Comments on: Something interesting happened on the way to Verona

By: Bas v.d. Wiel

Bas v.d. Wiel — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:56:49 +0000

As the author of the serial-to-amiga article you linked to: my laptop doesn’t have a serial port either. I assembled a contraption from a USB-to-serial adapter, null-modem cable and a 9-to-25-pin converter. It works flawlessly but it looks like something straight from Dr. Who.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 11:24:25 +0000

In reply to Nick B..

Yeah… Once uppon a time I made my own VGA out with a DB25 that I had to take a hacksaw to… Now even DB-25 serial ports are a rarity!

By: Nick B.

Nick B. — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:04:35 +0000

Oh those elusive 23-way D-connectors for the serial and the video… I don’t think I’ve ever seen them anywhere except for the Amiga series.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:33:16 +0000

In reply to ampharos. Yeah the whole hombre thing is kind of interesting.. But ultimately if they had pulled it off in some fashion, it would be a stand alone CD-32 like device, from the sounds of it, more of a Dreamcast.. which worked so well for Sega. And even if that all panned out, the whole Itanium thing would have crushed the whole effort.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:06:06 +0000

In reply to ampharos. Commodore was run more like a pump/dump stock scheme which ultimately brought it down. Bad timing in their stock cycle + one frivolous patent lawsuit ended them. They were doomed to eventual failure anyways, in this era of software patent racketeering.

By: ampharos

ampharos — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:25:19 +0000

Although the attempts at Hombre were interesting – PA-RISC, maybe NT in my Amiga, typical advanced Amiga graphics? lolwut?

By: ampharos

ampharos — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:21:11 +0000

The hilarious part is that the PPC stuff is overpriced and basically useless.

MUI is garbage – it also shows why people were lining up for Windows 95 and Macintoshes – hell, even OS/2 was better – no hunting for libraries, no hassle of them pretending they’re the star of the show (MUI, all you needed was a control panel and library, not an entire folder) – but you can still get PCMCIA networking for them easily.

They might not have been as good as the Amiga, but the user experience was a lot better. Linux gave you a CLI that wasn’t shit, Windows 95 gave you hardware and apps, OS/2 gave you whatever OS/2 did, and anyone could figure out how a Mac worked.

Sorry, just want to get that off my chest. Amigas are cool but very overrated. If I could take any hardware offered at the time, I’d go for a 040 Mac or a really fast 486. Bettter UI, and more software even if they were inferior.

By: Gabucino

Gabucino — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 09:12:52 +0000

Watch out for 37.300, it contains a bug which _will_ yield constant filesystem corruption on “big” CF cards (or HDDs). Better use 37.350, or rather what I did: a 3.1 kick… Then I put the 37.300 in my HD-less 500, because OS 2.x runs more utils than 1.x.

The A600 is the perfect machine to realize how A4000/PPC-centric were+are the Amiga users. Just try to use any program that uses the absolutely horrible MUI toolkit, like a “simple” IRC client: AmIRC… Since the PCMCIA slot will be in use by the ethernet adapter (therefore no +4Mb SRAM), AmIRC will “quickly” (takes 30 seconds even to start) evaporate all (with expansion: 2Mb) the memory, subsequently freezing the Amiga, all the while being horribly slow like Windows 95 on a 386…