of images or tons of useless javascript. Pages with flash are a nightmare. I was shocked though that IBrowse worked perfectly with my office's Microsoft Outlook Web Access. I had expected it to fail with some stupid IE-only bs, but it worked and looked exactly the same in IBrowse on my A500 (..but 16 colour). It's amazing writing work emails from home on an A500.

[KThunder]

probably the three hurdles people have to jump with amigas on the net are:
1. access speed- do NOT use the normal serial port unless you are running 14.4 modem or so

2. images- you really really need a video card. even simple pics have to be converted including dithering possibly

3. flash, java, etc. most amiga browsers dont handle this stuff well if at all.

[mr_a500]

probably the three hurdles people have to jump with amigas on the net are:
1. access speed- do NOT use the normal serial port unless you are running 14.4 modem or so

14.4 modem? What do you mean? Normal serial is OK running at 38400 with 56K modem and 16 colour screen. Any higher than this though and you run into problems due to screen depth. I tried 57600 and it would go extremely slow until I switch to 2 colour screen, but 38400 works perfectly fine in 16 colour.

2. images- you really really need a video card. even simple pics have to be converted including dithering possibly

You don't "really really need a video card". You can get along fine with 16 colours if you've got a good palette. Of course it's a lot nicer with more colours, but not necessary. (I can take a screenshot for proof)

3. flash, java, etc. most amiga browsers dont handle this stuff well if at all.

Too true.

[Argus]

Just use Ibrowse and turn off image loading and it works quite fast, even on a 68030.  Of course, no CSS and javascript is slow, but it works.

[KThunder]

@mr_a500

the serial ports on amigas have no buffer to them and are dependant on chipset timing. something you alluded to in your post (screen depth) a real serial port (gvp ioextender or other) can lock any serial speed without dropping bytes retransfering or logging out without regard to screen depth or cpu loading

you dont absolutely need a video card especially if you turn off image loading etc. however if you have to load images they have to be converted and possibly dithered to be displayed in 16 color or whatever. this takes time and many people dont like that.

an amiga running with a video card at 16 or 24 bit depth wont have to do hardly any conversion of images. this would make surfing much more enjoyable and realistic.

i usually run at 8bit video so some stuff has to converted i can deal with that.