It's downright affordable compared to what it's mimicking. A decked-out A1200 setup with 060 accelerator and RTG graphics etc is easily $2000 or more, and that would still be a lot slower and less capable than the Vampire.
The Vampire is made for a niche of a niche and it's priced accordingly, because building small-run hardware is expensive. If you don't care for the last 1% of accuracy that an FPGA affords compared to an emulator, then you are not the target market, and a Raspberry Pi 4 will make a fine virtual Amiga using something like Amibian.
The MiSTer can do this. It can do MC68020 and will meet and surpass A1200 performance with AGA, and RTG graphics support is in fact there as perhaps the most recent major update. Yes, in 16 bit color and all with very good performance. And it's much, much cheaper (and quicker to get!) than a standalone Vampire. Like a third of the price or something for a pretty complete setup.
This should be the install instructions once you have the MiSTer. (the code is closely related to the FPGAArcade RTG support so apparently the procedure is pretty interchangeable)
As an Amiga 1000 owner, I watched this video with interest... unfortunately the add-on shown costs over $200. Way too expensive for me :(
I applaud the developers efforts, but I personally would have preferred an open-source design, using through-hole components, that anyone could build. The time-line of Amiga add-ons over the past 35 years is littered with the corpses of closed hardware that you can no longer buy, or are now so rare that their value pushes them out of most peoples reach.
To an extent you are right, lots of Amiga software and hardware has traditionally been commercial and proprietary in a (maybe misguided) effort to save the platform.
That said, there is a lot of open source hardware too nowadays, here's a very helpful list:
Probably true. As an aside, coming from a Linux/Windows background and having partially moved to Mac recently, I observe the same of the Mac community.
For instance, when Big Sur launched, there was a tiny little utility that did nothing but change the color of the menu bar, and they wanted something like five dollars for it. Lots of stuff like this on Mac, I find. Popular FTP clients and text editors and disk utilities and stuff like that, they all cost money. The equivalents on Windows are more often than not free-as-in-beer. Just an observation.
But yeah, surely AmigaOS would benefit from being open source and free software in 2021, like EmuTOS or RISC OS Open. Unfortunately the ownership of the core parts of the OS has fallen into less than optimal hands (Cloanto...) and/or is still encumbered by patents or rights issues. So it goes. There is AROS though of course.
> lots of Amiga software and hardware has traditionally been commercial and proprietary in a (maybe misguided) effort to save the platform
Wow. "Misguided" seems like the understatement of the century. How can a niche retro platform be "saved" by keeping everything proprietary (and often expensive)?
Most likely because the people keeping the platform alive have better things to do than offer free beer, and would rather spend their lives doing something else instead.
I'm not sure I follow. Giving something to the community, either for free or gratis, in a hobbyist space such as this one is not more work. It's clear people in the retro computing scene feel passionate about it -- they'd rather spend their time doing this and not something else (and if you see the people writing retro games, they are willing to put a lot of work into it). So how can this closed/proprietary mindset help "save" the platform? It only caters to the very small niche of people who are willing to pay relatively large sums for custom hardware & software with no real use (it's a hobby) and who will take it all to their graves.
Yes, some sell them. It's puzzling to me, because this effectively narrows down their audience.
> Because the people charging for their work, would do something else if that wasn't the case, thus there wouldn't exist anything at all.
I don't know that this is the case for Amiga enthusiasts. They chose this not for the money, but because they love retro computing. They wouldn't be doing something else, just like a writer or an artist wouldn't. And by making their output proprietary -- and pricey! -- they are narrowing down their audience, which is the opposite of "saving" the platform.
I've seldom seen people more passionate about their hobby (note: hobby, not business) than retro computing fans.
Except for many people having a hobby is a side job.
Not everyone is blessed with such a wealthy life that can just seat and offer free beer to others.
So they choose a side job where they can still have some fun.
If that wasn't the case they would probably just be dumping remakes into iOS, Switch, PS, XBox indie stores or even doing something completely unrelated to computers.
> Except for many people having a hobby is a side job.
> Not everyone is blessed with such a wealthy life that can just seat and offer free beer to others.
I understand what you're saying in principle, but I don't believe this is the case with retrocomputing or the Amiga scene. This is an expensive hobby anyway, people who are not blessed with a relatively wealthy life do not have time for retro computing. People love retro computing because they feel passionate about it and find it intellectually or aesthetically stimulating. Nobody sets out to make a game for the Amiga, the C64 or the Speccy thinking "I know, this is where the money is!". They do it primarily out of love.
I believe the issue here is a cultural thing, really. Like someone else mentioned, the Amiga community, much like the Apple community, is used to paying for things that would be free or even libre in other tech communities. (edit: this is supported by this thread from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888726, let me quote: "In my observations (also as a relative outsider), it has been like this at least from the early 1990s. Every little itty-bitty program for the Amiga cost money.")
Back when I was a kid, Amigas were pretty expensive and few people could afford them (none of my friends could). Kids without wealthy parents didn't own Amigas.
Regardless of their motivations, my overall point still stands: pricey gadgets/software for a tiny niche hobbyist platform puts up a wall, raises the barrier to entry, and discourages newcomers -- surely not the best way to "save" it!
I tend to agree with those communities, as former demoscene member, Windows and macOS users. :)
Doing stuff out of love doesn't mean we have to offer it as free beer. UK RetroGaming magazine has plenty of new interesting games being sold for 8 and 16 bit platforms, where the authors even repurpose old cartridges, or go through the effort to produce tapes just like back in the day.
In the 80's all computers were expensive, I find it interesting that you mention Amigas only being available to wealthy families, given that in Portugal getting an Amiga 500 was definitely cheaper than most PCs.
Anyone capable of buying a computer would do so via credit anyway.
Even on MS-DOS/Windows, people are used to pay, only the UNIX communities tend to feel entitled to get stuff for free.
Unfortunately the market exists for insanely overpriced things for the Amiga and full of grifters who take open source hardware and sell it assembled for massive markups.
Still, there are many of us who make open source hardware for the Amiga still but it seems that commercial projects are the ones you hear about more
>full of grifters who take open source hardware and sell it assembled
WTF is this attitude? and I dont mean people actually manufacturing hardware. I mean your reaction to it. Even Terriblefire, author of "open source" Amiga accelerators, got mad [1] someone had the gall to manufacture his designs for people unable to solder/compile and as a result deleted all of his work from the internet and vanished. WTF is this?
If you dont like people making money manufacturing your projects then ....manufacture them yourself cheaper?
[1] complaining about someone in a country with <700 Euro average engineer salary manufacturing and selling something a guy in UK making 3000-8000 pounds cant be bothered to waste time on.
It’s the exorbitant markup that I have a problem with
In regards to the TF blowup his problem with that was someone selling clones of the TF536 which wasn’t open source (yet). How much he earns is irrelevant you don’t get to just steal his work
Sell it cheaper, cut off speculators. How much someone earns is the crux of the matter here. All of a sudden slaving away soldering, manual labor pfeh, doesnt sound all that sexy when it translates to fast food wages for someone with >10 year EE experience.
Overnight I remembered more details, cant edit my last post so another reply.
TF had a racist (nationalistic?) tirade on YT around end of May 2020 about Poles making money off of him and charging exorbitant prices. All the while talking about overpriced Super Agnus chips and those damn Polish price gougers. When I pointed out the _only_ place selling Super Agnus at the time was in Germany and charged ~100 Euro/chip he only got angrier .. at Poles.
Yep, looking over from the Atari ST community, I'm always astounded by the way Amiga projects are run.
On the ST we have a fully GPL'd version of the operating system now (EmuTOS), which matches and exceeds in many cases the original OS. And a Coldfire based system (Firebee) following in Atari lineage, for which the FPGA and supporting software are all open source. Most hardware add-ons have fairly open specifications and drivers etc. are usually open source. Nobody is under the illusion that they're going to be making a living or a profit out of this community, they're doing it for passion.
But looking over at the Amiga, I see new and interesting projects all the time but they seem to be always closed.
This extension is only possible due to very modern part (2017?), a $25 AS6C6416, 8MB SRAM in a TSOP Package
https://www.alliancememory.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Allian... the rest is really cheap and very simple. You could replicate it at $50 bom including shipping for all the parts. Thru hole would indeed push the price to >$150.
Even still, I am a bit dubious about this Ram chip. Its 3.3V rated, and its maximum ratings are below what Amiga presents on its bus (5V). I wonder if the fact its working is the miracle of modern manufacturing processes and safety margins, or just a temporary fluke and will results in dead parts in near future. Normally you would need either a 5V tolerant part or a bus translator like <$1 74ALVC164245.
SMD parts aren’t much of a barrier to open source/DIY assembly. They look harder, but any parts with leads and 0805 or larger are just as possible in my experience to hand-assemble and I find SMD generally slightly faster. (All assuming a board with solder mask and the intention in board design was to allow hand-assembly, which if you’re using 0805s everywhere today, that’s probably your intent.)
That specific board would be easy to hand assemble by anyone who finds through-hole assembly easy.
I have very fond memories of my Amiga 2000. There were Atari guys in my hood and Amiga guys, and I was an Amiga guy apperently. It was a hell of a computer. I'd go to a book store, browse through those fat AMIGA ROM Kernel books (could not afford all), go home, hack assembly code, hack C code, compile it with a copy of the Aztec C compiler, all night, go to school sleepless, and talk about graphics, sprites and whatnot with my friends. This was a hell of a time.
In my case, I loved my Atari 800 and 800XL, but when the Amiga came out and someone brought theirs in to the university lab where I was working, I knew I had to have one. I finally got a 500 a couple of years later and still have it.
Growing up in the 90s DOS/Win9x era I feel like I missed out on a crucial part of computing by only using my Dad's C64 for playing games. That same level of computing knowledge necessity just wasn't there for me outside of learning DOS commands.
I'm glad I can navigate a CLI easily all these years later, but still feel like I missed out by not having the same drive to learn computers on a more bare metal level.
Eventually I subscribed to the point of view that DOS/Win was the way to go. (Amiga was going nowhere with a management that could not draft a vision for the company that was bright enough.) How wrong I was! - A Mac was way to expensive here in Germany, so that was not an option. So I bought a boring PC, learning Wordperfect and whatnot.
But the Amiga taught me what 68000er assembly is, what a hex editor is, and all of this (the Amiga Workbench, the games, the graphics) was so much more fun and beautiful then a dry DOS box.
I was the PC dude among the gang that was focused on the Amiga, I use to dislike being the only one diving into Peter Norton and PC Systems Programming books, while only being able to do Amiga programming (in pairs, apparently we were already doing agile!), and music (hey Protracker!) during our weekend meetings.
Apparently I was the lucky one, although like everyone else on the group I always kept trying to find the Amiga soul in newer systems.
BeOS seemed to be it, but it wasn't.
Nowadays I would give that place to macOS and Windows, in what concerns being multimedia desktop computers, although it isn't the same.
The 68k are 32-bit, though. The 68000 just happen to have a few 16- and 24-bit parts (yeah, I know, but it's not a proper Amiga thread without bickering about tiny details).
Deterministic CPUs seem like such a distant part of the past.
I loved the days when Motorola and Intel would ship you a full set of detailed manuals about everything from CPUs to MMUs, UARTs and whatever other chips they made. I still have my Motorola manuals sitting on the shelf. Was such a nice instruction set to learn on after the 6502.
Depending on what "is" is... It's a 32 bit architecture, what do you care if it is implemented with 4 or 16 bit microarchitecture. Some minicomputers were built from bitslice (1-bit) parts :)
I vaguely recollected having an Amiga 1200 in a box in the shed and one day I went and looked and found two Amiga 1000s plus an a Amiga 1200 in the box.
The C64 is rather more impressive in this domain of new hardware: cases, motherboards, SIDs, Ethernet and (S)NES Classic/Mini adapters, keycaps; but most of all new software, by the truck load: http://csdb.dk
The only thing that requires 16-bit is 3D and not much is happening in the Amiga retro scene on that front.
Yep, based on Pouet's statistics, the C64 scene has overtaken even the PC (Windows) scene last year [1]. Huge activity there, even compared to the "golden years" of the scene [2]
Nah, I felt the Amiga 3000 was the most beautiful, followed closely by the 1000. The 2000 and 4000 were just PC desktop looking derivatives. An Amiga 3000 with a Video Toaster (that I'd never have been able to use) was my dream machine back in the day...
I have very fond memories of the A1000. The one I used was a US import to the UK, so it had a special transformer and monitor to run on foreign screen refresh rates and voltage.
That machine with Lattice C was my introduction to modern programming techniques, having been a 6502 and Z80 programmer before.
I ended up with an A500, and upgraded it with a 16Mhz processor by putting some TTL logic together to build a suitable clock from the mainbaords 8Mhz. This is obviously in pre-internet days, I have absolutely no memory of how I learnt about that hack, or even where I sourced a suitable processor. Happy days.
I had two Amiga 1000s. It's one of several early computers I regret giving away.
I guess Amiga enthusiasts are an unusual bunch. If you note in the comments to this post, it devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages on FPGAs.
I feel ya! I threw away not one, but two!!! Amiga 500's I had when I moved houses 10 years ago. One wasn't working because I had done the Fat Agnes chip hack where you cut a trace on the MB to enable 1MB of "chip RAM". It worked sporadically and then just stopped one day. The other worked, but my 1084s didn't, so I couldn't use it if I wanted to. Sigh, I wish I hadn't gotten rid of mine...
I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.
I love the Amiga/C64/ZX Spectrum/Atari ST community. The spirit of still tinkering with your hardware as you did in the 80s/90s in these machines and something that I think large groups of people outside of the UK missed out on
How many people learnt to solder on a £99 computer that you could then use. How many people learnt basic by typing in lines from a magazine and then fiddling about with the code to give them extra lives in the game?
It really was a golden age in the UK, and I wish more countries got to experience that
Does anyone know a site that lists old/classic technology that still gathers fans? Things like the Amiga, Sun's workstations, Casio's B640 digital watches, Pebble, etc.
65 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadThe Vampire is made for a niche of a niche and it's priced accordingly, because building small-run hardware is expensive. If you don't care for the last 1% of accuracy that an FPGA affords compared to an emulator, then you are not the target market, and a Raspberry Pi 4 will make a fine virtual Amiga using something like Amibian.
https://misterfpga.org/viewtopic.php?t=414&start=25
This should be the install instructions once you have the MiSTer. (the code is closely related to the FPGAArcade RTG support so apparently the procedure is pretty interchangeable)
https://www.fpgaarcade.com/kb/how-to-setup-the-rtg-picasso96...
> http://m68k.info
The M68k backend for LLVM is still work in progress, but will hopefully get merged in the upcoming months, see:
> https://reviews.llvm.org/ (search for "M68k")
I applaud the developers efforts, but I personally would have preferred an open-source design, using through-hole components, that anyone could build. The time-line of Amiga add-ons over the past 35 years is littered with the corpses of closed hardware that you can no longer buy, or are now so rare that their value pushes them out of most peoples reach.
That said, there is a lot of open source hardware too nowadays, here's a very helpful list:
https://github.com/grovdata/Amiga_Sources
(This has been observed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888726)
For instance, when Big Sur launched, there was a tiny little utility that did nothing but change the color of the menu bar, and they wanted something like five dollars for it. Lots of stuff like this on Mac, I find. Popular FTP clients and text editors and disk utilities and stuff like that, they all cost money. The equivalents on Windows are more often than not free-as-in-beer. Just an observation.
But yeah, surely AmigaOS would benefit from being open source and free software in 2021, like EmuTOS or RISC OS Open. Unfortunately the ownership of the core parts of the OS has fallen into less than optimal hands (Cloanto...) and/or is still encumbered by patents or rights issues. So it goes. There is AROS though of course.
https://jonlennartaasenden.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/hyperion...
Wow. "Misguided" seems like the understatement of the century. How can a niche retro platform be "saved" by keeping everything proprietary (and often expensive)?
They are passionate, just not that passionate.
People doing retro games also happen to actually sell them, with nice packaging.
> Because the people charging for their work, would do something else if that wasn't the case, thus there wouldn't exist anything at all.
I don't know that this is the case for Amiga enthusiasts. They chose this not for the money, but because they love retro computing. They wouldn't be doing something else, just like a writer or an artist wouldn't. And by making their output proprietary -- and pricey! -- they are narrowing down their audience, which is the opposite of "saving" the platform.
I've seldom seen people more passionate about their hobby (note: hobby, not business) than retro computing fans.
Not everyone is blessed with such a wealthy life that can just seat and offer free beer to others.
So they choose a side job where they can still have some fun.
If that wasn't the case they would probably just be dumping remakes into iOS, Switch, PS, XBox indie stores or even doing something completely unrelated to computers.
> Not everyone is blessed with such a wealthy life that can just seat and offer free beer to others.
I understand what you're saying in principle, but I don't believe this is the case with retrocomputing or the Amiga scene. This is an expensive hobby anyway, people who are not blessed with a relatively wealthy life do not have time for retro computing. People love retro computing because they feel passionate about it and find it intellectually or aesthetically stimulating. Nobody sets out to make a game for the Amiga, the C64 or the Speccy thinking "I know, this is where the money is!". They do it primarily out of love.
I believe the issue here is a cultural thing, really. Like someone else mentioned, the Amiga community, much like the Apple community, is used to paying for things that would be free or even libre in other tech communities. (edit: this is supported by this thread from 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22888726, let me quote: "In my observations (also as a relative outsider), it has been like this at least from the early 1990s. Every little itty-bitty program for the Amiga cost money.")
Back when I was a kid, Amigas were pretty expensive and few people could afford them (none of my friends could). Kids without wealthy parents didn't own Amigas.
Regardless of their motivations, my overall point still stands: pricey gadgets/software for a tiny niche hobbyist platform puts up a wall, raises the barrier to entry, and discourages newcomers -- surely not the best way to "save" it!
Doing stuff out of love doesn't mean we have to offer it as free beer. UK RetroGaming magazine has plenty of new interesting games being sold for 8 and 16 bit platforms, where the authors even repurpose old cartridges, or go through the effort to produce tapes just like back in the day.
In the 80's all computers were expensive, I find it interesting that you mention Amigas only being available to wealthy families, given that in Portugal getting an Amiga 500 was definitely cheaper than most PCs.
Anyone capable of buying a computer would do so via credit anyway.
Even on MS-DOS/Windows, people are used to pay, only the UNIX communities tend to feel entitled to get stuff for free.
Still, there are many of us who make open source hardware for the Amiga still but it seems that commercial projects are the ones you hear about more
WTF is this attitude? and I dont mean people actually manufacturing hardware. I mean your reaction to it. Even Terriblefire, author of "open source" Amiga accelerators, got mad [1] someone had the gall to manufacture his designs for people unable to solder/compile and as a result deleted all of his work from the internet and vanished. WTF is this?
If you dont like people making money manufacturing your projects then ....manufacture them yourself cheaper?
[1] complaining about someone in a country with <700 Euro average engineer salary manufacturing and selling something a guy in UK making 3000-8000 pounds cant be bothered to waste time on.
In regards to the TF blowup his problem with that was someone selling clones of the TF536 which wasn’t open source (yet). How much he earns is irrelevant you don’t get to just steal his work
Sell it cheaper, cut off speculators. How much someone earns is the crux of the matter here. All of a sudden slaving away soldering, manual labor pfeh, doesnt sound all that sexy when it translates to fast food wages for someone with >10 year EE experience.
TF had a racist (nationalistic?) tirade on YT around end of May 2020 about Poles making money off of him and charging exorbitant prices. All the while talking about overpriced Super Agnus chips and those damn Polish price gougers. When I pointed out the _only_ place selling Super Agnus at the time was in Germany and charged ~100 Euro/chip he only got angrier .. at Poles.
On the ST we have a fully GPL'd version of the operating system now (EmuTOS), which matches and exceeds in many cases the original OS. And a Coldfire based system (Firebee) following in Atari lineage, for which the FPGA and supporting software are all open source. Most hardware add-ons have fairly open specifications and drivers etc. are usually open source. Nobody is under the illusion that they're going to be making a living or a profit out of this community, they're doing it for passion.
But looking over at the Amiga, I see new and interesting projects all the time but they seem to be always closed.
Even still, I am a bit dubious about this Ram chip. Its 3.3V rated, and its maximum ratings are below what Amiga presents on its bus (5V). I wonder if the fact its working is the miracle of modern manufacturing processes and safety margins, or just a temporary fluke and will results in dead parts in near future. Normally you would need either a 5V tolerant part or a bus translator like <$1 74ALVC164245.
That specific board would be easy to hand assemble by anyone who finds through-hole assembly easy.
I'm glad I can navigate a CLI easily all these years later, but still feel like I missed out by not having the same drive to learn computers on a more bare metal level.
But the Amiga taught me what 68000er assembly is, what a hex editor is, and all of this (the Amiga Workbench, the games, the graphics) was so much more fun and beautiful then a dry DOS box.
Apparently I was the lucky one, although like everyone else on the group I always kept trying to find the Amiga soul in newer systems.
BeOS seemed to be it, but it wasn't.
Nowadays I would give that place to macOS and Windows, in what concerns being multimedia desktop computers, although it isn't the same.
The 68k only has a 16-bit ALU, so at the core it's a 16-bit CPU despite the 32-bits wide registers.
I loved the days when Motorola and Intel would ship you a full set of detailed manuals about everything from CPUs to MMUs, UARTs and whatever other chips they made. I still have my Motorola manuals sitting on the shelf. Was such a nice instruction set to learn on after the 6502.
The only thing that requires 16-bit is 3D and not much is happening in the Amiga retro scene on that front.
[1] https://twitter.com/pouetdotnet/status/1345056422757871616
[2] http://www.xentax.com/?p=1325&fbclid=IwAR1XAEbZwK6lL4g-_RkyN...
That machine with Lattice C was my introduction to modern programming techniques, having been a 6502 and Z80 programmer before.
I ended up with an A500, and upgraded it with a 16Mhz processor by putting some TTL logic together to build a suitable clock from the mainbaords 8Mhz. This is obviously in pre-internet days, I have absolutely no memory of how I learnt about that hack, or even where I sourced a suitable processor. Happy days.
I guess Amiga enthusiasts are an unusual bunch. If you note in the comments to this post, it devolves quickly into a discussion of mixed voltages on FPGAs.
It's not so much an amiga thing as a hackaday thing
That would be me spotting a problem in the design, and Im sure you meant elevates ;-)
https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts
I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.
How many people learnt to solder on a £99 computer that you could then use. How many people learnt basic by typing in lines from a magazine and then fiddling about with the code to give them extra lives in the game?
It really was a golden age in the UK, and I wish more countries got to experience that
Sort like the Mustangs and Corvettes of tech...