@resle

There have been many opinions expressed in this thread.

The following are my opinions and my interpretations. It is ok if you disagree.

In my opinion the best place to start is back at the beginning.

In the beginning, Amiga was a brand name and Amiga computers just happened to be a combination of special hardware and a tightly tuned OS. Many different applications were possible, limited only by the imagination and development money.

The Commodore days brought us a family of machines, many of which still run today. They are part of a proud legacy.

I won't repeat the sad history of greed, bankruptcy, aquisition, and failure.

Over the years, we have seen upgrades to the "classic" AmigaOS, as well as many attempts to move the OS forward into the future and onto different hardware. Some of them were sanctioned officially by the owners of the brand name Amiga and then licenses were revolked or denied as time moved on.

I don't remember them all ....

Amithlon, AmigaXL, WinUAE, Amiga Forever, E-UAE, WarpOS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4.0, AROS.

Some people would say we have ended up with a hodge-podge of systems and operating systems, and rabid fans supporting one or the other.


Finally .... What is an Amiga?

IMHO, we have ended up with a wide range of choices, all of which are Amiga because it is the developers, testers and users who have made the difference.

---
redfox

Last edited by redfox on 14-Sep-2008 at 11:37 PM.
Last edited by redfox on 14-Sep-2008 at 11:33 PM.

@BigD

Quote:

But they made it work!!!! Settlers 2 works on a iBook PPC through sandbox emulation of OS9! It works seemlessly! The game needs a patch, that's it

That's the thing, it just looks silly. Whenever you try and run an OS9 app on OSX it loads up an emulator and starts booting OS9 in it. It's like UAE in a window, just faster!

I don't know why they just couldn't make some OS9 library wrappers for OSX. Case in point, is Carbon IIRC. Or Cocoa, whatever it was called, it was a GUI library. This allowed OS9 programs to run directly on OSX without the emulation! So IMHO OS9 on OSX was a bit confusing.

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As I read OS4.x can play Sim City 2000 and little other 68k games. The killer ap of 68k Amiga games will NEVER work - WHLoad!!!

Not directly no, although it does enable a system to be brought back.

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Apple through force of will MAKE it happen, Amiga makes promises but can never keep them.

They made it happen on the PC! Look at all those Amiga games you can run on every version of Windows. Not gonna happen on OS4. So don't expect Amiga to do anything OS4 wise. Well the legal battle is delaying any "Amiga OS4" development for over a yesr now. And set to rise!

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Amiga is retro! A 16/32bit computer released by Commodore that deserved better marketing and wider success.

Yes. Instead of ending up in the hands of the Anti-Amiga!

@itix

Quote:

Line emulators are in fact faster than "real" cycle exact emulators. Frodo and MagiC64 are line emulators and hence faster than VICE which is cycle exact emulator.

They are better at speed, but still based on PC VGA hardware, so still slow on the Amiga despite the faster technique.

Quote:

Amiga sprites are too narrow and have too few colours and you can not scale sprites. On Amiga you can reuse sprites but IIRC they can not be on the same scanline. In other words hardware is not flexible enough to emulate other hardware no matter how advanced it is.

Doesn't make it sound so advanced. How many colours did the C64 sprites have? Width can be worked around. Sprites can be combined for double depth colours. And with unlimited height sprites could appear on separate scanlines possibly by offsetting the sprite image with blank lines.

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How? Paula does not have registers what SID has. They have nothing in common. PlaySID emulated SID by defining bunch of samples which were played at different periods. It did its job quite well but it could not emulate method how samples are played on real SID.

As I understand it, SID had four basic waveform types, sine, sawtooth, square and white noise. These can be recreated with some accuracy and the last sampled. And also the ADSR. The Amiga sound hardware can easily play these samples or even play different waveforms after eachother.

Now, with ADSR we had attack, decay, sustain and release which, IIRC are all related to volume. And time. Using amplitude modulation these can be programmed in and done by the hardware. Periods can be changed at any point or frequency modulation can be overlayed to control the pitch using hardware as well.

Now, how did these C64 samples work?

OTOH, emulating a Plus/4 would be easy!

Quote:

Hmm... copper could have been used to do some tricks maybe. But blitter requires that data is in the chip ram. And would it be any help when you must take into account modifications during that frame...

With 64K in the whole computer I think there would have been enough chip RAM. Blitter could do chunky to planar and I worked out once how it would blit single bits from a bitplane across a chunky buffer. So it should have been capable of blitting the conversion.

Even so, the screen could have been made to directly change immediately like the real hardware. I'm sure even with the CPU poking in converted data into planar bitmap as soon as the virtual character space or bitmap had changed would have worked as well.

Have you played the Amiga version of Thrust? A C port of the original C16/C64 game? That ran on a 1Mhz computer using block graphics. I tried it on my A1200/030 once. The experience was terrible! It was immensely slow. As if it was a 3d doom game. But it was only in 2d. Do you know why it was slow? It was a straight port designed to work on PC VGA graphics. And because of that the speed slowed down immensely. Like trying to run an SDL game on an A500!

What the game did was draw boxes and plant images in a chunky buffer. For each frame it then had to render this onto a planar bitmap. Fine for RTG but dog slow for native Amiga. What should have been done was to rewrite and port the actual graphic subroutines so they used AmigaOS. Making it fast an both Amiga native and RTG. The code could have drawn boxes and blitted images onto the screen much faster. And played at the real fast speed it should have!

http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/athrust

So, you can see my point, when I think things should have been done better on the Amiga. And in some cases certainly could have! These sorts of things frustrated me!

Quote:

Not necessarily. At least DosBox is not any faster on laptop than it is on my Pegasos.

That's because it is emulating an old PC. Now I don't see the point of this, at least on a PC. Who wants to play old PC games on a new PC anyway. And why are they emulating an x86 CPU on a PC that already has an x86 CPU? Sure it's slightly different but this is like emulating an Amiga using 68k UAE on a 68k Amiga. It already has a 68k so why flog a dead horse trying to emulate it? You'd think on the PC version they'd optimise it to make it the fastest. Since the PC always gets the fastest optimised software.

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There is HW acceleration as long as implementation and the operating system permits. You can also accelerate graphics using AltiVec. In the end it depends on what BltBitMap() can do and how efficiently.

Yes, it would be good if CPU features were used as well.

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OpenTTD is nifty in 8bit screenmodes because it uses classic colour cycling for animations. It is much slower if you use hi/truecolour mode for OpenTTD. If they opted for modern 16/32bit graphics it would not be possible. Then there are games which are slow in 320x200 and crash after 5 minutes.

Yes, a CLUT mode is universal, and can have it's palette changed efficiently. Exactly the sort of thing I am talking about. Compare that with the overhead needed to change all individual pixels in a true colour screen. Not pretty! One 24-bit value against thousands of others, that have to be found!

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Downloaded MegaBall and it appears to work. I dont have any game controller so couldnt try it out by playing but I got ingame graphics at least. I also noticed that MegaBall does not work with 3D layers in MorphOS (half of ingame gfx is missing) but works just fine with old layers. Is it the same in OS4?

I can't try yet with OS4.1 and it's layers but on OS4.0 it works fine How development is similar. . And it is playable. With sound. Music is missing though. BTW you should be able to play it as it used the mouse.

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Drip appears to kill my mouse (maybe because it is USB one? no idea) and I am not sure if all ingame gfx were drawn. Not sure because without game controller I am not sure.

It kills my mouse and renders my system useless. Not as nice as it once was on a real Amiga. But it did have a start up screen. Must test if it was using the OS.

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I am not so sure. Announced gfx support does not cut it anymore (1600x1200, pffft, useful for minimonitors maybe :)) and SCSI is completely out of date today. My Efika has better specs than that. Except for IDE, thanks to incompetent Freescale engineers.

Well I can tell you that even a 1600x1200 screen is still larger than the average LCD display. Perhaps modern LCD's can now do about this size, but they usually have to be huge! In any case the real wow factor was the MPEG encoders/decoders. Even my A1 doesn't even have hardware MPEG encoding! And certainly less HW acceleration now it doesn't have AltiiVec anymore. As to SCSI, back then it was a must, they couldn't put SATA on it !

So does your Efika feature HW MPEG encoding/decoding? Without a plug in card?

The problem with boards like the Efika and Sam is that they are an insult to the Amiga community. They run at extremely low clock speeds by modern standards and only have a single core! What the? And still are expensive. You'd think that four years after the A1 and Pegasos that there could be a cheap PowerPC/mainboard running at a decent speed. No, we are now going backwards and paying the same almost for a slower CPU! : It's got working USB 2.0 and SATA over IDE? Well, sorry but that still doesn't cut it anymore, it's not good enough. No wonder people just want to use a PC as their NG Amiga.

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Compared to my A1200 at that time it does not sound very exciting either. I was quite happy with my A1200 in those day (BPPC+BVision). In fact I could not understand interest on Mediator expansion cards either... just having some newer gfx card didnt justify it, in my opinion... but then it was just my opinion :)

Well the point of the Mediator of course was to add an expensive Amiga Zorro card in your Amiga so you could stick cheap PC cards in your Amiga! The contrast! Despite that, it was logical. All the Amiga video cards became expensive VGA on PCI to Zorro cards anyway so why not cut out the middle men of hardware and just use the VGA part? It also made things like networking and sounds cards easier and cheaper with more available. People used to complain about expensive Amiga cards and how cheap the PC ones were . Well this evened the field.

Except it failed with software. Although a network driver and AHI driver (AFAIK) were included, it didn't provide RTG software nor a properly set up driver for it. It was a fiddle around. Going against the Amiga plug and play standard. But since RTG the Amiga lost that ability.

@Hypex

Gee I write a lot.

@Hypex

Upping your postcount?

OldFart

_________________
More then three levels of indigestion and you're scroomed!

@redfox

I agree with Redfox. When I was a teenager Amiga XXX was a computer model, but so were the Macs and Ataris. Every home computer in 16-bit era laughed at beeping expensive typing machines called IBM PC. But database per databse and later game by game, the concept of a barebone motherboard which can be expanded with ISA/VLB/{PCI/AGP/PCI-E ... card was only one to prevail.

So, all the emulations like UAE, AmiKit and Amiga Forever and packages to bring RETRO gaming back is to make us feel nostalgic or to make us do with OS 3.x applications what we couldnt do when we had 7-40MHz CPUs. This also hits Miniming and Natami, even they are way advanced hardware concepts then software emulators. This does not make them less worthy, but its emulating "Classic Amiga"

WarpOS, MorphOS,AROS and Amithlon for me are in the same line of RETRO nevermind that first two are true PPC and other two are native PPC/x64 Operating Systems: they are basicaly OS 3.x comaptibile with adding new features and using
some of the capacities of the host PPC/x64 motherboard.

Only real Amiga is any piece of hardware able to run OS 4.x since it is true Amiga of today. And that`s it.

If there is going to be Amiga OS 5, it can only evolve from four.

Such a shame we do not have real killer apps made for OS 4 to prove it.
OS 3.x compatibility had to be broken to advance to PPC (as it was promised in 1996 "Amiga goes PowerPC"), but some decent custom chip emulation should be built in to make it more "Retro usable" - please integrate UAE like Apple did made a OS 9 and even PPC OS X wrappers.

And that is most of Amiga experince one would want.

What does not make modern Amiga of x64 and PPC machines other then few Blizzard expansions, AmigaOne models and SAM models is simply
inability to run Amiga OS 4 and applications.

_________________
Future Acube and MOS supporter, fi di good, nothing fi di unprofessionals. Learn it harder way!

@OldFart

I typed so much I just felt everone should have a chance to see it. It looks like at least an hours work in that big post. Or two.

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: They are better at speed, but still based on PC VGA hardware, so still slow on the Amiga despite the faster technique.

They're not based around VGA hardware, they're based around a chunky framebuffer. You do know that most VGA-modes were planar, right? And that the most used chunkymode was actually MCGA, just to be nitpicking a bit.

Quote:

As I understand it, SID had four basic waveform types, sine, sawtooth, square and white noise. These can be recreated with some accuracy and the last sampled. And also the ADSR. The Amiga sound hardware can easily play these samples or even play different waveforms after eachother. Now, with ADSR we had attack, decay, sustain and release which, IIRC are all related to volume. And time. Using amplitude modulation these can be programmed in and done by the hardware. Periods can be changed at any point or frequency modulation can be overlayed to control the pitch using hardware as well.

And how would you do things like filter, ring-modulation and combined waveforms, just to mention a few features of the SID-chip?

Quote:

Now, how did these C64 samples work?

The easiest way was to change the global volume register of the SID that would cause a slight 'pop' in the sound. Although this only works on old SID-chips as it was fixed later on.

Quote:

OTOH, emulating a Plus/4 would be easy!

Not really, even if the plus/4 is a bit simpler, you'd still have a lot of the same problems as with emulating the C64. At least if you want the emulation to be accurate enough to play anything else than some very basic games from the mid 80's.

There's lots of reasons why trying to define a modern Amiga leaves you grasping at thin air:

1. Hardware

The constraints that defined an Amiga from a Mac aren't there any more on any system. We have as many colours as the human eye can perceive. Sound is as good as the human ear needs it to be. Ever smaller differences in 3D capabilities cease to be really interesting to most people, at least while we have flat displays.

2. Software

The WIMP and desktop metaphors have evolved to a degree where Windows, Mac, Gnome, KDE and Workbench are all tinkering with similar ideas and have broadly the same goals. Most people just use it to launch apps anyway, and application toolkits are being taken online.

3. The industry

No one company could take on the job of defeating the big boys at building processors, motherboards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc and the reasons for going it alone are practically non-existent in the face of points 1 and 2.

4. Hardware standards

The days of a cottage industry built around proprietary standards are gone. There's no need for proprietary expansion slots and Zorro cards. Things like USB, Ethernet, 802.11x wireless and SATA are standards and the reasons for diverging are less and less compelling. Even a great technology like Firewire struggles to be compelling enough in the face of USB and will probably die in favour of USB 3.

5. Sofwtware standards

The failure of computers like the Amiga was one big reason for the emergence of standards in software and those standards in turn kill much of the chance for the Amiga to 'make it big' again. We want our browser to obey W3C rules and we want our apps to open standard file formats.

Authoring tools for those formats provide some distinction between OSes until they themselves go online.

6. Open-source

The days of paying for most proprietary software is numbered. While Amigans wait on court cases and kill time, there are many many open-source communties bustling with activity and looking forward instead of back. I've said for years that the community needs to abandon proprietary software and get behind open-source and experience proves this.

7. The Internet

Most people just use their computer to click the browser button. Google gave Chrome its own look because they recognise that the browser is becoming the OS. The really interesting stuff in computing is out there on the web.

What do you currently store on your computer? Pictures? Yes, but less and less. Music? Yes, but how long until most people put their whole library online and play it in a browser? I've recently discovered Evernote, and the decision to use the desktop Mac & Windows versions over the online is extremely marginal.

As I said, authoring tools are still on the desktop, but if Adobe were building Photoshop from scratch now, it would not be a desktop app.

--

That really leaves the vague 'feel' of using an Amiga, the enjoyment of tinkering with something and the sense of communty. I sense that some people hope for much more, but they'll always be disappointed.

Chris

Last edited by clebin on 29-Jan-2009 at 02:31 PM.

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: @Deniil715 ... What defines the Amiga spirit after all? :) ...

I do.
I define what the "Amiga Spirit (TM)" is for me - and urge you to do the same for you...

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @resle ... I can tell you what an Amiga is. It was a machine that rose up out of the 80's computer revolution lead by Jay Miner and his team of developers, with a 16-bit CPU, amazing graphic sound chipset and a multitasking operating system. It was called the Amiga. ...

No, IIRC it was a CPU that was 32 Bit internally and 16 bit externally.
So it took 2 cycles to read/write a 32 Bit word.
Internally the 68000 cpu worked with 32 Bit.

Last edited by Dandy on 06-Feb-2009 at 11:18 AM.

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@itix

Quote:

itix wrote: @olegil Quote: One DM was about half an EUR. So 2000 EUR. Oops. I accidentally converted DM to Finnish Marks which would be make it cost about 12000 FIM (2000 EUR). Nevertheless overly overpriced and these are prices 10 years ago.

Not sure what the prices were 10 years ago.

But I can remember that I was looking for a computer that would enable me to exercise CAD at home back in 1986.

I went to a Commodore shop, told the man that I had heard of the stunning graphic capabilities of the Amiga and asked if the A1000 (roughly 2000 DM at the time) could do the job.

He denied and tried to talk me into an brand new 386 PC.

It came with breathtaking Hercules monochrome graphic and groundshaking one channel "beep" audio capabilities - at an introductory price of 6000 DM.

"And this machine is capable to do CAD?", I asked him.
He answered: "Yes - basically. If you add an high end graphic card (256 col, max. res. 1024x768 dpi) for annother 10.000 DM..."

Needless to say I left without buying.

Later I got me an A500 plus CBM 1081 monitor plus external floppydrive plus loads of disks for 1250 DM (second hand) - and I did CAD/CNC on it!

But when I compare the offers - an A1000 with a resulution of 640×512 pixels interlaced (PAL) and 16 out of 4096 possible colours, as well as with 8-Bit four channel stereo sound at 1995 DM compared to a x86-PC with breathtaking Hercules monochrome graphic and groundshaking one channel "beep" audio capabilities at 6000 DM - it should be quite clear that I think of the latter, when I hear "overly overpriced" - and not of Amiga...

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Hypex

Quote:

Hypex wrote: @BigD ... Well the legal battle is delaying any "Amiga OS4" development for over a yesr now. ...

That's why I think it's even more amazing that now - just 5 months later - OS 4.1 for Pegasos II just has been released.

Does this now somehow imply what direction the lawsuit will take?

I mean - back then it was said to be impossible due to the contract with AInc to ever port OS4 to the Pegasos - and now it nevertheless happens - so I'd assume something must have changed in the legal surroundings...

But what?

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@clebin

Quote:

clebin wrote: ... The failure of computers like the Amiga was one big reason for the emergence of standards in software and those standards in turn kill much of the chance for the Amiga to 'make it big' again.

The Amiga didn't fail - it's managers did (and continue to do so so far)...
What do you mean with "standards in software"?

Quote:

clebin wrote: We want our browser to obey W3C rules and we want our apps to open standard file formats.

Of course we want that - or would you prefer a "Babylonian language confusion"?
In some areas standards make perfectly sense.

Quote:

clebin wrote: Most people just use their computer to click the browser button.

And you think the definition of "computer" has to change on behalf of that?

Wouldn't it be better to give them a device they really want - a "browser device" so to say - and leave the definition of "computer" as it is?

Evern the kids today call their devices "play station" or "Iphone" - and not "game computer" or "phone computer"...

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clebin wrote: ... The really interesting stuff in computing is out there on the web. ...

"The really interesting stuff in computing is" inside my head.


Quote:

clebin wrote: What do you currently store on your computer? Pictures?

No.
I store data on my computers.
Never had the idea so far to try to store pictures on it - data of pictures at best...


Quote:

clebin wrote: ... Music? Yes, but how long until most people put their whole library online and play it in a browser? ...

I would never put everything online - I want to be in control of my data.

I would never ever leave that to an unknown person somewhere on this globe that possibly has a credibilty/trustability/reliability like BillMcEwing...

Naaaaahhhh - not the least interested...

Quote:

clebin wrote: As I said, authoring tools are still on the desktop, but if Adobe were building Photoshop from scratch now, it would not be a desktop app. ...

Then someone else would make a desktop application for photo editing.

Don't make the mistake to think desktop computers are redundant, just because YOU don't need them.

There still are and always will be application areas where real desktop computers are required, even if all private households would downgrade to webconsoles.

Or would you be happy if your financial institute stored all YOUR financial data somewhere on the web?


Or think of automotive manufcturers - no, manufacturers in general - do you really believe they would store their latest developments somewhere on the web?

The useful the web and browsers may be - they will certainly not make desktop computers and OSses/desktop apps redundant...

Last edited by Dandy on 03-Feb-2009 at 12:30 PM.
Last edited by Dandy on 03-Feb-2009 at 12:28 PM.

_________________
Ciao

Dandy
__________________________________________
If someone enjoys marching to military music, then I already despise him.
He got his brain accidently - the bone marrow in his back would have been sufficient for him!
(Albert Einstein)

@Dandy

Quote:

The Amiga didn't fail - it's managers did (and continue to do so so far)... What do you mean with "standards in software"?

Well, that's either semantics or different argument from the one I was making. Regardless of how Commodore, Atari, Acorn and others died out, the situation in the mid-90s left a small status quo and a very compelling reason to enforce standards to keep some semblance of competition in the market.

I'm talking about standards relating to file formats and so on. I hope you're not going to pick an argument with me and say "that's data, not software" because that would really be boring.

Quote:

Of course we want that - or would you prefer a "Babylonian language confusion"? In some areas standards make perfectly sense.

So you agree, then? Good!

Quote:

And you think the definition of "computer" has to change on behalf of that? Wouldn't it be better to give them a device they really want - a "browser device" so to say - and leave the definition of "computer" as it is?

I'm giving you reasons why operating systems are less relevant these days, which consequently makes any AmigaOS less relevant. I'm not arguing for re-defining the meaning of 'computer'

Quote:

No. I store data on my computers. Never had the idea so far to try to store pictures on it - data of pictures at best...

Are you addicted to arguing semantics or what?

Quote:

I would never put everything online - I want to be in control of my data. I would never ever leave that to an unknown person somewhere on this globe that possibly has a credibilty/trustability/reliability like BillMcEwing... Naaaaahhhh - not the least interested...

More and more people are putting more and more of their data online - that is just a fact.

Quote:

Then someone else would make a desktop application for photo editing.

I'm just saying that web frameworks are sophisticated enough to build apps like Photoshop and only precedence and legacy code prevents that situation from happening with the most popular desktop apps. It'll take years, of course, but the big companies are already investing in this area. It's up to you whether you use them or not - in years to come, when the best image editing program is online, it's entirely up to you whether you use a competitor's. Many people may make a different choice.

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Don't make the mistake to think desktop computers are redundant, just because YOU don't need them.

This is funny, because I've been talking about what's actually happening in the market and in the real world, and you've talked about your personal world view.

Quote:

Or would you be happy if your financial institute stored all YOUR financial data somewhere on the web?

Just like millions of others, my bank details are on the web, available securely through my bank's web-site. If I were Quicken, I'd be looking to convert my desktop software into a web-app and strike deals with the banks to offer the facilities within the banks' websites.

Privacy is a concern, but the masses share lots of personal information online every day. If I wanted to rob someone, I could go and Twitter and find out exactly when they aren't at home. It isn't about right or wrong, it's about what real people do.

Unfortunately, this means no desktop OS will ever make a dent in most people's lives. Nobody's who's used my laptop cares that it's Ubuntu - they fire up Firefox, fire up Facebook and that's almost like their desktop...

Quote:

Or think of automotive manufcturers - no, manufacturers in general - do you really believe they would store their latest developments somewhere on the web? The useful the web and browsers may be - they will certainly not make desktop computers and OSses/desktop apps redundant...

I'm sure the data is available on a secure internal network. They may be using a document management system with a web front-end. Less confidential information may appear on their intranet site. They may even be allowed to access this through their extranet. And all through a browser.

The world is changing. You can argue with me, but you can't argue with that fact!

Chris

Last edited by clebin on 03-Feb-2009 at 06:15 PM.
Last edited by clebin on 03-Feb-2009 at 06:14 PM.

@Dandy

Quote:

No, IIRC it was a CPU that was 32 Bit internally and 16 bit externally.

Nearly right: it was indeed 32 bit internally, with 16 bit data and 24 bit address registers.

AFAIK.

OldFart

_________________
More then three levels of indigestion and you're scroomed!

The 68000 series started with the 68000 cpu

It has 8 32 bit pure Data registers, D0 to D7 which can be used for any data function.

It has 8 32 bit pure Address registers A0 to A7, which can be used for any address or pointer offset store and generation.

Itahs two 32 bit Stackpointer registers, One only visible in User Mode, and one only operational in Supervisor mode.

It has hardware logic support for MMU and FPU extenstions, including system, user, executable and data memory seperation.

It has write only output registers, and read only input registers for hardware based secure connection.

It has a 32 bit ALU.

It only has 24 address pins, and 16 data pins, except on the 68008, where theres only 20 address pins, and 16/8 (?) data pins.

The 68010 version also has a 4 byte, one instruction cache for loop functions.

So your saying the 68k CPU used in the Sinclair QL was only a 20 bit CPU? 8)

_________________
The older and more respected a scientist is, the longer it takes to prove him wrong.

@resle

What is an Amiga?
Sadly, it's a cult object. Like the Graal or the ark of the covenant.

A lot of people here thinks the same. The subject of the Amiga "spirit" is... subjective. A matter of personal believe. I'm opposed to that view. It is, indeed, from the point of view of the acolyte: Those who have built a collection of prejudices and traditions through their experiences with the machine. These people live in an intelectual island called "The community". Their definition of the Amiga spirit are a range of fixations. A collection of technical or mental caracteristics that only serve as a portrait of obsessive individuals.

This community is incapable of reflection, and this kind of thread shows it very well. Let's do an exercise of abstraction and reformulate the question on new terms:

What makes an Amiga better tham other systems?
And now imagine that the question comes from an external source, not from The Community. The question demands a rational approach to it, because the external source does not care about your personal feelings. From this point of view, hardware features cannot be taken into account because they are more feeble and more expensive than the competition BY LARGE. You cannot mention OS features because the competition offers more software services and more complete infrastructures for building applications than the Amiga and you cannot deny it. Be honest. But you don't need to surrender. I am going to surprise you and be positive and optimistic. The superiority of the Amiga relies on some principles. These principles can be enumerated like this:

1. A system that is optimized for audiovisual work.
And this can be subdivided in two:
1a. The implementation is a balance between performance and cost-efectiveness.
The Jay Miner implementation was very good in the 80s. But these new PPC boards are below the standard. This requirement changes with time, nVIDIA knows it.
1b. User-interface features have in mind the kind of workflow that people require in the audiovisual world.
In the old times I was amazed by the "Screens" concept. Now I am amazed by UIs like the one in Blender 3d.

2. A system that is optimized for responsiveness, thus encouraging agile visual feedback for the user.
This means that there must be a wise choice between quality of what is shown and the fluidity of the work you perform (or play) on it.

2. A system that is intellectualy affordable.
If "normal" people can remember where every functional part of the system is located, then this principle is acomplished. This sets a maximum on system complexity. The amount of directories in the system partition is, in part, a metric of this concept.

3. A system that encourages simplicity through clarity, not hiding details.
This encompasses that notion of "everything has a logical name on Amiga".

4. A system where applications are not islands. You can combine a number of them to provide yourself with solutions.
This kind of flexibility was well represented by Arexx.

5. A system where startup time is important
If you are inspired for creation or you want entertainment... You cannot wait!

This list is, possibly, not complete, but it obviously shows more abstract ideas than what people typically bring forward here. It is this obsession on especifics or implementations, like if they were sacred symbols of a tribe, that do not allow a productive discussion on this matter. The path will be allways obscured with this closed mentality.

The only sensible comment I've seen in this thread is one made by cecilia, defining Amiga as the things that the tool allow you to do. Is the only opinion I can relate to.

@xispo

Impressive listings... how about asking whay any of the os's make them amiga? I know my answer for macos x, windows and linux/unix.... regarding mos and aros I haven't tried mos since 0.4 and aros was a long time ago as well. aros wasn't amigaos to me since it wasn't able to do much... run a demo or two. At this point it seems to have come much further though but amigaos 4 is very usable and I have a hard time seeing any of the competitions being better or more amiga like. To me amigaos 4.x is what I had expected would come after 3.9... more or less.

The thing that makes Amiga better than other systems is different today than it was in 1985.

Back in 1985 Amiga was the only affordable computer that was capable of doing interesting things. If you wanted to do interesting things with a computer, you bought an Amiga.

But today, all computers are capable, even cheap ones. But they're all too complex, except for Amiga. Even Linux is too complex. It didn't used to be, but it is now.

The "perfect" computer is an ideal combination of simplicity and capability. This is "the spirit of Amiga."

_________________
"Unix is supposed to fix that." -- Jay Miner