One machine I am excited to “re-learn” is the Commodore Amiga.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I bought my first Amiga (the first computer I ever bought for myself) in December of 1989. I’d known about the Amiga for a while but I never expected to own one as in the 80s computers would maybe last a couple of years then get replaced by something different and incompatible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That first Amiga was an A500 bought with the infamous “Batman pack” from a newsagent and “sweet shop” that had also had a sideline in computer games and some computer hardware. This independent family business still exists (with two small changes of location) as a pure computer shop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In later years I got a second hand A500 as a second machine and later still an A1200 (new from same shop as my first A500 I believe) which I used until roughly 1995\/1996 when I moved to PC, then to Mac and mostly back to PC again (with a combination of Linux and Windows).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have dabbled with emulation over the years, but I got something in late 2017 that I would have never believed possible let alone likely in the mid 90s. A new “computer” that would “natively” run Amiga software. The so called MIST FPGA computer. I got a version 1.3 plus (includes MIDI ports).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can’t explain the feeling of booting it up with an Amiga “core” and suitable Kickstart ROM file, “inserting” an ADF version of one of the first 17-Bit PD music disks I ever obtained and seeing it run and hearing the music coming out of hardware! Sadly I haven’t actually used it much since then…<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve decided now though I want to really get back into the enjoyment I had programming in years past and the Amiga will be one of the systems I want to really get into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To do this I will probably lean on emulation for convenience reasons, not that it would be impossible on a MIST (or similar) or even a real Amiga as I am planning to work on the “machine” itself, mostly using tools available via Aminet, still around all these years later as one of the de-facto sources of Amiga software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However there is the issue of Kickstart and Workbench. Whilst there are other (mostly dubious) ways you can source these, I will source these from Cloanto’s “Amiga Forever” product. Here’s lies a little niggle for me in that Cloanto make changes to Workbench and those changes SOMETIMES cause issues outside of emulation, e.g. as I found with Amiga Forever 7 putting their Kickstart 1.3 and Workbench 1.3 files on an SD card for the MIST computer to emulate a 1989 era A500 results in a Guru Meditation. Software added to the “Startup-Sequence” assumes an emulator environment and if you’re not running UAE, poof! Also the disk is\/was so full I couldn’t even edit the file as “Ed” wanted to create a new file when saving. Solution was breaking into the boot sequence and deleting a file or two before editing out some Cloanto changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At time of writing Amiga Forever is on version 9 and unless you have real Amiga hardware it’s pretty much THE way you get this stuff legally. The “plus” edition includes everything required. The cheaper “value” edition only contains the “1.3” system software, the state-of-the-art in late 1989, but not useful for our purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My normal general computer of choice these days is a Dell laptop running Devuan Linux, and even though Amiga Forever focuses on Windows (the default download being an “msi” file) you can download a zipped ISO file which is perfectly usable under Linux. But we’re getting ahead of the story for now…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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