What defines Amiga: the custom chipset, or the system software?

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

I voted for Both, but to be more accurate for me the Amiga, and indeed any tool, is defined by what it allows users to achieve. The technology is defined through the technique.

When I bought my first A500, I was aware of 286 AT PCs and the Apple Macintosh. Beyond those other options being way outside of my price range, the A500 with a 512kB expansion and an external floppy drive allowed me to do things that I had not been able to do before. 80% of the time it was a gaming machine, 20% used for university work.

When I got my A1200 in late 1992, gaming represented 50% of its use. I was using it with a HP laser printer and later a Cannon BubbleJet printer to produce many types of printed materials. I was doing amateur video production work with a genlock and Scala MM, I was initially communicating with people on BBSs and later connecting it to the internet. I started my '90s web development career on the A1200. By the time I blew the motherboard in 2002, gaming was about 10% of its use.

No machine before, and none since, has inspired such creativity for me. The combination of the hardware and the software was constantly expanding my world of what is possible.

Last edited by agami on 01-Nov-2021 at 07:16 AM.

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All the way, with 68k

@agami

Chipset was nice but even 020 is faster than blitter.
It was so many years ago so I dont care about chipset.
It is, it ok, it is not also ok.

@bison

The name written on the label.

@bison

Amiga, is so much more than just the software and hardware, its the great community that comes with it, its the crazy story / ride it been on. Its places like this web forum and the great debates like this one, its the little meet up show, it the never ending challege of pulling / pushing the platform forward.

I think if you see Amiga as only a hardware / software thing you missing a big part of the hart of Amiga to me any.

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@ppcamiga1

By the time Commodore went under in 1994, Unix, OS/2 and other multitasking kernels were becoming commonplace. But the chipset remained unique until the Minimig core came out for the FPGAs much later.

One thing I do agree with you about AGA: the blitter and copper should have been updated to use the page-mode bus accesses for a 4x speed increase in 64 bit aligned operations. That would have increased the resolution of the copper-chunky 12-bit graphics color mode to 320×200 and made the blitter competitively fast as well.

Last edited by Samurai_Crow on 01-Nov-2021 at 01:51 PM.

@ppcamiga1

I'd actually like to see some tests for blitter vs. CPU speed. And for that I mean real operations. It's easy to say the CPU is faster when doing a straight copy of bitplanes. But the blitter is more complicated than a simple memory block copier. No doubt the 020 with the exra bitfield operations can compete with the blitter. But how fast is the CPU when doing real blitter simulation?

That is, copying an interleaved bitmap. Copying an offset bitmap into another offset bitmap. drawing lines.

Interleaved requires doing lots of smaller burst copies for each line separately against an easy full bitmap.

Offset copy requires to rotate and mask data as it transfers the bitmap in source, desination or both as well as perform a logic operation to merge data.

Line drawing requires lots of little shift and mask operations including texture mapping a straight line pattern into a bitmap line at any angle.

Not saying it can't be done. But, easier said than done! When hardware does all these operations for free the CPU should be way faster if it is able to efficiently simulate the exact same operations at a faster rate with less expense on the CPU.

Last edited by Hypex on 01-Nov-2021 at 03:58 PM.

@amigang

Good point. I didn't want too many choices, so pancakes will have to cover anything I left out.

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

@bison

In the late 80’s, Amiga chipset pretty unique, but there other computers had similar features like SHARP X68000 (the Amiga Killer if had competed in the same market), and Sega Mega Drive, also SNES used planar graphics, so maybe the chipset was not so unique.

limited RAM, limited CPU power sparked creativity, resulting HAM6, dual playfields,
being able save memory using least amount colors to display a image, other computer has 2, 16, 256 colors. Amiga had 2,4,8,16,32,64, plus Ham6, it able work with images in layers, gave interesting blending of color for free, pretty interesting 80’s for sure, but the people wonted more colors in 90’s, when memory become more available, PC CPU’s got better, GPU’s got better, and advantages Amiga had, become more like disadvantages, PC’s got FPU, and Amiga can’t keep up with rendering, not with games, not video, and not with anything else. A1200/A600/A2000 got IDE on Amiga, but PC got EIDE quickly, sure there was some expensive Amigas that had SCSI. The problem with IDE was required lot CPU power, so Amiga quickly lagging behind on disk speed.

Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 01-Nov-2021 at 07:13 PM.

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I voted for both. My computers that run AmigaOS4 in my head are some type of neoAmigas. These are my two X1000s and my Sam440ep. It's interesting to me that, while not intentional, AmigaOne is an anagram of neoAmiga. If compatibility with more chip-banging or chip-utilizing 68K software were better integrated into this system, it would be less neo Amiga and more SuperAmiga for me, which would be more desirable. If there would be more and better quality new PPC software for OS4, that would become less important for me. I do appreciate that Petunia allows a fair amount of 68K software to work within OS4.

The Apollo Vampire in my Amiga 500 feels more the spirit of a classic SuperAmiga, and I am planning to buy a Firebird from these fellows soon, for my Amiga 2500. But wouldn't that be cool in my Amiga 1000 too? Suspect I will have more SuperAmigas as time moves on.

An interesting and I'd argue worthwhile thing for an AmigaOne would be a PCI card with an FPGA chip on it sufficient to provide some variant of the Amiga chips. I'd buy two of those if they existed. But, I don't see that happening so just daydreaming there.

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@bison

I would say that good old Amiga feeling is only limited by one's imagination.


redfox

@bison

What defines Amiga: the custom chipset, or the system software?

Years ago, I would have said both operating together.

But you also require good software and imagination to have fun.

My OS4 system works well because long ago someone discovered a way to retarget the graphics to other graphics chips.

I don't use petunia at all. I rely on the 68K interpreter built in to OS4. Final Writer 97, TVPaint, PPaint and other system friendly 68K software all work fine with OS4. I run E-UAE and AmigaOS 3.2 for some older software like the Appetizer suite and some games.


redfox

Last edited by redfox on 01-Nov-2021 at 11:56 PM.
Last edited by redfox on 01-Nov-2021 at 07:45 PM.

@Hypex

blitter in A1200 works on 7 MHz like in 1983.
every pixel in line mode takes 8 cycles per bitplane.
Which makes for example in 256 colors 8x8x2=128 cpu cycles per point.
No problem to made line drawing faster on cpu in C.

This is in lower resolutions.
In higher resolutions blitter has no access to chip ram during display.
It is more slower.

@NutsAboutAmiga

So your argument is simply based on performance - the Amiga chipset ruled because it was ahead of the other in terms of what it enabled you to do. If the situation wasn't as make removing certain limits of productability available then the design wouldn't have mattered.

Last edited by Srtest on 02-Nov-2021 at 11:00 AM.

@NutsAboutAmiga

we do not need to talk about that Amiga (classic) is not up-to-date anymore and that a modern PC is more powerful. But my problem is where Amiga running on modern hardware would be better than a existing Windows, Mac or Linux? To be interesting you must offer something different, in best case a better solution for a customers need... I do not see that. Amiga is today nostalgia and for that you do not need new modern hardware

Last edited by OlafS25 on 02-Nov-2021 at 11:12 AM.

@bison

What -literally- defines Amiga is the text in Commodore’s RKRM documentation:

RKRM-AMIGADOS
RKRM-DEVICES
RKRM-Hardware
RKRM-LIBRARIES

That’s the definition, right there!

@OlafS25

Amiga offer something different, unique cpu and os.
We all are getting older not younger,
and new hardware with some improvements are welcome.
New Amiga hardware do not compete with Windows, Mac or Linux.
If it is just faster and need less work than hardware from Commodore it is ok.

@ppcamiga1

@OlafS25

Quote:

But my problem is where Amiga running on modern hardware would be better than a existing Windows, Mac or Linux? To be interesting you must offer something different, in best case a better solution for a customers need...

Well your problem, is that you expect standard hardware to be more impressive if it has Amiga sticker on it, well that’s not how it works. “

My hopes is to be able to watch a video, play some music, maybe play few games, I don’t expect magic… I like the OS that all, and there are some nice programs & tools for AmigaOS.

Quote:

To be interesting you must offer something different

I don’t sell anything, but what I offer on github, is experiments mostly, trying different things out, doing classic coding in C on next generation OS is what doing now, I guess that’s a bit different, but I guess you talking about OS, but what you do with is the interesting thing, if you don’t know how-to use it its going to be boring.

Quote:

in best case a better solution for a customers need...

It does not need to be better, it just need to be interesting, or something people like, if your listening on radio, next song does not need to be better than the last song, it only needs to be good song/melody. Or think of food, tacos better then apple pie?

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Last edited by NutsAboutAmiga on 02-Nov-2021 at 05:14 PM.

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@Rose

You waste your time.
One and only way to convice people to use Amiga like solutions on x86/arm
is to make it not look like shit compared to win/lnx/osx.
Stop trolling. Start working on AROS.