Could someone explain why there is such a cult following behind these old Amiga machines? I see them mentioned a lot on HN and would like to understand the interest...
That's what the Amiga was like in the 80's.
On the fat iMac I use, doing some video conversions in the background makes it impossible to play TF2 at the same time.
Ars Technica's History of the Amiga - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/07/a-history-of-the-ami...
"The Future Was Here" - http://amiga.filfre.net
Of course, these features became increasingly irrelevant as CPUs got cheaper and faster and could perform the graphics duties of the Aliga adequately in software, and the it didn't keep up. Particularly devastating IMO is that the Amiga uses a bit-plane model for graphics. Essentially, this means that graphics screen is composed of several single-bit per pixel planes that are interleaved to index a palette. This is great for memory consumptions because if you don't need 4 bit graphics for a particular screen, you can use two or three planes. It's awful when it comes to render raycasting columns because it makes each pixel in a comumn based renderer take several writes and reads. So a popular opinion is that Doom killed the Amiga. IMO it was just the final nail in the coffin.
I got myself an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator rather late, trading it for a Pentium PC when those went out of fashion, just out of interest. It's a great machine and I still sometimes use it for games, basic internet duties like IRC and... Doom!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defender_of_the_Crown
Also, I saw this article pop up yesterday that takes a look at "The Amiga Concsiousness." It may help, here.