AmigoOS vs Everything Else + Storage!

Floppy drives have no firmware. This is quite clear if you look at the pinout of say the ST's floppy drive connector (which is very similar to the PC standard - I once hooked a PC 5 1/4 drive up to an ST).

I know that I wrote some very dodgy interrupt disk management code on ST's that were highly likely to damage the floppy disk, so I'm not sure if it really is impossible. I believe that initiating certain operations then toggling the drive select line at megahertz rates was one way to do it (and supposedly how some of the ST disk copiers managed to copy some protected disk formats).
 
The write protect on the Amiga floppy was a hardware switch that controlled the write-enable on the floppy head. It is not possible to override it.

However, the Amiga filesystem was easy to corrupt and as others said, you can't eject the disk until damn sure everything has been flushed.


Amiga C compilers weren't that great. Most people I think used Lattice, but there was a free one by Matt Dillon called DICE which used very little RAM and could fit on a floppy. Serious development should be done on an A2000/A3000 with gobs of RAM and an HD.
 
lattice , that rings a bell . we used to write 68k though on ST's using err some assembler ;) then we spat the data across to the amiga using the parallel port and the amiga had been booted into our little app ( making sure that stoopid os didnt nick any ram ;) )
hmm can't load any old floppies,, but one's marked "amiga download disk" and another lattice ( though thats probably pc )

yeah bzb , i suppose most disk copies failed due to the "4:55" backup syndrome ;)

-dave-
 
On the topic of multi-texturing, lots of different graphics companies came out with multi-texturing at around the same time. None were exactly the same. 3DFX claimed nVidia stole their way of doing it. nVidia IMO gave in far too easily to 3dfx. I would have happily had a court contest if I were nVidia rather than waste money buying 3dfx out.

On the subject of the Amiga, I still have my A1200 (not setup though, I use WinUAE nowadays) and most of my floppy collection. I never had a corrupted floppy that wasn't due to dodgy media or user stupidity. Last I checked all my floppies worked. Re: the A500 and usability, its just like any other entry level machine that ever existed; you need to expand it some before you can comfortably use it. It was usable out of the box though, just slightly more awkard.
 
radar1200gs said:
Last I checked all my floppies worked.
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That's very lucky (or it must have been a while ago). In part of the great clearout of shite I've been doing here these last few months I've been through approximately 1000 ST and PC floppy disks extracting anything that might be useful for archival onto HD and CD.

There were a few complete duffers - mostly dodgy media, mostly not important because I avoided using cheap crap disks for important stuff - but I reckon about 5% of the disks I tried to extract the data from had at least one bad file on.

I'd recommend that anyone who's storing anything you might want to find again in ten years time on floppy should schedule a weekend to get the lot onto some other media now.

I won't be relying on CDR either for long term storage. Been through about 500 of those as well and those probably had a higher fail rate than the floppies despite being ten years younger in many cases.

(I still ended up keeping two disk boxes worth of ST disks, mostly games that I would like to transfer to a 'full' protected disk image for permanent archival purposes).
 
I checked the discs last year. Backed them up onto CD-r then.

All my old C64 floppies still work too and they are starting to get quite old now (in terms of estimated media life when it was new).

I think its how you store them that counts. I've always been pretty careful with my discs.
 
That is a good point. A substantial number of the ST ones were in the garage at my parents for a while, I think...
 
radar1200gs said:
I think its how you store them that counts. I've always been pretty careful with my discs.
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Not running "Für Elise" on the drive too often also helps I presume.. :LOL:
anyone got a link to that binarary btw? Ive lost mine.
 
Actually, I think most of the corruption issues people had, not related to disk quality and handling could probably be explained by using the disk in two seperate machines or drives. If one of the machines floppy drive wasn't properly aligned it would write data other drives would see as corrupt.

Edit: I never owned a copy of that stupid musical floppy drive program. Great way to ruin perfectly good hardware IMO.
 
Ah, the good old Amiga vs. PC arguments.

When I was in high school, most of my friends had Amigas, and they were indeed very nice machines, but mostly only for gaming. But the one thing they were missing was Wolfenstein 3D. And when it finally arrived for the Amiga, my friends where happy as hell, because the one great game missing on the Amiga was finally there.

Just guess how they felt that immediately after that the Doom freeware version was released.

BwuhahaHaHaHAHA!
 
Don't talk to former Amiga owners about Doom!

It's a damn good job JC has turned out to be as good a coder as he is on the PC because he destroyed the Amiga by refusing to port Doom to it.

The reason he didn't want to do an Amiga port of Doom was because of how the Amiga handled pixels compared to the PC. Amigas use bitplanes, PC's used bytes. JC preferred the PC way.

The really stupid thing about it all was that it all could have been avoided if Commodore actually had a clue.

Back when they launched the A1200, they also launched the CD32 against the Sega Saturn and Playstation. The CD32 had one thing the A1200 didn't - a chip called AKIKO (there was a place on the A1200 PCB for AKIKO btw). This chip did two important things:

1 - provide cd support
2 - convert chunky (byte) pixels to bitplane pixels and back again

Commodore in their infinite wisdom decided not to use AKIKO in the A1200 or offer an official CD player for the A1200 lest it interfere with sales of the CD32.

Of course then Doom and the Multimedia revolution happened on the PC and it was all over for the Amiga because of one small cheap chip.
 
radar1200gs said:
The reason he didn't want to do an Amiga port of Doom was because of how the Amiga handled pixels compared to the PC. Amigas use bitplanes, PC's used bytes. JC preferred the PC way.

The really stupid thing about it all was that it all could have been avoided if Commodore actually had a clue.

Back when they launched the A1200, they also launched the CD32 against the Sega Saturn and Playstation. The CD32 had one thing the A1200 didn't - a chip called AKIKO (there was a place on the A1200 PCB for AKIKO btw). This chip did two important things:

1 - provide cd support
2 - convert chunky (byte) pixels to bitplane pixels and back again

Commodore in their infinite wisdom decided not to use AKIKO in the A1200 or offer an official CD player for the A1200 lest it interfere with sales of the CD32.

Of course then Doom and the Multimedia revolution happened on the PC and it was all over for the Amiga because of one small cheap chip.
Click to expand...

now that's funny, as pc devs commonly used to do some vga reg tweaking to get back to 'unchained'* pixel modes**

* etymological remark: regarding the VGA's 'chained | unchained' terminology, two opposite opinions have been formed among coders with time as to wich is which. i, personally, am of those sticking to the one true (tm) IBM doctrine which teaches us that 'unchained is the raw bitplanes mode, whereas chained is the one mode where a sequential access to planes 0 through 4 is chained into a single byte-pack'. amen.

** admitedly for quite different reasons than just to have bitplanes, but that's still funny nevertheless 8)
 
Except weren't they unchaining to be able to achieve higher resolutions above Mode 13 while still keeping 256 colors. All the way up to 360x480 @256 colors except no pages to flip unfortunately. Mode-X 320x240 @256 colors I was recalled preferred since you get double buffers and its easy to work with (just need to remember for polygon rendering you don't want to do horizontal scanline rendering but vertical scanline rendering in that mode).
 
Pretty sure there were more reasons than JC refusing to port Doom to the Amiga which destroyed it. Besides I played a couple of FPS on the CD32 and even compared to the PC FPS of the day they were atrocious.

Not convinced the Akikio chip was worth a damn in the end.

Yes I owned a A1200 and CD32, chucked both away last year when I moved house.
 
Oh yes, there were more reasons to be sure (Irving Gould & Abdul Medhi being the main culprits), but the Amiga was good at surviving Commodore incompetence. The lack of new titles and the perception of falling behind to the PC were the biggest blows however.
 
Heathen said:
Pretty sure there were more reasons than JC refusing to port Doom to the Amiga which destroyed it. Besides I played a couple of FPS on the CD32 and even compared to the PC FPS of the day they were atrocious.

Not convinced the Akikio chip was worth a damn in the end.
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IIRC it didn't do that good of a job. Besides, it couldn't compensate for the slow CPU of the Amiga. FPS's needed a fast CPU before the days of 3D.
 
I never claimed akiko would do a good job of anything, it simply would have robbed carmack of his excuse not to support the amiga.

It was incredibly daft not to put it in the A1200 (while putting it in CD32) since it would have helped the A1200 match PC features (if not performance).

Commodore chased the console market while buyers of Amigas wanted general purpose computers capable of gaming. That mistake cost Commodore everything.
 
Cryect said:
Except weren't they unchaining to be able to achieve higher resolutions above Mode 13 while still keeping 256 colors. All the way up to 360x480 @256 colors except no pages to flip unfortunately. Mode-X 320x240 @256 colors I was recalled preferred since you get double buffers and its easy to work with (just need to remember for polygon rendering you don't want to do horizontal scanline rendering but vertical scanline rendering in that mode).
Click to expand...

your memory serves you right, unchaining was done for better video memory utilisation (as chaining, i.e. mode13h, wasted vid mem like no tomorrow), and x4 speedup at flat-shading (and basically any sort of single-color fills).
 
I never claimed akiko would do a good job of anything, it simply would have robbed carmack of his excuse not to support the amiga.
Click to expand...

I disagree, the 68020EC just had nowhere near enough processing power and the Akiko chip chip was just enough complication.
 
AmigaOS was a development of a little known OS call TripOS. TripOS was a Unix-like OS developed at Cambridge (hence the name). It runs on PDP-11, IBM mainframes and was ported to Motorola 68000 which is how it would be chosen as the base of AmigaOS. TripOS replaced the late never finished real AmigaOS (called CAOS) but CAOS GUI would be ported to TripOS.

Anybody who programmed Amiga apps will remember how disimilar dos.library and intuition are in structure. Intuition was the GUI of CAOS and never fitted to well with TripoS.

One other curious thing is the TripOS was written in BCPL, BCPL was the inspiration behind first the language B, then the language C (K&R have never confirmed wether the next language in the series should be D or P...).

Unix dates from 1971, TripOs dates from 1977 so borrowed lots of features and improved a few, its main improvement over Unix was its minimal system requirements. Unix's main advantage was a better language...

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/Tripos.html

AmigaOS was an amazing OS for such a low powered system but internally it was a rushed mess and it showed especially later on when other systems started getting similar powered features.
 
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