Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User

What a great computer. Way ahead of its time. Still usable today. It is one of the last computers produced where all the components are well documented.<p>The legacy it left behind is huge. Whenever I meet another dev and find out that we have similar background it is like meeting an old friend.<p>The computer might be discontinued but it&#x27;s legacy will live on forever.

I still know Amiga inside out, even after all these years. I don&#x27;t have to look up that $dff180 is palette entry 0. Or how to set up BPLCON and bitplane pointers, etc. in a copper list to set up a graphics mode.<p>Alternatively you could of course do those the &quot;proper&quot; way through exec.library vector at address $4. But the name of the game was to extract all the performance available and that meant bypassing the operating system. :-)<p>Programming Motorola 68000 was so simple and enjoyable. A very elegant and orthogonal design!<p>I miss Amiga.

OMG that Epyx joystick [1] in the screenshot brings it all flooding back! I hated that thing so much that I went to my local arcade parts dealer, bought a stick and buttons, built a plexiglass housing and circuit board (designed in Deluxe Paint) in the electronics lab at my high school, and cannibalized that horrible Epyx joystick for its plug. Best decision I ever made! SOTB and Turrican were so much nicer with an arcade stick. I even added toggle switches to reroute one of the buttons to &quot;up&quot; (since many games used up for jump).<p>I still have the buttons and joystick, though the home-built plexiglas housing didn&#x27;t fare so well over the years.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bytecellar.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;a2000.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bytecellar.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;a2000.jpg</a>

I enjoy seeing how people <i>use</i> old tech. I never really understood the appeal of just &quot;getting them working&quot;, which seems like fixing up a classic car and not driving it. But seeing how they are still in production is interesting to me. About 15 years ago I was at a cable access station and they were still using an Amiga; I think it was for captioning. HD did it in, I expect, but it was neat to see it getting use in the 21st century.

I totally agree it&#x27;s the biggest leap I&#x27;ve ever seen in a computer, I just thought everything would be getting better at the same rate for years. The only thing that happened was that PC CPU&#x27;s got so fast you could have real time 3D graphics at a given point but things would not get dramatically better in terms of colors, resolution or sound anymore.<p>Especially given the fact most people came from an Apple II, bleep bloop 4 generous colors PC or Commodore 64 the difference was just day and night. Only Mac users had a similarly large improvement but it was still black and white and silent.

Couple of years older, but his experience matches mine completely. Even that Personal Computing issue.

I had the third Amiga in New Orleans. And a 2000, and a 1200. I finally gave up the platform around 2000 when I got a used Mac.<p>It was a decade ahead of everything else when it launched but Commodore sat on their asses for twenty years.

I love these articles. Brings back fond memories of the BBS and public domain scene with my 1000 and 1200 baud modem.<p>(Kickstart 1.0&#x2F;Guru Meditation crew checking in)

This is awesome, thanks

Impressive.