Life is funny. We always want to move forward.
There been years where I always wanted the Amiga to be better, stronger and keep up with the big boys.

Now I'm so impressed with what it is and how joyful it is to use and own.

It is just so much to play with. My main interest are games, scene products and tracking.

We see great Productions come out resenty. Reshoot R, Worthy, Raygar, Giana sisters special edition.

There are fantastic games in Development.

Check out Inviiya on Facebook.

https://bitbeamcannon.com/

https://www.patreon.com/loewenstein/posts

There are a lot about low res. Pixel art, 8 bit sound etc. that fits some game genres much more that HD resolutions and the modern way.

If Commodore survived, it might not have been for the good. Maybe would be just an alternative to PC, MAC, Linux.

Classic Amiga forever!

Last edited by nikosidis on 27-Nov-2019 at 04:58 PM.

@nikosidis

Well if C= had survived they would have become more like Apple.

The actual Amiga would have an AMD/Intel CPU and we would use AmigaOX with a BSD kernel.

But only a fraction of the AmigaOX users would ever remember the original 68k system.

Last edited by OneTimer1 on 27-Nov-2019 at 06:59 PM.

@OneTimer1

it is a little like in Groundhog Day

we not stick in the same day but at least in the 68k period

@nikosidis

Quote:

If Commodore survived, it might not have been for the good. Maybe would be just an alternative to PC, MAC, Linux.

Err... had Commodore survived and flourished, you'd still have 35 year old technology to play with and no doubt an even more active retro scene.

Quote:

Life is funny. We always want to move forward.

Or perhaps not.

@OneTimer1

Apple didn't survive in the form it took after the initial release of Mac OSX. They briefly produced very reasonably priced and high build quality PowerBooks and iBook G4s with fast booting Tiger OS that was backwards compatible with OS9! Awesome!

However, it couldn't last and the iPhone and iPad cemented them as a consumer electronics company with very high profit margins! They have been about greed ever since. The new Mac Pro is the perfect example; yes you can buy the cheapest model and upgrade with third party parts but you will be Apple taxed to within a whisker of bankruptcy for the cheek of sidestepping the normal Apple supply model! A sickening way to run a company other than for the shareholders.

I am a person that upgraded my Macbook Pro internal DVD burner to a Blu-Ray burner and didn't ask Tim Cook's permission so I guess on that basis alone I'm dead to them!

I am fully adapted to Adobe Premiere now so other than BootCamp there is no Apple software that I consider a killer app. The rejection of OpenCl / OpenGL and 32 bit apps was the last straw which finally showed me they simply don't care about serious computer users! We're ALL supposed to upgrade every 2 years to a thinner model, with less features and ports with a re-tweaked gimmicky touch bar to keep the whole twisted cartel creaking forward! Oh and upgrade every single piece of software in that timescale too! Greedy beyond belief! OSX is a bloated mess and I was far happier with a cut down responsive build with great backwards compatibility features like Tiger.

Now with no Jobs, no Jony Ive and no hope in commanding those ridiculous profit margins going forwards as they are out of ideas. It definitely would not have been like this for any successful Commodore. The "Computers for the masses not the classes" mantra should have been at the forefront of everything that they should have released going forward. The problem was they didn't wholeheartedly believe that that computer was an Amiga! R&D dried up accordingly as they waited fot the next McGuffin or their overpriced outsourced PC clone line to take off!

Last edited by BigD on 28-Nov-2019 at 09:02 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 28-Nov-2019 at 09:00 AM.
Last edited by BigD on 28-Nov-2019 at 08:47 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

LOL, you should be banned from posting on aw. Really, it took iPhone/iPads for Apple to be considered as an overpriced? Do you recall the starting retail prices of PPC PowerMacs or PowerBooks? And I am not bringing the inflation rate into discussion yet. 99's Sawtooth cost triple price of a PC equivalent which featured twice CPU speed, faster bus, more PCI slots, faster IDE connections, better GFX options, more USB ports and basically it could run circles around it. And no, there was no killer application on Mac which a WinPC couldn't handle equivalently even during that day. You can find any excuse to justify your overpriced purchase but simply, again, it won't be true.

_________________

@Cool_amigaN

Well since I owned (still own) a working iBook G4 I can tell you that it was a far more useful, responsive and productive machine than a 2003-2006 era Windoze laptop. iMovie and iDVD were killer apps and for many Garageband was too! iWeb was good for producing basic webpages and there were loads of useful third party apps like iSale for example that made my ebay listings look great.

Year by year all these 'key' software packages were thrown by the wayside and Apple left their users with an expensive piece of jewellery to take to Starbucks! The Mac Pro does not fix that though it should be good to grate cheese.

Just because I don't sign up to your revisionist view of history does not excuse you suggesting that I be "banned from posting in aw". Apple DID make very good (and in the case of the iBook G4) very reasonably priced laptops back in the mid 2000s. They dropped the ball with that market segment however in addition to the Mac Mini (dual core only for the best part of a decade) and the Mac Pro (if it looks like trash it probably is). The foolhardy expectation for people to keep buying non-professional spec branded 'Pro' machines is a recent problem they have created for themselves. They not only borrowed NextStep for OS X, they took on their business model with the Mac Pro.

The putting out to pasture of ALL 32 bit apps and the depreciating of OpenGL is finally the end of the road. It's just a shame that Windows 7 wasn't used as the 'forever upgraded' Windows paradigm as it's UI is a far better one for desktop use and I would happily use Windows 7 instead of macOS these days.

Last edited by BigD on 28-Nov-2019 at 01:39 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

When I went to TRSAC this demos sceners party in Danmark around 1 month ago I sat beside this C-64 guy.
I showed him something on my A1200 but he was not interested. To many colors he said

He showed me some amazing stuff on C-64.

Retro is so cool!! The limitations are what makes it so special and nice.

Sure there are cool new stuff too, but I'm just as impressed or more than what people can do and does with old hardware. It is art!!

Many, even younger people start to see this!

Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 02:08 PM.
Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 02:07 PM.
Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 02:05 PM.

@nikosidis

Presumably that's why a lot of ex-Amiga users turn their nose up at games like T-Zero or Napalm since they expect the Amiga to be trapped in 1987 technology?! I always liked pushing the Amiga hardware by using the trapdoor / Zorro slot upgradability as well as pushing software on a certain hardware base!

Heck, some ex-Amiga owners think that hard drives are a PC thing! Hopefully the PS3 / 4 and XBox 360 / One has dispelled this!

Last edited by BigD on 28-Nov-2019 at 02:18 PM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

I'm not into floppies, casette players and that shit ;)
I know many are.
I want things comfortable. Things like WHDLoad, Compact Flash as HDD and with PCMCIA to transfer files (FAT32 formated) with A1200 have made things so much nicer than in the old days. I even have Playstation controller adapter for my Amiga. Works great and give you much better controllers than Amiga ever made. I have TAC 2 that is probably the most nice Amiga, Commodore joystick made, but the buttons are not that good. I have many Playstation Arcade stick controllers from HORI. That is great and sometimes the normal Playstation PAD. I even have a CD32, honneybie pad but it is not that nice either.

It is not to be trapped in anything. Amiga have some real classic games and more comming that is at least to me as good as anything I like to play. As I have talked about some games just fit that old tech.. better than new tech. 3D platform games make me sick. Some 3D effects can be nice but that is it. Same goes with space shooters. I don't like to play games like that in HD res. either. Does not work for me. Pixel art!!

Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 06:44 PM.
Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 06:43 PM.
Last edited by nikosidis on 28-Nov-2019 at 06:41 PM.

@Cool_amigaN

Quote:

Cool_amigaN wrote: @BigD LOL, you should be banned from posting on aw. Really, it took iPhone/iPads for Apple to be considered as an overpriced? Do you recall the starting retail prices of PPC PowerMacs or PowerBooks? And I am not bringing the inflation rate into discussion yet. 99's Sawtooth cost triple price of a PC equivalent which featured twice CPU speed, faster bus, more PCI slots, faster IDE connections, better GFX options, more USB ports and basically it could run circles around it. And no, there was no killer application on Mac which a WinPC couldn't handle equivalently even during that day. You can find any excuse to justify your overpriced purchase but simply, again, it won't be true.

No.

@nikosidis

Not just Commodore. Tandy and Texas Instruments made really nice machines back in the late 70s and early 80s, too. Both platforms still have yearly, user-organized meetings, too (both in the Chicago area, no less).

Tandy had a 68000-based workstation available long before Lisa, let alone Mac or Amiga. However, I don't think it was targeted at home/small business users the way their TRS-80 machines were. For a while, Tandy sold more TRS-80's than anyone else. When the PC burst onto the scene, though, they made the same mistakes as Commodore, only worse: they jumped on that bandwagon and let their other lines wither. I think their last non-PC-compatible was the Color Computer 3, which was much nicer than the previous CoCo's, but a pale imitation of the Amiga. (With an 8/16-bit CPU it couldn't do much more than imitate, anyway.) Tandy went on to make a lot of PC-sort-of-compatibles, where I think the display graphics were somewhat different (possibly better). But eventually they couldn't compete with the likes of Dell or Gateway.

TI's 99/4A was supposed to be a great machine, too, though I only maybe used a friend's, and didn't follow it much.

Had Commodore & TI collaborated instead of engaged in a price war, or had Tandy opened their systems up the way IBM opened the PC, or had they focused on improving their own platforms instead of chasing the PC-compatible market, we could be living in a very different world.

Of course, we might well be dissatisfied with that world, too.

_________________
I've decided to follow an awful lot of people I respect and leave AmigaWorld. If for some reason you want to talk to me, it shouldn't take much effort to find me.

@simplex


Thanks for the history lesson.
What is cool about the Amiga is that it was realy popular at least in Europe.
So much was released for it and what is happening now is that we see great quality
releases again. Looking at a game like Deamon Claw you can see how capable Amiga 500
is. It can be a realy great arcade like mashine if done right. A1200 even greater.

https://bitbeamcannon.com/daemonclaw/

All the conversion from Arcade games back in the day where russed.
Only a few where done right. Best Amiga games where the original titles.
We see some do much better conversions that what where done back then
like Bombjack beer edition. Rygar AGA is also very nice but first seen now on
Amiga.

@bigd
Why is dropping support for 32bit such a big thing for you?

For me, it had zero implications, the only 32bit software I had was already not working and abondened years ago.

_________________
B5D6A1D019D5D45BCC56F4782AC220D8B3E2A6CC

@kolla

It is unreasonable for Apple to expect everyone to ditch their old software. AnimWebConverter is PPC only so I have to use Fusion and Snow Leopard Server Edition to use that along with my Hi-MD Transfer MiniDisc software. It just creates a clunky multi booting system to retain compatibility. iDVD will never be updated now and I like to use it from time to time. Office Mac Edition 2008 is 32-bit and the last best version without the ribbon interface with the large kiddi-buttons!

I fail to see how upgrading gives me new useful features, Apple just seems to cut them out like with no chapter markers on iMovie versions past version 10! All games have fallen away now that OpenGL is depreciated. I bought Cuphead but Sonic Mania and Elite Dangerous are on the Windows Bootcamp partition. My next machine would need access to Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, El Capitan, Catalina and Windows to have a system to use with all my software and stay future proof! Plus the machine would be a mess of dongles and external Blu-Ray burners and graphics card enclosures! Easier to switch to Windows plus if they switch to ARM ISO it will disable Bootcamp and Fusion destroying ANY ability to run 32-bit, PPC or Windows software!

Last edited by BigD on 29-Nov-2019 at 08:20 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@kolla

I guess if you trust Apple and like getting led by the nose and don't mind being told your useful apps should no longer be available to you then its a great ecosystem. I guess with subscription models for software no one gives it a second though but since the iMovie / iDVD and now the OpenGL / 32 bit debacle I just don't trust Apple to push macOS or its killer apps in the right direction! They obviously think we've all been chomping at the bit to use iOS software on our Macs when I'm just worried an optimised macOS version of most apps will never materialise as we will be expected to use the cheap feature crippled iOS version designed for touch screens!

Last edited by BigD on 29-Nov-2019 at 08:50 AM.

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@BigD

Quote:

The putting out to pasture of ALL 32 bit apps and the depreciating of OpenGL is finally the end of the road. It's just a shame that Windows 7 wasn't used as the 'forever upgraded' Windows paradigm as it's UI is a far better one for desktop use and I would happily use Windows 7 instead of macOS these days.

I hardly remember how a 32bit application looks like in Windows 10. All software I currently use is built for a 64bit architecture. The last 32bit virtual machine I'm using is the old Ubuntu one that builds Icaros Desktop. And this is just because it does not need updates, and I am too lazy to migrate all scripts to work on a newer machine.

But all my productivity software is 64bit ready. There is no practical motivation, except money, to put ourselves in the jail of 32bit applications limitations. All programs that have not been recompiled for 64bit are either confined in a virtual machine, or completely ditched, replaced by current solutions. I can understand being conservative on AmigaOS-like systems, but there is no reason to keep the same behavior on other systems.

@paolone

In order to do productive work we might need / prefer to use older niche software or older versions of mainstream software and that should be our prerogative. AnimWebConverter is a great part my animation work cycle which means I can then edit it in iMovie 10 and burn to disc in the 32 bit iDVD if I so choose (or at least a disc image). These practises seem to be actively discouraged by Apples choice of macOS, hardware and software upgrade decisions. This does not suit my way of doing things and I will not be told what software I should and should not be using! After struggling with a now two colour 'ribbon interface' on Office on Windows 10 it is much nicer to come home and use Mac Office 2008 with smaller colourful buttons and useful menu structure. Who is Apple to tell me I can't do that?

_________________
"Art challenges technology. Technology inspires the art."
John Lasseter, Co-Founder of Pixar Animation Studios

@nikosidis

What a bunch of Kali worshiping, silver linings seeking, post hoc ergo propter hoc crap.
It's like saying that the only reason the single season of Firefly is good is because FOX cancelled it.

None of us know what would've happened to Commodore if it didn't drive itself into the ground in 1993/1994. Without a serious change in management, it would've been highly likely they'd be acquired by another company for the IP.

And it doesn't matter if there was a Mac like renaissance with Amiga computers and other devices becoming lifestyle statements, or if it ended up only being some tech which powered today's cable and satellite TV boxes; It wouldn't be any easier to forget the heady days of multimedia computing, 16/32-bit gaming, or the demo scene.

_________________
All the way, with 68k

@nikosidis

Quote:

nikosidis wrote: @BigD I'm not into floppies, casette players and that shit ;) I know many are. I want things comfortable.

There is modern hardware (like devices working with SD-cards) for almost every 8-Bit-computer. Loading and playing games on my C64 is almost as comfortabel as on Amiga.

_________________
AmigaOne X5000/40, 2.2 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, Radeon R9 280X, M-Audio Revolution 5.1, 240 GB SSD