Classic Amigas - Still Useful?

[nicholas]

As to the mention of something about having a real machine to do this on rather than an emulator... yeah, I feel the same way.  I guess it all just comes down to time availability... ever since I got the "real" job and had kids, all the tinkering and game playing seemed to go to the wayside...

I only ever use UAE to prep hard drives and get everything I need installed before putting them into real miggies.

[nicholas]

Go figure... the Quantum ProDrive LPS 240 in this A3K is apparently going flakey and it will not boot anymore.  HDToolBox will recognize it but it cannot properly read the driver geometry nor can it save the geometry information (Error 4 on write!) is what I get.  to top that off, it appears to have a random lockup here and there when booted to the 3.1 install  floppy and I don't know if it's related to the HD issue or not.

I have some U320 SCSI drives and am waiting for an active terminatior (already have the 80 pin to 68  & 50 adapters) but then I found a thread that IBM drives are a crapshoot and low and behold these are IBM drives that I have sitting around.

The deck seems to be stacked against me... I'm seriously considering parting with this thing.  I'll wait until I try the active terminator to see if perhaps it's all related to an outgoing drive but I'm not going to hold my breath.

This is the easiest solution.

http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=324&prod_no=AEC-7732U&type1_idno=6&ino=43

[Kernel]

Have you checked the battery??

I removed the battery long ago... it never had problems booting to the HD until yesterday.

And it just booted to the HD no problem.  Then I try again and it doesn't.

The caps lock key is blinking slow and steady.  Anyone know what that means?

[gertsy]

Kids love amigas. Every kid I put in front of one cant get enough. Especially with a real joystick and games like Superfrog or something. Use the amigas with your kids then you both have fun!


@OP

Classic Amigas can be very useful if you are into music and/or graphics and video.

Agree. Kids and wives.  My wife still fires up Loopz every now and then for a late night game. Kids still love Bubble n Squeek.

[Linde]

It seems that modern systems are all for consumption, especially Windows systems. I was always productive and creative on my old Amiga. Can't wait to get an FPGA Arcade and run DPaint again*.



* as a homage to DPaint, GrafX2 somehow comes up horrendously short. It does have some useful features however for pixel work, albeit a nasty user interface.

I'm not sure what you mean by Windows systems being "all for consumption". To your defense, I haven't tried Windows 8, but Windows 7 certainly has a huge base of productivity software.

I could see the sentiment as being valid if you compared modern systems to, say, Commodore 64, where programming the thing is actually something you have to opt out of after boot, but I have to say that Amiga really isn't far off from modern systems in any way related to productivity.

[AmigaBruno]

The classic Amiga personality when I boot it up is: Lets do something fun and creative. I can't say the same for my laptop. I can easily be distracted by an email, even if I am having some fun and mostly what I do is business. It's stimulating, yes, but not pure fun in any sense. My classic Amigas are sheer joy and fun. I wouldn't never contaminate them with the distractions of web browsing and email. That's business. I turn my Amiga's on to do some art and have some fun.

That's it in a nutshell! "Let's do something fun and creative". I started looking into classic 8 bit computers last year after a report on BBC Click some time before. Later still, I realised I could hardly remember what I did on Amigas over a period of about 10.5 years, so that meant I had to buy one to undo the brainwashing. I soon bought a copy of Deluxe Paint III and started creating some computer graphics again, which I'd hardly done since buying a PC. I started with Photon Paint, which was included with my first Amiga, though. I thought that I needed to persevere to get the hang of Windoze or Linux graphics software, but I was wrong. It seems that no Windoze or even Linux graphics software works much like or as well as Deluxe Paint or Photon Paint. People talk a lot about Photoshop, but it seems hardly anyone knows how to use it. Just the name should tell you that it's for photo editing, not creating your own graphics. I think the GIMP is just as difficult and user unfriendly. I've used Paint Shop Pro, but didn't work with it for long.  

I hope to move on to creating something else on the Amiga apart from just graphics in the near future.

As for the faulty components mentioned in this thread, my newly purchased GVP Impact Series II HD8+ stopped working after 5 days. I suspect the hard drive itself isn't the problem. Please check my thread about this and make any suggestions about what you think may have caused this. To sum up, the HDD still spins, the drive read light still lights up, the extra RAM is still detected, but the GVP installation software says it's a Quantum HDD of 0Mb capacity.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64684

[AmigaBruno]

The classic Amiga personality when I boot it up is: Lets do something fun and creative. I can't say the same for my laptop. I can easily be distracted by an email, even if I am having some fun and mostly what I do is business. It's stimulating, yes, but not pure fun in any sense. My classic Amigas are sheer joy and fun. I wouldn't never contaminate them with the distractions of web browsing and email. That's business. I turn my Amiga's on to do some art and have some fun.

That's it in a nutshell! "Let's do something fun and creative". I started looking into classic 8 bit computers last year after a report on BBC Click some time before. Later still, I realised I could hardly remember what I did on Amigas over a period of about 10.5 years, so that meant I had to buy one to undo the brainwashing. I soon bought a copy of Deluxe Paint III and started creating some computer graphics again, which I'd hardly done since buying a PC. I started with Photon Paint, which was included with my first Amiga, though. I thought that I needed to persevere to get the hang of Windoze or Linux graphics software, but I was wrong. It seems that no Windoze or even Linux graphics software works much like or as well as Deluxe Paint or Photon Paint. People talk a lot about Photoshop, but it seems hardly anyone knows how to use it. Just the name should tell you that it's for photo editing, not creating your own graphics. I think the GIMP is just as difficult and user unfriendly. I've used Paint Shop Pro, but didn't work with it for long.  

I hope to move on to creating something else on the Amiga apart from just graphics in the near future.

As for some comments here about faulty components, please read my thread about my GVP Impact Series II HD8+ with the hard drive that stopped working 5 days after I got it if you haven't already done so. http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=64684

[mykrowyre]

I've tried a few times to go back to classic hardware... about 10 times.  I tried an A3000, A1200, A1200 with accelerator, A1200 with Accelerator and Scan Doubler, just about everything.  I even tried MorphOs on a powerbook.  But in the end I gave into the simplicity of WinUAE.

Although I admit if MorphOs ran on modern hardware and wireless worked without a USB wireless adapter, I would have actually used it daily.

As for the classic stuff... no way... just too clunky.  Don't get me wrong, I love it, I would sleep with an A1200 under my pillow, but on my desk it's just too much space wasted with not much return.

[commodorejohn]

I'm not sure what you mean by Windows systems being "all for consumption". To your defense, I haven't tried Windows 8, but Windows 7 certainly has a huge base of productivity software.

I could see the sentiment as being valid if you compared modern systems to, say, Commodore 64, where programming the thing is actually something you have to opt out of after boot, but I have to say that Amiga really isn't far off from modern systems in any way related to productivity.

I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I think there has been an increasing push towards computer-as-consumption-device in the last decade and a half - and while I think it's only gotten really bad in recent years, it was already starting to be a trend when Windows XP came out (as fond as I am of XP, look how many steps were taken into "media integration" with it, as compared to 95-2k. Hell, it was the version where they introduced a dedicated "Media Center" version of the OS.) Nowadays it's apparently expected that an operating system will auto-index all your media files into a master library, auto-play any CD or DVD you drop in the drive, auto-everything so that you barely have to get up off the couch to be a media consumer.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a lot of great productivity software available for Windows (which is why it's taken me so long to even consider switching some of my pursuits over to my Amiga,) but the emphasis has shifted, and continues to shift. And while the Amiga is just as great a games machine as it is a productivity machine, I think Hattig's point holds true, because it was out of the mainstream well before that shift began to take place.

When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles. And we did use it for productive and creative work; my brothers and I drew stuff in MacPaint, or created doofy stories in Storybook Writer and Opening Night. We got our first electronic piano and my mom took up sequencing and printing sheet music on that Mac. And this was the norm back then. None of us were "computer people" at the time, and only my next-younger brother and I really ever became "computer people." We were all just ordinary people exploring the potential this new environment had to offer.

That's not really true anymore. "Average users" don't create, they only consume. (We're told as much - repeatedly - by advocates of consumption devices like tablets.) Nowadays, I'm pretty much the only member of the family who does anything more creative than my taxes on my computer; my brothers play games or read Cracked, and my parents read the news or hang out on Facebook. There's been a shift, and I think I'm the only one who's even noticed. And even I have more trouble getting myself in a creative mood on my modern systems.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just psychological; maybe putting myself in an old environment causes me to revert to the old mindset. But there's just a certain je ne sais quois electronic-muse that vintage computers have and modern computers don't.

[TheBilgeRat]

I'm not going to say you're wrong here, but I think there has been an increasing push towards computer-as-consumption-device in the last decade and a half - and while I think it's only gotten really bad in recent years, it was already starting to be a trend when Windows XP came out (as fond as I am of XP, look how many steps were taken into "media integration" with it, as compared to 95-2k. Hell, it was the version where they introduced a dedicated "Media Center" version of the OS.) Nowadays it's apparently expected that an operating system will auto-index all your media files into a master library, auto-play any CD or DVD you drop in the drive, auto-everything so that you barely have to get up off the couch to be a media consumer.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a lot of great productivity software available for Windows (which is why it's taken me so long to even consider switching some of my pursuits over to my Amiga,) but the emphasis has shifted, and continues to shift. And while the Amiga is just as great a games machine as it is a productivity machine, I think Hattig's point holds true, because it was out of the mainstream well before that shift began to take place.

When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles. And we did use it for productive and creative work; my brothers and I drew stuff in MacPaint, or created doofy stories in Storybook Writer and Opening Night. We got our first electronic piano and my mom took up sequencing and printing sheet music on that Mac. And this was the norm back then. None of us were "computer people" at the time, and only my next-younger brother and I really ever became "computer people." We were all just ordinary people exploring the potential this new environment had to offer.

That's not really true anymore. "Average users" don't create, they only consume. (We're told as much - repeatedly - by advocates of consumption devices like tablets.) Nowadays, I'm pretty much the only member of the family who does anything more creative than my taxes on my computer; my brothers play games or read Cracked, and my parents read the news or hang out on Facebook. There's been a shift, and I think I'm the only one who's even noticed. And even I have more trouble getting myself in a creative mood on my modern systems.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just psychological; maybe putting myself in an old environment causes me to revert to the old mindset. But there's just a certain je ne sais quois electronic-muse that vintage computers have and modern computers don't.

QFT.  It is actually the "clunkiness" that keeps me coming back.  I turn it on, work through some C stuff, actually wait on the compiler (I have yet to wait on GCC even on my P4!), and am actually rather productive on it.

But yeah - I agree about computers as appliance.  There seems to be little room left for people who don't want that, unless you like Unix.  And if you don't?  You're SOL.  Unix/Linux is actually boring to me these days.  Amiga fills a nice niche.  Its that je ne sais quoi!

[commodorejohn]

A rant.

[Linde]

A rant.

That's a great read! As a musician and programmer, I get to meet a lot of people who use their computers for producing original and interesting stuff, so my idea of it all might not be very representative of the whole. I don't think this is caused by computer technology -- the real cause is capitalism and consumerism. Capitalism is the angle and the ubiquity of information is just the magnitude. Capitalism reinforces the idea that whatever you do for a day job (whether you're a fireman or a telephone salesperson) is more valuable than whatever you'd spend your time doing being jobless (whether you're picking your nose or creating great art), and the idea that in your free time you might as well just stimulate the market in various ways.

The technological shift towards consumption I think of mostly as an adaption to the market, but if you get into the cybernetics of the thing, it's also very much the consumers approaching technology in the way they were taught to approach it.

[slaapliedje]

@commodorejohn

That is exactly how I see things.  In fact, I've been wanting to get my printer working with my A4000D so I can start writing on it instead of my PC, where there are far too many distractions.  With Windows 8 especially, it's become purely a "me too" application store.  

It's also why I dislike Android so much.  People have become only what their search parameters are to Google.  

I think for most people that still use the Amiga, it really is a shot back to the days where there was some magic in computers, and they weren't just another appliance sitting around waiting for someone to look up the newest fail compilation on Youtube.

slaapliedje

[SACC-guy]

The magic of the toaster flyer editing system is still great!

[Damion]

When we got our first computer (a Mac IIcx) back in ~1992-93, it was expected that anybody owning a computer would be using it for productive work; the only systems that anybody saw as dedicated games machines were the consoles.

That was much more true for Apple than C64/Atari 800 and later ST/A500. When I was a kid (C64 era) computer gaming was already huge, "productivity" was the line we gave our folks to justify buying us the things. Console gaming was for the peasants. :-)

[magnetic]

The magic of the toaster flyer editing system is still great!

The beauty of it is you can teach a 12year old to edit on it in an hr! And the full setup looks like you are a mad wizard


@ commodorejohn

nice post. agreed