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Defining moment you HAD to have an Amiga?


marcfrick2112

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1 hour ago, zzip said:

Scalable, proportional fonts for WYSIWYG applications.

I always always always "assigned" such sophisticatedness to MAC and MAC only. The crisp and tight B/W monitor, the snappy feeling (yet slowish) GUI software routines.. Always felt WYSIWYG engineered into MAC software in a confident easy way - whereas other micros had to work at it.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

I didn't really know you could make digitized sounds and play them back in hardware.

I was super curious about the matter. And I quickly brushed up on early speech synthesis/playback. Having played with a Speak'n'Spell and seeing a TRS-80 Votrax in action, talking computers were big hit with me. I quickly understood how phonemes were assembled. Even got a speech chip from (the racks of chips) Radio Shack. Never got it work however, the circuit was too big and I didn't yet comprehend breadboarding circuits from schematics. Only knew how to do those spring-loaded projects kits or solder parts directly to one another in a big mess.

 

Then I learned about digitizing speech through the Apple II cassette port, and eventually The Apple-Cat. I was rather disappointed at how simple that was. Felt like cheating. Felt like bloat. All that memory for a few utterances. Defo liked synthesization better. Efficient. Complex. Computed in realtime.

 

As far as custom chips go, I had ZERO idea it was a Miner design. Let alone being the next generation of the Atari 400/800. Wouldn't learn of the heritage till well into the 21st century.

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

- multitasking - coming from a 6502 world were most code was not written to be relocatable, I could not grasp how multitasking could possibly work.   "How can you load more than one arbitrary program at once?  What if they need to reside in the same memory locations?"

This was something that didn't seem revolutionary at all. It seemed as simple as pointing the processor to a new set of instructions. I was already used to loading DOS and a software clock on the Apple II. Using the "&" to access user created machine-language routines. Accessing the BASIC interpreter, loading new languages into the 16K card like FORTRAN, PASCAL, and INTEGER BASIC. And then there was the Firmware contained on some interface cards - a short 1K or 2K utility to give the cards some functionality.

 

I gained a grasp on why programs needed specific resources at specific addresses, time slicing between them all - without actually knowing I was learning anything. It. Just. Was.

 

So.. This multiple-program "thing" on the Amiga was but a mere extension of all that. The 68000 wasn't magical in that respect. It could still only execute one instruction at a time.

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2 hours ago, zzip said:

But after using them all, clearly the Mac was the most user friendly.

I have never appreciated "user friendly" operating environments.  Like Windows 10 and how it has to welcome me and say Hi all the time, or those cutesy "something went wrong" or "we're working on it!" messages.  Stop patronizing me, stop trying to be my friend, and just do what I want, and if what I want cannot be done then give me a useful error without the f-ing smiley faces to make sure I feel good about shit going sideways.

 

I will happily take an "* INCORRECT STATEMENT" error over a wall of text and an Emoji.

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41 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I always always always "assigned" such sophisticatedness to MAC and MAC only. The crisp and tight B/W monitor, the snappy feeling (yet slowish) GUI software routines.. Always felt WYSIWYG engineered into MAC software in a confident easy way - whereas other micros had to work at it.

I remember COMPUTE had a whole feature article on WYSIWYG and provided font samples from Mac, Amiga and ST,  making it seem like all three were equally competent at it.   But of course after getting an ST,  I learned that the portion of GEM that was responsible for Font management was called GDOS, and it came too late to be integrated into the ST ROM,  so any WYSIWYG app had to ship with a version of GDOS on the disk.    Without GDOS loaded, all it could do was scale bitmap fonts which were hideous.   So yeah the font feature on ST was not as seemless as it should have been.   But the ST Monochrome monitor was as crisp as a Mac's.

 

47 minutes ago, Keatah said:

This was something that didn't seem revolutionary at all. It seemed as simple as pointing the processor to a new set of instructions. I was already used to loading DOS and a software clock on the Apple II. Using the "&" to access user created machine-language routines. Accessing the BASIC interpreter, loading new languages into the 16K card like FORTRAN, PASCAL, and INTEGER BASIC. And then there was the Firmware contained on some interface cards - a short 1K or 2K utility to give the cards some functionality.

Coming from an Atari 8-bit,  it was very common for machine language routines to reside at memory location 1536, especially if called from BASIC.  That area of memory was reserved for such things.   But often these had branches, jumps's or JSRs to fixed memory addresses rather than relative so you couldn't easily relocate the code without fixing all those references--   I don't know if that was a 6502 thing, an Atari thing, or lazy assembly language programmers using fixed addresses instead of relative.   But anyway if you had multiple machine language things needing to run at 1536, you couldn't load them all into memory, they would overwrite each other.    Since this was the computer I learned on, I assumed that all computers worked similarly and leaned heavily on fixed addresses for code.   So that's why multitasking seemed like sorcery to my young teenage self :)

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23 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

I have never appreciated "user friendly" operating environments.  Like Windows 10 and how it has to welcome me and say Hi all the time, or those cutesy "something went wrong" or "we're working on it!" messages.  Stop patronizing me, stop trying to be my friend, and just do what I want, and if what I want cannot be done then give me a useful error without the f-ing smiley faces to make sure I feel good about shit going sideways.

It's definitely possible to take user-friendly too far.   I think my ideal is more like what my college friend described as "getting in your way".   A user interface can get in your way by being too hand-holdy or being too kludgy that everything becomes a chore to complete.   Ideally you should be able to get your work done without your OS/UI becoming a hurdle.

 

Whatever you think of the original MacOS, it was at least though-out and consistent in how it handled things.  It seemed more elegant than GEM or Workbench.   But I've used it at length so maybe eventually it would annoy you and get in your way.

 

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2 hours ago, zzip said:

Oh yeah there's a funny thing about "potential".  When fanboys online start their system wars, they are always arguing potential rather than the actual results of a system. 

Along with overclocking I've vowed to never pay attention to fanbois. It's not really what *I* want anyway.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

I always wanted an Amiga but never got one, I settled for an ST which was maybe half the cost.   But boy did the Amiga fans lord their potential over you online.

There were times when I wanted to get an ST, wanting to see what I was missing. Wanting to simply explore another platform. Maybe even hoping I could afford the 520. But then there were the necessary add-ons that added up to the cost of the Amiga. And I read more and more about the blitting and animation on the Amiga. Fanboism started swaying me too. I also (genuinely) wanted the larger simultaneous-on-screen-at-once color palette. Sound was never consideration. All were lightyears head of the screeching 1-bit-sized ticks and blips and bloops of the Apple II.

 

I had considered the 1st MAC and IIgs too. MAC was immediately a no-go because of high cost. And a buddy of mine got the IIgs before I did. Truthfully it was contest between the IIgs and Amiga for a while. Again the Amiga's animation potential swayed me. The IIgs didn't offer much above the //e at the time. And I had cargo ships full of II+ & //e software, more on the way everyday.

 

I played with my buddy's IIgs for a while and found myself asking a few questions like:

"What can it do that my //e cannot?" There was no real answer to be found. Not at the time.

"Can the //e and IIgs access each other's modes? Cross-compatibility?" No.

 

ProDOS was being introduced at the time, and I was still big fan of DOS 3.3. Perhaps it was one of the first times I realized I had to learn a new OS to do the things I already knew how to do. So again no.

 

2 hours ago, zzip said:

- genlock - I gather it had something to do with syncing with TV signals, but to do what?   Overlay graphics onto a TV signal?   I never really saw it explained well, just that it was a revolutionary feature for some reason.

The way I see it is that its a feature that ensures the CRT beam is in the same spot and moves at the same speed, for 2 video sources. Both beams start drawing the image at the same time. And finish at the bottom at the same time.

 

It more or less allows for one signal to be aware of another. Because they are synced together. This lets you overlay one signal on top of the other in a precise position. Good for additively superimposing text onto home videos. Just can't throw the signal out there, they have to be running in lock-step in sync.

 

But absolutely. It wasn't explained well back in the day. I also don't believe it was a revolutionary feature. Been around since the early 1950's. Only special in that they figured out how to bring it to the low-cost consumer & pro-sumer market. I suspect, but never tore into the technical details, that mixed-signal analog/digital IC's made it cost effective for computers.

 

The Wikipedia explanation is as good as any I s'pose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genlock

https://web.archive.org/web/20150403120241/http://www.mivs.com/documents/appnotes/an005.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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5 hours ago, zzip said:

What disappointed me was the OS.  Not that it wasn't powerful (it was), but it seemed it was not great for a floppy-based system.  Probably would have been more suited if you had a hard drive.  It also wasn't very user friendly.

I didn't learn the OS in as much depth and detail as I did DOS 3.2 and 3.3. Far from it. I had chosen not to dive into the inner workings of the Amiga too much, and much less the disk procedures. Swapping was annoying. And no one ever explained that that would happen. And I got ohh so pissed because of it!

 

I found myself avoiding doing a variety of things because of swappage. I did acquire a 2nd floppy late in the game. And by then my attitudes and ways were set in stone. I was becoming an applications user. Leaving technicals behind. For better or worse.

 

I wold have bought a hard disk, but cost was still in the $600+ range. And there was no way I was coming up with that kinda money during those years. I didn't care about user friendliness - still thought computers were in the pioneering stage. Mail ordering and trips to specialty shops were still required.

 

3 hours ago, zzip said:

For one most of the games were virtually identical to the ST version!   Clearly it was easier and cheaper to design games to a spec that both systems could handle, and that's exactly what most developers did.

I never had enough games to notice the difference. Just the other day I was impressed at how equivalent the PC <-> Amiga versions of Stellar 7 and Nova 9 are, despite the machines' differing architectures.

 

4 hours ago, zzip said:

These days you will see guys with RTX 3090's video cards trying lord it over everyone else, even though games are designed to run on mainstream cards like the nVidia 060 series.

Mmm. Lording it over. IDK.. I'm more interested in the breadth and content and variety of levels in gameplay. I quite nicely rest assured that my next graphics card will be miles ahead of what I have now. No need to worry about progress. It happens.

 

In the days of Cirrus Logic 54xx vs S3 Trio and Virge, I didn't care too much either. Had the 54xx. Only when I got into the Voodoo and Riva 128 did I fall into the benchmark trap. Made sure I had each iteration of GeForce no matter if the gains were slight. As of 2010'ish I stopped. Bought a 1080 in 2019, and may buy a 30xx when the used prices are right. Otherwise integrated graphics serve nicely.

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3 hours ago, OLD CS1 said:

I have never appreciated "user friendly" operating environments.  Like Windows 10 and how it has to welcome me and say Hi all the time, or those cutesy "something went wrong" or "we're working on it!" messages.  Stop patronizing me!

It's not like they're useful or anything. And I don't want anyone working on my computer either!

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1 hour ago, Keatah said:

Along with overclocking I've vowed to never pay attention to fanbois. It's not really what *I* want anyway.

Ugh,  when I first got my 486 PC, I stumbled upon an overclocking newsgroup and was trying it,  but I'd get like 10% performance boost max, which I barely noticed under actual use, but it came at the cost of stability.  I wasn't interested in buying exotic cooling equipment to get an extra few percent either.   The OC enthusiasts started to seem kinda crazy to me...   As soon as they'd their desired OC results, they'd post their Doom Frames per second and then get bored with their rig and buy a new PC and start unlocking the OC potential of that.

 

I just wasn't interested in getting on that hamster wheel so I quickly left the scene.

 

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

I had considered the 1st MAC and IIgs too. MAC was immediately a no-go because of high cost. And a buddy of mine got the IIgs before I did. Truthfully it was contest between the IIgs and Amiga for a while. Again the Amiga's animation potential swayed me. The IIgs didn't offer much above the //e at the time. And I had cargo ships full of II+ & //e software, more on the way everyday.

I was interested in the IIgs as well.  Seemed to have similar specs on paper to Amiga and ST, plus another exotic sound chip from Ensoniq.     Ensoniq actually came to my high school and showed off some of their synthesizers and they sounded great, so I really wanted to hear what the Apple IIgs could do for sound.   But I never even saw one action back then.     It wasn't until the past few years when I watched some IIgs vids on youtube did I have an idea of what it was like.   I ended up being disappointed in the performance.   I mean I should have guessed from the specs that it was much weaker than a 68000,  but I suppose it was even slower than I expected it to be.

 

 

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20 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I wold have bought a hard disk, but cost was still in the $600+ range. And there was no way I was coming up with that kinda money during those years. I didn't care about user friendliness - still thought computers were in the pioneering stage. Mail ordering and trips to specialty shops were still required.

Hard drive makes a huge difference.   The ST was a disk-swapping nuisance too, until I got a hard drive, and then it was like a completely different computer.  But I hear you on the price.  I bought mine second hand.

 

The Amiga Workbench in particular seems like it would really benefit from a hard drive because I remember a crazy amount of disk swapping for relatively common disk operations.

 

24 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Mmm. Lording it over. IDK.. I'm more interested in the breadth and content and variety of levels in gameplay. I quite nicely rest assured that my next graphics card will be miles ahead of what I have now. No need to worry about progress. It happens.

On gaming sites it happens a lot .  Everyone brags about having the latest nVidia cards, and having multiple of them in their PC.  Very few people will admit to having the mainstream xx60 series cards even though statistically far more people do, all because they don't want to be sneered at.

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Yeah, it wasn't long before I bought a hard drive for my Amiga, and it was a game changer (literally). Not only was the OS an immense pleasure to use, but being able to start a game in a couple of seconds that usually took far longer and a couple of disk swaps was a breath of fresh air. Not having the disk swaps on big games, or long loading times between levels or screens was great too. Applications were greatly enhanced too, being able to swap data between programs was so much quicker and didn't require disk swaps.

 

Regarding PC graphics cards, it depends on what you're doing with it. Some people want to run in 4K at >144Hz, and with many games that can take all the muscle you can throw at it. Personally, my main monitor is 1920x1200@60Hz and I'm not that bothered by slower framerates, so my 970 still serves me well.

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I remember my first overclocking adventure/failure.. Today I see how it could not possibly work. It was some project from a magazine that said easy simple way to double performance of your Amiga 500. It gave a BOM and essentially said to replace a couple of logic chips and the 68000 (7 to 14MHz upgrade). So I did it and ended up with a blank screen. Nothing I did seemed to make it work.

 

I hated stuff like that. Probably the replacement support logic wasn't spec'd right, likely I didn't order it correctly. And the explanations seemed anything but simple to me. Probably missed some tiny esoteric detail because I just put the parts in and expected to go. Turned out to be a waste of money. Easy. Simple. My ass!

 

18 hours ago, zzip said:

Ugh,  when I first got my 486 PC, I stumbled upon an overclocking newsgroup and was trying it,  but I'd get like 10% performance boost max, which I barely noticed under actual use, but it came at the cost of stability.

I was never able to OC my 486. The motherboard was/is high-quality, but wasn't of the time when multiple speeds were set by Berg Jumpers or BIOS. It has a soldered-on 50MHz / 2 oscillator. So that would need to be changed at a minimum. It also has a couple of "fixed" jumpers for DX or DX2 doubling. That's about it. There's some 6 or 7 unknown <reserved> dip switches which still remain a mystery.

 

I eventually tried OC'ing a Pentium II 350 and Pentium III 450. Absolutely nothing I did showed any measurable increase. Likely wasn't doing anything. I may have gotten the 350 to run at 372, maybe. Maybe not. A waste of time.

 

I eventually managed to get a Pentium III 850 to run at 862 or something. A minor bump via herculean effort adjusting the FSB, PCI, and AGP speeds. Messed with all the DRAM speeds and timings too. Most I got out of 133MHz DRAM on a 100MHz FSB mobo was like 103 MHz. All the overclockerzboize claimed to be getting a full 140MHz. They were like gods! Because I spent weeks trying to figure this stuff out. Then My HDD started acting wonky and stuff started freezing. So I got all those system cleaners, memory compressors & optimizers, and registry debloaters. And even a TCP and Windows optimizer. And those fucked up too! No performance increase. Changed exotic and esoteric niche settings that only seemed to destabilize my rig.

 

Sometime later, after I gave up I reset the BIOS and reinstalled 98 or XP, whatever I was farting around with at that time. 2 years later I powered the rig on and this molten slug shot out from the S.E.C.C. 2 and whizzed around the motherboard area for an instant. Like Silicon Ball Lightning. Maybe it didn't. But it seemed that way because parts of the CPU core were squished out from the heatsink pressure and splattered around. It was all in slow motion and quite the scare!

 

Not sure if that was caused by previous attempts at overclocking. Or if it was bad caps on the motherboard. An ABIT BX6 R2.0. Either way I replaced the mobo and got a Powerleap PL-iP3T. The PL is essentially a Tualatin Pentium III/Celeron Socket-370 chip running at 1,400 MHZ. Turned out to be one of the best upgrades. I still have it to this day.

 

I even "blew up" a "Gainward GeForce4 TI4600 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP TV/VIVO Golden Sample 128MB AGP Video Card". Yep that's its official name. I ran some sort of Nvidia RivaTuner program that changed the core and memory clock speeds. And I did what those hardware sites told me. Keep cranking it up till you got artifacts. Then back it down 5 or 10MHz. Done! Instant performance increase.

 

Well shit! I got 2 or 3 FPS more in Quake III. Was already running above 50 or 60. So what's the big deal. Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator got testy and crashed. So I lowered the speeds just a bit more - till there was almost no realizable gain. But gains there were. I'll be damned! I'm Elitezers! Really doing the Overclock thing! I HAVE ARRIVED! Told everybody about it, oblivious to the fact nobody gave a rat's ass. Or even understood what it was all about. But I didn't care. I had my eyes on the 5900 and eventually got a 5950 - which was a bust. Hot. Heavy. Bug-laden.

 

4 years later this card started developing green sprinkles and cracks in where the polygons were supposed to align or overlap (to give a seamless joint so to speak) and then that was it. Oh it had been returned to stock speeds years ago. But something apparently was damaged. Latent damage. And it grew and finally blew out.

 

Luckily I was able to quickly buy a new 4600 of the same make/model. Bought two of them in fact. And in the past 10 years I hadn't seen them on fleabay ever again.

 

Fucking Maximum PC. I blame it all their bloated one trick pony niche builds. Solid conservative hardware is not in their vocabulary. Then I started hating on all these performance magazines. Buying them was no different spending money to learn how to spend money, feel bad about your current existing hardware, and damage it in the process. The magazines, the elite OC message boards, it's all the equivalent of dubious oil & gas additives. Gosh almighty! How did I ever fall into that trap?

 

But since 2008-2010 I really began to appreciate conservative engineering and stability in PC hardware. It's like going back to the 80's.

 

Today, the closest thing to "performance enhancement" I do is minimize the amount of junk I install and keep watch on excessive temp file buildup. Thankfully that's quick and easy.

 

Hardware wise? Today little or nothing need be done. Keep it dust-free, avoid liquid cooling, and be sure there's a quality thermal paste on hot parts. No liquid metal or anything.

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13 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I was never able to OC my 486. The motherboard was/is high-quality, but wasn't of the time when multiple speeds were set by Berg Jumpers or BIOS. It has a soldered-on 50MHz / 2 oscillator. So that would need to be changed at a minimum. It also has a couple of "fixed" jumpers for DX or DX2 doubling. That's about it. There's some 6 or 7 unknown <reserved> dip switches which still remain a mystery.

I overclocked one of those 5x86/133's (despite the name it's 486 class),  you could alter the clock multiplier and bus speed with jumpers on a 486 mobo so I think I took it up to 150 or 160mhz.   It was a little faster but it became unstable at those speeds so I put it back to normal speed.   This was a CPU that was commonly overclocked so the chip itself could take it,  I probably had insufficient cooling.

 

24 minutes ago, Keatah said:

But since 2008-2010 I really began to appreciate conservative engineering and stability in PC hardware. It's like going back to the 80's.

 

Today, the closest thing to "performance enhancement" I do is minimize the amount of junk I install and keep watch on excessive temp file buildup. Thankfully that's quick and easy.

 

Hardware wise? Today little or nothing need be done. Keep it dust-free, avoid liquid cooling, and be sure there's a quality thermal paste on hot parts. No liquid metal or anything.

In the past 10 years or so I've seen overclock sections in BIOS along with OC profiles that are considered "safe".   Same with my current videocard, comes with OC tools.   IDK, if there are overclock settings recommended by the manufacturer, it doesn't seem like "real" overclocking.  They are just selling you parts clocked at a slower speed than it was designed for and making you feel like you are getting away with something by clicking a few buttons for extra performance.

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19 hours ago, zzip said:

On gaming sites it happens a lot .  Everyone brags about having the latest nVidia cards, and having multiple of them in their PC.  Very few people will admit to having the mainstream xx60 series cards even though statistically far more people do, all because they don't want to be sneered at.

For the hell of it I just entertained, and entertained the idea only, of getting a 3090 with 24GB of RAM. Price was over $3500 with shipping. Not exactly cost-effective. And I ain't sure that over-the-top graphics will really improve my gaming experience. Especially when low-mid range graphics are more than sufficient.

 

In other words top notch graphics aren't addressing undesirable characteristics of modern gaming, DRM, micro-transactions, kiddie mentality, shovelware-like excesses, and the need to be constantly connected to the internet.

 

IDK. A $3500 graphics card doesn't seem right. And it seems to be creating a category of "gamers" that's too stratospheric. Maybe all that will collapse or something.

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1 hour ago, zzip said:

I overclocked one of those 5x86/133's (despite the name it's 486 class),  you could alter the clock multiplier and bus speed with jumpers on a 486 mobo so I think I took it up to 150 or 160mhz.   It was a little faster but it became unstable at those speeds so I put it back to normal speed.   This was a CPU that was commonly overclocked so the chip itself could take it,  I probably had insufficient cooling.

Yes. I have a pile of those in "PowerStacker" and "QuickChip" format. Been wanting to try it on my original 486 board (they work on other 486 boards I have laying around). This would take the system to a clock-quadrupled configuration of 25MHz X 4. It wouldn't be a balanced system with an ISA only bus. But I suspect it'd be stable since nothing's going over the limit. If anything, everything'd be running at spec or lower (the chip itself).

 

1 hour ago, zzip said:

In the past 10 years or so I've seen overclock sections in BIOS along with OC profiles that are considered "safe".   Same with my current videocard, comes with OC tools.   IDK, if there are overclock settings recommended by the manufacturer, it doesn't seem like "real" overclocking.  They are just selling you parts clocked at a slower speed than it was designed for and making you feel like you are getting away with something by clicking a few buttons for extra performance.

With Intel's SpeedStep and TurboBoost 3.0 and other instruments to vary the core speed and voltages I'm not keen on any of it. It's interesting to see it work from a technical standpoint. Interesting to have the settings available. but I'm happy to leave it at default. Maybe in 5 or 10 years I might want a little boost to get me through till the next generation comes out. But otherwise meh!

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17 hours ago, Keatah said:

IDK. A $3500 graphics card doesn't seem right. And it seems to be creating a category of "gamers" that's too stratospheric. Maybe all that will collapse or something.

Current GPU prices are insane.  It's a combination of pandemic/chip shortage, general inflation+ crypto miners I think.   The same GPU I bought 3 years ago now sells for twice the price brand new!

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On 1/13/2022 at 3:24 PM, Keatah said:

With Intel's SpeedStep and TurboBoost 3.0 and other instruments to vary the core speed and voltages I'm not keen on any of it.

I meant to say not excited to play around with it. The features are cool and stuff. I just want them work.

 

10 hours ago, zzip said:

It's a combination of pandemic/chip shortage, general inflation+ crypto miners I think.

Likely that. And I suspect a little of "just because". IDK I think it's creating a league of gaming way out the everyday player's reach and very different from the 8-bit and Amiga/ST days.

 

I'm wondering if that ridiculousness will in any way allow integrated graphics to gain more respect?

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On 1/14/2022 at 9:08 AM, zzip said:

Current GPU prices are insane.  It's a combination of pandemic/chip shortage, general inflation+ crypto miners I think.   The same GPU I bought 3 years ago now sells for twice the price brand new!

I bought a 1080 GTX Founders Edition for around 250-300 in 2017 or 2018. Today they are moving for $500, more with the box & dox.

 

Anyways, back to the Amiga. A sleeper feature of Amiga that was exciting (at the time) was that it had a 68000, same chip as MAC & ST. It wasn't a defining moment, but I visions and delusions about learning to program it and tear into the innards like I did on the Apple II. Got all pissed and disappointed when I couldn't do something like CALL-151 to get into the monitor. Same with BASIC, had to load it? WTF?

 

But couldn't wait to see how it handled Flight Sim, of course. 16-bits! And 6 more MHz!

Edited by Keatah
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On 5/21/2020 at 9:42 AM, English Invader said:

I went for the 520STe Turbo Pack because it was £100 cheaper than the Amiga and came with a lot more software (in technical business terms, this is what Alan Sugar called a "mug's eyeful") but one of the things I found the ST to be great at was getting things done a lot more quickly and easily than the Amiga.  With the Amiga, you'd spend hours messing around with complicated third party applications; with the ST, it was just there.

 

There was always a part of me that was curious about the Amiga and it wasn't until 2009 that I finally got one.  I remember being intrigued by an A600 I saw in a Tandy store in the early 90s and that was the Amiga that called out to me.

I don't think the Turbo Pack came with any STE enhanced software, all the games seem to be not included in any STE Enhanced lists I can find. Also I think the Amiga 500 was 399.99 same as the STE in 1990.

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