Amiga users?

[Miqorz]

I'm just wondering if anyone surfs AA on an Amiga machine..

 

I've been reading the Amiga forums and it seems cool.. just a weird question I suppose..

 

I'd KILL for a decent amiga computer.

[Dauber]

[frantically raises hand] MEEEEEEE!!!!!! I USE ONE!!! I USE ONE!!!!!

 

Here are my specs:

 

-- Amiga 4000, converted into a Power Tower Mk II with seven, count 'em, seven, Zorro III slots and I think five PCI slots [i don't use 'em, personally]

 

-- GVP 4060/50 accelerator maxed out at 128MB RAM. I did try a PowerPC on this thing, the Cyberstorm. After a couple of weeks it died on me. Returned it to Software Hut for a replacement. They were fresh out, so they had to send it back to DCE in Germany to have it repaired. They lent me a Cyberstorm MKIII 68060 to use while waiting for the PowerPC to come back. Took almost seven months before DCE sent mine back. After a few days it died AGAIN. Software Hut said send it right back to us, we'll swap it immediately. No problem. They gave me a brand new one, which died in two weeks. I just flat-out bought the Cyberstorm MKIII, gave up on PowerPC. THen THAT THING died! Since everything was still under warranty, they gave me this GVP thing, which has been working like a charm for me for over two years now, and gave me the difference in cost back in cash. Seriously, though, Software Hut is awesome...great people to deal with...Aaanyway, the only thing the Amiga really needs a PowerPC for is playing certain games and encoding MP3s at a decent speed. [On my setup, it takes about half an hour to do one standard-length song. DEcoding is realtime, though.] I'm not much into games, and if I need to MP3 something I do it on my wife's laptop.

 

-- Highway USB card -- yup, you read right: USB on Amiga! First the Highway came out, which has four ports, and shortly after that there were like three or four other ones available! Works great when transferring digital photos from my camera's CompactFlash card -- using a small piece of plastic I bought at Target! So I don't have to keep climbing behind my tower to connect the card reader, I went to www.frontx.com and got a port extender kit and bought a black one. [i like the color black on computers...]

 

-- Norway Ethernet card -- this thing actually attaches to the Highway, so it doesn't take up any Zorro or PCI slots. THat's what I'm using to connect to the 'net via DSL.

 

-- Picasso IV gfx card...with PCI and a current PC-based graphics card, the graphics possibilities are considerably more, but what I have does up to 1200x1600 in 24-bit TrueColor screens, so it does the job for me. The cool thing about the Picasso IV is that you can add on a TV card, a video capture card, and a sound card. Unfortunately, all are hard to find. Fortunately, if you have PCI [i have PCI slots but not the Mediator enabler], that's no problem.

 

-- Prelude sound card...this is one awesome card...a TON of inputs on that sucker, so I have my four-track, external CD rewriter audio, Yamaha keyboard, and the Amiga's native onboard sound all piped into the card.

 

-- 80-gig hard drive -- yup, you can use those on Amigas now, providing you use one of the new operating system patches or the Professional File System. [i use the latter...haven't had a hard drive crash since I installed that a few years ago!]

 

-- A4091 SCSI -- Software Hut GAVE this to me after my PowerPC problems. Nice card...I have a 500MB hard drive connected internally just as a boot drive, a Yamaha CRW4416SX CD rewriter externally, and an external ZIP drive that I've had almost five years. [Thankfully, this drive was made AFTER the whole click-of-doom scare.]

 

As for software:

-- Miami 3.2B is the Internet dialer I use. Miami is no longer supported, so it's literally impossible to legally register it.

 

-- YAM 2.3 [the current version is 2.4, but I prefrer 2.3] -- probably the best e-mail client on ANY platform....and it's free.

 

-- Web browsing -- the Amiga has three "major" web browsers, all of which support JavaScript [although they all interpret it slightly differently, unfortunately -- just like Nutscrape and Internet Exploder]. IBrowse 2.3, which just came out earlier this year, is my browser of choice...very quick, and...supports TABBED browsing! In other words...if I want to open up multiple web pages, I don't need to open multiple windows...I just click on a tab below the address bar and it switches to another site! [i think Netscape is looking to implement this...and of course, they're gonna claim they invented it! IBrowse has been doing this for years!] There's Voyager, which some people swear by and others swear at, but it has some decent Flash support -- which the other two Amiga browsers don't support. Then there's AWeb, which has recently been made Freeware. Nothing really special about that one, IMHO. None of the Amiga browsers support Java [no real Amiga JVM is available] or cascading style sheets [which are interpreted differently in Netscape and IE, anyway]. BTW -- for some reason, the background in Atari Age is gray in IBrowse [picture enclosed in the next message I post]!

 

Any questions?

[Dauber]

BTW -- Amiga OS 3.1 came out in like 1991 or 1992. The next update didn't come out until 1999 or 2000, OS 3.5. A year later, OS 3.9 came out. So they've been a little more active lately! Right now there's a new Amiga out called AmigaOne, which runs on a G3 or G4, depending on your preference and budget. Only problem is it doesn't have an operating system ready yet -- Amiga OS 4.0 is going to be the new PowerPC-only operating system....so right now if you get an AmigaOne it comes with Debian Linux and, if you choose to install it, an Amiga emulator.

 

Also...I run a program called Directory Opus Magellan v5.82 -- it acts as basically a substitute for Workbench, and it's 100% compatible...cool thing is you can do a TON of things with it and have all kinds of sound events and things.

 

Aaaaaanyway, as promised, here's a shrunken version of my Atari Age screen capture via IBrowse 2.3:

 

 

BTW -- the toolbars and background graphics are user-customizable; obviously, I need to do a little work here.

[ApolloBoy]

Dauber, I'm surprised your A4000 isn't a mess of melted silicon and plastic yet. Too... Much.. Mods... Head... EXPLODING!!!

[Dauber]

Well, considering the clock battery was replaced when Software Hut towered my machine, I'm not using the CPU card that came with the machine, the built-in floppy is long gone and replaced with a better one, the Zorro daughtercard is almost brand new, along with the power supply, and I have no fewer than three cooling fans in this sucker, and the Tower is huge and has a lot of airflow....the only thing that's original is the motherboard. Even the KEYBOARD is only a couple of years old!

[Ze_ro]

Wow... Amiga fans are definitely some of the most devoted people I've seen in the computer world. It's really too bad that Commodore isn't still around, because the Amiga was a very remarkable machine.

 

I've got three Amigas in the basement, although I don't use any of them very often. I have an Amiga 500 that I used to use for games that was recently replaced by an Amiga 1200 (although it has a bad hard drive, so that needs replacing eventually). I also have an Amiga 3000 sitting around too. My brother use to use it for web browsing (as well as all his other computer needs), but eventually took one of the hard drives out for something else, so although the machine works fine, it needs some attention before it can really be used (It actually boots up properly, and makes it to a shell, but complains about tons of missing files).

 

Frankly, I always thought that internet access through an Amiga was a rather messy business. My brother used to complain about this stuff a lot. He was always very annoyed with the fact that so many important programs were crippled shareware... whereas the equivalent Windows programs were often free for non-commercial use. I've heard there have been a lot of advances in this area since then though, so these may not be issues anymore.

 

--Zero

[Miqorz]

 

Any questions?

 

Yes..

 

Where do you live and when will you not be home?

[Fretwobbler]

While I dont use an Amiga for browsing I do own one, an Amiga 500. Like Ze_ro I dont use it often, but it holds many happy memory's. My first ever network was between two Amiga's. When I started working the first computer I bought with my own money was the very Amiga 500 I still have to this day

 

The games I really loved, and still play (albeit very occasionally) are Stunt Car Racer, Civilization, Utopia, Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix, Knights of the Sky, Syndicate, Cannon Fodder, and I still play Elite on my Amiga from time to time

[Miqorz]

I'm VERY intrested in non MS OS's in general... I've been realling wanting to mess around with the Amiga OS for a while on a real Amiga..

[Fretwobbler]

You should try this then....

 

hehe just j/k.

 

You dont need a big Amiga to play around with Workbench. There are stacks of 500's/1200's on ebay for peanuts. Everyone should own an Amiga, and a copy of Monkey Island to boot!

[Miqorz]

The computers in my 5th grade class ran on OS/2.. not sure if it was warp or not..it's been a while.. o_O

 

But all I want to use an Amiga for is games and messing with the OS.

[Fretwobbler]

The games were...are great! Along with the ST it was the first home computer capable of producing half-decent 3D graphics, without textures but who cares!

 

When you consider the 500 had the same processor as a Megadrive I think they rock! Kind of like comparing the performance of a crappy Xbox to a PC in todays terms.

 

You should make one your next purchase!

[Ze_ro]

But all I want to use an Amiga for is games and messing with the OS.  

 

In that case, here's the cheapest Amiga you'll ever find. Possibly the fastest one too.

 

--Zero

[Chris++]

I have an A3000 that I use for composing. Also, Krissie uses it for Megaball. She's addicted. (It's still the only really good Breakout/Arkanoid-type game I've ever played.)

[SteveW]

I got an Amiga 1000 from my brother sometime around '89 or so. My brother knew a guy that worked on them and had piles of them, including loads of - how should I say this - non-legitimate copies of games. I was young, I didn't think much of piracy. (I've gone 180 degrees on that since then.) Later on, I got loads and loads of games from a friend of mine who called up some of those European BBS boards loaded with cracked copies of games. I probably have between 500-600 games around here. I loaned them out to my brother a couple of years ago, and he took them out of the storage boxes they were in and threw them into a big cardboard box. They've sat in the corner of my room, getting dusty and dirty. I doubt if half of them even work anymore.

 

My uncle bought an old Amiga 2000 for the Video Toaster that was inside (he has a side business filming weddings, school events, etc.) and he gave me what he thought was a spare keyboard. It was actually an Amiga 1200HD. But I don't have a power supply to make it work. And also, my old mouse from the 1000 went out, and I don't know where to find another. Anybody know of a good web site (not eBay) that sells power supplies and mice?

[Godzilla]

im a huge amiga head. I still have my original, still working a1000 from decades ago. and a few more a1000s, a few a500s, an a2000, an a4000, a cdtv, and a cd32. also have 2 emplant emulation boards. i used my a4000 for all my web stuff up to the mid 90s. amiga will always r00l all. :-)

[SteveW]

I'd love a CDTV. Drool........