Sad. I was an Amiga user from roughly 1989 through 1994. Commodore barely updated the Amiga platform for most of its life. The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
One of my biggest regrets in my "journey" with computers is walking away from Commodore when Amiga was released. I felt it was superior to anything else I had seen, and I knew the Commodore 64 inside-out, but I just felt like PCs were for grown ups, and I needed to grow up. I needed to skate to where the puck was going, and that wasn't Commodore. I guess I was right, but I still regret it because all the dudes I knew that stuck with Commodore, with the new Amiga platform - well, they all seemed to be having more fun. I learned macros for Lotus 1-2-3, which was more practical (I made $$$ as a teenager teaching stiffs about macros), but my Amiga friends were making cool drum beats and sample-based music and remixes on their Amigas - totally impractical, but also fun as shit back then. So yeah, they were all having fun with their Amigas, while I became Alex P. Keaton.
I still miss features from AmigaOS, to the point I've started adding some to my software. E.g. I've added "assigns" to my shell (very superficial integration), and it's so nice to be able to just create an alias for any path.
It's hard to explain why it feels better, because you could "just" create a bunch of symlinks in one location, but being able to "cd projects:" instead of ~/Desktop/Projects just feels nicer. I've also added "implicit cd" when entering paths, so I can also do just "projects:" like on the Amiga.
What made the Amiga special wasn't just the hardware, but a whole host of small extra niceties like that.
Another favorite is datatypes: A uniform plugin-based API to open files of any type, ensuring Amiga software written decades ago can open modern image formats.
And another one I love was the ability to open a new console window as a file path, so you could redirect shell output to a new window just as if it was a file.
(it also took way too long before I remembered who Alex P. Keaton was...)
I also enjoyed these features! I used to have "downloads:" for all my BBS downloads, "docs:" for my papers, etc. The Amiga OS had some other interesting features, like the ability to attach comments to files as metadata ("filenote" command.)
I use a script to create a dotfile with comments about a file, and an ls wrapper that outputs the comments if present for that reason as well.
My setup is very slowly converging on getting back some of the things I enjoyed about AmigaOS... The challenge of course is that simulating it without rewriting every piece of software and/or replacing the kernel will always be a leaky abstraction, but I can at least do it for the basic desktop and terminal experience...
I stayed with Commodore, but with my 128, since I couldn't afford an Amiga. I envied my PC friends their VGA graphics, but yeah, the Commodores were a lot of fun. And I learned to program on it, which none of my friends were doing with their PCs. Once they went to PC, it seemed like they just used them to run software, and weren't interested in tinkering.
For me anyways: Amiga was learn what a computer can do, PC was learn how a computer works. PC was also my path to linux and linux changed my circumstances in life drastically. I get what the comment above you is saying, but I don't think the Amiga was more fun at the end of the day, PC ended up being much more challenging as a power user (therefore fun).
> The major updates, like AGA, were too little, too late.
And AGA was a mixed bag. The extra bitplanes were really welcome, but not having chunky (1 byte per pixel) mode when all the 3d coming out really required it, and having to do an expensive operation to go from chunky to planar, did really hurt efficiency.
It was a great addition that extended the existing idea of bitplanes, which was a really good one in lots of ways though.
I disagree that it needed a chunky pixel mode most of all. What you're asking for is a machine that can draw a scene byte by byte with the CPU, then just display that. But if your hypothetical Amiga is doing most of its graphical manipulation with the CPU, then it has failed as a platform. The main idea of the Amiga is to handle media data using specialized chips that are much faster than the CPU for certain tasks.
What an upgraded Amiga really needed was two things. The first is a fast blitter that could also horizontally stretch or shrink a bitmap by some fractional amount. The second was some sort of “flipper” device (or new blitter feature) that could reflect a bitmap across a diagonal line (or rotate by 90 degrees).
Here's how you'd use these for a third-person shooter. Store the wall bitmaps flipped along the diagonal; each line of those bitmaps correspond to a vertical slice of the wall. For each vertical line in the scene, find the correct wall tile and row, and blit that line of pixels into a scratch space, squishing it and shifting it by the correct amount. Then use the flipper to copy that to the screen.
Yeah, as you mentioned before, the chipset just didn't keep up. I had an A3000 for a while (68030 25mhz) You could do faster blits with the CPU. I remember running a utility called "cpublit" that accelerated window scrolling. It was noticeably faster. This was 1991 or so. ECS was long in the tooth.
The problem with AGA is it arrived when 386 clones with SVGA were becoming incredibly affordable. If it had arrived in early 1990 instead of late 1992, the Amiga might've had more of a chance.
Basically, Commodore should've skipped ECS entirely. ECS was essentially useless to most consumers.
Actually, Commodore should have kept their chips up-to-date with process improvements. That means releasing a new chipset with four times the performance every three or four years. So the AGA should have arrived in 1988, and the blitter should have been four times faster as original, not just twice as fast.
The Amiga 2000 should have been delayed until 1998 to include the new AGA. Keeping the cheaper Amiga 500 on the OCS would have been fine.
