Amiga Users & other classic computers stuff

LawlessPPC · #1 06-27-2008, 02:53 PM

Just out of interest how many Amiga or X Amiga users are there in here.

L8rs
LawlessPPC

naquaada · #2 06-27-2008, 10:44 PM

I'm Amiga user. But I'm not very active anymore after the HD crash in december 2005. I'll reduce my collection but still keep some machines, an A1000, A1200/040, A4000T/060 and a CDTV. Maybe a plain old A500 for my Action Replay MKIII, that cardridge is great!

LawlessPPC · #3 06-28-2008, 12:23 AM

1200T, blizzppc 603e+240mhz&060@50mhz (with scsi), 256mb, G-Rex, voodoo 3000, realtek 8139 100Mb and sound card (cant remember which), all scsi drives including CDRW. Blah Blah Blah all runnign MorphOS

naquaada · #4 06-28-2008, 12:59 PM

I tried getting MorphOS to work on my A1200PPC, but it never worked. I'm selling my BlizzardPPC actually on ebay. I only use Workbench 3.1, I don't like the newer stuff.

Here's my C128 stuff from the OKI thread:

My C128 configuration: 2x 1571, 1x 1581, CMD SCSI HD using a 640MB magneto-optical drive. JiffyDOS and KeyDOS in the computer. I also have a Commodore 1750 REU, but only 512K, not upgraded.
For my C64 I have a Flash8 8 MHz accelerator card (= 800% faster) with 1MB RAM and a 2 MB BBGRAM accu-buffered RAM expansion. I can combine them, so I have 3 MB RAM for GEOS (And this is a lot on the C64!).

I still have 6 1541 drives, 7 different C64, some C128 and VC-20, the whole C16 and plus/4 series including the very rare 1551 drive and a lot of other Commodore 8-bit stuff. One of the coolest drives I have is the SFD-1001 (Single Floppy Drive, nickname was Super Fast Drive) which uses the IEEE-488 bus and could write 4133 blocks = 1.033 MB on a standard 5,25" DD disk. As I remember this thing has a 100 tpi-drive, not 48 or 96 as common.

If you ever want to hear a cool sound, check the 3,5" floppy 1581 on a C128 in burst mode. The is a picture demo which uses this mode and the floppy makes noises, great. The 1581 is an obscure drive. It has an oversized ROM with contains parallel routines which can't be used because the drive is connected serial. There are a lot of free spaces and the programmer added some undocumented commands which have no use :-P And he left a message in the ROM 'Dedicated to my wife Lisa' :-D I presume this floppy is the only one one which can be partitioned. You have no subdirectories, but you can partition the drive like a harddisk. But in a rather complicated way. Another crazy thing is the block handling. The drive itself is a standard shugart-controller with an Amiga drive. So it has two sides 0 and 1 with 40 tracks and a sector size of 512 bytes. The Commodore 5,25" drives always had a sector size of 256 bytes. To enhance the compatibility, they rearranged the drive geometry virtually to 1 side with 80 tracks and 256 bytes per sector. To do this a whole track must be read fully in the floppy RAM. That's why this thing is rather fast, especcially on the C128.

For the people who don't know it: Commodore floppy drives are fully own computers, with own CPU, RAM and I/O. That's why they are very flexible, you could always write your own routines for the floppy for faster access, copy protection and more. There were programs that used the floppy as co-processor! The 5,25" floppies had 2K RAM, the 1581 3,5" floppy 16K. And it's possible to program effectively in this bit of memory! The serial bus Commmodore used on their home computers is very similar to Firewire. The components are connected in a daisy chain type, so one input connector and one output connector. You can connect printers, floppies, SD-card interfaces and even harddisks to this bus. But at these times you have to give the device maually an adress number, it doesn't do this automatically. So it can happen that there are bus collisions if two devices had the same adress.

naquaada · #5 06-28-2008, 01:07 PM

BTW: ever took a look on http://www.recordedamigagames.org ?

Wow, these guys must be good. A lot of this old school-games are rather hard, I'm sure there are a lot on which modern gamers would fail. If I remember Apidya, I never managed it though the first level. Really hard is level 4, the techno level. You can access it by typing 'hastalavista' in the title picture. I'm just downloading all 12 DVDs.

LawlessPPC · #6 06-28-2008, 01:48 PM

naquaada
yeah it seriously amazes me what they still manage to bolt on to the systems. Retro heaven eh!!! Long live the commodore community

L8rs
LawlessPPC

P.S. to give you an idea on age first system I ever got my hands on was a ZX81 then vic20, 64, 128 , a500, 1200

LawlessPPC · #7 06-28-2008, 01:48 PM

i skipped ST's dont likes bees lol

naquaada · #8 06-28-2008, 01:58 PM

i learned programming on a VC-20 of a shool girlfriens, my first own computer was a C64 - and I still have it. I had an Atari ST but I never used it. Imagine - the 68000 was fully solderd in the board - yecch! Here's a nice graphics comparison demo of the Atari ST and the Amiga on YouTube. Music by Chris Hülsbeck!

LawlessPPC · #9 06-28-2008, 02:01 PM

yeah ive seen that major difference in colours

naquaada · #10 06-28-2008, 02:05 PM

Also take a look at this thread, it's about speech synthesis which we Amiga users know for long. If you like C64 SID tunes, take a look at SIDPLAY. It's a Leopard-only SID-player like iTunes with online syncronisation to the High Voltage SID Collection with about 35000 SID tunes. Great is also remix.com with high quality C64 remixes and of course SLAY Radio, which plays all the day C64 and Amiga remixes via internet.

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