I have my old Spectrum and Atari ST and from time to time I run them. My friends had Amigas and Apples(or their parents had them) that were super expensive at the time. I bought one Amiga from a friend when it got old. I also got old consoles cartridges and emulate them using FPGA devices as the original consoles died and I have not analog TVs anymore, so I need to use converters.
What I get from using those machines is feeling rich. I can look at my phone or a raspberry pi and say: Wow!!, that has millions of times more memory!
You also get the essence. With such a limited power they made programs that were useful and games that were funny. Now you have Unity or Unreal Engines powering games that are not fun or electron apps consuming gigabytes of memory that are not useful because the basics are wrong.
I use old Autocad for DOS with Autolisp support and you realize after all this time, the thing is useful.
My job is creating software so reminding what the basics are is always important.
Quite a few. The retro computing scene is extremely popular at the moment with Amigas being much in demand. Amiga use in the US was pretty low except for certain sectors such as TV production. I know more people with Amigas now then I did when they were originally sold.
Add my anecdata to yours, I also see a lot more interest (including from myself) now than when it was sold in regular shops. And not just from demosceners.
It gets even weirder when you realise that apparently it's some ones job to maintain an 35 year old operating system... for a platform that's no longer manufactured.
How do you even hire for that position? What tools do the AmigaOS team use?
I love that this is still worked on, and I'd love to know more about what that job is like.
If you want to make sure it boots up next time though, consider having it recapped : on A600/A1200/CD32 it's a matter of when, not if, low quality capacitors will leak and damage the board.
It's a pretty special machine. It can display a lot of colors and has PCM (sampled) sound, but is still simple enough that you can understand everything that's going on. The SNES is comparable but hard to program. The DOS PC is comparable but less standardized.
(I am not an Amiga user, but I'd love to get one in the future when I have more space, time, and money.)
Most ended up with ram expansions including RTC with battery, not to mention leaked capacitor juice dissolved chip pins and pcb vias.
They were build just a tad better than contemporary Atari ST from the point of signal integrity, but Commodore manufacturing plant was a shit show. Multiple models shipped with capacitors mounted in reverse polarity (1200, 4000, CD32).
Caps and batteries on Amiga motherboards go bad and need replacement and cleaning up. There are replacement Amiga motherboard projects to keep Amigas alive just transplant chips from a dead Amiga motherboard to the replacement motherboard. Also replacement Amiga case designs.
Not to mention the emulators out there. It seems everyone wants at least Amiga via emulation, just won't emulate PowerPC Amigas.
I am perpetually surprised at this. I remember 24 years ago a colleague of mine had the butchered remains of an A1200 with all sorts of daughter boards literally taped inside a PC case. Just before covid hit i by chance bumped into him and yep he was still using it apparently.
I have test equipment that’s 50 years old in active service so I suppose the mantra of “if it works and makes you happy, use it” is still valid.
Still have my Amiga 1200 (expanded with 68040+MMU, RAM, VGA adaptor card which I can use to plug into one of my LCD monitors, plus some stuff I've probably forgotten) and I'm sure if I powered it up again it'd still work.
There were about 10k hard-core users left a few years ago, and many have multiple Amigas. There's probably at least as many (probably many more) enthusiasts with working hardware, and a ton of people running UAE and the like.
I fire up UAE every now and then for the fun of it.
Edit: I just realized that what I really want is an easy way to launch a single Amiga app in a window on my Mac. Double-click an icon and have The Bard's Tale up and running? Yes please.
Given that kstrauser specified "an easy way to launch a single Amiga app in a window on my Mac," an Amiga emulator that only runs on Windows -- however good it may otherwise be -- is probably not in fact what they're looking for. :)
(Edit: I see that Cloanto does have a somewhat cryptic page for macOS, but the way I read it, Macs can only run the open source UAE that I gather Amiga Forever is built on top of. So https://fs-uae.net might be a better place to investigate.)
That’s exactly the one I use, with the ROMs and ADFs from Amiga Forever. Still wish I could double-click a Defender of the Crown icon and be playing it a moment later.
I had an Amiga 1000 in a staircase closet in my parent's basement. It just needed a new floppy drive and keyboard. My brothers cleaned up and found it broken and threw it away.
Are you kidding me? The Amiga scene is the most dedicated retro scene there is. Plenty of people with real hardware -- like myself -- are gonna be real excited over this.
What I get from using those machines is feeling rich. I can look at my phone or a raspberry pi and say: Wow!!, that has millions of times more memory!
You also get the essence. With such a limited power they made programs that were useful and games that were funny. Now you have Unity or Unreal Engines powering games that are not fun or electron apps consuming gigabytes of memory that are not useful because the basics are wrong.
I use old Autocad for DOS with Autolisp support and you realize after all this time, the thing is useful.
My job is creating software so reminding what the basics are is always important.