We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) - Hackdot

Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by technothrasher on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @05:29PM (#20690474)

I know this article was about how commodore screwed up there marketing on the Amiga, but all those references to software, publications, and developers just took me on a nostalgia trip back to my 15 year old self pining for an Amiga as I worked in a farmer's fields all summer long to be able to buy one, and after I finally got one I spent many late nights teaching myself to code up some Homebrew bbs software for it.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by yodsanklai on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @06:50PM (#20691060)

> a nostalgia trip back to my 15 year old

You're not alone. I had mine around 12-13 I think. I remember how cool and modern it looked compared to the C64 I had before. There were all the great games, but also so much to learn programming wise. We had rather limited resources available at that time (esp. in a small european town), mostly computer magazines, older friends... It was a really different approach to learning.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by ecpottinger on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @11:54PM (#20692580)

I built hardware mods on my Amiga 1000 and 500, and for members of my local Amiga club

What got me was how easy it was to do, yet a large company like Commodore was not doing that I did at home.

500KB original memory and 1.5 MB of memory piggy-back to the chip memory, 1.8 of high speed static memory, designed myself and install a CPU speed doubler, a gray composite (used analog colour signals) to drive a high persistence monochrome monitor, a Zorro bus to IBM ISA bus adapter, external triple floppy drive array.

All this was very easy to make, I don't know why Commodore could not do the same things.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by Annatar on Thursday August 15, 2019 @02:34AM (#20703078)

Commodore was on the verge of bankruptcy, that's why, but the engineers designed the Amiga to be expandable so that people like you could do exactly what you have done: works as designed!

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by rasz on Thursday August 15, 2019 @03:35AM (#20703317)

Commodore was still making good revenue up to 1993 despite peddling 7 year old designs. Firing all good engineers, cutting costs to the bone and selling outdated, but cheap to manufacture technology was a fantastic short term strategy. Surprisingly 1991 was the second best year by revenue, Commodore was already a walking corpse by then.

https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial-history-1978-19...

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by icedchai on Thursday August 15, 2019 @09:40AM (#20705079)

I was an Amiga user from 1988 to 1994 or so. 1991 felt like the peak of the Amiga. AmigaOS 2.0 was finally released, which was a huge upgrade. The A3000 was out... their first "professional" Amiga. There were lots of 3rd party vendors supporting it.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by eterps on Wednesday August 14, 2019 @06:05AM (#20694049)

Sounds awesome are you still building hardware/mods? If so, for what hardware platforms?

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by eitland on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @11:53PM (#20692579)

This is me too. Working in the barn to clear for the next load of grass before it arrived, working extra fast to manage to read manuals between the loads.

I never could afford an Amiga when they where in sale[0] so this memory is 3 years later when the family bought a PC.

[0]: I and two of my brothers saved money and managed to buy a used C64 somewhere around '92.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by adamredwoods on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:01PM (#20692093)

I wrote my first C program on one! It was very difficult after the ease of use of programming in Commodore 64 Basic.

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Re:We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015) by teuna on Tuesday August 13, 2019 @10:08PM (#20692132)

Same here, but I was younger and lucky that my dad was a complete Amiga nuts. We had like 4 A500 around the house, he used A2000, A3000 then finally A4000... I was really young (8-9) and mostly used them for gaming (Sid Meier's Pirate was my all time favorite). Good times.

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