Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dabbling_Dion | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Whole Amiga concept was a glorified game console for PAL/NTSC TV standard. Once PC market moved aboive using TV monitors, whole Amiga lineup was doomed.

As anything Commodore ever did, Amiga was far overengineered for what it did.

That being said, there are only two Amigas worth remembering: - A500 as original one ( A1000 was overpriced crap) - A1200 as a cheap successor. Its upgrade value was "meh", but it was cheap. And there were games, actually using those extras. And it had a cheap HDD option (used an IDE drive).

View on HN

It wasn't overengineered, it was well engineered.

It was cheaper than a PC and much nicer to use - Windows was terrible in that era, the janky mouse jumping all over the place under load due to no hardware sprite and serial buffer overrun.

Meanwhile an Amiga under 100% CPU would have a silky smooth mouse due to hardware mouse port tracking and sprite pointer.

Then you had stuff like autoconfig hardware that was 10 years ahead of its time.

Practically no one was using AMiga for its OS. All the people would ever see is a Kickstart as tool to load their game.

Amiga was smooth just as long as CPU usage was low and as long one used the stuff that its chipset could do.

And all that "smoothness" was useless once one got above what TV can do. I used PC for DOS Tango (schematic and PCB CAD) for example and even cheap Tseng ET-4000 card with 1MB would put Amiga to shame as it could do 1280x1024x16 colors.

Yes, animation speed wasn't great, but it worked. Two years later I had Diamond Stealth 2MB which could do 1600x1200x16 colors, running circles around anything any Amiga could do.

The Amiga brought us DPaint, OctaMED, AMOS, Blitz Basic, and a whole lot more.

People bought it for the games, then got interested in the creative possibilities. At the very least it inspired a generation of game developers, digital artists, and electronic music creators.

Meanwhile, many PCs of the time only had PC speaker audio capabilities, the horrible palette of EGA, and the inability to scroll the screen smoothly. And a DOS prompt rather than a smoothly-multitasking GUI.

Yes, there were only a few short years before the PC caught up/overtook the Amiga. But for those few years, the Amiga was something really special.

Except the system was designed with a productivity display oriented RGB port that worked, and its main selling point was the hardware, not the games. My stock 1200 can output 1440x550 res and more, and it works just fine.

Deluxe Paint, tracker music, Video Toaster w/Lightwave, all Amiga achievements. And all systems were extremely good value for the dollar until late VGA era. Europe understood and appreciated that; US unfortunately had Commodore main branch, which was very self-sabotaging, to put it mlildly.

"Productivity oriented RGB display"...

I remember going through a TON of pirated SW to get useful PCB CAD programs on Amiga (being the graphic "beast" of the time) and wasted a ton on non-PC harware (basically everything from Sinclair QL to Atari ST lines and Amigas, from 500 to 1200) only to admit defeat years later and settle on plain old DOS PC and Tango.

Amiga was ATROCIOUS for everything besides gaming. Its graphics was great only on paper - until you had it on the desk and havign to use it daily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com