Having read this thread I was looking at other options and... there don't seem to be any. I looked at Pi though but it failed to turn me on really. "Yaaas it's so small! Err... what do I do with it?"
Before Imagine I used to design by text-based retracers. Anyone remembers those?![]()
Lotus! Could never win the last raceI think Amiga is still the most impressive computer for it's time ever created. Previously owning ZX Spectrum 48k and Commodore 64, I still remember my reaction when I was buying my first Amiga 500 (used, not new) and the owner demonstrated to me Lotus Turbo Challenge II... when I heard that music, sampled talking, saw butter smooth colorful graphics... it was basically a sealed dealPCs were laughable compared to what this machine could do, and to be honest, Macs weren't that much better - it really was that much ahead (yeah, it was because of that "too much hardware", that Jobs didn't like
) Also my music career started on Amiga with Protracker and later Octamed PRO.
After Amiga 500 (expanded to 1 MB of ram) I bought new Amiga 1200 and expanded it to 6MB of RAM, 420 MB hard drive, sampler and a printer - it was quite a serious machine, not just for games but also for work. The OS was so fast and stable compared to Windows, which I couldn't stand at the time, I usually crashed them in first 10 minutes of working with them - I was probably clicking too fast and run too much software at the same timeAmiga had no problem with this - Amiga OS had real preemptive multitasking in '85, which PCs got yeeears later and Macs only with OS X... it also had autoconfig way before plug&play (also much better working) - basically you plugged in the expansion and everything was configured automatically - no DMAs and IRQs to mess with like on PC or million of BIOS settings (btw. even the Amiga "BIOS" called Kickstart was graphical and used mouse straight from the ROM). Basically Amiga combined the simplicity and "just works" concept of a Mac and expendability of a PC (in the pro A1000/A2000/A3000/A4000 models at least), while being more powerful than both (that was true even for home all-in one versions).
OS X actually reminded me a lot at Amiga OS, which is part of why I switched to Mac 8 years ago. It's a shame they didn't have true leader like Apple had Jobs or MS had Gates, Amiga might still be around... but to be honest, it probably wouldn't be that much different these days compared to Mac or PC, since there's only a few chip makers that rule the market today (Intel, nVidia, AMD...) and both most popular operating systems of today reached similar level of power... it could have happened quite a few years earlier with Amiga though...
I thing I'm going to launch my FS-UAE now and play my first amiga game