Amiga guilt and time distortion.

[runequester]

I'd like to discuss a phenomenom that I've observed in the past year or so.

Amiga guilt, and by relation, time distortion.


The subject is plagued by feelings of guilt about having used an amiga. This may come from insecurities of having made a "wrong choice" and a burning need to correct others misconceptions.


Various symptoms may manifest themselves, such as feeling a need to post in as many conversations as possible with any of the following:

How much commodore sucked

How much PPC sucked

How terrible the amiga was compared to the PC

How much every amiga model past the 500/1000/2000 was awful and terrible

How much better Turrican 2 was on the C64

That x86 solves everything

How terrible AGA was

That the X1000 is super expensive, in case you hadn't heard

In doing so, they hope they can somehow dispel the illusion other users had of having an interesting discussion about amiga's, by reminding them of things every person on the planet is already aware of.



This is often accompanied by Time Distortion. In this particular illness, the subject mentally transposes the PC market of today to the 80's and early 90's, imagining a world where PC's are reasonably priced and can run for hours without crashing, compared to an unexpanded 512 kb amiga 500.
All thoughts of 2000 dollar PC's running windows 3.1 while vomiting out PC speaker bleeps are banished, and the world is made of microsoft flowers and intel bunnies dancing in the meadows.



The cure for both illnesses is to go have a wank, and is thus easily accomplished. If you still suffer from either afterwards, you obviously didn't wank it enough.

[save2600]

Shoot, I thought this thread was about an Amiga quilt, which by after surrounding yourself in, you'd be zapped back to 1985  :lol:

Seriously, not sure I can relate to all of those points above, but I will say I felt guilt when I momentarily ditched the Amiga scene in the mid 90's. Took nearly 6-7 years before realizing I couldn't live without my first love  

[amigean]

I don't know much about the 'guilt' effect, but you've hit the nail on the head with your time distortion theory - it's pervasive lately and the examples you mention make the point abundantly clear.

Having said that, it's not unique to aficionados of a some obscure home computer from the 80-90s: It's a common psychological fallacy, and some hold that even professional historians are not immune from it.

[Borut]

Yes this is really a phenomenon. For me it seems this are former Amiga-users went to x86 and want to convince now all remaining that this was the only right way. Why they do so? They miss the Amiga OS and really, really, really want that the holy Amiga direction goes the x86 way so they need not buy new HW because they are somehow not satisfied with their existing HW/OS possibilities.
But probably its more psychological - I don´t really know and also don´t understand. Thought there are enough Amiga directions available but there are still grownig crazy new ones (x86 with Linux?) - crazy new world

[commodorejohn]

In doing so, they hope they can somehow dispel the illusion other users had of having an interesting discussion about amiga's, by reminding them of things every person on the planet is already aware of.

+1000 to the OP, and extra-emphatically to this bit. It's like some people here are so insecure about even using one of the x86 machines they grew up hating that they want everybody to agree that x86 is the new True Amiga, so that they'll never have been "wrong" in the first place.

Yes this is really a phenomenon. For me it seems  this are former Amiga-users went to x86 and want to convince now all  remaining that this was the only right way. Why they do so? They miss  the Amiga OS and really, really, really want that the holy Amiga  direction goes the x86 way so they need not buy new HW because they are  somehow not satisfied with their existing HW/OS possibilities.

This.

[persia]

Windows 95 ended the debate.  It was solid, graphical and cheap.  There was a brief moment for Amiga and then it was gone.  I believe there was no winning hand.  The direction the industry took was inevitable.  Instead of crying over the past let's just enjoy our little corner of it.

[minator]

Windows 95 ended the debate.  It was solid, graphical and cheap.  There was a brief moment for Amiga and then it was gone.  I believe there was no winning hand.  The direction the industry took was inevitable.  Instead of crying over the past let's just enjoy our little corner of it.

Windows 95 Solid

Have you ever used it?  Solid is not the first word that comes to mind.

I remember it well.  It was incredibly slow, took gobs of RAM and flakey as hell.  From a reliability point of view my Amiga was a lot better.

Windows 98 was better and was functionally a lot better than the Amiga but it was still slow.

Then I got BeOS and all was right with the world.  It was fast, and it could multitask properly without sizing up or crashing.  Just like the Amiga.

[save2600]

When Windows 95 came out, I was impressed. Until I bought a machine to run it. I always thought of Windows as a program that ran other programs - kind of like GEOS, but somehow Workbench never felt that way. Games that were designed to run on DOS ran better and with less fuss during the mid 90's. My first Win95 machine, I ended up using DOS more. Go figure  

[Khephren]

Windows 95 ended the debate.  It was solid, graphical and cheap.  There was a brief moment for Amiga and then it was gone.  I believe there was no winning hand.  The direction the industry took was inevitable.  Instead of crying over the past let's just enjoy our little corner of it.

welldone for proving RQ's point.  C= going bankrupt ended the debate.
'95 was the first usable MS gui that vaguely operated as amiga/mac users expcted a gui OS to function.
It wasn't cheap. because our OS was free. it wasn't solid, because it invented the term 'bluescreen of death'. it was a massive resource hog, as all MS OS's have been since.

RQ I may think commodore heralded the downfall of the amiga, but that does not mean i'm a pc fanboy. C= does not automaticaly = amiga. Mehdi Ali proved that.
Also, many of those who slag off various elements of C= or Amiga, are probably mourning what could have been if things had been changed with hindsight, not shouting for the oposition.

[B00tDisk]

There's two sides to this coin.  There's realizing that from '85-'90 the Amiga rode tall in the saddle, then there's outright delusion: believing that the Amiga was still a viable platform into the late 90s, that AGA was some kind of awesome panacea of graphical capability (it wasn't; it was a chopped down version of a chipset that was late and throtted back by Commodore management and outdone by SVGA when it was released) and that OS4 was poised to take the world by storm.

Most people had seen the writing on the wall by 1994 and simply acknowledge that the PC side of things wasn't so terrible.

As for processor architecture, until the end of the '486 days and early into the P5 arch life, it was neck and neck.  The 68k series hit a wall and that was that, Motorola made a clean break, went PPC and for a good long while had the backing of Apple and IBM - but there was never a "clean" implementation of PPC on classic Amigas, and no classic OS was created around it.  It was half-steps with WarpOS and Power-Up.  A version of OS4 for classic hardware didn't happen until what, 2008?  2009?

Amithlon showed that a tightly integrated emulation solution was a step in the right direction.  That Amithlon could run pure x86 code was more proof of it: imagine all the apps being scrambled for now (decent web-browsers, for example) being at your fingertips circa 2002!  

You can cry about it, you can hold up this or that datasheet from nearly 20 years ago but until you build a time machine that can warp the world back to 1990, that's where any arguments about what CPU is best for the desktop remains.  Games went 3d, 3d that required a different approach than what the Amiga had or has.  The apps that the Amiga was really a champion of?  Rendering?  Yeah, you know what that requires?  LOTS AND LOTS OF CPU CYCLES.  Ask me how long I'd rather wait for a CGI sequence to render: minutes on a PC or days on an Amiga.  Simple as that.

That's what I saw, that's why I left.  Maybe I'm foolish enough to let myself get trolled by people who rave about the importance of polling a joystick port at 1000hz or whatever, but waving around your AmigaDOS manual telling me I don't know from computing because I don't live inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Field and wear the rose-colored contact lenses doesn't make me want to see your side of the argument!  I used an Amiga.  For years.  I know what it can do.  I know what it can't do.

[Digiman]

Windows 95 Solid

Have you ever used it?  Solid is not the first word that comes to mind.

I remember it well.  It was incredibly slow, took gobs of RAM and flakey as hell.  From a reliability point of view my Amiga was a lot better.

Windows 98 was better and was functionally a lot better than the Amiga but it was still slow.

Then I got BeOS and all was right with the world.  It was fast, and it could multitask properly without sizing up or crashing.  Just like the Amiga.

OS/2 is related to Amiga OS.

Win95 was good enough to stop 99% of companies ditching PC and cheaper than OS/2.

I had the unreleased beta which was OK on 8mb PC, as ever it's usually memory for Winblowz being slow.

[commodorejohn]

You can cry about it, you can hold up this or that datasheet from nearly 20 years ago but until you build a time machine that can warp the world back to 1990, that's where any arguments about what CPU is best for the desktop remains.

A fair point, but it seems like for every obsessive fantasizing about what might have been for the 68k or what might still be for the PPC, there's an equal obsessive ranting about how x86 is, was, and always has been The Only Way, instead of just being the one main path (of many possibilities) that the desktop PC market has taken, and from my reading of the OP that's mainly what he's talking about. (Actually, it seems like there's even more of the x86-obsessed killjoys these days than the PPC delusionaries, but that might just be me.)

Yes, it's true that for horsepower x86 kicks any other desktop architecture's ass these days, but that wasn't nearly so true back in the early '90s - the 68k line was still a reasonable competitor, and PPC was a promising up-and-comer. (Though either of these might be more relevant if Commodore had put some real support behind them, instead of half-heartedly sticking in low-end 020s and 030s with a couple MB of fast RAM and letting everybody else provide the workable 040 accelerators.) As someone in another thread pointed out, the x86 didn't really clearly outpace the 68k until the Pentium Pro in 1995.

(IMHO, what the Amiga really needed by the '90s was less a new CPU architecture and more a complete overhaul of everything else. The Z3 bus was a good first step, but the new machines were still tethered to a chipset far slower than even the now-stock CPUs, unless you bought a separate video card and sound card - not good, considering that Commodore was staking basically everything on them.)

[Digiman]

Before cheap Pentium (ie 94) AGA vs ISA VGA = no real difference. 680x0 CPU price vs 486DX/Pentium/AMD586 was a problem for price/performance by 94.

OS wise Win 3.1 was pretty bad, until Win95 all that editing conig.sys file and 640kb memory barrier = utter bollox for PC gamig. Win95 multitasking was WORSE than KS/WB 1.3 whatever CPU you bought. Oh and massive memory leak requiring reboot 2 or more times if you go on intetnet/use GDI memory* my Amiga 2000 with Supradrive ran for WEEKS, something you need 2000/XP to manage on PC

Also add the fact you needed a 486DX50/DX266 to play Lotus 3 as fast as CD32/1200 (1500+VAT in 93 with CD+Gravis) and Pentium 100-120 for Super Stardust PC at same speed as AGA (aain 1500ish in late 94) I think there is some clueless posting at best. More to PC gaming than Wing Commander (shit) and Doom (perfect for PC like Beast is perfect for A1000/2000/500 and impossible on PC in 91)

AGA inside CD32/A1200s only problem was C= needed to update it in 2-3 years AND solve 680x0 CPU price performance. Unlike 1986 A500/1000 in 1991/2 wiping the floor with £800 386DX25 multimedia PC playing Lotus II(Amiga OCS) vs Lotus III(PC) oh and don't forget 2 hours with QEMM386 (£99) to get the DOS games to work. Also a not having a SIMM slot and hence a cheap 512kb SIMM option to double 1200/CD32 speed was a classic Commodore oversight. Hell make it 1.5mb Chip/512kb Fast on motherboard deign. grrrrr don't remember Apple/Wintel crippled to 50% CPU speed in the box from day of sale *sigh*

256 VGA colours was a bit of an issue pre A4000/1200 release sure.

*I know this as a fully ITIL qualified service manager from 96-99. Win95 was terrible for business users, Win98 SE bare minimum acceptable.

[runequester]

There's two sides to this coin.  There's realizing that from '85-'90 the Amiga rode tall in the saddle, then there's outright delusion: believing that the Amiga was still a viable platform into the late 90s, that AGA was some kind of awesome panacea of graphical capability (it wasn't; it was a chopped down version of a chipset that was late and throtted back by Commodore management and outdone by SVGA when it was released) and that OS4 was poised to take the world by storm.

THere's a lot of grey scale inbetween. Its okay to think AGA was pretty cool, and the A1200 was a nice machine, without being a zealot. AGA /was/ better than OCS/ECS. Now, in 2011, how it compared to [insert PC here] or how OS 3.1 compared to [insert windows version here] is competely irrelevant.

That's what I saw, that's why I left.  Maybe I'm foolish enough to let myself get trolled by people who rave about the importance of polling a joystick port at 1000hz or whatever, but waving around your AmigaDOS manual telling me I don't know from computing because I don't live inside the Amiga Reality Distortion Field and wear the rose-colored contact lenses doesn't make me want to see your side of the argument!  I used an Amiga.  For years.  I know what it can do.  I know what it can't do.

Lets step back and relax man

Its not binary. Its okay to enjoy what the amiga was, for what it is.
Its 2011 today. Not 1995. There's no point fighting the holy wars of computing anymore.

[Digiman]

Yes, it's true that for horsepower x86 kicks any other desktop architecture's ass these days, but that wasn't nearly so true back in the early '90s

The point PC was viable future winner for UK computer gamers was mass adoption by software houses of VGA graphics as standard. Why?

386 VGA/SBLASTER owner buys SF2....pretty slow and unplayable. 18 months later sells it and gets 486DX66 +GRAVIS etc....suddenly old unplayable game is arcade quality. Had 256 colours but is faster and sounds better automatically.

A500 owner buyss SF2...32 colour slow rubbish....3 years later he gets a 4000/030 and loads SF2....STILL rubbish (same speed, 32 colours, SFX/music). Has to pray a good AGA version is released and buy a 2nd copy if it is ever made! No reward for his £999 investment!

And that my friends is the problem, in 1990 most arcade games on PC had 256 colour graphics like Super Nintendo and their old PC games bought before upgrading to better PC automatically improved without the need for a single line of game code to improve. VGA mass adoption was the key. EGA Cinemaware games will forever be inferior to Amiga versions even on an running on Intel i7 920 PC today. After VGA though it was game over. 256 colours was enough even for 3D games like Doom or Screamer Rally  comparedto PS1 RidgeRacer/Doom.

Big problem for AGA AND Atari Falcon potential purchasers no?