The X-COPY user interface[1] was very powerful, watching the little squares slowly fill with color while hearing the floppy drive painfully squeaking and grinding was an experience in itself.<p>Operating system standardization have killed this kind of creative interface, it's probably for the best, but I'm pretty sure something bold and colorful can still happen and make a difference to users.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/a5003-crop-2302041155-01.png" rel="nofollow">https://www.datagubbe.se/utildisks/a5003-crop-2302041155-01....</a>
I loved the old menu screens. I remember one on the C64 that had a little spaceship in the left screen border. It could be moved up and down with the cursor keys, the space bar made it shoot at the menu entries. If you hit one, you had it selected successfully, if you missed, the projectile was reflected from the right screen border. If you were not quick enough to move the ship out of the way you'd shoot yourself down. A tiny and very upset space creature emerged from the damaged vehicle and dragged it off the screen.<p>I still believe being able to portray an upset alien in like seven or eight pixels is true art.
> Size saving CLI commands<p>For those unfamiliar with the Amiga culture, it's worth pointing out that this frequently includes shaving <i>bytes</i> off tools. I remember more than once disassembling some CLI utility to strip out a few bytes here and there (seeing the poor, wasteful quality output of early C compilers delayed my switch from asm to higher level languages by at least a couple of years...).<p>Not just for the sake of saving disk space, but because you'd either make them resident in memory or copy them to a RAM: disk so you could more easily swap floppies and still have your tools available, and when you had 512KB or 1MB of RAM, every little bit made a difference.
That X-Copy Screenshot was a blast from the past. A friend and I used to combine our pocket money, goto a local independent sport shop that had a tiny Amiga game corner and buy a game then X-Copy it. None of us remember how we learned about that. Was probably the guy in the sport shop itself. Amazing days.
Oh yes, a trip down memory lane... some notes:<p>> <i>Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two).</i><p>These memory expansion cards went into the "expansion trapdoor" at the bottom of the A500 and most of them included an RTC - without that, you had to enter the date and time at every startup (of course only if you cared for your files having correct timestamps and other such stuff). I had one of those before I got a "Power PC Board" (<a href="https://mingos-commodorepage.com/sammlung/erweiterungen_detail.php?rubtable=sammlung_erweiterungen&id=35&detailf=erweiterungen_detail&title=KCS%20Power%20PC%20Board&listtype=icondetail" rel="nofollow">https://mingos-commodorepage.com/sammlung/erweiterungen_deta...</a>) because I needed something MS-DOS-compatible. The good thing was: when the "PC" wasn't in use, it not only doubled as a 512 KB expansion + RTC, but you also had a whopping 512 KB RAM Disk where you could copy some often-used programs to reduce floppy disk swapping.<p>> <i>Fred Fish's AmigaLibDisks</i><p>Of course everyone (except maybe Fred Fish himself) called them "Fish Disks"...
> Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two)<p>Indeed, I had that very setup, but with a little twist... I still have my very weird oddity which is an external, non-official, 5"1/4 (not 3"1/2, like most people had) floppy drive. Among our group of friends we'd all do that because, at that time and in the EU at least, 5"1/4 floppies were so much cheaper than the 3"1/2 ones that for the price of about 3 boxes of 3"1/2 floppies we could buy 3 boxes of 5"1/4 floppies <i>and</i> the external 5"1/4 floppy disk drive reader (which I take it were assembled by amateur/hobbyist: they didn't look anything like official drives and were very raw, bought through friends-of-friends-of-friends).<p>Now that Amiga Internet forums are flourishing people have accepted that this was a thing (there are even rare pictures of the thing) but in the past I've had Amiga users explain me that this didn't exist and that I was seeing things (!).<p>To make the matter even more confusing Commodore did sell <i>official</i> 5"1/4 drives for the Amiga too, but these were different.<p>The "bootleg" 5"1/4 were, for all matter and purpose, identical to the 3"1/2 ones and we'd install a switch on the Amiga to decide if we were booting from the 3"1/2 or 5"1/4 and the OS had zero way to tell the difference.
If you like this, you'll probably like some of the books published by Bitmap Books [1].<p>Commodore Amiga: a visual compendium, for example [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bitmapbooks.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitmapbooks.com/</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/by-system/products/commodore-amiga-a-visual-commpendium" rel="nofollow">https://www.bitmapbooks.com/collections/by-system/products/c...</a>
I was responsible for creating a piece of shareware called 'RADBench' that part-eliminated the need for the second external disk drive, instead copying the essential utilities onto a re-usable RAM disk that survived reboot. It was a bit like having a hard drive, but without actually having to buy one!
This reminded me of Turbo Imploder, an Amiga file compression utility with a synth soundtrack and scopes:
<a href="https://youtu.be/vFbrYsXDM4w?t=189" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/vFbrYsXDM4w?t=189</a><p>The Save File dialog had a second soundtrack (played briefly at 3:45).
I miss those type of graphics. They added an element of fantasy that you just don't get nowadays.<p>We keep chasing realism for the graphical frontend and its depressing.
I used to love this kind of stuff on the Amiga. My Dad would take me to computer fairs where there'd be random floppy disks being sold, sometimes with programs or games or even cheats and cracks on them.
I once had an Amiga utilities disk from a friend in the UK, it was called something like The Carpet Monster's Utilities and it was awesome. I wish I still had a copy, so on the offchance that anyone seeing this comment now or in the future, has it, please let me know!
I loved my Amiga 500. All my friends at the time also had one.<p>And then later on my Amiga 1200 with an actual hard drive. With the then excellent Amiga Workbench.<p>Whilst I tinkered with Basic on C64 and the 500 it was with EasyAmos on the 1200 I properly started my programming interest.
Ah, the joy when I managed to cram both the compiler <i>and</i> the linker on a single diskette, so I didn't have to switch diskettes every time I compiled!<p>I think it was Matt Dillon's DICE C compiler. A true legend, Matt.
That's a lovely collection of screenshots, I'm suprised the LSD Legal Tools series[0] wasn't included, but it does seem to be because the author is selecting for the aesthetic of the menu screen, calling the purely-ASCII ones "uninspired" :(<p>For a further hit of nostalgia, check out the 1994 Impact DK demo <i>In A World of ASCII</i> [1] which features a lot of demo effects that pretend to look like they were done in the Amiga CLI window<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amiga-stuff.com/pd/lsd-legaltools.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.amiga-stuff.com/pd/lsd-legaltools.html</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sPUVm4WH5U">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sPUVm4WH5U</a>
It was really a shame the Amiga failed as a general purpose machine. In the end, even the ST, which was much better positioned to be one - cheaper to build, could read/write PC floppies, had a standard hard-disk port - failed to make a sizeable dent...
My family had an Amiga 1200 when I was growing up although I was too young to do anything fancy on it other than play games.<p>I do fondly remember watching my brother copy disks using X-Copy though and being mesmerized by the UI.
Notice the "Schwarzkopf" killer in the 4th screenshot, a useful tool against the notorious "Saddam" virus (which could be activated simply by inserting a disk into your Amiga).
That was a trip down memory lane. I loved the Amiga, I owned 3 of them at one stage, but ended up moving on after the collapse of Commodore.
Still has a place in my nostalgic heart though
There is PiMiga distribution which is Amiga workbench + emulation on RaspberryPi. The torrent is 22GB (6oGB unpacked) of Amiga software. If anyone wants to play with retro computing.