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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

I’m skimming over the transcript and this dude is all “well most games didn’t take advantage of anything beyond 512K so what use was it” and, well, we did use the damn things for stuff beyond games back in the day, you know.

Games are the part that’s most interesting for retrocomputing and nostalgia; I played a lot of games on my Amigas, but I also did stuff like “laid out the newsletter for the local Dr Who fan club” and “chatted on BBSs” and “dabbled with art and animation” and all of those things were enhanced by having more than the bare minimum of RAM. Hell, I connected it to the Internet by getting a PPP gateway up on a mainframe at the local university and browsed the Web, that sure was helped by extra RAM.

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> we did use the damn things for stuff beyond games back in the day, you know.

This. The Amiga's multitasking was amazing back in the mid/late 1980s. My favorite example:

I'm in my dorm room, writing a paper in a non-western-alphabet language[1] on my Amiga. The phone rings. My BBS, running in the background, answers the phone and someone logs in. This all happens with zero impact on my using the computer.

This blew my fellow students' minds. I'd have to show the BBS user's activity for them to believe me. All this on a machine with only floppy disks. I couldn't afford a hard drive until later.

I also wrote solvers for math problems in AmigaBASIC, fancier programs in Modula 2 (I couldn't afford the C compiler), and, of course, played games.

Edited to add [1]

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[1] There was one PC that supported this. Not having to sign up to use it made getting homework done much easier.

Exactly - The 512K expansions were by far the most common expansion. I did play games on my Amiga, but far more of my time was spent doing other things with it.

If you make a game for a given platform, it makes sense to target the most common configuration, which in this case was 512k (not 512M btw). Even though RAM expansions eventually became popular, I guess publishers would be hesitant to put a "requires 1M+" sticker on their boxes. But man, 512k seemed like a blessing in those early days, too...

Some games simply used extra ram to hold the contents of, say, disk 2. Reducing disk loading (and swapping!) was a big deal.

If I remember correctly, Dungeon Master was the first game to require 1MB.

k. Not M, right?

Oh right, duh. Fixed, thanks.

Yes.

The Amiga 500 shipped with 500 KB of "chip RAM", so named since it is accessible by all the wonderful custom chips.

Many people opted to install a 512-KB expansion in the "trap door" under the machine. That was "slow RAM".

you could make some changes to the board, and it would all be addressable as 1M chip ram.

of course, the real fun was adding 4M of "fast ram" on the side bus.

That was on amiga 500+ I think, older amiga 500s would not be able to use 1M chip anyhow.

it was a mess, 500 was a 512 or 1MB lottery. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_Agnus

I had an original non + amiga, and definitely had 1M.

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