For those that missed the opportunity to go to VCF West this year, I should say they put on quite the dog and pony show for the Amiga. The platform was given such huge fanfare for its 40th anniversary, with many of the original Amiga staff from the 80s present. Some videos will start to trickle up on YouTube over the coming weeks.
For anyone interested in this I can recommend the book, The Future Was Here. It really explains the Amiga hardware and how it was used. It even goes into how the bouncing ball demo works, and once you know all the tricks it could use on the Amiga, you can see why other computers of the time had to work so hard to recreate it.
As always, I can't recommend enough a very thourough dig into the system and its history that was posted in multiple parts on ars technica. Really well put together.
It was great for its time, having been there I think the recreations hardly make the point of what meant being able to use an Amiga during the 1980's hardware landscape of home computers.
Hence why I find funny the discussion about the US point of view, educated playing games in consoles, about the raise of PC gaming.
In Europe, gaming and indie development (back then bedroom coders), was all about 8 and 16 bit home computers, our consoles were arcade machines, and wanting to code at home games that in our dreams would get close enough to them.
Amiga was one of the best options at that.
Still so excited when I see stories about the Amiga computer. As a kid I spent nights doing stuff with my Amiga 2000, trying to develop animations in Aztec C compiler, writing my own (super inefficient) matrix library, hacking assembler, playing games, it was just unbelievably cool. There were Atari guys and Amiga guys in my hood. And we‘d have endless discussions about which was better. Defining moments. An Apple computer was not affordable in Germany. And my Amiga 2000 must have cost 2000 Deutsch Marks back then.
256 kilobyte of the RAM used as ROM, did not drive cost significantly IMHO.
Such a large ROM would also have been expensive. It was entirely a practical matter - the OS was pretty buggy and Commodore knew it. It was smarter to distribute the firmware/OS on magnetic media vs burning it in forever.
The hard drive story may have been weird, but it was very flexible.
You could in theory design completely new storage hardware today and hook it up to an old Amiga, and the operating system would be just fine because the drivers can be loaded from the device itself.
Worth mentioning the brand has recently been acquired:
https://www.guru3d.com/story/perifractic-completes-commodore...
I don’t recall the Mandrill image ever being used in conjunction with Amiga. Jim Sachs creations like this one were more common https://www.reddit.com/r/VintagePixelArt/comments/m1fxm1/sac...
On this subject: Perifractic (new Commodore owner) and his team did not rule out that they will also take over Amiga.
If that were to happen, that would be amazing!
There's also the ownership/legal aspect, which is covered in detail in the Amiga Documents[0].
Malotru !
AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAA!!
In my opinion, an important detail is missing here. The Amiga 2000 was my first computer, and what made it special was that it had a PC bridgeboard with an 8088 CPU[0]. I remember it never worked properly, but being able to access MS-DOS and program in GW-BASIC was amazing to me. At least I could convice my parents at the time that I would use the computer not only for gaming but for also for school homework ( we had a class for learning programming/informatics )
[0]: https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-bridgeboard-the-pc-compatibil...