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The day which has been foretold, brethren, is nearly upon us: when the Amiga will rise from the ashes and come again in glory, putting asunder by fire and sword the heathens who thought virtual memory and blocking direct access to hardware were good ideas. Apostates! For with "virtual memory" how can one put some variables into fast RAM and some into chip RAM? Without direct access to the interrupt and DMA controllers how can one program the Copper to do cool colorbar effects? Pray, brethren, that these blasphemies be extibguished from our sight.

In the name of Tramiel and Miner and Sassenrath, amen.

The Amiga was undeniably magical for those lucky enough to experience it in the 80s. We've seen lots of magical platforms since (mobile, tablet, maybe VR soon). I often wonder what about the Amiga took hold so strongly. Was it just that it was so much more advanced experientially than its peers, or the fun personality down to the hardware naming, or some more technical aspect? Is that magic still alive for young people today when they first explore ipad+xcode development, or (maybe in the future) Rift devt?

If you were to design a system today to try to re-create that magic for young developers and users, what would it look like?

I think that contemporary platforms can't have distinctive graphics / audio where you can look at a screen and say "that's a ZX spectrum game!" or hear a buzz and know "it's a C64 tune!". So the distinctiveness gets limited to the physical design of the device (for the looks) and maybe some default start-up and other sounds (for the sound).

You said VR - I suppose the first VR platform with full field of view could be rather memorable, but the first software won't be ported especially for it unlike just about any ZX Spectrum game...

I feel that the limiting factor is now software, not hardware. There are way more great PS4 games in our imagination than in reality, while, with the ZX Spectrum, most of our imagination easily outran the platform's ability. This made each platform advancement more exciting. I couldn't care less when the new Samsung Galaxy 7 comes out because there's no software I want that my Galaxy 3 can't run.

But that's just how I feel as someone born 6 years after the ZX Spectrum. So someone younger will have to comment to really answer your question.

I think somehow we're wired to get attached to a system architecture and how people create representation that will create sensations/emotions in you. A sense of using the bandwidth of a system to its limit. A holistic interaction that is not filled by high density / high resolution (I like the sound of FM radio more than clear CD-A, I enjoy using an old Nexus S for its low-res LCD even though my moto G is high DPI).
When I went to the computer store as a kid, there was the amiga 500:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yJNGwIcLtw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkKxJw-jB5Q

And then there was the PC:

http://www.davidbarrkirtley.com/images/phantasietowncga.jpg

Amiga had one of the best planar GPUs ever build. This was great in the eighties and made it a cult classic. Hardware assisted 2D planar gpu could do miracles with weak CPU.

This was also Amiga downfall, as planar graphic modes became irrelevant in the nineties. As soon as you get into ~486DX2/66 territory you have enough pure CPU to render chunky(13h) mode in software.

I'd always wondered about this. Planar always just seemed a horrible way to try and think about a screen.

What made it faster? Is it just that the hardware could be simpler? Curious to know.

CPUs had poor support for addressing memory as 5 bit bytes, for one. 32-color paletted mode was really a sweet spot for pixel graphics and limited (512k) memory. It looked much better than 16-color which could sort of work with byte addressing.

You could compose out of, say, 3 bpp sprites or layers. Or you could make 1bpp "control" bitplanes that, when fed to the blitter, would fill your polygons scanline by scanline. (The blitter can also make these for you using the harware line drawing support) All the graphics hardware could be bit depth agnostic but still do 1bpp operations 5x as fast as 5bpp operations. And do it asynchronously with CPU doing other stuff concurrently. Saved memory bandwidth, memory space, and CPU time - all of which were very tight and CPU had no cache.

Related note, there also used to be bit-sliced CPUs that didn't have hardwired byte lengths.

On the PC, VGA had a "byte-planar" mode that combines some of the advantages of planar and chunky graphics that had further advantages in eg filled polygon rendering over "plain" chunky mode.

> what would it look like?

That's the raison d'etre of the raspberry pi, which appears to be really popular... with middle aged men who grew up with the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 and Amiga!

It's pretty close, but until we have sufficient open or reverse-engineered information on the videocore it's not really the same. Much of the Amiga's fancyness came from creative use of the video chipset.

A modern comparison might be the "layerone" demoscene board, which is a PIC24 with a VGA connector: http://hackaday.com/2015/05/26/layerone-demoscene/

I think the Amiga was pretty revolutionary when it launched. Without any accessories, it had stereo sound output and pretty impressive color graphics. And it was affordable (esp. the 500). PCs didn't really get anywhere close in that department until the whole Multimedia PC thing happened in the early 90s.
And as you mention VR, the Amiga powered the first generation of Virtuality SU1000 & SD1000 arcade machines!
using Unity and Cardboard to build stuff for steam boxes and rifts / etc... I hope
The Amiga had a very magical feel for the late 80's. In 1988, I upgraded to an A500 (from an Apple II) and was blown away. A couple years later I got an A3000.

The OS, with real multitasking, was very unique for the time. I first learned C on an Amiga, and you had to be careful since there was no memory protection. De-reference a null ptr and you'd get the old "guru meditation", followed by a reboot. Fun times.

Beyond that, some of the games were amazing. I specifically remember Shadow of the Beast, Blood Money, and some other Psygnosis titles.

They'll still be reinventing the Amiga when I'm in my 80s I'm sure. I remember back in 1998 a friend had a bastardised A1200 in a PC case with bits of sticky tape holding it together. I was constantly lending him my soldering iron. 17 years later...

I have nothing against this for ref, just that it appears to be an eternally unsolved problem.

The Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine when it was released. This, like most "vintage" computing projects can't be for more than the love of the machine.
I owned one for a bit (A500 and A1500). AS I was in the UK, this was wiped out by the Acorn Archimedes coming on the scene.

I can't say I ever "loved" it nor found it reliable. By 1998 it looked quaint compared to NT4 etc.

> The Amiga was a reliable

Stop right there. Multitasking without memory protection and reliability do not go well together. It was a fun machine, but reliable it was not.

>Amiga was a reliable well-polished machine

Stop deluding yourself, Commodore had a ton of reliability problems. Amigas came from factory with electrolytic capacitors soldered backwards! (and afaik they were also backwards on the factory diagram).

shrug - I can't say I am deluding myself when I am unaware of reliability problems with my somewhat limited exposure. None of my friends who owned Amigas at the time complained about them (A1200/A600 era).
There is something then the current computers do not provide. Whatever it is, there seems to be a business niche for someone who deciphers what it is.
What current computers don't do is remind ex Amiga users of what it was like when they were in their teens and/or twenties.

Difficult problem to solve...

While nostalgia is part of it, the Amiga had a special feel to it that is still not met to me by mainstream OSs. I'm occasionally involved in AROS in the hope of getting something that gets finished enough to let me use it.

Things like Datatypes (gaining instant ability to read any image format into any viewer or editor by dropping a library into the right directory), XPK (gaining instant support for any compression library everywhere), pervasive AREXX support (Linux is slowly getting something similar with dbus, but in comparison to AREXX ports dbus is overcomplicated), screens (sort of like virtual desktops/spaces, but could be private or public and named), responsiveness (e.g. by default widgets and input handling were running in different tasks/threads to the applications, and so would remain responsive even when your app was doing stupid stuff), or the device/filesystem model which was frequently exploited (e.g. the editor FrexxEd exports the open buffers in a custom filesystem, so that on limited memory systems you could process the content of the buffers with external programs - like your compiler - without having to save it to T: (the equivalent of /tmp), which was usually assigned to the ramdisk), or assigns - creating dynamic drive/volume labels (less important now, but I could e.g. "list music0:" and get prompted specifically for the disk with the label "music0"), or "joining" multiple paths together under a single name. E.g. LIBS:xpk.library would find xpk.library in whichever path it was as long as that path had been added to the LIBS: assign.

There are many little things. None of them sufficient for me to be willing to use AmigaOS now, but many of them things I still miss.

Is there a good book on the design of AmigaOS that explains these things? It sounds like a lot of them are side effects of being a multitasking but not multi-user or memory-protected OS, so you could teleport data into other programs without concern.

It would be interesting to try and forward-port these aspects of AmigaOS to an ARM system.

I don't know of any good books that specifically contrasts the advantages of the AmigaOS design with modern designs, unfortunately. A lot of these things won't have been spelled out in books at the time because it seemed obvious once you'd used an Amiga for a while.

Some of them certainly expect single-user. I think Linux etc. loses out quite a bit by not differentiating between single user (in terms of "person in front of the machine is most important, regardless of uid) and multi-user systems.

Some of it could be emulated by tweaking priorities. But others require a large change in how you think about applications. E.g. the widget ("gadget" in Amiga-speak) responsiveness largely comes from the OS threads carrying out updates of them. To do the same in an X app for example, you'd need your app to explicitly start a separate thread to forward events to your main thread, and have a mechanism for giving it higher priority. It's not that hard to do, but without libraries providing wrappers for it, it won't happen often.

Other things, like the assigns could be implemented easily enough with a filesystem driver. Coupled with namespaces you certainly can do this transparently in a multi-user system.

Memory protection helped reducing the cost of context switches, and certainly there has been a variety of sins carried out as a result of it being possible to pass data all over the place without paying much attention to it. But it's not that integral to the things that make AmigaOS unique.

With respect to ARM systems, AROS runs on ARM (and x86, PPC, m68k) and AROS is relatively close to parity with the lastest AmigaOS releases (including features from the 4.x series for PPC). I think at least one AROS distribution has images for Raspberry Pi for example. If nothing else it's a good place to get a feel for how some of it works.

There were the developer manuals, but you will need to find someone willing to get rid of them.
They seem to be online, along with people selling devkit CDs: http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual_gui... / http://www.vesalia.de/e_developer2.htm

But I was hoping for something with a little more of the design rationale. Maybe this is what I'm looking for. http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Future-Was-Here-Commodore/dp/026...

The responsiveness point somehow resonates with me; I recall running 3D renders in the background (taking up 100% of the CPU), while running simple games in the foreground set to "high priority". The games typically never stuttered.

Yet my android tablet routinely freezes for 30 seconds for whatever reason.

And yes, app crashes could take the machine down, but it was typically back up in a usable desktop within 6 seconds. And later on (mid 90s), they seem to have become far more rare.

You could have said the same thing about Apple's PC business (with its small, hardcore audience) before it got a new lease on life with phones. Not only does brand matter, but people have reasons to prefer certain design characteristics.
I used to be absolutely in love with my Amiga(s) back in the days but I'm a bit puzzled: what is the point of this?

Whenever nostalgia strikes, I fire up UAE (or whatever the best emulator is at the moment), run a few games and after a few hours, I'm done.

What is the business purpose behind this initiative?

There's a small but vocal contingent on the Amiga boards that insists on classic hardware at nearly all cost for different values of "classic hardware" that usually includes some extent of new expansion boards or replacements, as long as they're suitably close to the original in spirit.

The business purpose is that there is still a small number of people that keep buying hardware.

The Amiga community is odd - you have the whole spectrum from purists that want 100% original hardware, via Franken-setups with a mix of original hardware and newly developed expansions, to FPGA reimplementations, to the PPC AmigaOne's running AmigaOS 4.x, to the AmigaOS reimplementatins/inspired OS's (AROS and MorphOS), and some people are very militant about their camps.

> What is the business purpose behind this initiative?

Why there needs to be a business purpose? When did hackers stop doing stuff because it's fun and because they can?

I guess this is somewhat costlier than doing free software development during one's spare time. Still, they'll probably lose money only while prototyping, since they'll start producing after pre-orders start coming in. Unless, of course, they screw up and start getting refund requests via paypal.

Exactly. I recently did this with simcity and a Mac emulator. I downloaded all these games and what not, only to pay simcity for a few hour and my nostalgia quotient was filled. No need to boot up an original as fun as that might seem.
I want to play "Marble Madness" and "Hole-in-one Miniature Golf".
I'm a classic Amiga enthusiast but this project fails to resonate with me. One can purchase original Amiga computers and hardware and run the old software just fine. Why would anyone want to replicate the motherboard with the original chips?
Same here. If I were to buy an Amiga today I would expect a modern computer with an Amiga feel. Something that's a bit like Linux but without the bloat and complexity. Come to think of it, OS X is the closest.
I'm with you. I have the A1200 I bought as a teenager and have recently acquired an Amiga 2000 that I'm in the process of restoring and upgrading. A new motherboard doesn't interest me as much as new CPU cards or other expansions to classic machines.
If it were a business purpose per se it might promise an enterprise model for over 200 euro. Nope. Maybe it's so you can have a plexi case with accelerators (the M68k-ish CPU this project requires you to bring from the archives) in the entrance to your accelerator. Then you can save a few hundred thousand in attention to someone very stuck in disambiguation? I don't really understand the split between pulleys-on-gates 1770s nostalgia and this; if you're going to have a micro, why no RasPI headers so you can write up 'IPv6 gateway DNS vuln in Paula netBTMPdeen?' Pretty sure it was this or early ARM or PLD nostalgia, and completely awkward hardware (Sinclair Z1 anyone? Anyone not wearing burning phylacteries? No?) wasn't the challenge sweetspot? Not really a clear advantage if you need it to help rebuild Washington once it's half-subducted. On one hand, it's nice to have standalone fanless gadgets, perhaps running demos as background noise. On the other hand, is it really out of reach for an old phone and 8W rather than 50W (give or take a multisync monitor?)