I'm nostalgic for those days, I learned assembler and made simple demos and games which lead to a career in video games. But I'm not sad. Look at the current generation. They have game development tools like Unity and Unreal Engine, cheap fun hobby computers like the Raspberry Pi and perhaps most importantly they have the internet; youtube, twitch, forums, chat programs. When I learned to write assembler I had magazines and a book and I was on my own. Nobody else I knew was programming.

Yeah, me too. For me it was the best community ever. They were pro sharing, pro openness but not anti commercial at the same time. Creativity and sharing was high. And the machine itself was way ahead of its time. I really miss it.

I have never played with an Amiga so I am curious as to what made it so fun to write code for?

Consider that when the Amiga arrived most PCs had monochrome text only displays, and the PC speaker was the only sound option. In 1987 VGA arrived and you would start to get the opportunity to compete with still images, but it still took a while before most PCs would use more than 16 colours. And prior to the Soundblaster in 1989, most PC users still had no proper sound. And until 1995 most PC users had not used a pre-emptively multitasking OS.

Meanwhile the Amiga shipped with a fully multitasking windowed OS, 4096 colours, higher resolutions (until VGA), the copper (a coprocessor that let you update things like the palette and video registers synced to the raster beam, e.g. to let you combine multiple graphics modes on the same screen, or duplicate hardware sprites multiple times on the screen without involving the CPU), the blitter (letting you move areas of memory; geared towards moving graphical objects while the CPU did other things), 4 voices of sampled music, and a CPU (M68000) that was simply far more pleasant to program for.

For most of us who saw Amigas in the early days, the PC looked like a dinosaur.

The Amiga was ridiculously ahead of its time until 1995, when Windows 95 came out and pretty much crushed everything else.

That year is when I realized it was time to sell my Amiga and buy a PC because the future had just jumped to a different hardware architecture.

To me, booting Windows 95 was as jaw dropping as seeing the ray traced juggler demo and Marble Madness on an Amiga 1000 Kickstart 1.0 in 1986.

Windows 95 was pretty uninteresting to me. The only thing it had over the Amiga was memory isolation, which wasn't seen as a big deal by most Amiga users at the time. In most other respects AmigaOS still beat the pants of Windows95, with things like Datatypes, deep Arexx integration in most applications etc. There are parts of AmigaOS I still miss.

What killed the Amiga apart from the Commodore bankruptcy was hardware costs and lack of viable 3D support on the low end far more than Windows 95.

Yea, the Commodore bankruptcy predates Win95 I think.

Ultimately the Amiga painted itself into a corner; so finely tuned for 2D that it couldn't easily just slot in a 3D card like a PC could.

I still have mine, suped up with a 68010, that'll get you 5% in a tight loop.

I wonder where the Amiga would have been today if those chips had been sitting on one or more easily swappable boards like what most of the PC did.

What seemed to sink the Amiga in the long run was that to go from OCS to ECS or AGA you basically had to buy a new computer.

But a PC could go from EGA to VGA by swapping out a card.

Never mind that the first 3D accelerators were pass through concoctions, where the VGA card had a short cable run over to the 3D card that in turn was connected to the screen.

The big box Amiga's did get graphics cards with decent specs. The problem wasn't so much that, but that the vast majority of the Amiga volume was the low end machines. You'd never get an Amiga500 or A1200 style machine with card slots usable like that at the time. The big box Amigas sold too little, and the accelerator cards were equivalently high priced niche products.

That, and of course that Commodore management consistently messed up and delayed the better options.

What is a real shame is that Hombre didn't get finished before he bankruptcy [1]: A 64 bit 3D graphics chipset with an integrated PA-RISC and DSP, coupled with an AGA-Amiga-on-a-chip for backwards compatibility, and with Windows NT compatibility (back in the days when NT ran on multiple hardware architectures; though at that time I probably would have thought Commodore had sold it's soul to the devil if I'd seen the Win NT compatibility).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Hombre_chipset

I still have an original 3DFX Voodoo Graphics somewhere that worked like that. Alas, it didn't do any sane from of OpenGL, so eventually I just used it to show X on a second monitor, via a full-screen texture. It worked astonishingly badly.

Now completely unusable, of course, like its Hercules cousin, because it was an ISA bus device.

It wasn't the lack of slots and cards, it was the hardware was too magical and hacky. Basically it was over-engineered so much it couldn't evolve.

People made code that depended on those hacks and magic. If the coprocessor doesn't work the exact same way in the future then everything breaks. That's fine if it's doing something simple like displaying a big array where each byte was a pixel or RGB value because you can easily make that backward compatible. Instead it was doing things like running code between scan-lines and using 5 bits per pixel.

A new display chip would basically have to include the old chip in its entirety just to be backward compatible. All the Amiga hardware worked like this.

And if you weren't impressed by Windows, by that time Linux was quite good on the PC if you built it with Linux in mind. And you could still dual boot to DOS games.

Linux was horrendous on PCs in 1995. First of all, OP is talking about hardware support: switching OSs doesn't give you a copper, or a soundcard with four voice wavetable synthesis.

Linux was slightly convenient on PC in 1995 if you really cared about: (1) a basically Unix-y userland, with all the good and bad that implies. Shells and stuff worked better than cygwin (2) tcp stack (3) gcc

That's really it. X was a fucking nightmare to get to work "correctly" and then, as now, "correctly" on X means "it handles a remote networking case no one cares about better than the alternatives but still poorly, and everything else about it is totally broken."

Hardware support for every feature that was becoming interesting in PCs in 1995 (basically anything where economies of scale were making interesting stuff cheap) was absolutely terrible on Linux. Drivers for PC hardware, even the kind of PC hardware nerds liked (SCSI CD-ROM drives) were super flaky or non-existent. Application software was horrendous. There was no support at all for anything that still had a licensing regime around codecs, which, at the time included all the media software.

Linux was "quite good" in that you could set it up in a corner of your house and run httpd. That was dope in 1995. But compared to Amiga as a user-facing hacking desktop, it sucked shit. Hell, it sucked shit compared to a PC running Windows or a Mac.

Seriously, find a 486SX/25 w/ 4MB ram, a 160MB disk, a decent modem, and an S3 video card and put like, Yggdrasil on it. It will be way less fun to fuck around w/ than an old Amiga/Mac/NeXT/BeBox/SGI....at least in 1995 an Intel machine running DOS could run DOOM. It's probably the least-fun hardware/os combo from 1995 you could dredge up to play with.

In 95, I ran X on 486's w/16MB RAM, and an Amiga 3000 with a Picasso II and an Apollo (?) accelerator. While I still held on to the Amiga 3000 and loved it, I don't agree Linux was that painful hen.

And of course it would be worse than BeBox, SGI, NeXT. SGI and NeXT were high end work stations (or above). We had SGI Indy's at uni that they'd gotten at near cost from the distributor at about 3x the cost of the my souped up Amiga 3000... BeBox was a PPC SMP box - it was where many of us had hoped the Amiga was headed.

I held on to the Amiga 3000 for 2-3 more years, but mostly out of loyalty and nostalgia at that point. I still loved (and love) the OS, but already in '95 it was on borrowed time and it cost a fortune to tack on enough third party add ons to make it viable. And the lack of software was becoming a problem - a colleague and I even spoke o Escom at the time about writing a browser for them, because the available Amiga web browsers were already then lagging behind he times.

And in '95 people did care about the "remote networking case no one cares about". At university, we also had old Sun servers that served up apps for dozens of dumb X11 terminals each. At work, by '96 5 of us ran all our applications off a single 120MHz Pentium w/128MB RAM, using our 486's as terminals.

If you got the best supported video card and best supported sound card etc (like I said, built the PC with Linux in mind), they worked. It wasn't for everyone, it wasn't polished but I thought it was awesome to have your own graphical Unix box and be connected to the community building Linux. I had a lot of fun. You could browse the web, listen to mp3s (if you had a 100 MHz 486), learn Emacs and Perl and Python and C, get to know how everything on the Internet worked including security aspects by playing with all the server software. All this for free and on cheap hardware.

The old 1995 Linux box is less interesting to play with than the stuff in your list because all the stuff in your list became extinct and aren't just retarded versions of their modern incarnations.

In the summer of 1995 I installed Slackware 2.0, with kernel 1.0.9, the very first one to support ELF files.

My IDE CD-ROM wasn't reckognized, I had to copy all floppies into the MS-DOS partition and install from there.

X Windows could not do more than 800x600, and that was after lots of fighting with the X Config file.

So quite good?! No.

What it was, was a cheap way to have UNIX at home, because we were having DG/UX and Aix at the university.

One of the reasons I kind of lost my way into the game dev culture, was because I had this silly idea of trying to invest into the Linux demoscene that went nowhere.

Yeah, as per my caveat, you had to build the PC with Linux in mind, from best supported components. And the installation process wasn't really the good part. Interestingly this has remained constant in the last 20 years, though the list of good hardware has expanded considerably ;)

Which is why the laptop I am typing this reply is running Windows.

With my interest for demoscene, gaming and graphics, which I already had before jumping into GNU/Linux, I could never get fully away from what those communities use.

The demoscene and gaming cultures are more focused into results, how to get there doesn't matter and there is a certain pride in being the only one capable of doing X.

I've owned one, though i never programmed for it. But from what i know, i guess the answer is that the amiga is very close to a modern computer, in that it has specialized chips for graphics and sound (Denise and Paula), making many tasks quite easy, but is still weak enough to force most programs to be relatively simple.

At the same time there's also still a very active competitive amiga programming community², making things like these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7vbzMYYRc -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpK3Kp7-0zU -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPdB_zdyMbM -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cOjC-nhs_o -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jziQBWQxvok

² http://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?platform%5B0%5D=Amiga+AGA&...

There was a very thin layer between writing code and having something on the screen. The original 3Dfx voodoo libraries had a similar feel. You could write 30 - 40 lines of code and poof, something neat would be on the screen. In contrast at PCs picked up more interesting graphics they also got DirectX which always felt like you needed 500 lines to do what you could do on other platforms in a tenth of that, and CaMeLCaSe drove me NUTS at first. As a result I spent more time trying to figure out how to say what I wanted in DirectX3 than actually thinking about the code that actually drew interesting things into the frame buffer. The Amiga it was just a call to open screen with some allocated "chip" ram for the frame buffer and you were off to the races.

You might want to try coding your entire demo in shaders, it gives you a similar feel, and you can skip all the gl/d3d mess.

For examples, shadertoy.com is full of cool shader-only effects and entire demos.

Absolutely amazing book on the tech and history behind the Amiga http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/02620...

For one thing, it was very easy. As there were no protection mechanism in the 68000, you had direct access to all the hardware in your programs (basically, your programs ran in kernel mode). So you could bypass all the OS layer and program your coprocessors and graphical cards. With enough perseverance, a little documentation (that we found here and there) and a logical mind, it was very easy to produce cool things, even for a kid.